County Cork’s Kim Carroll has won the Gold Medal at Utah’s Park City Film Music Festival, the first event that singularly recognises the contribution of composers to the motion picture industrY.
Only $12 million’s worth of box-office for Michael Bay’s latest opening weekend? Whither cinema? Surely people have been longing for another two hours plus of incoherent bangs and crashes and mind-numbingly long chase sequences?
As far as this writer is concerned, Category III films – Hong Kong’s answer to the good old-fashioned X rating – are where it’s at. Johnny To’s triad thriller, the first film to receive the dread stamp in quite some time, isn’t the crimson tide we might have expected, nor indeed does it stylishly swagger into theatres like the director’s girl gang epic The Heroic Trio.
Saddled with the worst band name since Voice Of Cheese, The Sea And Cake often sound like The Beautiful South after two weeks in Benidorm studying jazz construction. And it works for the American four-piece's first album in three years, with vocalist Sam Prekop's soft voice bringing a wistfulness you hadn't known you missed so much.
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.
It’s not often that people start queuing outside London’s Koko at 5pm – the last time was for Madonna, and that was Madonna. Tonight though, the Doherty-ites are making sure Babyshambles’ UK tour kicks off in style.
Damien Dempsey is a soul singer in the truest sense of the word. OK so he's no Al Green, but the 23-year-old from Donaghmede is incapable of being anything other than honest and giving anything less than 100% every time he opens his mouth to sing.
She could have carved her niche as matinee totty but instead Catherine McCormack has followed her own route. Her latest movie, for instance, is a zombie flick freigthed with political overtones.
During his misspent youth, Johnny Cash crashed and burned so spectacularly, so frequently, that a future rock biopic became something of a certainty. James Mangold’s fine film has plenty of seamy detail – Cash’s amphetamine fuelled tours with Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, hysterical groupies, a drug-bust at the Mexican border. Primarily though, Walk The Line is a romance, a dark, spiritual, difficult, redemptive love story.
Holmer may be our last hope, a vinyl junkie who evidently doesn't give a fiddler's fuck for ersatz (or otherwise) notions of lineage, tradition, nationality.
In 1972, the British government “swept clean” the Chagos Islands and handed the biggest – a tropical paradise called Diego Garcia – over to the US. 30 years later no one seems to care what happened to the natives who were uprooted and exiled. words Eamonn McCann
When not locking themselves away in 18th-century farmhouses and getting freaked out by UFOs, Mani-endorsed English rockers Kasabian are setting ablaze the UK indie scene and claiming, “If you cut our skins, we bleed rock’n’roll.” Danielle Brigham talks to the group’s consummately charming frontman, Tom Meighan
How long must we sing this song? We ve known for what seems like aeons that Ireland in the first two thirds of the 20th century was a cesspit, in which children were routinely and systematically abused, physically and sometimes sexually, by people in whose care they were placed in sports clubs, schools, orphanages, reform schools and so on.
From strange days coming second in a yoghurt-sponsored competition and playing awful gigs sandwiched between boy bands, Damien Dempsey, with a little help from Shane, Sinéad and Christy, has survived and thrived. Eamon Sweeney meets a rap balladeer with a hit album, a social conscience and more than a few stories to tell.
On the occasion of the first Irish screening of Nagisa Oshima’s Ai No Corrida (In The Realm Of The senses), banned for 18 years because of its explicit sex scenes involving lead actor Tatsuya Fujii’s hardcore hard-on’s, Neil McCormick takes a ride through the history of the ’members’ of the film world’s penis colony and while he’s ‘at it’, talks to film sexpert David Sullivan about the ever narrowing gap between the porn film industry and mainstream cinema.
...But the 50,000 people at the EXIT Festival liked it! Young Serbs, fed up with being blamed for the crimes of their erstwhile leaders, partied the weekend away in a walled fortress next to the Danube.
"This is hell, dude!"
- Ascanio Pignatelli. L.A. based graduate student and would-be actor, interviewed during the Malibu fires by the Los Angeles Times.
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.
Their friends warned them against it and the textbooks were hardly more encouraging, but when ADRIENNE MURPHY gave birth to Fiach, herself and partner Dara were not to be dissuaded from travelling en famille for three months in the "hot thin waist" of Central America. This is their remarkable story
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.
In Auckland, it was punk rock, gang wars, heroin and prostitution. In Cavan, it s rolling countryside, a recording studio in a church and more dogs than you could throw a stick for. It s been a long way from there to here for BRENDAN PERRY, the former partner in Dead Can Dance who now has a solo album on release.
Interview: NICK KELLY. Pix: CATHAL DAWSON.
Few Irish albums have been as eagerly awaited as THERAPY?’s Troublegum and while the jury has yet to deliver its final verdict, early indications suggest that the band from Larne may be about to fulfil their own prophecy and become multifuckingnationally huge. But does taking on the world mean having to compromise the hardcore principles they’ve fought so hard to protect?
ANDY CAIRNS and MICHAEL McKEEGAN tell Hot Press trouble-shooter GERRY McGOVERN that displaying your gums doesn’t mean having to sacrifice your teeth. Pix.: MICHAEL QUINN.
He s the Godfather of TV-Astronomy. He s not only the size of a minor planet, he even has one named after him. He knows all the secrets of Life, the Universe and Everything. He is Patrick Moore. And now he tells Andy Darlington about his Flying Saucer Close Encounter , his musical input into 2001: A Space Odyssey, why there are no Skating Rinks on the Moon and much more groovy cosmic stuff
JOHN WHELAN journeys through the former Yugoslavia with New Age travellers, the Rainbow tribe, on the occasion of the 12th European Rainbow gathering which, this year, was held in Slovenia. The event encapsulated the very essence of international socialism; and the earthy conditions in which it was held only served to underline its lineage with the true spirit of Woodstock.
It is five years since rapper TUPAC SHAKUR was gunned down on the streets of las vegas in a gangland-style shooting that took place on September 7, 1996. Since then he has become the subject of one of modern music’s most bizarre death cults, as he continues to sell millions of records and to top charts all over the world. but behind his death lies a story of hip-hop babylon – a sordid tale of intrigue, egos, drugs, sex, intimidation, violence – and, almost by the way, some great and enduring music.
By PETER MURPHY
