Witnness the phantom
The Hot Press Newsdesk, 31 Jul 2002
Foo Fighter Dave Grohl was spied sitting on the top step of the Grandstand smoking a fag and admiring the chaos in the field beyond… Gwen Stefani made a brief appearance flanked by swarms of over bearing body guards. Methinks she could’ve done better by swatting an oncomer with the spike of her 8” stillettoes… Gomez were wandering in and out of the smallest (and nicest) pub in Ireland, ‘The Witnness Inn’ backstage, making the most of the free Guinness… Tom from The Electric Soft Parade spun a drunken tale of irregular Spanish verbs on legs… Damien Rice rocked the VIP area with a blistering performance in the TV Tent… Howlin’ Pelle got the corwd screaming “The Hives, The Hives, The Hives” instead of “Olé, Olé, Olé”. Cheeky bastard… The Frames performed a cracking cover of Pixies anthem ‘Debaser’ after which a dementedly euphoric Glen Hansard jumped from the stage headfirst into the mud before declaring “ARE YOU FESTIVAL FIT?”… The Bluetones described the aftermath of getting caught in traffic and arriving too late to play as feeling “like spare pricks at a wedding”… Rumours of surprise appearances by Daft Punk, David Bowie or Queens Of The Stone Age abounded but unfortunately proved to be unfounded… Sets by Gemma Hayes, Hundred Reasons and Creative Controle all came a cropper during the afternoon’s confusion… Not to be undone, Creative Controle played their set anyway despite the fact that no-one was allowed in the Dance Tent to see them… Sandra Bernhardt preached the merits of love to the audience before backtracking with a brusque “sober up arseholes”. Worse was to come when she started to sing… Rumours abounded that the giant Jenga in the Treatment area got a bit tense, with the Phantom FM team beating off the Melaton boys… The Cooper Temple Clause got fruity on the bed in the interview tent backstage, pouring Guinness everywhere and hurling grapes and oranges in every direction… Extortionate rates for food (E7 for a breakfast roll) saw many wallets empty quicker than initially expected…
It was gentlemanly handshakes all round when Noel Gallagher met Starsailor in the Press Area. A stark contrast to the previous day when T In The Park security had to stop them indulging in fisticuffs. It appears that ‘Sailor singer James Walsh wanted Gallagher Sr. to explain some derogatory remarks he made about them in a recent press interview… Lovely and well proportioned as it is, Stuart Clark would’ve preferred it if one of The Parkinsons hadn’t shown him his todger. And bitten his head off for mentioning The Hives! As for their hastily rearranged TV Tent set, the Anglo-Portuguese quartet seriously rocked. Imagine an even more balls to the wall D4 and you’ll have some idea of the racket they make… Which big, nasty national radio station objected to poor, sweet Phantom FM broadcasting live from the backstage area?… The much kinder Spin FM played a blinder with eight hours of live coverage each day. After a bit of a shaky start, the 103.8FM crew are starting to deliver the goods. Big time… Rory Rev’s teeth modelling days are over for good after a flying TV Tent microphone stand chipped one of his pearly whites. Unperturbed, the whole group jumped into bed with Stuart Clark. A rather unsavory episode which will soon be viewable on hotpress.com… Saturday night saw a very, very relaxed Robbie Keane enjoying a tipple or three in the Media Bar… Top publicist “Dangerous” Dan Oggly was unable to attend Witnness because his young lady, Jackie, selfishly went into labour on Saturday morning. They’re now the proud parents of a 6lbs 12oz baby boy. Congratulations… Ian Brown arrived on stage wearing a weird shirt-like affair fashioned from the tricolour, the old crowd pleaser… While the masses dealt with the mud, the lucky few in the Treatment Area reclined in an Arabic-style opium den being entertained by dark-eyed belly dancers gyrating to ‘Get Yr Freak On’… Hot Press Art Director Simon Roche successfully passed himself off as a member of a popular indie band and spent a very pleasant 10 minutes holding court in the Signing Tent… Lorraine Keane has reason to feel chuffed with herself after eliciting more Treatment area wolf whistles than Gwen Stefani…
Spotted backstage: Andy Rourke from The Smiths hanging out with the Scream Team. Affectionately referred to as 'Rourkey' by fellow Manc Mani…
A meeting of great Glaswegian indie minds – Bobby Gillespie, Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub and Eugene Kelly of The Vaselines comparing notes and colourful local tales… A very relaxed Kevin Shields, happy to be spending a few days in Ireland to visit his parents in Shankill…
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Treacherous things, these retrospectives. A whole year’s worth hangs on whether or not I’m in a good mood at the time of writing. Bear this in mind.
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In Ireland, conspicuous celebrity replaced politics. The press didn’t get to interview the Taoiseach so they documented the social activities of his Press Secretary P. J. Mara.
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1988 was a year characterised by solid, rather than spectacular achievements. On the live front came Ario Guthrie, Joe Ely, Peter and Lorin Rowan, but pride of place must go to the home-grown splendour of Arcady, a band for the future if ever I saw one.
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Shock horror! No elvis Costello album! … In certain circles 1988 will be best remembered for the King’s lack of vinyl. His soundtrack for ‘The Courier’ was all well and good and ‘Out Of Our Idiot’ filled in a few of this particular household …
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It’s official 1988 was a great year for music because it finally returned guitar-based pop to the chars where it belongs. Forget the turgid (Fl Acid House invasion which was merely a minimalist retread of early ’70s disco (what’s the betting on House Sucks badges in ’89?).
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1988-12-15 - News
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1988-12-15 - News
End of term reviewers are a bit like film censors. As they reel in the year, there is a tendency to cut and paste according to their own prejudices and passions.
1988-12-15 - News
All the real action in ’88 was on the dancefloor, where innovation, eccentricity, joy and love could be found in abundance.
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This December 31st/January 1st when some drunk at whatever New Year’s party you happen to be gatecrashing starts mumbling sweet nothins in your ear about how bloody awful the last twelve months were for music, do me a big favour and clout him.
1988-12-15 - News
A year bedevilled by inconsistency, 1987 cruelly ruptured all the upheaval theories linking it to ’67 and ’77. Lots of brilliant singles and precious few (and few precious) albums.
1987-12-31 - News
While 1987 will of course be recognised as the year U2 conquered the world, spare a thought for those whose careers begin beneath the shadow of ‘The Joshua Tree’.
1987-12-31 - News
The privilege of being given space in a newspaper to pontificate on the events of the past year is afforded to very few people. As such it is a privilege. The same applies to rock criticism in general.
1987-12-31 - News
In a year that saw U2 take on the world and win hands down, with a string of superb concerts and the album to beat all in ‘The Joshua Tree’, there was much to be leased with in terms of Irish bands consolidating their reputations.
1987-12-31 - News
Lazy, hazy days indeed. While The Master of the Universe made his glorious presence felt in Dublin, Stock, Aiken and Waterman belched out a ghastly amount of dirge in London, working puppets like the god-awful Rick Astley to the bone in an effort to combat the wave of hip-ho and house music that gripped the city in the summer.
1987-12-31 - News
1987 was a year to be eagle-eyed in distinguishing between headlined hype and reality.
1987-12-31 - News
It was a year of cut-backs, cut-ups, cut-offs, cock-ups, condoms, market crashes and country music! A year also where the song and anti-song vied or dominance – and both survived.
1987-12-31 - News
In 1987, it seemed as if every band inside and out of Dublin signed themselves off the dole and on with a record company.
1987-12-31 - News
Aside from “boosts for the whole country”, “taking our place among the greats” and all the other woolly notions which surrounded the Republic qualifying for germany, Stephen Roche winning the Tour de France and U2 finally cracking America, 1987 will hardly go down as one of the most memorable of rock’n’roll years …
1987-12-31 - News
In a popular music world that has become increasingly schizoid and fragmented, it was appropriate that the best records came from those folk who have always boasted independence and individuality.
1987-12-31 - News
A memorable year, for so many reasons, ’87 promised much but ultimately failed to deliver the musical goods we’ve been waiting for since the beginning of the decade.
1987-12-31 - News
One might have thought that such a wild and woolly year would have produced a more extraordinary selection of records to mull over in these last weeks.
1987-12-31 - News
‘That’s entertainment’ was the message of the year but not as Paul Weller intended it, for in 1986 popular music was closer to mass entertainment as Declan McManus’ pater knew it than any year since Elvis Presley swivelled his hips on the Ed Sullivan show.
1986-12-18 - News
All things considered, the past twelve months are unlikely to be considered essential in the rock’n’roll scheme of things. It was a year when few new acts came to the public eye and those that did weren’t breaking any particularly new ground.
1986-12-18 - News
There was an odd period some ten or fifteen years ago when punters would pay a few bob to go into a folk club and shut their gobs while somebody played. I can’t imagine why. Perhaps the late arrival of technology was making us romantic.
1986-12-18 - News
’86 inspired the realisation that rock’n’roll now encompasses such a broad spectrum of self-contained categories (Hip-Hop, Metal, AOR, ad infinitum) operating simultaneously that the possibility of any truly revolutionary movement on the scale of ’78 would appear to be singularly remote.
1986-12-18 - News
Casting a cold eye on 1986, one must be frank that, although it was a good year, the absolute pinnacles that have marked previous years were absent. Perhaps ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ and ‘Born In The USA’, and their respective tours in 1985, not to mention Live Aid, drained a lot of emotion.
1986-12-18 - News
1986 was an excellent year for Irish bands. Single released were aplenty, but the ones that took my fancy included Brush Shiels’ elegaic 'Old Pal’, Dorian Mood’s ‘It’s A Funny Thing’, and Something Happens!’
1986-12-18 - News
In the virtual absence of the maker’s of ’85s best two LP’s (the Pogues and Mary Chain) the return of Elvis Costello was more welcome than ever.
1986-12-18 - News
1986 was a disappointing year for Irish albums, with only Blue In Heaven and Maura O’Connell distinguishing themselves on that front.
1986-12-18 - News
No sooner had the Xmas decorations been taken down than The Blades, the last vestige of one’s misspent youth, decided to call it a day with an emotional performance in the Olympic Ballroom.
1986-12-18 - News
The three thirty-threes of eighty-six were the Half Biscuit’s ‘Back In The DHSS’ (whacky, witty and tv sussed) and The The’s ‘Infected’ (tense, big and scary). Iggy Pop, David Sylvian and The Housemartins accounted for many happy hours while Blue In Heaven’s ‘Explicit Material’ exuded power with a minimum of pomp.
1986-12-18 - News
There have been some wonderful records in 1986, and Napoleon Dynamite’s little hands of concrete produced two of them.
1986-12-18 - News
“And now we havf ze results of ze ‘elseekni jooury” … burble, squeal, zeekzrrzzsngtum … oops, we’re sorry, we’ll write that again … the result of the Hot Press jury, who wish to profusely thank David Byrne for all those pints he bought us in the International Bar last week – even if he did rather endanger his chances with all those neo-structuralist musings about The Bogmen.
1985-12-20 - News
Reflecting on the big beat as it was delivered over the last 12 months I’m conscious less of a list of albums than of a series of events.
1985-12-20 - News
Some surprises from overseas, and several gems from the homefront – that was 1985.
1985-12-20 - News
1985 was the year of the debut album. Light A Big Fire and their explosive ‘Gunpowder’, Hoodoo Gurus’ ‘Stoneage Romeos’, The Men They Couldn’t Hang with ‘A Night Of A Thousand Candles’, and the much vaunted Jesus And Mary Chain who silenced the detractors with ‘Psychocandy’.
1985-12-20 - News
1985 has got to remember as the year when one of the most spoiled, wasteful, self-indulgent and ephemeral industries on earth suddenly woke up, not only to the urgent insistence of its conscience within the person of Bob Geldof, but to its power to actually achieve something, (to raise money and thereby save lives), given the right motivation and mechanism.
1985-12-20 - News
The first part of the year undoubtedly belonged to the Americans. Week after week the albums drifted through signalling a shift back to a more orientated form of music – no bad thing from my point of view as I’ve had it up to here with Fairlights and bloody drum machines.
1985-12-20 - News
’85 was a good year for music, though not for albums. The most interesting 12-inch singles came from John Lydon and Afrika Baambatae’s Time Zone project and The Bomb Party with ‘World Destruction’ and ’Ray Gun EP’ respectively.
1985-12-20 - News
Establishment rules O.K.! That’s the message to be drawn from ’85s long playing output! In a year which has been yawn-inducing rather than epoch-making, it speaks volumes about the state of the art that the year’s best buys were reissues of one sort or another by Echo And The Bunnymen, Velvet Underground and The Doors.
1985-12-20 - News
Occasionally one gets a hardy annual, but 1985 has been more of a hardly annual, than anything. Jazz hardly raised its head above the rafters, and only Wynton Marsalis brought forth a thing of beauty in ‘Hot House Flowers’. Miles Davis got worse, and sadly Philip Larkin, a great jazz critic, died.
1985-12-20 - News
’85 was a remarkably stagnant year. Twelve months after the end of ’84, little seems to have changed or advanced musically and I only hope and pray we won’t be running on the same spot when ’86 ends.
1985-12-20 - News
The glum view is easily stated: finally, after eight years, the Bay City Rollers revival. The dominant pop purveyors – Duran, Wham, Spandau, Culture Club, Young, Kershaw, and Jones – regressed to the most conservative models of teen exploitation.
1984-12-14 - News
As the dust settles on another twelve months, at least one thing, if nothing else, is blindingly clear: 1984 was not the year of Frank Tovey.
1984-12-14 - News
Even with the explosion of F.G.T.H. 1984 saw the rebirth of ‘the song’ (and songwriting) and the return of rock’s most rudimentary and potent instrument, the guitar.
1984-12-14 - News
In the year of Frankie, many of the best musical moments came in the form of the 12” single.
1984-12-14 - News
The alarm only went off half-an-hour ago, and yet here we are, looking back in anguish at a year that threatened so much and largely failed to deliver.
1984-12-14 - News
Such a strange and contradictory year. Mixed fortunes complemented perfectly by a bizarre range of listening choices. A disc for every mood, and every memory.
1984-12-14 - News
An unsatisfying year for albums. In this video age I’m rapidly falling victim to the 'Instant Gratification Syndrome’. Why wade through 45 mins of uneven music for the sake of one or two highlights when it’s so easy to make video and audio recordings of favourite songs.
1984-12-14 - News
In a mediocre year, there was one album which offered a complete vindication of our continuing belief in the power of rock’n’roll. Just one – but that one is enough.
1984-12-14 - News
The Annual appears at this end, thankfully, to have been one without any movements, bandwagons or charabancs, with Frankie carrying that can for everyone.
1984-12-14 - News
Fending off the ailments of the new pap, my year got divided in two.
1984-12-14 - News
Boy George brought androgyny to Toy Town and made every gel wish he was their teddy-bear. Annie Lennox proved that women could take the harder part. Otherwise, Brit-pop melted down to pills and soft-soap.
1983-12-15 - News
? weighed the pleasure and the music itself was too often forced into the background by economic and business considerations.
1982-12-15 - News
Stephen Rapid's 1979 Could any radically different music survive – how would a home grown pop group be received?
1979-12-15 - News
Dave Fanning's 1979 Talking Heads are the most important and exciting band I’ve heard in the last four years.
1979-12-15 - News
Jack Lynch's 1979 Kevin Burke and Michael O Domhnaill’s ‘Promenade’ displayed consummate artistry on every level, rivalled only by Planxty and Van Morrison
1979-12-15 - News
PJ Curtis' 1979 My album of the year is Ry Cooder’s ‘Bop Till You Drop’, encapsulating all that has gone down since 1960 it seems, in one superb album
1979-12-15 - News
Niall Stokes' 1979 My own album of the year was the Radiators ‘Ghostown’
1979-12-15 - News
Liam Mackey's 1979 Released when the infant ’79 was still in the grip of winter, Graham Parker’s ‘Squeezing Out Sparks’ stood the test of time and defeated the heaviest competition.
1979-12-15 - News
Declan Lynch's 1979 The Jam will only be on their fifth pint when Tom Waits starts making eyes at his second bottle of Haig.
1979-12-15 - News
Dermot Stokes' 1979 You couldn’t call it vintage could you? Although the overall standard was … uh … OK.
1979-12-15 - News
Karl Tsigdinos' 1979 ‘Drums And Wires’ marked further development for the ever-brilliant XTC
1979-12-15 - News
The Hothouse. That phrase has been used in this paper more than once since it’s inception, to describe the London scene.
1977-12-15 - News
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