Archives for November 2010

Phil Redmond was in Derry today to workshop ideas for UK City of Culture 2013. He met up with the steering group of ILEX, the urban regeneration company responsible for the year. I told him he was like a helicopter parent, hovering over his baby, soothing and reassuring! He laughed!!

So quick update, he's over to rid the team of the "fear". He knows how great that fear can be, having run Liverpool. The thing he wants the Derry team to hang onto are the core principles of the original bid - what the city has uniquely and the all important "step change".

He also said that while the recent announcement of the Turner coming to town in 2013 is there, it doesn't follow on that the other major arts events will come too. The Man Booker may, but the Brits and the Baftas probably won't. It was hard, he says, to get the ones in London up the road to Liverpool when he was running the Capital of Culture and it had a direct train route, so getting them across the water to Derry might be even tougher.

He's pragmatic, as always. Listen here to the rest of what we talked about on Arts Extra tonight. 

I got a taxi home a few years ago after the show and the driver, a very chatty Czech, told me he was an artist. We ended up talking about visual art , with me explaining how I found it quite tough to discuss visual art on the radio. He was enthusiastic and passionate, so much so that we kept talking even after he pulled up at the house. He drove off, I think I said something like "hope it all works out" and that was the last I saw of him. Until today when I walked into the Tibor Studio, newly opened on the Lisburn Road. And met Tibor Cervenak for the second time. On the right here one of Tibor's abstract paintings.

Today I discovered that he was a bit of a child prodigy, a talent for drawing saw him at the age of 14 pick up passing trade from tourists who he would sketch. "I earned more money than my father!" he told me 

Tibor moved to Belfast in 2004 to work for Maybins. He'd picked up an ad for work here at his local job centre in the Czech Republic. 100 people were interviewed for the job. 25 were selected. Tibor was one of them. He was one of the first wave of migrants to come to Belfast, the new pioneers from Eastern Europe. ""People here had to get used to us and we used to life here", he said to me today. I didn't push it, what it must have been like to be from Eastern Europe then. The racist attacks, the resentment, the ugly race hatred that quickly bubbled to the surface.

He said he remembered picking me up that time. He had kept taxi-ing to support his art, but had got himself an agent, got the interest of the local art scene including the Emer Gallery in North Belfast, the Safehouse Gallery and the Royal Ulster Academy. But then he thought he had pushed himself as far here as he could. He went to Amsterdam and saw artists working in studios which also doubled as galleries. He was set to move there and then thought why not he says "bring Amsterdam to Belfast! "

This weekend 60 people gathered to celebrate the gallery opening. The paintings on the walls are not all his. The idea is to showcase other artists too. And, as it is a working studio, there are easels up, paint brushes in pots and a sense of work in progress. 

I'm just really glad I didn't get the bus home that night.

This incredible photo of Brian Friel was taken by the photographer and broadcaster Bobbie Hanvey (aka The Ramblin' Man) and appears in the latest edition of Irish Pages. Bobbie, of whom Van Morrison once said "Look at the cameras flying out of that man!", is a force of nature. You can almost hear him behind the camera, standing in Brian Friel's back garden in 2000. I love the look on Friel's face, totally inscrutable, but you know that he has to be enjoying himself with Hanvey. 

Friel is a man of few public words these days. I've long given up trying to get him to agree to me doing a radio interview with me. He always writes back to me with a polite but firm no.

I got to know him in the late 1980's when I spent summer holidays helping Field Day Theatre Company in their Derry office. I was head of putting up posters! 

Brian would come in from time to time, for board meetings or to pick up letters. I must have said to him I was heading to London for a few days, and he paused and said would I do him a favour? "Only if I had time" he insisted "but would I go to Foyle's and look out some sheet music for him?" He wrote down the pieces of music he was looking for, all popular songs from the late 1920's and the first half of the 1930's. A big band number like "Dancing in the Dark" from 1931, or Cole Porter's "Anything Goes " from 1934. He wanted to know publisher's details. Now I realise for copyright.

It was only the next year watching "Dancing at Lughnasa" in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1990 that I realised what I had been doing. He was researching songs for that play. The sisters love to dance and snatches of songs break through on the kitchen radio, the wireless with Marconi written on it. It's funny now, with the internet, that kind of research can be done with a search engine and a download. In 1989, it was me heading into Foyle's armed with the piece of paper on which he had jotted down some song titles and browsing through the alphabetised rows upon rows of music.

A few days after I came back and had sent him on the sheet music, a copy of his plays was left on my desk. Inside he had written, "To Marie-Louise who tramped the streets of London for me, Brian".

I was in a Belfast shopping centre this morning, getting my hair done, if you want to know, when I was told that Katie Price was making a public appearance there. Now I didn't hang around to see her, but the taxi driver told me that he had left his daughter off. What does she like about Katie Price? I asked. Her books? Her perfume? The celebrity, he said. She's on the telly.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for celebrity. I devour gossipy celeb mags, I can tell you all about Katie Price's love life, why Nadine and the rest of Girls Aloud are supposedly not speaking and the alleged ongoing spat between Cheryl Cole and Dannii Minogue. You couldn't make it up - or maybe you could.

While "I'm a Celebrity....get me out of here" allowed Katie Price to escape her Jordan image and certainly relaunched Peter Andre's singing career, I'm more drawn to the choreographed escapism of "Strictly Come Dancing" and "The X Factor". The gloss & sheen of it, the glamour and the cattiness. 

The taxi driver said that on a saturday night their fares are down until after the shows. In the new ecomonic climate, people are staying in, watching the tv, having a few drinks and then maybe coming out after, out for the night in a culture where everyone can be a star.

"Britain's Got Talent"'s Susan Boyle has her autobiography out in time for Christmas, along with a rake of other celebs from Chris Evans to Russell Brand.

But there's something poignant about Boyle's "The Woman I was Born to Be." She says “When I strutted on to the stage for that audition, I was a scared wee lassie, still grieving for my mother, not caring how I looked. I think I’ve grown up a lot in the last year, become more of a lady, and I’m not so frightened anymore."

I posted a photo of the queue waiting to see Katie on the Arts Extra Facebook page earlier today. It started quite a few comments. One stood out "An article in The Times on Saturday estimated the intelligence of UK cities. One of the measures was the ratio of book sales of Katie Price vs Hilary Mantel. We came about 19th out of 26. KP outsold HM by about 2 to 1".

Will Susan Boyle give both Price and Mantel a run for their money this Christmas? 

I was talking to Michael Longley recently about tv. He never misses Mad Men, as much for the dialogue as for Christina Hendricks! He said it, not me!

So it's only taken me 3 years but I have finally started watching series 1 of Mad Men. It's a great watch. Michael was right about the writing, the dialogue is razor sharp, the frocks are fab, and, you have to admit, there's a certain nostalgia for everyone smoking their heads off and drinking well before the sun is above the yard arm, kind of! But, the problem is, I know too much! Over the years I haven't turned away from spoiler alerts in newspapers and magazine. I've even watched Ep 1 of the 4th series for review, although I had to have two diehard Mad Men friends come round to watch it with me to get me up to speed with the subtle nuances of series 1, 2 & 3 that would have gone over my head. 

It's a funny way to watch something. For example, all the way through episode 1, I was wondering where Don Draper's wife was. So I didn't get the shock factor, after scenes where Don was with another woman, of the moment he walked into a suburban family home, kissed his wife and went into the children's bedrooms as they lay sleeping. A killer punch for any screenwriter, except I already know.

If I had a kitten heel , I would kick myself with it for not watching the show from the get go. Maybe the only thing for it is to get Will Dean's Ultimate Guide to Mad Men, a book version of all his tv blogs, so I can feel connected with the moment passed.

When Mike Scott came in to talk to me a few months back about his new show "An Appointment with Mr Yeats", I was struck by how genuinely engaged he was with Yeats' poetry. This was a real love affair, not egg heady or cerebral but passionate and rooted.

So when I went to see the show in Belfast this week, I knew I was on to a good thing. Now, there were obvious diehard Waterboys fans there, waiting for the back catalogue, but even those diehard fans will know of Scott's long time interest in Yeats. The Stolen Child on the Fishernan's Blues album and later Love and Death. It started back in the 1970's when his mum took him to the Yeats Summer school in Sligo. You get the sense that if he was to meet a Yeats scholar he would hold his own. He talked about reading biographical material, reading and re reading the poems and the plays. Of Yeats' interest in the occult and the mystic, and the scholars who either laugh at it or brush it aside quickly, "If you haven't done it you don't know it, yee ken?" he said.

From the get go, the show was pure theatre, with dramatic light changes, video projections, even Venetian masks and Scott's dancing seemed like he was channelling a 1970's Mick Jagger.

On stage, a ten piece band, including his long time Waterboys collaborator Steve Wickham, himself a bewitching, pied piper figure with his electric violin. Stuart Baillie, who was sitting a few seats down from me, gave Steve a big whoop when Scott name checked him. Apparently he had forgotten to namecheck him in Dublin, "his hometown and all!".

So what would Yeats have made of it? According to our reviewer at the gig, Eamonn Hughes, he was tone deaf! You can listen to Eamonn's review on Arts Extra here.

There's a good discussion on our facebook page at the moment, and a chance to see a video with one of the songs as the soundtrack. The song "Let the Earth Bear Witness" is two poems put together by Scott. They're both from Yeats' play Kathleen ni Houlihan. Scott said that while he was piecing the work together and writing the music, he and his wife were watching the news footage of last year's protests in Iran after the elections. It's probably one of Yeats' most political pieces, written in 1902 about Ireland's struggle for independence. Scott updates it to a political controversy over a century later. It is very moving and the words still resonate.

And yes, he did play "The Whole of the Moon". Men and women of a certain age were in the "mosh pit" at the front of the stage, the ghosts of their teenage selves propelling them out of the comfy Opera House seats to be close to Mike and the band. Scott dedicated it the song to the one person who couldn't make the gig. WB Yeats himself.

There's talk of an album but no date. For "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" as a blues number it will be worth the money.

Just finished watching a preview of "Some Dogs Bite". It's a new independent British film about care, crime and adoption in the UK today. It looks at the lives of three young half brothers. 18 year old H (Aaron Taylor) Casey, 14 (Thomas Sangster) and 10 month old baby Severino have been split up after their mum dies. Casey is in care, Severino is with foster parents with a view to being adopted and H is adrift, living in a flat, drinking, surviving on petty crime and dodging the police. So far, so grim. But I was only reading the blurb at this stage. 85 minutes later from the opening shot to the fade out for the end titles I hadn't moved from my seat.

The screenplay is by Dublin born writer Lin Couglan. It was a job in a prison as a writer in residence ten years ago that got her thinking. She says that as she heard the stories from the inmates she was struck "by the intense loyalty the young men and women had for their family, especially their siblings". And she goes on to say that "these are children who have often never been parented, nurtured or comforted....still had their humanity intact, despite having often committed crimes where they clearly had little or no ability to empathise with their victim". 

In one of the most telling scenes in the film, played out against almost Monarch of the Glen kind of scenery in Scotland (where the brothers have gone in search of Casey's biological father), Casey says to H "We're no good, but we ain't bad....it's just we're not anything special". 

This film shows that they are.

It premiers on BBC 3 tomorrow night Wed 10th Nov 21:00.

 (Images by Alice Clancy)

While the Pope was consecrating Gaudi's the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona yesterday, a building closer to home, Derry's An Gaeláras Cultúrlann Ui Chanáin, was winning at the Oscars of the architectural world in the same city.

Not bad for a local arts centre which found itself in the same competition as Soccer City in Johannesburg, the Apple Store on New York's Upper West Side, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

It's certainly a bold piece of architecture, and amazingly, despite its angular concrete design and brash, bold colours, somehow manages to fit into the existing Victorian city scape of Great James street.

Also something that might not have come up in the judges' assessment in Barcelona at the weekend but one that I have experienced first hand. Inside it's high ceiling acts like an echo chamber when you're sitting in the coffee shop, an attraction spotted to the delight of my two daughters on a recent saturday afternoon outing!

I love talking to Maeve Binchy. And she loves talking too. Talking was actively encouraged when she was growing up. To be seen and heard, she says.

She's promoting her new novel "Minding Frankie" and is quite shameless about the fact that she enjoys a good natter. She says she starts every book as if she was with a friend and is about to launch into a story "Let me tell you something". 

She's kind of stunned that she's going to turn 70 this year. "Inside I still feel I'm 23" she says. "I thought when you got old your mind narrowed but it doesn't". 

She also told me how she doesn't worry about best seller lists any more, "they can worry about that in London". But when she was younger, she admits that she would go into bookstores and re-arrange the layout of the books, putting Joanna Trollope and other "rivals" behind hers. Trollope has admitted to Binchy that she did the same to her books!

"Minding Frankie" is published by Orion Books.