Lights in the northern sky

It’s a pretty sure bet that around midnight on the December 21, there’ll be a festive spirit abroad in Belfast indie circles that, bar the actual appearance of big Daddy C himself, will not be topped anytime during the rest of the holidays.

I imagine that the epicentre of good cheer will be located on-stage at the Empire Music Hall, most likely with those jolly boys Oppenheimer conducting ceremonies from the front. Topping a bill including Six Star Hotel and Cashier No. 9 (more of whom you will hear next year), Rocky and Shaun should be benefiting from a surfeit of musical goodwill.
Earlier on in the evening, you see, Snow Patrol will have marked their territory at a no doubt rafter-shaken Odyssey – meaning that in just 12 months they’ve graduated from the Ulster Hall to Botanic Gardens and then finished up ruling over the city’s biggest venue. God knows where they expect to be playing next Christmas. I wonder will we be able to ship Wembley over to Belfast for the night. Getting used to his own strain of career vertigo, it’s appropriate that Duke Special will be joining them on the bill.
I hardly need to state that the only comparable ‘local’ gig in recent years was a blistering Therapy?/Ash/Joyrider bill from back in the mid-’90s, but even it was barely half the size of this. Heady times indeed.
You probably already have Eyes Open by now (or, at the very least, made a decision on whether your life needs it or not), and maybe Songs From The Deep Forest has made its way into your collection – but if you’re thinking of adding another Nordy record to your Christmas list, there are no shortage of candidates.
The debut albums from the aforementioned Oppenheimer and Downpatrick’s loudest, The Answer are well worth a punt – the former, a delightful synth-pop treat; the latter, a balls-out and unabashedly retro rocker .
Ian Archer and Desert Hearts have a few more miles on the clock, but Magnetic North and Hotsy Totsy Nagasaki are the best records of their careers thus far. Both are risk- free investments.
For the literary-minded among you, there are all manner of goodies to scribble on your note to Santa. Post-Nobel, Seamus Heaney may have been cast (by those who had never read North) in the role of cuddly and twinkle-eyed national treasure, but his recent collection, District And Circle, is a thorny and troubling work – with Dante’s Inferno and the bombings on the London Underground providing a framework for meditations on the ageing process and the ever-presence of violence in nature and history. It’s an impressively (and worryingly) timely book. As is Horse Latitudes, Paul Muldoon’s latest – in which the brilliant Moy-born poet rewards his readership with another dizzying exhibition of his elastic associative skills – taking on the neo-cons, brooding over battlefield wreckage, dropping in on the Emmy Awards, and harking back to his salad days, sleazing around the Four In Hand. It’s delight in puzzles and fog-bound ciphers means that Horse Latitudes is anything but an easy read, but give it your full attention and by New Year’s Eve you should have worked it out. New Year’s Eve ‘08 that is.
Even though Michael Longley matched Muldoon drink-for-drink throughout the Seventies, his work – as evinced by his handsome Collected Poems – is of a much more sober disposition, and well worth investigating.
Glenn Patterson’s Lapsed Protestant, meanwhile, is a collection of more than a decade’s worth of articles and miscellaneous writing from the very fine Belfast novelist.
These contemporaneous thoughts and reflections (culled from newspaper columns, literary journals and radio broadcasts) offer a warm, witty, and always clear-sighted and humane commentary on the de/re/e/volving merry-go-around we’ve all been spinning on since the ceasefires.
Am I the only one who suspects that this Christmas could be the dizziest yet?