Archives for August 2011

I've just done something entirely out of the norm for me. I have listened to a band's new ep 6 times in a row, and have, just now, officially "liked" their page on Facebook and checked them out on myspace.

Plus I had a long chat with Paul McClean from BBC Radio Ulster's Across the Line programme about the band, even if we did end up talking about *cough* Jedward. Sorry. And I have found the band are playing the Cellar Bar in Draperstown in a few weeks time. So am I a fan?

They are Rams' Pocket Radio. Well they are actually he, Peter McAuley, a drummer, pianist and songwriter from Lisburn. I first heard him/them last year on a sampler cd of local musicians released by the Oh Yeah Centre. But this new ep, which I found in a pile of unopened post today, is called "Dieter Rams Has Got The Pocket Radios". It's been out since 19th of August and it is incredible. There are 4 tracks, (1)Dieter Rams has Got the Pocket Radios, (2) Coal, my lips are sealed", (my personal favourite) (3) "Friendship fails you" and (4) "Souvenir".

So does this mean I am a fan ? I haven't been a music fan for a very long time. I went all awkward and unable to listen to a lot of music in my late teens. Don't ask me why, but I have long held a grudge against the men I knew/know who, when contemporary pop/rock music is mentioned, immediately go into a kind of double speak. You know the ones who have an encyclopedic knowledge of bands, from early album covers to band members who died in nineteen canteen. I've always felt a bit redundant when those bromances kick off!

Anyhow, I missed Rams' Pocket Radio last week at Belsonic, but they're playing the Cellar Bar in Draperstown on Saturday the 10th September. Am off to book the babysitter.

Guy Garvey is on his hands and knees in a Portacabin behind the stage at Belsonic in Custom House Square Belfast. It's a surreal,but totally Elbow type, moment. He's being helpful before we do our interview, as there's a fridge buzzing in the background and I have a thing about fridges having to be switched off before I start recording. It's usually me looking for the plug socket but Guy Garvey, lead singer with Elbow, headlining tonight, is down on his knees quicker than I can say "Throw those curtains wide"!

He is in great form, once he's sitting down, garrulous almost, talking about the song "My Funny Valentine" in his opinion the antithesis of a love song, but says that no one really listens to the lyrics and, instead, thinks its one of the greatest love songs ever; how he spent last night, drinking in a hotel in Belfast, and wrote a lullaby for a stage show, a big show that he can't tell me anything about, but he's been asked to co-write the song with Massive Attack and how he woke up after half an hour and wrote it. "I nailed it" he says with infectious enthusiasm - "it's great!"

He talks with genuine emotion about lullabies, and, in particular, his mother who would sing him and his siblings to sleep with songs that she made up herself . He also reveals the names she called him when he was a child - "chicken", "lambkin", "soldier boy". And he then laughs and says he can't believe he just told me that.

I could have spent longer with him. He's a really nice guy, as you can see from the big smile on my face as I sat beside him in that Portacabin! I'll have an even bigger smile tonight when I see them in concert. And probably a few tears too.

Elbow play Belsonic tonight at Custom House Square, with support by Foy Vance and The Villagers

The revival of Owen McCafferty's "The Absence of Women" at the Lyric has not only got a new cast, including Peter Gowan as Gerry and Ciaran McIntyre as Iggy, but some 200 shovels at the centre of the set design.

They're a wonderfully quirky visual :-real spades, all shapes and sizes. As I looked at them today, words like "old", "used", "loved", "looked after" sprang to mind. But then, bizarrely, so did the word "survivors". First time I had ever thought of a shovel as a survivor. Come to mind, it's the first time I've ever thought about a shovel!

There they are, these old spades, part of a powerful moving testimony. But they are also a very poignant reminder of men like the two characters in the play, Gerry and Iggy, who spent years working the roads, railways and mines of England and who ended up in a hostel drying out and dying out.

The spades have survived, and Owen McCafferty has made sure that the men who held them survive too, even if they hung up their spades a long time ago.

"The Absence of Women" is at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast now until the 3rd of September.

I feel like I've spent the last 3 weeks in therapy, even though I only got as far as Donegal. 

It wasn't the holiday (!!) but the box set of the entire first series of HBO's "In Treatment", lent to us by our neighbour before we set off. Staring Gabriel Byrne as Dr. Paul Weston, a psychologist, it is the closest to perfect television drama I have seen in a very long time. The action takes place mainly in his office, the writing setting up a perfect two hander between Byrne and his weekly sessions with a handful of patients and Gina, played by Dianne Wiest, who is Paul's own therapist and whose session sums up the week for Paul.

The fact that the action is rooted in the one room, very little movement, it's like a theatre piece, a 30 minute two hander in which the words resonate intensely. There's no distracting street scenes, no drinking coffee with over acting extras in the background, nothing but the words, facial movements, body language. It's incredible. But exhausting to watch.

I love it but have to say I can only take 2 episodes in a row. After that you feel you need to head for the couch yourself. Even if Gabriel Byrne is there and saying "I'm listening".