He Is The Booley Boy

As an old school journalist, I still hoard bits of paper, press releases, photos and interesting newspaper clippings. All of the aforementioned are gathered into piles and then stashed away in two large filing cabinets in the home office. There's one cabinet for Irish music and culture and the other for the rest of the known world.

These days, a few computer clicks and much of this information can be accessed online. Thanks to Wikipedia, we can all bluff it in any major subject, so my old trove of information is in question. My family think I'm a mad old duffer. But still I persist, believing that my esoteric collection gives me the edge over the amateur. That's why I have many reams of Van Morrison musings, or the utterances of Radiohead from their very first fanzine articles.

But space is finite and over the weekend, a cull took place. I dispensed with files full of redundant information on The Stunning, The Sawdoctors and Cactus World News. It was time to forget the soggy old festivals, the failed record labels and the yapping contenders who never did contend with much.

In the middle of all this was my Booley collection. This was the actions of Peter Wilson, sometime between DBA and Benzine Headset, before he morphed ultimately into Duke Special. Around 1997 he released a fine single called 'Bathroom Floor' and I interviewed the spikey-headed fellow for Hot Press. Interestingly, I also filed the transcript, which was worth re-reading.

Peter was talking about his travels from High School in Downpatrick, to a spell in Bristol and Swindon and his time on a record label belonging to Howard Jones. He was enthusing about Sparklehorse and Aimee Mann and claiming the rights to be abrasive as well as melodic.

"I want to be beautiful at some times, despairing at other time and kicking at other times," he claimed, rather defiantly. And you know, he was essentially true to his word.