The intellect is acute, the conversation is rich and Dara McAnulty is free with his ideas. Yet as you walk around Castlewellan Forest Park on a Sunday that’s lit and fresh, you also concede that the naturalist has eyes and ears for other, important stuff.
Lyra McKee wrote an article for the Mosaic website in 2016, The Fight of Your Life. It connected boxing and American football with errant behaviour and baseline poverty in Chicago and western Canada. It was about domestic violence and personality swings that were hard to figure.
The stories may have seemed random but the author led you into the narrative. You trusted her and in time there was a reveal about disposable heroes, mass entertainment and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Once-excellent athletes had become concussed, paranoid, punch drunk, suicidal.
Photo: Stuart Bailie
The spirit of Seamus Heaney resonates on your album, A Northern View, notably on ‘The Guttural Muse’. Did he translate easily into your music? And do you share his thoughts on the historic repression of the Irish language?
“His ideas did, certainly. The lost youth of ‘The Guttural Muse’ particularly but the language and the landscape always sounded like my language and my landscape, as I’m sure they do to many from this part of the world. Maybe the presence of his nephew’s basslines on there added a certain weight to it.
ANTHONY TONER
Ghost Notes, Vol. 1
RONNIE GREER & FRIENDS
Blues Constellation
There was never an Irish radiogram that didn’t stack up ‘Sample Charlie Pride’ and ‘Jim Reeves – 40 Golden Greats’. If you left the house you’d hear the same on Downtown Radio which powered up in 1976, playing ‘Okie From Muskogee’ to a listenership that bypassed the satire and banged out time on the steering wheel of the Vauxhall Viva.
What is the sound of Malojian? The sound of Malojian is ragtime and White Album whimsy, grunge, essence of parlour song and jet-powered synth lines that go hurtling across the octave. What is the meaning of Malojian? The meaning of Malojian is domestic zen, global horrorshow, empathy, endearment and gleaming soul. Is Malojian any good? Malojian is good, always.
Everything about this event seems pointed, anointed and morally sound. A bill of music curated by the Fontaines DC to raise around €70k for the homeless cause in Ireland. The faithful are tightly convened at The Olympia, aware that this is an epochal moment, a night when the new acts are in the ascendant, the sense of civic rage is acute and the political system is as cracked as the Liberty Bell herself.
The New Arborist record is tremendous. It’s there, close at your ear like Bill Callaghan with peculiar stories. Wedding nights and hanging days. Echoes of the Seamus Heaney lines in ‘Traditions’ about putting down language and growing dissent. There is plainsong, lap steel and imperial swoon. Mark McCambridge with the words while Ben McAuley assumes cavernous sonics.
‘Stay Young’ is the first new release by The Outcasts since 1985, a rush of sentiment and suss. The Cowan brothers are senior punk rockers, happily returned to the stage, enjoying the vintage status. ‘Stay Young’ could be a generational call, a resolve to not go quietly. Also, it’s a personal declaration. Greg sang it as his wife was recovering from cancer treatment.
When he was a boy, Lyndon Stephens sat in the back of the family Ford Cortina, loving the tunes on the 8-Track cartridge player. On the summer drives from Glengormley to Portrush, he listened to Glen Campbell and The Carpenters. Also, he was taken by the Paul Simon song about a boxer and a destitute kid, lost and defeated on Seventh Avenue.
He’s preparing for the Goodbye Vibrations Tour in 2020 and a last spin of the decks. “I’d rather go out with a bit of a bang than just fade,” Terri Hooley reckons. “Twenty years ago, somebody phoned me up and said to me, I believe you’re the oldest DJ in Belfast. I said, bloody sure I’m not – have you ever heard of George Carroll? So this guy from the Polytech wanted to test my hearing. He discovered that my right ear had been damaged. But I said, nah, that wasn’t DJing. That was Jimi Hendrix.”
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