“ROSE-mair-ee!” yells a sold-out Olympia along with Paul Banks, as the Morse-code bassline of ‘Evil” jitters away beneath. “HEAV-en re-STORES you in LIFE!” So, yes, onstage it looks like Interpol: five smart-suited gentlemen throwing rock shapes in a graveyard-mist fug that is ‘lit’ (if you can say that about a near-dark stage) in their trademark two colours, black and dark red. But turn around to face tonight’s all-singing, all-dancing crowd, and you could be at an Oasis concert circa Definitely Maybe.
Your writer is just as fond of the throwaway, the frivolous and the ephemeral as the next person, but it takes someone as integral as Damien Dempsey – back, here, with his third studio album – to remind you how empty, or, alternatively, full of shit most music is. That’s not a negative statement, just a true one.
Tonight’s noisily chatty office-party crowd are certainly excited about something, but it may or may not be Life After Modelling. They should be, though: the Lifers’ short set is a compact bang-zap of straight-as-a-die Noughties post-punk, leavened by dreamlike, hand-holdey boy-girl harmonies.
Patti mightn’t be leading from the front anymore, but she does wear her own legend, like everything else she’s sporting tonight, with authority.
Music Review | Live
21 Jun 2004
Kim Porcelli
Any cynics betting on an evening of flabby nostalgia and/or paycheque-induced dead-but-won’t-lie-downism can pay up now. That’s not to say it’s anything less than heartstoppingly moving to hear the old stuff in the flesh , but it’s more thrilling still to witness a sterling set drawn mostly from brill new LP You Are The Quarry and to see and hear proof in spades that Moz in 2004 isn’t just trading on past glories.
Holy high expectations, Batman. Here are some of the phrases being thrown around about Chichester five-piece Hope Of The States. “Like Godspeed You! Black Emperor” (gorgeous, instrumental-based, violin-led apocalypse-rockers),.“Like…Trail of Dead” (gorgeous, song-based, guitar-led, er, apocalypse-rockers). And, not least: “First credible possible heirs to Radiohead”. Arooga!
Music Review | Live
10 May 2004
Kim Porcelli
Incredibly, the woman before you in the rustling, blindingly white wedding dress, Mrs Tracee Mae Miller (flame-coloured cascade of hair; skin like a porcelain doll; sugary-breathy voice like the thought at the back of your mind), will turn out not to be the most interesting thing on stage tonight.
Having released his debut album to little recognition at home in Ireland. Perry Blake's career unexpectedly gathered momentum in continental Europe. Whilst he remains little more than a cult figure in his native land. These days in France it's all deification by La Monde, movie soundtracks and policy debate with the Culture Minister. "Part of me is thinking, oh fuck I hope it doesn't do a David Gray" Perry Blake.
"Early highlights like the soul-searching ‘Eskimo’ and the sharp, bitter melancholy of ‘What I Am’ confirm that they will not just be going through the motions today."
Widely recognised as the best sports writer in Ireland, Tom Humphries became a key player himself, this time last year, when his interview with Roy Keane led to the departure of the Corkman from Ireland’s World Cup squad. Here, Humphries discusses sports journalism, club versus country, soccer in Croker, the Michelle Smith scandal and, of course, Roy Keane, his part in his downfall. [Pics Mick Quinn]
Thickfreakness is all about paying homage and not at all about offering a new vision of how blues can be the backbone of music that is unapologetically modern.
They deliver their revolutionary polemic via brilliantly thumping turntablism, the immense thunderclap of a live drummer, deliciously vicious guitars and, of course, the mesmerising showmanship of Chuck D, Flavor Flav and Professor Griff themselves.
Is she a manufactured pop act made to look like a rock chick? is she a rock chick who sells records like a manufactured pop act? or is she something else entirely? Why’d Avril Lavigne have to go and make things so complicated?
The actor, director, novelist and husband of Uma Thurman on the thrill of being a non-specialist and the challenge presented by "the greatest adventure you can have" - being in love
Why do people read magazines? An interesting poser in view of the last decade: the era that brought us multimedia and the Internet, the cultural idea of “dumbing down”, and that saw “content” production in the media – what we read, what we listen to, what we even hear about – fall conclusively into the hands of the profit-or-die multinationals. The question is in the news pages this month following reports that landmark American music and youth culture magazine Rolling Stone is breaking with its 35-year tradition of intelligent cultural and political journalism to move into the racy male-lifestyle-mag arena, under the stewardship of British editor Ed Needham, famous for giving the world “lad” magazine FHM. …
Why do people read magazines? An interesting poser in view of the last decade: the era that brought us multimedia and the Internet, the cultural idea of “dumbing down”, and that saw “content” production in the media – what we read, what we listen to, what we even hear about – fall conclusively into the hands of the profit-or-die multinationals. The question is in the news pages this month following reports that landmark American music and youth culture magazine Rolling Stone is breaking with its 35-year tradition of intelligent cultural and political journalism to move into the racy male-lifestyle-mag arena, under the stewardship of British editor Ed Needham, famous for giving the world “lad” magazine FHM.
Somewhere in between Stereolab and Broadcast, you have Pram, merrily measuring out their own insignificance in light-years, even more fascinated by life as it exists on our odd planet because of its pathetic tininess.
In the nineties, renegade novelist, short-story-writer and establishment-bothering journalist WILL SELF had the additional dubious distinction of being the literary world's most high-profile drug addict. He begins the new decade clean, sober and with How the Dead Live, a new novel many are lauding as his finest work. He talks to KIM PORCELLI about being free of his own past, being alive, being dead, and being 'deader'
Cellos, harps and horns collide with magical results on the album of the summer, if not the year, from cult \bermensch BADLY DRAWN BOY. KIM PORCELLI reads between the lines
For a world still mourning Jeff Buckley, the prospect of Coldplay, in theory, is one that ought to provoke, at least, sniffily cynical disinterest and, at most, rioting in the streets.
Festival season again, and, as if on cue, the debut album from Kilkenny's Wilt arrives in a squall of seamless, subtext-free grunge pop and three-minute mosh-o-ramas readymade for summer location broadcasts on MTV.
This heartfelt love-poem to the strumpet city, and to those who wander its streets looking for connection, compassion, a home, should be required listening for anyone who has ever been anywhere near Dublin.
Hand-picked, coddled and manufactured: mainstream pop stars have the life. Don t they? KIM PORCELLI gets up about twelve hours earlier than usual and spends the day with SAMANTHA MUMBA. Hot shots: PETER MATTHEWS
Endless traffic, skyrocketing house prices, vandalism, litter, corrupt planners, listed buildings being pulled down to make way for |ber-pubs and highrises. Doesn t Dublin deserve better than this? KIM PORCELLI talks to Irish Times Environment Correspondent FRANK McDONALD about his new book, The Construction Of Dublin, and some of the more controversial proposals to save the city before it s too late
When the direct-action anarchist collective Chumbawamba signed to EMI, released Tubthumping and earned lorryloads of cash a while back, there was talk of how they were going to "subvert the system from the inside".
From Bella Union, home of Dirty Three, comes this label debut from the Czars, produced by Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde, and featuring backing vocals from Tarnation's Paula Fraser.
When Mr Smith went to Washington - or, actually, Hollywood - to perform his Oscar-nominated 'Miss Misery' from Good Will Hunting at the Academy Awards a few years ago, a worldwide audience of sensitive indie mopers cheered at the vindicating incongruity of it all.
If ever there was a debut album that literally required the listener to investigate further, insofar as it gives nothing away, it is this inscrutable mini-album of idle, sweet abstractions from Capratone.
One doesn't need much imagination to deduce that, after the runaway success of Macy Gray, the critical reanimation of Whitney Houston and the enduring mainstream popularity of Lauryn Hill,
