Budget cuts almost spelled the end of Other Voices. But the team behind the Dingle music institution rallied around – with the result that this year’s line-up is arguably among the strongest in the history of the show
He is one of our highest profile broadcasters and journalists. Now in his new book, Last Word host MATT COOPER looks at the rot and corruption that festered beneath the surface of the Celtic Tiger. He talks about the sense of anger he feels over the mismanagement of the economy, the damage wrought by the Bertie Ahern years and the apparent unwillingness of RTE to give him any publicity
Guitar heroes Rodrigo Y Gabriela have gone from busking on Grafton Street to jamming with Metallica. The acoustic duo talk about their long, strange journey, their fantastic new album – and their debt to the metal world
Winning an oscar was a culmination of a life-time's struggle for GLEN HANSARD. But success extracted a heavy toll on the singer, plunging him into self doubt and leaving him feeling confused and adrift. As The Swell Season prepare to release their second album, he talks about the long road back to sanity, his romantic break-up with songwriting partner MARKETA IRGLOVA and why, having derided Ireland in the press, he’s now proud of his home country
again. Plus Irglova talks about the end of their love affair and the challenges that fame and Fortune bring.
Here’s the deal. You can have the full bells-and-whistles Nick & the Bad Seeds production with all its attendant kinetics and dynamics, staged in a high-ceilinged cow palace or festival tent, or you can take your chances on the more roughshod and ragged-gloried variety up close and in your face in Vicar St, which isn’t nearly as slick but affords plenty of rarified moments.
They were the great new hopes of Irish rock. Until, with their second album in the can, they decided to, er, call it a day. Thankfully, Delorentos have changed their mind and are about to step back into the fray with new LP You Can Make Sound. Hot Press joins them for a contemplative walk by the sea.
In the run up to her Sligo Live appearance, chanteuse Martha Wainwright talks about learning from her father Loudon, channelling Edith Piaf and the perils of true romance.
They were one of the superstars of grunge, a band that did more than perhaps any other – even Nirvana – to bring underground rock and roll to the mainstream. But they lost their way with fan-alienating experimental records and a long-running feud with Ticketmaster. Now Pearl Jam have shrugged off the cobwebs and are back rocking like legends. Ahead of the release of their best album in years they talk about the long-road to rejuvenation, lessons gleaned from Neil Young and their place in the greater scheme of things.
It’s a literary high wire act with a difference. Dubliner Colum McCann talks about his 9/11 meditation Let The Great World Spin and the challenges of mastering the New York idiom.
Taking time of from serving as wingman to Jack White, Brendan Benson is about to release a new solo album. He talks about his Irish roots – including a Youghal mother, no less – and getting used to life outside The Raconteurs.
The Coronas were about a week into their 2008 American tour when they realised Colonel Kurtz was driving the bus. They can laugh about it now, oh yes. Sat around a table in the Library Bar on the eve of the release of their second album, the foursome – singer Danny O’Reilly, guitarist Dave McPhillips, bass player Graham Knox and drummer Conor Egan – are still young and hardy enough to take it in their stride.
AHEAD OF THEIR COIS FHARRAIGE APPEARANCE, Born-again indie rockers Doves talk about the changing of the seasons, escaping the country and getting past those fourth album blues
Origin of Symmetry? Freak of Evolution more like. The common response to Muse’s Showbiz debut in 1999 was akin to a primitive people’s first glimpse of a spacecraft over the prehistorical landscape. Here was an unlikely but hugely accomplished hybrid of prog-rock flash, quasi-symphonic attack and ferocious virtuosity, spearheaded by Matt Bellamy’s soaring tenor and Dick-ian lyrics. An impressive sound, even if you didn’t know what the hell it was.
Bequiffed crooner Richard Hawley takes a break from animal husbandry to discuss life, love and the making of what he believes to be the defining album of his career
hey’re the biggest thing to hit indie-pop in years, with a slew of day-glo hits and a reputation for partying until they drop. Ahead of their Electric Picnic headline slot, MGMT discuss falling out with Nicolas Sarkozy, their new base in sun-dappled Malibu and their work-in-progress new album. words
When we catch up with Bell X1 frontman Paul Noonan on a fine August afternoon, he’s bracing himself for a grueller of an autumn schedule that will begin with a handful of festival appearances – including an Electric Picnic set – and culminate in full-on month-long European and US tours. Reading dispatches from the band’s recent blogs, it’s apparent that the landscape of modern touring is far from Beat Generation romance and way closer to a Ballardian landscape of endless petrol stations, motorways and ferry docks.
He’s the PT Barnum of Rock, with Irish blood coursing through his veins and a penchant for encasing himself in translucent space bubbles. Ahead of THE FLAMING LIPS’ much-anticipated visit to Portlaoise, true believer Peter Murphy gets the gospel according to Wayne Coyne.
If you’re gonna be a one hit wonder, you might as well invent the dominant form of music for the ensuing decades. Released in 1979, The Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was the first hip-hop single to go gold, putting the group on American Bandstand and Soul Train long before Grandmaster Flash and Run DMC.
He's reputed to be one of the toughest interviewees in music. But RAY LAMONTAGNE is slowly learning to chill out and, if not embrace the limelight, then at least live with it...
There are those who believe that the future of music as an art form is seriously under threat from the rise of music piracy. Where will it all end? The truth is that no one truly knows.
Her fans include David Bowie, Bono and The Cardigans’ Nina Persson – and now she’s released possibly her finest record yet. EMM GRYNER talks about raising her game and steering clear of the ‘indie-folk’ vogue.
The superstars of today are inevitably the unknown newcomers of yesterday. In the final countdown to Oxegen 09, we trace the journey of two of the New Band Stage’s previous headliners, who have gone on to have glittering careers – and who feature at this year’s event.
She's the red-haired electro-pop debutante of the year. La Roux frontwoman Elly Jackson talks about her love of the 80s and tells us why Blur were the only decent rock band of the past 20 years.
Not since the death of Elvis has the passing of a music legend so gripped the world. As fans and detractors alike struggle to come to grips with the sad, strange end of Michael Jackson we assess his legacy – as musician, celebrity and enduring icon and talk to some of the people who knew and understood him best.
To mark AC/DC's sell-out return to Ireland, Hot Press celebrates one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time – tracing their drama-packed early years and talking to some of the musicians they helped influence.
The National Gallery is one of Ireland's unheralded treasures – and with a new exhibition of Hans Christian Anderson illustrator Harry Clarke now being held, there's never been a better reason to visit.
Since men first emerged from the water, they have written psalms in praise of the river. Old Man River. The River of Jordan. The Rivers of Babylon. Moon River. Shenandoah...
It’s hard to think of two artists less alike than MUNDY and LAURA IZIBOR. But they do have one thing in common: they’re Irish outsiders who have overcome challenging circumstances and, with new albums under their belts, are set to sweep all before them in 2009.
Fourteen years after Richey Edwards disappeared without trace, THE MANIC STREET PREACHERS have summoned the courage to fashion an album from the lyrics he left behind.
He’s the joker in the Irish music pack, a working class hero who has at once conquered and subverted the mainstream. For his first album in six years JERRY FISH and his MUDBUG CLUB have also roped in some top-tier collaborators including rockabilly queen Imelda May and Carol Keogh.
Guggi first emerged into the public eye as a member of the Virgin Prunes – the band that shared their early growth and development with U2. Having departed the Prunes fold, he turned his attention to art and has since become one of the country's most bankable painters.
Tyrone-born author and poet Nick Laird talks about the genesis of his second novel, a drama of manners entitled Glover’s Mistake, and ruminates on his addiction to the internet – a habit that threatened to blight his burgeoning literary career.
As her first ever solo greatest hits is released, Annie Lennox contemplates the ways in which parenthood has shaped her work – and explains why the past 15 years have passed in a flash.
They can rock with the best of them but beneath the guitars-to-eleven mania, Belfast noise-poppers Therapy? have a lot of smart things to say. Their new album was even inspired by an famous playwright
The angry young(ish) man of Irish preacher-punk is back, bleeding righteous indignation from every pore. Jinx Lennon tells us why it's time for a revolution.
It was inflight double entendres all round as Bell X1 donned cabin crew attire for a special Hot Press photoshoot. When not showing an unhealthy interest in women’s clothes and fancy Raybans, they talked about their chart-topping new album Blue Lights On The Runway, their imminent breakthrough in the US and freezing their arses off on The Late Show with Dave Letterman
Veteran post-rockers Mogwai have just released arguably their finest record yet. On a suitably overcast day in France, band leader Stuart Braithwaite talks about the influence of Glasgow on their work – and explains the part played by ‘nonsense art’ in their music
After witnessing a sermon from a Catholic Archbishop, our columnist is decidedly unconvinced that the Church will be enjoying a renassiance any time soon.
Graduates of the Manhattan avant-garde scene The Virgins join us from somewhere to the left of the middle of nowhere – that would be Madison, Wisconsin – to talk hype, art and modelling shoots.
Taking time out from his stag weekend, baroque retro-rocker The Mighty Stef talks about the influence of film on his writing, his enduring love for Nick Cave and his friendship with Shane MacGowan
Three years since his Mercury-winning second album swept the world, ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS’ Antony Hegarty is going back to nature. His new record is both a requiem for a dying planet and a statement of hope for the future – one that draws deeply on his Irish-Catholic upbringing. Prepare to have your spine tingled all over again.
It sounds like a car-crash waiting to happen – a Southern California garage band channelling psychedelic Cambodian pop. In fact, DENGUE FEVER are one of the most beguiling new acts to pop up on the radar recently.
He's the acknowledged elder statesman of Irish literature. But John Banville also has an intriguing parallel career as a writer of gumshoe potboilers. He talks about juggling personas - and about the dangers of dishing out bad reviews to other writers.
From his holiday hideaway in southern France, the hairier half of Mexican-Irish guitar duo Rodrigo Y Gabriela talks about the rigours of life on the road, busking on the mean streets of Dublin and the duo's growing heavy-metal following.
Back in his native Fife, Scottish folk sensation James Yorkston chats about his childhood sojourns in West Cork and the debt his music owes to a sense of time and place.
With a career-best new album under their belts, Razorlight's Johnny Borrell talks about bling, mid-career reinvention and Britain's battle with metrosexuality.
His plaintive violin playing will be familiar to fans of The Frames and Swell Season. Now Colm Mac Con Iomaire has finally gotten around to recording a solo album.
She's never been one to pull her punches but even by her standards, Mary Coughlan's latest album is a rollercoaster. Here, she talks about a life of love, loss, pain and redemption.
Unable to deviate from their set lists, 99% of bands now play the same show night after night. They get bored and jaded; so do their audiences. How did this horrible situation evolve?
Phillips’ vocal style is of the quietly devastated Erin Moran/Aimee Mann school, backlit by Bacharach-and-Wilson-ish arrangements on ‘Another Song’, ‘Little Plastic Life’ and ‘Flower Up’.
Meet Glen Campbell is a masterclass in how to make a song your own. The man knows it too: dig the sleeve’s Ezekiel quotation: “Sing to the lord and make music in your heart to him.”
Mac Con Iomaire may have started out as part of the Kila collective, but his range runs well beyond the Celtic pastoral and into the post-rock, the ambient and the neo-classical.
Some men go crazy and buy a porsche; other turn to booze to dull the pain. But whatever your response, one things for sure: few of us are immune to the midlife crisis.
Men out of time, The Verve were a neo-psychedelic jam-rock outfit who got fortuitously swept up in the Britpop boom and stumbled upon a timely form of Big Music.
Songs like ‘Sentimental Heart’, a concerto for piano, strings and Pet Sounds haberdashery, suggest this pair are as natural a songwriting team as Karen and Richard.
They're hardly typical festival fare, but Interpol know how to leave an impression. Sam Fogarino talks drugs, on the road insanity and being huge in Ireland and Mexico.
As Gemma Hayes steps back into the fray with her long-awaited third album, Hot Press arranges for her to have a tete-a-tete with long-time collaborator Dave Odlum.
In theory. But making good your promises isn't always as easy as it might seem. Plus: reflections on success not as a function of what you gain but what you lose.
Nouveau synth-pop and shoegazer drones mightn’t seem like the wisest bedding for Tom Waits’s compositions, but Scarlett and Sitek know exactly what they’re doing.
Producer and musician Daniel Lanois talks about turning his latest album into a film, cutting out the middleman to distribute his own music, and why he's fascinated by Michael Jackson's feet.
Best-selling author Colin Bateman has just published his 21st book, which is being hailed by critics as a cracker. He talks to Hot Press about cutting his teeth as a writer in Northern Ireland
In which Murph goes to Motown - where he discovers a vibrant arts scene, defiantly thriving in the cracks, despite at the neglect of the Motor City authorities....
Hard rock has taken on many forms, but if it's loud enough to annoy the neighbours, it should be categorised as good old-fashioned metal. Peter Murphy guides you through our choice of the Top 30 metal albums of all time.
The Kooks' first album was a million-selling sensation. As they unleash the long-awaited sequel, frontman Luke Pritchard talks about the death of his father, his feud with television presenter Simon Amstell and much more...
At the ripe old age of 50, when most of his peers are floundering in the doldrums, Nick Cave has hit a purple patch with Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, his most commercially successful and critically acclaimed album to date.
Debutante author Julia Kelly is the daughter of the late attorney general John Kelly, and the sister of singer-songwriter Nick, but her coming of age novel is far more than thinly-veiled memoir.
He was a life-long professional fraudster with a criminal record traversing several timezones. Now Elliot Castro has penned a gripping memoir about his, er, exploits.
In an exclusive interview, Once stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova talk about the love affair that sneaked up on them, recall their Oscar-winning adventures, give us the inside track on the movie's remarkable success and explain what it's like to hang out with the Coen brothers for an evening.
In Dublin to promote his latest book, Smiths-loving author Douglas Coupland explains why the Apocalypse keeps raising its seven-headed head in his avowedly modernist novels.
Tom Baxter's second album, Skybound, has just topped the Irish album chart. But it was a record that only got made after Baxter personally financed the sessions with his other talent of figurative art painting.
The relationship between drugs and creativity has always been a hotly debated subject. But narcotic indulgence has proven to be the downfall of many a gifted artist.
The latest group to benefit from the tutelage of legendary producer Stephen Street, attitudinal Mancunian rockers The Courteeners are one of hottest newcomers on the UK indie scene.
It was a night of songs about drugs, guns, murder and love, rendered on acoustic, national steel guitar, decks, mandolin, and “the kind of banjo that scares the sheep in Donegal.”
Michael Ondaatje wrote The English Patient, and is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language – but his latest tome, Divisadero, has confounded and impressed critics in equal measure.
For all the state-of-the-art urban production, there’s something distinctly unsavoury about Blackout. And yet, the truly bizarre thing is, the music is top notch.
Ronnie Wood reveals that his autobiography, a rather entertaining account of his hair-raising life as the 'new boy' in the Stones, was a toil of love to write.
A fresh generation of bands is tearing up the rule book and redefining what it means to be Irish. To celebrate this new wave of talent, we catch up with the best of them.
No rabble-rousing rock panto pandering, no gratuitous guitar solos or simplistic speechifying, just towering songs garnished with soaring melodies and counter-melodies.
Dave Grohl looks back on 20 years of playing music and talks about the birth of his daughter, the trapped Beaconsfield Miners and why Neil Young is his hero.
Foo Fighters’ sixth studio album is a transitional rather than definitive piece of work, but one that sees them growing older with 'patience and grace'.
David Baldacci‘s unsavoury contacts within the vast American military-industrial complex have lent authenticity to his tangled tales of insider dealings in the corridors of power
Every now and then a record emerges that announces the arrival of a major new talent. So it is with Anjani and her remarkable collaboration with Leonard Cohen, Blue Alert.
Steve Earle is known for his passionate political views. But never mind standing firm in the face of conservative America. The hardest thing he ever did was follow Christy Moore onstage.
Gen X race memory and The Devil And Daniel Johnston have ensured a full house at Vicar St, and in the foyer ‘Hi, How Are You?’ frog t-shirts are doing a brisk business in black and white.
A breathtaking variety of acts have come together - as Lennon might have put it - to focus attention on the ongoing genocide in Darfur, under the auspices of Amnesty International.
Making her solo debut, Andrea Corr has set about re-casting herself as a vampish singer with a taste for dark beats and sultry wordplay. In a forthright interview, she talks about her unexpected re-invention.
If REM apply the same print-and-be-damned attitude to the recording of these songs as they did to their live unveiling, they might produce their most vibrant record in years.
Journalist, essayist, atheist, author and, above all, agent provocateur, Christopher Hitchens has not shied away from controversy over the last 30 years. But in his new book, the writer takes on his biggest adversary to date – God.
30th Anniversary Retrospective: In a special interview, The Edge reminisces about the early days of Hotpress, explains Bill Graham’s role in U2’s development, and comes clean about what the band have been up to recently in Morocco.
30th Anniversary Retrospective: Looking back at 30 years of Irish literature, best-selling author Joe O’Connor reflects that things have never been better.
Ten Feet High is surprisingly playful, but in a serious way. For the most part, Corr and producer Nellee Hooper have fashioned a hybrid of high street pulses, airy melodies and acoustic chamber pop.
As The White Stripes prepare to unleash another work of scuzz-bucket genius, frontman Jack White talks about his Catholic upbringing and explains why, as a teenager in blue collar Detroit, he fell hopelessly in love with the blues.
In Jon Ronson’s new collection of his newspaper columns, this most provocative of commentators turns the spotlight on his own life and family, where things are not quite as normal as you might think.
Jinx Lennon is a true original, a rock'n'roll outsider whose music throbs to the pulse of rural Ireland. Here he talks about attending cocktail parties with David Norris and explains why Dundalk just might be the strangest town in Ireland.
American Doll Posse is Tori Amos's most ambitious role-playing exercise to date. She’s stepped outside the comfort zone of her Bösendorfer piano and seen to it that the boys and girls in the band earn their pay.
Fantastic Playroom sounds exactly like it sounds: often cute, occasionally lurid, always novel, a record with one eye on the alt-style supplements, the other on the charts.
Returning from an extended hiatus, Manic Street Preachers are in stridently upbeat form. In a revealing interview, they reflect on their enduring cultural imprint and talk about long lost Manic Richey Edwards.
As the son of horror writer Stephen King, Joe Hill has a great deal to live up to. Far from being over-shadowed by his father, however, Hill has crafted a chilling and original debut novel.
They love Ireland and Ireland loves them. As the Arcade Fire ramp up for world domination, the band talk about love, death, war and making music in churches.
A Tribute To should’ve been a godsend: a selection of Joni’s finest tunes, sung by a host of special guests. The reality, as one might guess from the diversity of the line-up, is a rather uneven record.
So then: a Francophile Belinda Carlisle album featuring Brian Eno, Sharon Shannon and Fiachna O Braonain on songs written and/or popularised by Piaf, Brel, Gainsbourg and Hardy. I swear, I haven’t been at the brown acid.
Ian Brown, Richard Ashcroft and now Brett Anderson; these guys seem doomed to roam the fringes of indie consciousness, forever questioned about halcyon days by cub reporters shiny-eyed with retro visions.
For what it’s worth, this writer was never convinced by Joss Stone. Folk eulogised about old soul in a young body, but I always thought she was playing dress-up, in R&B clothes that didn’t fit yet.
Peter Murphy catches up with former Ash guitarist Charlotte Hatherley to talk about 'crazy woman's music', writing songs and collaborating with XTC's Andy Partridge.
He found fame in Queer As Folk and is currently to be seen in the acclaimed US crime drama The Wire. Now Aidan Gillen is burning up the Irish stage in an acclaimed new production of a David Mamet classic.
Gavin Friday’s been a Virgin Prune and a glam cabaret torch singer, he’s done Brecht and Weill, and most recently stole the show at Hal Willner’s Leonard Cohen tribute concert Came So Far For Beauty.
This is the sixth album from Idlewild, if we’re counting their debut mini-LP Captain, and it marks a partial retreat to the noisier sonic terrain they covered on earlier records.
Recorded in the bucolic splendour of County Westmeath, Bloc Party's second album is a labyrinthine concept album about urban living. Better to take a risk, says frontman Kelé Okereke, than to repeat yourself .
One of Ireland’s leading young painters, Rasher has had his work collected by Colin Farrell, Louis Walsh and Ali Hewson, and has also contributed a cover image to the new edition of Declan Lynch's The Rooms.
The Beach Boys, Beatles and – whisper it – Fleetwood Mac are all on the menu as Sunderland’s Field Music give emo, New Rave and whatever else is 'in' this week the cold shoulder.
From piano-plonking crooners to nihilistic electro-pop duos, the UK and US are bursting at the seams with fresh talent in 2007. Could there be a new Arctic Monkeys out there somewhere?
In previous years Dara O'Briain’s public persona seemed to pendulum-swing from TV personality and game show host to stand-up guy – but with the release of his Live At The Theatre Royal DVD, the former UCD man’s comedy ship has well and truly come in.
Annual article: From the strange to the mundane, from poetic champions to pornographic novels, from maverick auteurs to great lost crime novels: it was a hell of a year to be a reader.
The godfather of the modern Irish gothic tradition, Patrick McCabe, has released what critics are hailing as his darkest, and arguably finest, novel yet, Winterwood.
Gareth Murphy’s Atlantean project takes Irish music on a journey of depth and discovery that sees it flirt with Arabic, Spanish and Indian stylings, Jah Wobble and Eno, all under the influence of maverick filmmaker Bob Quinn.
You know you’ve been to a bloody good Bruce gig when he can omit ‘Born To Run’ or ‘Thunder Road’ and nobody notices. Most of these young whippersnapper acts regard touring as a PR chore. Bruce, on the other hand, treats his job like a vocation.
An accomplished but uncontroversial second album that sticks rigidly to the template established by its predecessor. Not that adhering to form and formula is necessarily a bad thing. Shakespeare did it. So did Chuck Berry.
It wasn't too long ago that The Blizzards were unknown outside of their native Mullingar. Now they've three top 10 Irish singles to their credit and an album, A Public Display Of Affection, that has the potential to explode internationally.
Back from exile in Brighton, Fionn Regan is making major waves with his filmic observations on life in a seaside town. Peter Murphy joins him for a promenade down memory lane, and suggests that he might just be the Wicklow Dylan.
It's been over four intriguing years since Damien Rice's extraordinary debut album O was launched. That record went on to become a huge underground international hit, selling in excess of 2 million copies. Now his long-awaited follow-up – the similarly simply titled 9 – is finally ready to hit the shops. So how did Rice so successfully capture the collective imagination? And will the latest instalment in the Rice musical biography propel him to even greater heights? Hot Press talks exclusively to some of the key players in his remarkable rise and rise.
When the decision to dump Rattlebag and Mystery Train from the RTE Radio 1 schedule was taken, accusations of dumbing down were rife. So is there scope for arts and music programmes with a bit of depth in Montrose? John Kelly insists that there should be.
Sam’s Town suggests that the newly face-fuzzed Brandon Flowers has contracted a serious dose of Bruce-llosis (a quick scan of the album’s titles yields a number of Boss buzzwords: “river”, “town”, “Jonny”, “wild”). No bad thing necessarily, but any rock band without the E-Streeters’ skill or Springsteen’s Steinbeckian grasp of American history should beware of straying across the wrong side of the New Jersey tracks and ending up in Bon Jovi-ville.
Viewed in widescreen, Goodbye To The Electric Penguins is a triumph of sound over songcraft. The ensemble’s debut album is, as you might expect, an inventive and accomplished adventure in not-so-modern recording.
Sam’s Town consistently grandstands to the bleachers, makes cheap plays for the listener’s emotions and foolhardily flaunts with the conventions of good taste. Just like a great rock ‘n’ roll record should.
Fractious post-punk is the order of the day: bits of Slits, a soupçon of Pop Group, shards of Birthday Party, screeds of Breeders, shreds of Dead Kennedys, the odd surf riff pilfered from early B52s by way of Poison Ivy or John Doe, all rendered Anglocentric via a quirky lyrical sensibility (tales of rotgut shut-ins and Valleylands paranoia and Asperger’s syndrome savants).
It gives your reviewer great pleasure to report that on this album the singer has quite literally cut the crap and created a vibrant and inventive urban variation on an old school R&B set (that’s R&B as in rhythm in the beats and blues in the voice rather than rhinestones and baubles).
Rogues Gallery, can be roughly – if fancifully – described as a Hallowe’en masqued ball staged on a decrepit ghost galleon. Featuring a cast of hundreds arrayed over two albums and 43 tunes, it’s an unruly assembly whose various belchings, bilgings and bemoanings lurch in tone and timbre from the bawdy to the doleful.
Attending the infamously repressed St Peter’s College in Wexford gave a young Colm Tóibín an insight into ‘70s Ireland’s twisted attitudes to sexuality.
Burn those leather chaps, chaps. X-Tina wants to be PG-Tina, and that means no mo’ dressing like no skanky ho’. Except the Aguilerean definition of ‘demure’ means that when she uncrosses her legs now, you can only see all the way to Wisconsin instead of Nebraska.
Travelling by first class train between Wales and London James Dean Bradfield did a surprising thing: he started working on his first solo album. The resulting record taps the Manic Street Preacher’s growing affection for his roots in the valleys.
Overnight success was a long time coming for American novelist Lionel Shriver, whose breakthrough book, We Need To Talk About Kevin was her seventh novel. Here she talks about a life-time of struggle, unsympathetic women, her blistering tennis novel Double Fault – and how she is coping with the pressures of sudden literary fame.
Taking The Long Way is the kind of record you could slot between Lucinda and Emmylou at any Nashville Babylon hootenanny without anyone batting an eyelid. Listen without prejudice.
Who Are These People? is an expertly produced record that oozes high street style, a masterclass in how the home recording and digital editing set-up can easily replicate and/or sync with big budget deck-of-the-Starship-Enterprise technology.
He was a midwife to grunge and has worked with artists as diverse as Marilyn Manson, Hole and Ozzy Osbourne. Far from being a studio boffin, though, Michael Beinhorn believes modern music is too often reliant on technology.
The late lamented Tindersticks may not be around anymore, but the band’s singer and songwriter Stuart A. Staples still knows how to turn a masterful tune.
When indie godhead Frank Black hooked up with several veterans of the Nashville session scene the results were thrillingly different to his work with The Pixies
His career was almost over before it began. But hard work - and a surprise hit - have turned Edmund 'Mundy' Enright into one of Ireland's most widely adored stars. Here he reflects on some of the high points of what has been an amazing journey, during the course of which he has rubbed shoulders with some of the greats.
From the ashes of The Libertines comes Dirty Pretty Things, Carl Barat's new band. But can Pete Doherty's old sparring partner escape the legacy of his old group?
Too many live albums are about the stuff that didn’t actually get captured on tape: the ritual, the lights, the t-shirt, the bog roll, the bar tab. Please Leave Quietly is about music, sufficient unto itself.
The record, a double album, doesn’t always live up to the sum of the parts. Like the Stones, U2 and REM, the Chilis can often seem like victims of their own longevity and familiarity. The best songs on this collection are inevitably the ones where they venture out of their own comfort zone.
With a cracking new solo album on the shelves and a move to Paris on the cards, things are starting to happen for former Jubilee Allstars frontman Barry McCormack.
Discuss: The Libertines – one of the most exciting personality clashes since Mick & Keef/Strummer & Jones/Morrissey & Marr, or Jam-my dodgers in matching emperor’s new Sgt. Pepper suits who struck lucky with a couple of decent tunes?
Aw, who cares.
Alex Barclay used to write about fashion and beauty products. Now she’s a best-selling crime author with a lucrative book deal. What sets her apart from other whodunnit writers is her forensic eye for detail and chilling mastery of plot. She’s just getting started, she tells Peter Murphy.
The Swell Season is, as I read it anyway, the sound of people breaking each other’s hearts (and balls) slowly, with no cutaways to spare us the graphic bits.
Republic Of Loose are that rarest of beasts – an Irish rock band who can get their groove on. Ahead of the release of their new album, they talk about standing out from the crowd.
Consider Last Night… a lost weekend in a phantasmagorical theme park. I’d lobby for its creator to be awarded the freedom of the city, but going by these tunes, he’s already got it.
LA young guns Tsar are the latest sweethearts masquerading as bad-asses. The cumulative effect of their latest album is like watching a bunch of teenagers enact rites of passage rebellion before capitulating to Mom and Pop’s ten year plan.
He’s one of Ireland's most promising songwriters-for-hire, but now Limerick native Don Mescall hopes to establish himself as a solo artist in his own right.
The holy and austere surroundings only rendered that night's performance that much more powerful. It was certainly a lightning bolt moment for this listener, who hitherto always found himself torn between liking Mr Ritter and being exasperated at the transparency of his influences (Bruce, Leonard, Nick Drake, Townes Van Zandt).
Ten Silver Drops, Secret Machines' second album, is far from Big Apple parlour games. Rather, theirs is a widescreen vision that could’ve originated on the woolly mammoth plains of the mid-west, or further north of the border.
Meds – and how very Placebo is that, an even split between Elizabeth Wurtzel and Kurt Cobain – is their fifth album, and the sound of a band straining to slip their own skin.
Meds is their fifth album, and the sound of a band straining to slip their own skin. They’ve got a whole new set of musical ordinances going on (the sound is indisputably lush and muscular in a post-industrial kinda way) but still only two tunes: the one that throbs with dum-dum basslines and Sonic guitar swathes, and the slow spacey one with the Joy Division keyboard washes and heavy delay.
They were the coolest band on the planet – until the backlash started. Now The Strokes have released their most ambitious album yet. Can they leave their past behind?
Corinne Bailey Rae's self titled album displays the singers talent for mixing soul, funk, hippychick winsomeness, and edge, producing nothing less than a successful debut.
What producer Rick Rubin’s done for Diamond is rescue him from the super-sized supper set and corporate private party circuit. The result is an album that sits closer to Lee Hazlewood or Tim Hardin than Billy Joel (another hard-nosed ballad-toting veteran whose talent is all too often mismanaged by unsympathetic handlers).
Skye Edwards’ solo career is not so much a fresh start as a credibility reconstruction job. Her former band, Morcheeba, became something of a target towards the end of their recording career – though the detractors may have been unfairly overlooking the exquisitely chilled coffe-table pop moments on their 1998 high-watermark Big Calm.
It’s only February and already we can hear the hissing of summer lawns. Or maybe it’s applause. Comfort Of Strangers is not Beth Orton’s most radical statement, but it is her most reactionary.
He was a literary sensation, a writer with the outlaw charm of a rock star. But when rumours began to circulate that JT LeRoy was nothing more than a post-modern media prank, Peter Murphy, a friend and confidante, found himself caught up in an extraordinary story.
Yup, the brothers gonna folk you up. Anti-folk that is: Jeffrey and Jack’s garage troubador aesthetic topped off with smarter-than-your-average-bear lyrics and delivery courtesy of our old friends Arch and Knowing. If irony is dead, nobody invited these Lower East Siders to the wake.
From literary wild-child to haunted son, Bret Easton Ellis has travelled some distance since his clinical dissections of the American ID first scandalized the book world. His new novel, Lunar Park, is perhaps his most entertaining and personal yet.
With their debut single 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor' zooming to no.1 in the UK, Arctic Monkeys ended 2005 on a high. They are destined to be the new band of 2006.
From Blonde Bob to Big Star to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie, the smartest of avant standard-bearers always knew the value of going south. Cat Power (Chan Marshall to the IRS) is the latest: for this record she’s decamped to Memphis’ Ardent studios, an erstwhile Stax second base, and hired a bunch of Al Green alumni in order to salt her fairest airs with old-timers’ licks.
In pop art, acts of grave-robbing and cradle-snatching go largely unpunished. The Strokes are not what you’d call the most original of bands, but they’ve always excelled at petty larcenies.
Annual article: There was no love lost in 2005 between the ‘art’ and ‘middlebrow’ literary factions, but as long as Cormac McCarthy puts pen to paper, who cares? Plus round-up of the books of the year.
The El Paso combo’s vaulting and often impossibly convoluted noise is not every man’s meat, but for those partial to Fiesta de los Muertos hallucinations rendered sonic, their intensity and bloody-mindedness is a godsend.
Is there a technique to picking up a member of the opposite sex – or does it just happen? Feeling that he could do with a little bit of help in that department, journalist Neil Strauss hooked up with a cult community of Pick Up Artists and set out to learn the secrets of the trade. With all those Christmas parties looming, his advice might just come in handy.
The name suggests a winsome folkie waif, but Ms Rose ain’t nonesuch. Irish-English-Italian-Catholic-American of extraction and a descendent of bare-knuckle brawler John L Sullivan, she was born and brought up somewhere between Boston and Salem.
Lest we forget, for a long time there most of us Dylan-ites were glad just to see the man could get his boots on of a morning, but post Chronicles, the stakes have been upped.
How do you follow an album that sells 26 million copies? Since Jagged Little Pill, this is the dilemma that has haunted Alanis Morissette. A decade on, she feels able to come to terms with her whirlwind success.
The Eskimos have a hundred names for snow, the Irish a thousand ways to describe the weather, and Dermond Moore has at his disposal innumerable methods of evoking the many qualities of loneliness. In his first book Diary of a Man, is culled from a decade of Hot Press Bootboy columns, but it also hangs together as a string of depositions filed from the heart of exile and - that great literary theme so beloved of everyone Shakespeare to Dostoevsky- isolation.
Sean O’Reilly, whose superb Watermark hit the shelves recently, has been hailed as one of the most important new voices in Irish fiction. So why has more widespread success eluded him to date?
With his pounding third novel, The Rooms, Declan Lynch has written one of the books of the year – a driven story of love, lust and alcohol that introduces one of the great anti-heroes of contemporary fiction.
Recorded in a day across various locations by a cast of 22, Help! A Day In The Life is the second WarChild album, the objective being to raise funds for child victims of global conflict.
Since the demise of Husker Du (surely the next bunch of Amerindie pioneers due for the resurrection shuffle) Bob Mould has, with his solo albums and Sugar, gone about his craft in an unpretentious and stouthearted manner.
Ostensibly a side project, Transplants’ debut album managed to outclass anything Tim Armstrong or Travis Barker had achieved with Rancid and Blink 182 respectively.
The songs of Laura Cantrell are steeped in the timeless values of American country rock. But Cantrell, a former Wall Street banker, is a thoroughly modern artist.
Because the Fun Lovin’ Criminals never meant Bo Diddley in their home country, the band have always been at the whims of the British and Irish record-buying public, notoriously more fickle than America, where the sheer size of the land mass and populace means it takes longer to make a man as well as break one.
Whatever JJ72 Version 2.0 might be, they’re no support band. A couple of years ago the trio would have had a shot at headlining here, but a new pragmatism has seeped into the music. They’ve condensed the sonic architectural shapes of I To Sky (an album not so much released as sent straight to tax write-off limbo) into byte sized synopses of what they do best.
The debut solo album from Moloko singer Roisin Murphy embraces the avant-garde end of dance music. But it's still a great pop record. Interview by Peter Murphy.
Steve Lillywhite, who produced U2's first three albums – and has featured on the production team of almost all of their records – looks back over the band's career and recalls the highs... and the lows
Maria McKee’s last album High Dive was one of the most grievously ignored records of the last 20 years, a bona fide masterpiece dripping pearls of songs overlooked by swine and swineherds alike distracted by more easily rooted-out truffles. In its wake, the singer could have gone to ground for another seven years, but the irony would have been acute – High Dive was, among many other things, a devastating elegy to thwarted ambition.
South by Southwest indeed. Belladonna was conceived when Lanois made a sojourn to Mexico last year, but while the music herein is undoubtedly derived from a border state of mind (the sundown mariachi elegy of ‘Agave’ being a sort of musical equivalent of Marquez’s In Evil Hour), it’s also capable of migrating through various time zones.
In the making of their third album, Coldplay may have abandoned all hope at one juncture and come within an inch of splitting up, but the record has now finally arrived in the shape of X & Y. Chris Martin and co. here give Peter Murphy the inside story on the fraught creation of perhaps the most anticipated album of the year.
Or, Augusten Burroughs And The Art Of Magical Thinking. Peter Murphy talks to the bestselling author about his troubled upbringing in rural Massachusetts, the long and strange series of events that led to him becoming a writer, and why his current personal and professional happiness may just mean that his extraordinary story has a happy ending after all. Photography by Emily Quinn.
Compositional genius, musical visionary, tormented genius – Brian Wilson is many things, but a garrulous interviewee is not one of them. Peter Murphy undergoes strenuous discourse with one of the true icons of ‘60s culture.
Like many of his brethren in the world of comedy, David Baddiel has turned his hand to fiction in recent years. Although his previous efforts met with a lukewarm critical response, his new novel, The Secret Purposes – a skilfully rendered tale which draws heavily on Baddiel's grandparents' experience in wartime England – looks set to reverse that trend. Interview by Peter Murphy. Photography by Liam Sweeney
Maybe the best way to get a handle on Devils & Dust is by process of elimination. In other words, it’s not a big band extravaganza with sax and piano fanfares for the common man. It’s not Human Touch or Lucky Town, both of which suffered from pick-up pros trying to play E Street shuffles, and as any fool knows, the only ones who can do that are the original Jersey shower. Nor is it the bleak and beautiful lunar landscape of America under the Republican gun a la Nebraska. It’s not Tom Joad either, although it does share some of those album’s attributes, namely a writerly rigour with regard to research and character development, plus a slew of wetback protagonists inhabiting southerly borders both geographical and moral.
Mike Got Spiked are a quartet well schooled in the forge-work of the form. The rhythm section is nimble and quick, and singer Gavin McGuire has a fair set of lungs on him. They frequently carry off tricky muscle-funk licks and Rancid-like ska-metal hybrids with handbrake turn metre shifts (‘To Have You Here’, ‘Teen Idol’, ‘Find Yourself’) not to mention the odd muso fusion fuckabout (‘5 Second Heaven’, ‘All You Need’), although the songs invariably go scurrying back to the power chords and layered harmonies of a Linkin Park chorus. More worryingly, they have little to say, and no artful way of saying it.
This album sees Aimee Mann adopt a refreshingly speedy and ad-hoc approach to recording, not to mention a return to the comfort zone of early ‘70s AOR sounds: dampened down drums, piano, classic rock guitar licks, all overseen by producer Joe Henry (co-collaborator on Jim White’s excellent last album).
Such warm upholstery suits her un-histrionic vocal approach, and the choice of players complements the musical aesthetic and set-up (The Forgotten Arm is a song cycle about two lovers: John, a Vietnam vet, boxer and drug addict, and Caroline – echoes of the female lead in Lou’s Berlin).
Thank god for small mercies. This is not one of those guest-infested albums featuring Rod, Eric et al hatched by some opportunistic label exec in cahoots with a modish producer keeping one eye on the meter and the other on a Grammy. It’s the Reverend Al doing pretty much as he’s always done.
How does a parent react when a teenage son commits a horrific murder? In what has been a surprise best-seller, Lionel Shriver has confronted a taboo subject – with chilling results.
From that piano-ballad cover of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ to her new-found fascination with Gnostic texts, Tori Amos has remained one of the most compelling and enigmatic solo artists of the past ten years. Here, she fills Peter Murphy in on the intriguing background to her latest album, The Beekeeper, her reasons for relocating to the bucolic splendor of Cornwall, and the difficulties of maintaining artistic integrity in the face of corporate profiteering. Oh, and beekeeping, of course.
Can you really have too much of a good thing? The Mars Volta’s debut De-loused In The Comatorium was such a blood red feast, this listener’s digestive juices were still busy breaking the thing down when word came of a follow up. And whaddya know – the scope, scale, complexity and ambition of Frances The Mute, recorded in NY, LA, Puerto Rico and Australia, make its predecessor seem almost straightforward.
The star of cult movies such as Natural Born Killers, Kalifornia and Strange Days, Juliette Lewis appeared to have a direct entry to rock's premier league when she turned her attention to her punk outfit The Licks. Instead, she opted to embark on a small-scale tour and play a series of small venues throughout the US and Europe. Peter Murphy was on hand as Lewis' magical mystery tour reached Ireland, and was witness to some truly fascinating scenes as the singer and her band bewitched the Dublin indie cognoscenti, travelled south to rock Limerick and strolled the red carpet to join the glitterati backstage at the Meteor Awards. Photography by Liam Sweeney.
What’s a nice girl like her doing in a… well, okay, the Voodoo Lounge ain’t no dump, but it is your quintessentially dim-lit and cheerfully scuzzy north quay rock ‘n’ roll haunt. The choice of venue, not to mention the decision to spend a week playing clubs around the country, means that Juliette Lewis’s martyr-for-the-cause credentials can’t be called into question. The movie pedigree might open doors and get her a slot on the Meteor Awards, but this is obviously no moonlighting actor brat breezing in to play the swish palaces and then absconding with a satchel of cash.
Eveningland would make a palatable EP, but over 50 odd minutes starts to sound like a sexless, prim and proper interpretation of modern Americana that frequently strays into the excruciatingly twee.
Y’know I never thought I’d say it, but either this hot hip-hop-chicks-shaking butt-flossed-booty-all-in-ya face routine is getting old, or I am. A nocturnal stroll through the blue neon urban R&B arcade leaves the accidental tourist peering in exhibitionistic windows with pupils dilated in incomprehension at the audacity of the latest acts on parade.
The Boomtown Rats came burning out of Dublin in the late ‘70s, railing against the Irish establishment to the audible gasps of the nation’s more conservative elements. With their remastered back catalogue having been recently reissued, Bob Geldof here looks back on a period of notoriety, controversy and personal angst, and also reflects on his ongoing efforts to highlight the issue of Fathers’ Rights. Interview by Peter Murphy. Photography by Mark Harrison.
Marital breakdown can be hell for both parties. But for many fathers that’s just the beginning of the nightmare, as they are systematically excluded from contact with their children. For A special hotpress report, Peter Murphy spoke to three fathers about their first-hand experiences of Irish Family Law, and here relates their deeply troubling and unsettling stories.
The Beekeeper is like a whole new career in itself: 20 full-blown pocket symphonies, 79 minutes plus of dense, deftly orchestrated music. These days she doesn’t suffer the same burning in the gut that made ‘Cornflake Girl’ or ‘Precious Things’ so remarkable, and the band sound comfortable rather driven, but there’s something to be said for craft.
Following in the footsteps of Joy Division, The Smiths and The Stone Roses, Mancunian rockers Doves have continued the tradition of musical excellence for which their hometown is internationally renowned. With their new opus Some Cities in the offing, vocalist Jimi Goodwin here discusses apocalyptic weather, urban decay and those abandoned recording sessions with Madonna’s producer.
You could set your clock by him. Like some kind of agrarian song tiller, Will Oldham is a seasonal operator whose harvest falls every winter, January being market time. This year he’s gotten a little help on the farm from guitarist Matt Sweeney, and together they’ve come up with a batch of tunes that are by turns courtly, kinky and perverse.
Question: Why do so many rock bands take the tradesman’s entrance these days? And when was it they became so self-referential, self-effacing, heterogeneous, monosexual; cut off from the tributary streams of the other arts, adopting forelock tugging as a stance? What happened to glamour, decadence, risk, dandyism, wit? The idea of the pop star as alien emissary, queer weirdo, sin-eater, beautiful freak?
A New Jersey-ite Eurocentric who mixes the buttoned-up gravitas of Dusty Springfield and Karen Carpenter with the lush orchestral tapestries of Bacharach and Spector. A Girl Called Eddy’s bohemian rhapsody is well worth acquainting yourself with.
After examining the strange world of outsider conspiracy theorists in 2001’s acclaimed Them, chronicler of cultural weirditude Jon Ronson has now turned his attention to the murkey milieu of covert US military ops and sinister, Pentagon-sanctioned psychological experiments. Peter Murphy switches on the interrogation lamp and probes the Cardiff-born author for details on Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the tactical deployment of Barney the Dinosaur, and the men who attempted to kill goats simply by staring at them.
After 12 months which saw the group go from the indie B-division to rock’s premier league, Snow Patrol have had a more dramatic 2004 than most. In an in-depth interview, Gary Lightbody discusses a life-changing year, the Irish and British music scenes, friendships, relationships and where the band go to next.
2004 was a year of infotainment overload when popular culture became increasingly co-opted to the business of selling. But there were those precious few, who remained faithful to the idea of art for its own sake.
Rap-metal splicings are a hairy business, with even the better efforts (Anthrax/Public Enemy, Cypress Hill’s last couple of albums) resulting in a scoreless draw. So it is with Collision Course.
Watching Steve Earle and The Dukes is like rooting for a nag you know has a shot at the cup if it would only get the lead out. I’ve seen this lot a few times over the last 15 years, and tonight was possibly the closest they’ve come to an all-out tour de force, yet there’s always the sense that they’re holding out on that extra ten per cent.
If The Royal Society artefact were composed of paint rather than sound, it’d be an acid-dipped Joe Coleman print. Yes, there are elements of psychedelia, but The Disaster seem far more interested in comedown psychosis than the trip itself.
Susanna Clarke’s debut novel, the epic Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, is putting new blood into new magic, not to mention proving something of a sensation on the bestseller charts.
Back in their terrifying heyday, they threw pigs’ heads around on stage, covered themselves in muck, provided Marilyn Manson with a career and wrote ‘Community Games’ for Aidan Walsh. Having escaped the clutches of a sinister born-again Christian turned transvestite, they’re now making movies with Neil Jordan, dining with Damien Hirst and consorting with Tony Blair. All in all, it’s been a long, strange trip for The Virgin Prunes
Atomic Bomb is positively Spector-esque in its ambition, although curiously enough, it’s not a showy record, the playing being mostly subservient to the songs.
The songwriter’s oldest friends – Don Henley, Ry Cooder, David Lindley and Jackson Browne – occasionally seem hamstrung by too much respect for the material, although Bob Dylan does essay a decent ‘Mutineer’, and you can hear Bruce Springsteen’s mouth water as he gets his chops around the East Texas testament of ‘My Ride’s Here’.
With The Waterboys being between albums, tonight’s acoustic show was a case of evolution-in-progress, allowing Mike Scott, Steve Wickham and Richard Naiff the opportunity to excavate gems from the back catalogue too rare or oddly cut to fit the full band format.
They go in search of the holy grail and come back laden with embroidered bell bottoms, cowboy boots and Nudie suits – tourists bedazzled by the gimcrack knick-knacks in Beale Street souvenir shops.
Roddy Doyle is one of Ireland's most important writers. Having made his initial breakthrough with The Commitments, he won the Booker prize in 1993 with Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. Now with his new novel Oh, Play That Thing – the sequel to the critically acclaimed A Star called Henry – he is back to one of his guiding passions, music, as he takes his protagonist Henry smart through the scrum of 1920s New York, and on to Louis Armstrong's Chicago.
The only problem with writing about any new Tom Waits record is the man himself describes his own work so accurately that any further attempts at conceptualism are rendered superfluous.
Headgear is the brainchild of Limerick studio rat Daragh Dukes – or perhaps brainstorm would be more apposite, given that this album teems with more ideas per second than Philip K Dick on a caffeine buzz.
Veteran agitprop folk-rocker Steve Earle talks to Peter Murphy about kicking against George Dubya, jamming in Galway and revamping Shakespeare for the 21st century.
Growing up alongside the nascent U2 in the ’70s, Neil McCormick dreamt that one day he too would rank among the rock’n’roll greats. having quit songwriting to focus on journalism, his musical ambitions were ironically realised when he found himself included among such heavyweight talents as leonard cohen, bob dylan and elvis presley on The Passion Of The Christ soundtrack.
For 14 years The Frames have conducted the business of their art like filmmakers who reached a détente with the studio system through operating on a one-for-us/one-for-them basis.
Earle commands protest chops that go back to Guthrie, but he also has the smarts to examine the allure of war, both as boys’ own glamour and last-ditch career option. Most of the songs study the anatomy of soldiery.
A glance at the back cover painting by Heidi Wickham will evoke the music more accurately than any assembly of words: ink sky pierced by a green rind of moon, Chagall’s levitating fiddler just out of shot.
Hardly a singles band of note, Lambchop’s ambient alt. country textures are best enjoyed in much longer bursts than the 2.34 radio edit on this cut from Awcomon & Noyoucmon.
‘New Mexico’ is a driving, road-weary song not unlike Mundy’s ‘July’ in atmosphere and tempo but with Niland’s distinctive vocals very much to the fore.
You have to hand it to The Frames. Even Bruce and U2 baulk at starting new campaigns outdoors in front of 17,000 people – although Glen Hansard might claim that this is a farewell to Set List arms rather than the unveiling of Burn The Maps.
Has Madonna become the immaterial girl? Or will the Re-invention tour re-establish her as the foremost female icon on the planet? On the eve of her first ever Irish appearance at Slane, Peter Murphy takes a look at the strange twist the Queen of Pop’s career has taken – and how she is now fighting back, for all she’s worth.
All of which would be a lot harder on the ear if not for Ms Drewery, a graduate of the Dionne Warwick school of effortless breath control and just-so phrasing who oozes the kind of class (but not perspiration) to which Sophie Ellis Bextor might aspire if she only had a better team of writers.
The school I attended, if some dirty little urchin broke foul wind in class, the boys seated around him would wrinkle their noses and say, ‘Something crawled up your leg and died inside you, boy.’ The way Lanegan sings, it sounds like something died inside him a long time ago.
That, according to Shane MacGowan, will be the title of his next, and exceedingly long-awaited album. in the meantime there’s Sean Nós, the war, his dad, drink and Celtic football legend Jimmy Johnstone to be going on with.
Most ‘garage’ bands with half a budget sound like an over-egged simulacrum of the rehearsal room, but Modern Apprentice is brilliantly realised in the production department, tapped direct from the players’ power sources. Bottom line: Ikara Colt make a splendid noise, it just belongs to someone else.
Brody Dalle is tired – but then she has had a pretty intense few years of it. Peter Murphy learns how The Distillers survived marital discord and peer disapproval.
Gregory David Robert‘s life reads like the most sensational book, a painfully true but scarcely believable saga of academic success, crime, heroin addiction, incarceration, torture, escape, re-capture, and finally, literary acclaim. Peter Murphy hears the extraordinary tale of australia’s ‘gentleman bandit’ turned author. photography Liam Sweeney
Hey, hey, it’s The Pixies. A little thicker around the waistline maybe, but otherwise perfectly preserved, beamed down as if from Planet 1988. And your reporter, like the other few thousand in the front pit, well, he’s having a moment. Their Phoenix Park performance reconfirms The Pixies as rock ’n’ roll’s great dimestore surrealists.
Music Review | Album
18 Jun 2004
Peter Murphy
To The 5 Boroughs resists academic exegesis or undue analysis. It is what it is, and what it is is a vibrant, inventive and engaged piece of work. In the words of Grandpa Burroughs, it ain’t no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones.
That they sound this vicious after a three decade hiatus is a 50-something affront to Converse-sponsored plastic punkers whose only honourable response would be to slink away in a posture of abject humiliation. So here we will pay homage to the Stooge noise – a pent-up, piledriving, relentless, menacing, volatile, elemental, feral and utterly uninhibited din that manages to be equal parts industrial and organic.
There are artists who operate as holistics and healers, lifting the spirit, rousing the body. Then there are the pathologists and post-mortemizers that map the anatomy of cancers.
You can just hear the chatter in the back kitchen at all the snottiest pop parties: ‘Ooo I love Marshall, but I do wish he wouldn’t insist on bringing that nasty D12 crew along.’
When Martin Scorsese made Leaving Las Vegas director Mike Figgis an offer he couldn’t refuse, the result was the British component of an unprecedented film history of the blues.
Anybody can do sex, drug's and rock 'n' roll; precious few can capture the experience in prose. With her powerful first-person novel Brass, 26-year-old Helen Walsh has done just that.
In a ten-years-after-Kurt Cobain piece entitled ‘When The Edge Moved To The Middle’ published in the New York Times recently, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore made a point of dispelling alt-rock nostalgia by declaring: “You wouldn’t know it now by looking at MTV, with its scorn-metal buffoons and Disney-damaged pop idols, but the underground scene Kurt came from is more creative and exciting than it’s ever been.
Having disbanded the band, the man who is Divine Comedy sets out to make music that makes his soul happy. The reformed jack the lad talks music, memory, marriage and fatherhood with Peter Murphy
Having disbanded the band, the man who is Divine Comedy sets out to make music that makes his soul happy. The reformed jack the lad talks music, memory, marriage and fatherhood with Peter Murphy
Denounced by the Christian right in America and the Catholic church in Italy but championed by rockers as diverse as Marilyn Manson and Led Zep’s John Paul Jones, Diamanda Galas is unlikely to be hollywood’s flavour of the month as she rips into the oscar-winning Monster
Muscle gets stronger when it encounters resistance. On her ninth album, Patti Smith’s music is sounding buffer than it has in years largely because the singer has redefined herself in political and aesthetic opposition to the Bushwhackers.
The wild rise and fall of the coke-snorting, heavy boozing, rampantly horny music biz mogul who knew Dylan, Jagger, Jackson, Springsteen and Streisand better than most. And now he’s ready to tell all.
Exclusive: Kevin Shields, the missing presumed lost genius of Irish rock, re-emerges to tell the truth about sandbags and barbed wire, the making of Loveless, early Dublin days with Gavin Friday, Liam O Maonlai and U2, and his Bafta-winning work on Lost in Translation.
Tobias Wolff’s new novel returns him to his schooldays and memories of classmate Oliver Stone and the towering influence of Ernest Hemingway. Interview by Peter Murphy.
Aongside gentlemen of similar vintage and taste such as Shane MacGowan and Nick Cave, Will Oldham (by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Palace Brother, or any other name) is a master of adapting traditional musical and linguistic idioms to post-punk sense and sensibilities.
Call it the shitegeist. In times of war and pestilence, art gets decadent, and all we wanna do is dance. Scissor Sisters are a tight little NY combo who apply rock dynamics to disco’s lust for the transcendent dance.
With Come Away With Me, it was a class thing. Not class as defined by birthright or capital gain or social station, but that quaint 1950s Americanism denoting an indefinable aristocracy of character.
Following the sudden death of his girlfriend in the early ’90s, traumatised US writer Bill Carter took off for the unlikely destination of war-torn Sarajevo. Whilst there, he established a series of satellite link-ups with U2’s Zooropa tour, which still rank among the most divisive and controversial moments of the band’s career. Despite the subsequent media fallout, an unconsummated affair with an indian supermodel, and several brushes with death, Bill Carter has lived to tell his extraordinary tale.
Don’t go, they said. but they didn’t follow their own advice. Now, after much professional and personal upheaval, the Hothouse Flowers are back, once more in love with the idea of “ringin’ the bell”.
Over the past decade or so, Will Self has remained one of the most fascinating, infuriating and downright provocative writers in contemporary literature. Now, following the publication of his typically inventive and challenging new book, Dr Mukti and other Tales of Woe, the perennially combative author gives Hot Press the low-down on the perils of psychiatry, his relationship with ultra-controversial artist Sebastian Horsley, and that memorable showdown with Paul Merton on Room 101.
Mark Cullen’s second album, the follow up to the respectfully received Home Truths, further establishes him and his band as one of the sharpest tools in the indie shed.
Sting – all dull AOR anthems, mawkish charidee singles and empty celeb blather, right? wrong! The artist formerly known as Gordon Sumner here talks to hotpress about the lingering fall-out from the break-up of the police, hanging with über-hip filmmakers Terry Gilliam and David Lynch, and getting the seal of approval from the late Johnny Cash.
Let us now praise famous women. 2003 was the year of the female condition in all its most gorgeous and gruesome. Sure, the boys – and men – acquitted themselves admirably, but this year oestrogen overload didn’t necessarily equate with PMT (Pro-Minstrel Attention).
It’s been a hell of a year for The Thrills, propelled from rehearsal rooms in rainy Dublin to a number one album, sell-out shows and limo-driven tours of L.A. at night. Hotpress catches up with the band as they kick off an irish homecoming trek with an exclusive Dublin fan club gig.
Softly spoken off stage and complete lunatics on it, Kila have torn up the rulebook with their wantonly eclectic mix of styles. music, inner anger, revolutions and, er, women who cure warts are all discussed, as the band’s Colm O Snodaigh talks to Peter Murphy.
Ursula Burns’ third outing is one of the few albums since Astral Weeks to mess with notions of temporal, spatial and cosmic displacement. It is constructed from rolling piano figures that threaten to vanish off cliff-tops, fragmented drum taps, harp arpeggios, soprano sax and vocals so in-your-ear they could be your conscience – or your fairy godmother – calling.
Jerry Fish – or if you prefer, Gerry Whelan – is what you might call a happy man right now. In fact, if the guy were any higher, the boys in blue would probably stop him on the street and ask him to piss into a cup. Not only is he preparing to close on his most successful professional year in a decade, he’s also received a rather momentous early Christmas present. Some 28 hours before our meeting, the singer’s partner Niki had given birth to a baby boy, their second child. Mr Fish, as you can imagine, is coasting on cigars and brandy and goodwill to all men.
Body Language is a fair to middling dance pop record that might go down easier if the listener wasn’t aware of how innovative and imaginative Kylie Minogue can be. Right now, she’s stuck halfway between Erotica and Evita, peddling PVC when we need fake leopardskin and warm leatherette.
Taking surf rock, doo-wop and bowery punk down the Euro-autobahn, The Raveonettes have hit on a winning combination of the wild, the innocent and the sado shuffle. Sharin Foo tells the story.
Taking surf rock, doo-wop and bowery punk down the Euro-autobahn, The Raveonettes have hit on a winning combination of the wild, the innocent and the sado shuffle. Sharin Foo tells the story.
Taking surf rock, doo-wop and bowery punk down the Euro-autobahn, The Raveonettes have hit on a winning combination of the wild, the innocent and the sado shuffle. Sharin Foo tells the story.
from reagan to bush; from radio free europe to clear channel; from green to reveal; from the sfx to marlay park. REM call time out and Peter Buck fills in the gaps from 1983 to 2003. interview Peter Murphy
With the death of Johnny Cash two weeks ago, music’s Mount Rushmore finally crumbled. From the hell-raising country outlaw of the ’60s to his final incarnation as a patriarchal figure intoning songs of guilt and redemption, Cash’s voice resonated down through the years with undimmed intensity. In this special Hot Press tribute to the Man In Black, Peter Murphy talks to Cash collaborators Sandy Kelly and U2, and recounts the turbulent life and times of one of the most iconic figures in 20th century music
While Johnny Cash held what Nick Tosches called the “imprimatur of ageless cool” among the young punks, his repertoire, like that of Hank Williams, provided staples for the country ‘n’ Irish and showband canon, from the slickest old pros down to the most inept of part-time bar bands.
After laying At The Drive-In to rest, two of their members have put together another outfit who are determined to push back the boundaries of modern music. In a far-ranging interview, Peter Murphy talks to The Mars Volta about reincarnation, hanging out with the Chili Peppers and their Hispanic roots.
He created great songs out of the good, the bad and the ugly and earned the respect of people as diverse as Bob Dylan and Hunter S. Thompson. In this previously unpublished interview Warren Zevon, who died last week after a long battle with cancer, reflects on his sweet and dirty life and times.
One of the greatest penslingers in rockdom, he’s championed U2, Joy Division and Kylie and taken a critical scalpel to Oasis, The Strokes and their “miserably narrow mates”. he’s also locked horns with Germaine Greer, helped Frankie to relax and let The Frames slip through his fingers.
Jewel is a pleasing if somewhat bland vocalist, but for an artist who cut her teeth on the professional-confessional circuit, she’s no great writer of lyrics.
He's famous for asking the questions and sometimes getting unexpected answers. Like when one woman confessed to a distressing three in a bed romp. These days the RTE reporter is a little more circumsect about his own personal life but still outspoken and controversial on the subject of aids.
One look at the cover will tell you all you need to know, with all four members rockin’ the second-generation Heartbreakers look via Izzy Stradlin and Andy McCoy.
Exiled in America when war erupted in his hometown of Sarajevo, author Aleksandar Hemon taught himself to speak and write english – with stunningly powerful results. Portrait Mick Quinn
Maverick genius or away with the fairies? Peter Murphy travels to North-East Scotland to meet Mike Scott at home in the spiritual Findhorn community where The Waterboys’ latest album was written and recorded. And Steve Wickham explains how he left and rejoined the band.
The days of pop dominance are over. The worm has turned, and a whole new slew of blood and guts rock and roll bands are coming through with records that carry more than a hint of greatness. The darkling posse is headed by the Kings Of Leon – but there are outfits from all over the world who will be vying for poll position over the coming 12 months.
Close your eyes and you get flashes of Hispanic action painters flinging colours at bare canvas in whitewashed shanties, or shackled poetical prisoners sketching prohibited images in black dust in a hot tin shed.
Of the two shows, the first was characterised by a more formal atmosphere, and under scrutiny the band concentrated harder. The second was looser and more given to mischief.
He may possess formidable academic credentials, but Road To Welville author TC Boyle refuses to take an elitist stance on his chosen art-form. “If it’s not entertainment at its root, it sucks!” he tells Peter Murphy
Fresh from winning the IMPAC literary award for his acclaimed novel My Name Is Red, the Turkish writer talks about censorship and self-censorship, east and west, Christianity and Islam and the U.S. versus them. Photography: Roger Woolman
Despite having to contend with muscular dystrophy, the inspiration of working with some well-known musicians has given Fergus O’Farrell of Interference a whole new lease of creative life.
It was often emotional stuff of course, but if this was O’ Farrell operating on one third of his lung power and tired after two days of intensive rehearsal, then most of the vocalists on the scene could be thankful for their egos he wasn’t on full throttle.
Gone are the distorted kaleidoscopes of A Rock In The Weary Land, back are natural fibres, and if Wickham plays a subsidiary role, his high lonesome keenings are integral to the prevailing air of windswept ennui.
The industry may not have always liked them but their fans couldn’t be more passionate. Ten members, four studio albums, three managers and two major labels later, The Frames still managed to add up to more than the sum of their parts. Peter Murphy, with help from Glen Hansard and other key players brings the story of the band up to date in this, the final part of our two-part special [Photo Mick Quinn]
From “Outspan” to Glen Hansard, from Grafton Street to Hollywood – and onwards to Lisdoonvarna 2003. A portrait of The Frames as a most unusual band. Part one of a two-part special feature by Peter Murphy. [Main Photos: Mick Quinn]
How The White Stripes turned the bare essentials into an essential noise, insisted that three is indeed a magic number and wound up becoming one of the most phenomenally successful rock acts in the world
Sci-fi revolutionary and reluctant cyberpunk, William Gibson marks the publication of his new novel pattern recognition by offering Peter Murphy a peek into the present and a brief history of the future.
Pennie Smith, the legendary NME photographer who shot the cover of The Clash’s London Calling is about to have an exhibition in Belfast. Peter Murphy gets her to rewind the film
Their special talent is the ability to Frankenstein together body parts too diseased for other bands to use, sew ’em together and cover over the cracks with heaped trowels of whiteface and panstick.
You might not have heard of Leya, but Elton John, Ronan Keating and Jools Holland have. Peter Murphy meets the band who are putting Bangor on the rock’n’roll map
An 83-year-old woman says that she suffered shock and extensive bruising as a result of police action at an anti-war protest outside the Dail last week.
A veteran of conflicts in Nicaragua, Somalia, Lebanon, Rwanda, Algeria and the former Yugoslavia, Lara Marlowe is currently best known to readers in Ireland for her compelling and humane reports from Baghdad for the Irish Times. On the eve of what was being billed as a potentially decisive battle for the city, she spoke to Peter Murphy by satellite phone about war and journalism, her personal circumstances and why she believes the invasion of Iraq could still end in catastrophe
Pioneering ambient artist, film-scorer, and producer of choice for everyone from Willie Nelson to U2, Daniel Lanois has assembled one of the most impressive CVs in modern rock. And with his new album, Shine, having just hit the racks, he’s far from done yet, as he tells Peter Murphy
Anyway, the Dirty album proper hasn’t dated one second: Vig and Wallace had keen radar when it came to knowing just how much to sugarcoat the Sonics’ dissonant assault without compromising on raw power.
Anyway, Macy does both sides of the actor’s mask very well, balancing the party animal (‘Come Together’) with the natural melancholic (‘Jesus For A Day’).
Rory Gallagher’s posthumous Wheels Within Wheels is a remarkable collection of previously unreleased acoustic material by Ireland’s guitar legend. It comes complete with a cover by the celebrated painter, David Oxtoby, that is certain to make a lasting impression.
She’s no saint. She swears and smokes and doesn’t think she’ll go to heaven. But the one-time Dublin street kid has used the nightmare of her own past life to help make unlikely dreams come true for abandoned children across the world. Peter Murphy hears her extraordinary story.
The Donnas, if you don’t know, are a hard rock (and yes, that antiquated term very much applies here) quartet armed with a serious index of AC/DC riffs and a smattering of gauche girl-gone-wrong charm
The collective object of their allegiance have put on a few pounds, but remain lean and hungry, perhaps mindful that previous shots at bulking up with unnecessary extras like horn sections and blues harpists resulted in the bloat of Be Here Now.
Since their debut single ‘Wired To The Moon’ went gold here The Revs have established themselves as Ireland’s hungriest and most energetic rock combo, with an appetite for gigging and an eye for publicity that has seen them embroiled in a number of amusing controversies. But behind the brash exterior is the fascinating story of three dedicated young musicians who have overcome their status as outsiders to build one of the biggest and most loyal grass roots following of any local act. Now with the release of their debut studio album, Suck, they are ready to go international.
Only the most blinkered rap aficionados could claim themselves immune to yet another record padded out with the same old routines about homicidal life on the street.
Gone wrong the whole filthy enterprise could’ve come off as contrived but guitarist Jamie Hince makes a virtue of rhythm in its rawest state, chopping out ugly-puss figures wound tight as sinews.
Specialising in a howling brand of blues-rock not a million miles from Led Zeppelin, Dublin quintet Sato provide a very enjoyable hour of entertainment in the tiny South William Street venue
She may be very sensitive about babies and young people and her ideal bloke might have to be respectful, responsible and Christian – but that don’t mean Kelly Rowland doesn’t want to be bootylicious.
The Neon Handshake sounds like a record made of bits cherry-picked from the rock radio airwaves of the last ten years: some tried and tested Pumpkins bellyaching, a few attempts at the clenched angst of the mighty At The Drive-In, a slice or two of prime Soundgarden
Not so long ago mavericks and experimentalism were thin on the ground in Ireland. But with the growth of an independent scene, all of that has changed. for confirmation, look no further than the rise to eminence of The Jimmy Cake.
The Heineken Rollercoaster Tour is taking to the road again and this time the capital is nobody’s hometown gig. From Kells come Turn, from Limerick Woodstar and from Cork The Frank and Walters. Next stop: a venue near you.
Thus far reviewers have been foaming at the mouth trying to describe what an ungainly and unprecedented enterprise is The Raven, but Reed has always been at his best when there’s a thread to his threnodies, from New York to Berlin.
He may have ranked among the biggest-selling artists in the world in 2002 – but the ambition that has driven Eminem to pop’s dizziest heights shows no sign of abating with the release of his own biopic, 8 Mile. On track to becoming Hollywood’s latest darling, with all the attendant pressures and provocations that entails, will his art survive?
His compositions have this remarkable unfinished air, as if he is in possession of painterly instincts telling him exactly when to stop, an interior alarm mechanism warning him that one more stroke might reduce a great piece of work to a failure
When Jeff Buckley drowned in the Wolf River, Tennessee, five years ago, the world lost a fledgling musical visionary, his lone album Grace becoming a sacred text of loss and unfinished beauty. In his short 29 years on earth, his power and grace touched many, especially his mother Mary Guibert and his former bandmate Gary Lucas.
Peter Murphy considers Nirvana’s legacy and wonders will we ever hear their like again. Producer Butch Vig and Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age help him with his enquiries
From badass bunnies via political incorrectness to the mightiest drummer in rock ’n’ roll, it’s all in an interview’s work for Queens Of The Stone Age mainman Josh Homme.
This album operates under its own internal logic, happens in its own dreamtime, the basic tracks being augmented with all the care and lightness of touch one would expect from musicians preparing their friend’s last will and testament
U2 frontman speaks about "the biggest pandemic since the bubonic plague" and urges middle America to use their nation's huge financial power and get involved. "Our age will be remembered," he says, "for three things: the war against terror, the Internet, and how we let an entire continent burst into flames and stood around with water in cans"
The guy’s a great hard rock drummer in the busy-bee late-’60s mode, his vocal phrasing is addictive, and he’s of the Neil Young school of gutsy but physically dyslexic guitar playing
They are the ultimate life-is-a-movie soundtrack, perfect for self-mythologizing and elevating the humdrum ho-hum of the ’burbs and the boonies into the stuff of half-speed-shutter-flutter-partial-exposure existential
Buckley was the original crazy mixed-up kid, a brilliant dilettante who could flit from jazz fusion to classic hard rock to vocal stylists like Nusrat and Nina to lo-fi garage rock to French chansons/chanteuse
Right now, Prince is caught in the twilight zone between tributary minnow and nostalgia act, unwilling (or unable) to advance, yet refusing to plunder the back catalogue for a classic hits roadshow
Banned by the Iraquis and ribbed for “liberating” Kabul, veteran foreign correspondent John Simpson is one of the world’s most recognisable journalists. “I want people to think of me as a little bit like a grenade with the pin out,” he insists
It’s been a long, strange trip for David Grohl, from Nirvana drummer to Foo Fighters frontman, via Queens Of The Stone Age and Tenacious D. Now he’s back with a new Foo album, he’s buried the hatchet with Courtney Love and he’s still as rock’n’roll as ever
With ‘Yellow’, Coldplay captured the imagination of even the most resistant of hard-boiled rock’n’roll cynics. Now, as A Rush Of Blood To The Head achieves lift-off in the U.S., even the sky is no longer the limit.
Iicons is mercifully devoid of the usual filler that is the bane of hip-hop, namely unfunny skits based on outdated gangsta posturing, off-the rack bitch-dissin’ and equal-opportunities deployment of the epithets nigga, pussy etc.
JJ 72 have been hailed by some critics as the finest thing to come out of Ireland since U2 - and no wonder. With a hugely impressive debut album under their collective belt, the expectations are even higher for the follow-up, I To Sky. They share with their illustrious predecessors a predilection for intense songs of spiritual yearning - and a desire to make music that truly stands the test of time. But is it rock'n'roll?
"When did Ireland ever take a stand on anything?" Niall O'Dowd, leading Irish-American and author of a new book on September 11, attacks Ireland's "moral superiority"
Dirk Whittenborn started his writing career on the cult us show saturday night live in the 1970s when the hedonistic, cocaine-fuelled lifestyle claimed the talents of many of his contemporaries, including John Belushi. Whittenborn survived - but only after brutal heart surgery.
1000 Wedding are a loose affiliation of players drawn from a deep pool of Dublin barroom philosophers playing songs by Sean A. McDermott in a wilfully sloppy style
Author Barbara Ehrenreich worked in a variety of low-paid jobs in the USA to research her book Nickel & Dimed - Undercover In Low-Wage USA. The conditions and terms of employment she uncovered make frightening reading
Uncertain Intent is immaculately executed and recorded, full of big shiny shapes somewhere between art school quirkiness and latter day prog-rock muscle
At their best - 'Scooby Snacks','‘Big Night Out', 'Korean Bodega' - FLC provide the comedy take on Lou's New York by way of seminal rap-rock crossbreeds like Big Audio Dynamite
The beats are lethargic, the melodies are second generation g-funk and the main players just sound slovenly, and not in a Snoop-y gin and juice way either
Last winter, as the cold set in and rock ‘n’ roll seemed about as useful as a paper piss-pot, you could almost hear the voices from the back of Madison Square Gardens hollering, “Bruce, why hast thou forsaken us?”
The criterati may not like them but Adrian Young doesn't care. and why should he when No Doubt have crafted a most excellent pop record, with dancehall rhythms, in rock steady
Age has not withered them. twenty years after they rose out of the new york underground, Sonic Youth have managed to grow old and stay hardcore. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon reveal how it’s done
It's Bruce and the band given a new coat of paint by producer Brendan O’ Brien, who through his work with bands like Pearl Jam, knows a thing or two about gut feeling and mile-high noise
Presumably the fault lay with Oasis' techies rather than Witnness crew, but for an unforgivable dozen songs - the bulk of the set - Oasis battled to establish some sort of rapport with an underwhelmed crowd
Leaving behind his desk job, Paul Oakenfold has enlisted a galaxy of stars to perform vocal duties on hs new album Bunkka including Tricky, Nelly Furtado and, uh,
Hunter S. Thompson
The outlaw loved by the in-law, Willie Nelson can draw 4,000 people outside Dublin virtually by word of mouth. But it ain't all middle of the road: as befits a veteran of the honky-tonks who had done battle with the IRS and the law, the country music legend can still get in touch with the dark side of Hank
Donal Dineen launches his latest exhibition at the Galway Arts Festival this month. as we've come to expect from the DJ, TV presenter, filmmaker and photographer, music plays a big part in the new work
They have got it all going on: big beefy choruses, a rhythm section that don't lose their nerve at high speed or volume, a nice line in multi-tracked vocal melodies, and guitars like a gravel bath
The Red Hot Chili Peppers visited Lansdowne Road, Dublin on July 8 but we caught up with the band in Paris recently and heard why the west coast warriors of funk-rock have never been hotter
Staros rarely raises its voice, and like Margaret Healy, marries flatland minimalism with elements of euro-electronica, avant jazz equations and The Blue Nile's nocturnal urban emptiness
The rise and rise of the female singer/songwriter is fast achieving phenomenon status in Ireland - here,
Peter Murphy profiles an eclectic mix of new and distinctive talent
Hot Press was granted an exclusive preview listen to so-new-it's-not-even-finished-yet Red Hot Chili Peppers LP By The Way, due out on July 8th. Peter Murphy gives us the rundown
The thirteen tracks herein can be split roughly into two camps - the originals penned quick and recorded even quicker for soundtracks, and the covers dashed off as extra incentives on special edition albums, or just for pig iron
Alice and Blood Money are Siamese twinsets written by Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan for a stage production directed by Texan image alchemist Robert Wilson
With A Head Full Of Blue, music journalist Nick Johnstone reveals the harrowing story of his alcohol addiction - not just from first drink to last, but right back to the childhood "faulty wiring" that also led him to cut himself and through to the sometimes difficult process of recovery which has allowed him to reclaim his life
Florida's favourite crime writer Carl Hiaasen has turned his attention to the equally murky world of newspapers and rock music for his latest book basket case. Peter Murphy reports
Peter Murphy meets Sweden's Soundtrack Of Our Lives frontman Ebbot Lundberg and discovers that Scandinavia has more to offer music than Roxette and their ilk
His melodies do the job, and this new record utilises a peculiar but pleasing palate of muted drum figures, manipulated guitar and synth strings, but as I say, the vocal tone grates
Or how a short-term model, aspiring novelist and Indie kitten became a sophisti-cat and lived to twitch her tale. Peter Murphy meets the multi-layered Sophie Ellis Bextor
Comic book genius Alan Moore, who was also the original author of the big screen Jack the Ripper yarn, From Hell, has now turned his attention to fellow visionary/madman, William Blake. Peter Murphy reports
No mere actor boy moonlighting as a rock star, Billy Bob Thornton is steeped in music and also in the kind of brooding Southern gothic aesthetic which informs his compelling album of song and story, Private Radio. Peter Murphy meets a singular man of stage and screen
Tanya Donelly has returned with a new album, Beautysleep, which features the cream of Boston's musical talent. But Peter Murphy discovers that the ex-Belly vocalist's pregnancy at the time of recording forced her to re-evaluate her singing technique
A rethink in the production department (Steve Jordan's on the board) means some of the gunk has been scraped off the Explosion's bright pink fuck machine and the fenders have been given a good waxing. Some, I said, not much
Seventeen years after his second book was banned and he lost his teaching job, John McGahern's reputation as one of Ireland's most gifted writers has been underlined by the critical acclaim accorded his latest novel That They May Face The Rising Sun. Yet McGahern remains a somewhat enigmatic personality, tending his farm, refining his prose and observing a vanishing world from his Leitrim home. "The rather nice thing about writing is that it makes everything else a pleasure,' he tells Hotpress
How Bubba Sparxxx went from being nose-down in a bowl of coke to becoming hip-hop's greatest white hope since Eminem. Peter Murphy hears how the southerner fell and rose
Elstree, remember me, went the old Boggles tune. The location is a far-flung suburb of north London, former nerve centre of an entire B-movie industry, now home to television shows like East Enders, Holby City (wandering through the corridors, your correspondent comes across a room identified by the rather ominous notice: Make-up - GUTS), and of course Top Of The Pops.
Nirvana - Ten years after. Peter Murphy talks to producer Butch Vig, musician Mark Lanegan and critic Greil Marcus, and gets the inside story of the making of Nevermind, the classic album that changed the face of music, unveiled the anthem 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' and brought the world face to face with a screaming soul called Kurt Cobain.
Don't let the tulle threads fool you - there’s a flinty edge in Maria Doyle-Kennedy's delivery that's far closer to Patti Smith or Marianne Faithful than any of the '90s vintage Lainey Keogh-goes-to-Lilith songbirds
Allegations of racist literature and links to the British National Party have once more brought the activities of the immigration Control Platform into focus. Peter Murphy reports
Under Rug Swept starts promisingly with the toothy guitar hook of '21 Things', but it isn't long before the groove fractures under a shopping list of Alanis' requirements in a lover, a bunch of cumbersome lines that probably scan better than they sound.
Rock Steady comes with aspirations towards roots-reggae by way of dancehall beats, but the band have made a wise choice in plumping mostly for luscious cherry pop here, crafting a bunch of tunes that can slot easily between nu-punk and the new Pink.
Of course, there are some prime Wu-Tang tunes here.....But this listener misses the sheer force of character of ODB or Redman, an ill not even guests like Flavor Flav and Ron Isley can remedy.
Sex and sanctity, grit and glitter, penthouse and pavement, God and the Devil, and all conical points in between!
PETER MURPHY dials M for ADONNA, the pre-eminent pop icon of this and every other year
what good was rock’n’roll in 2001? No good at all – and yet we couldn’t have got through without it.
Peter Murphy reflects on a year in which some old codgers stood up to be counted and many of us lived “on songs and hope”
Peter Murphy discusses the finer points of prophecy with US writer T.C. Boyle whose latest short story collection includes tales of plague, air rage and terrorism
