The year of living outrageously

Right, wake up. 2003 will be a year to get busy.

The debut LP from Corrigan has already been flagged by hotpress as something worth watching out for. Consider this another prompt. How To Hang Off A Rope should be with us before spring, and although I don’t want to spoil the fun by telling you what it sounds like, be warned – if you invite this record into your house, it will drink your cleaning agents and sit up all night explaining Mulholland Drive. Expect dirty, discordant guitars, and skewed narratives a go-go. Bright Star Recordings will be looking after it, and 2003 is also the year when they finally put out the first solo recordings from Bangor lad Iain Archer. The former Snow Patrol guitarist also proved a significant presence in The Reindeer Section, and has been showing up in support slots and low-key headline gigs for the guts of a year and a half now, impressing all with his take on the lo-fi singer-songwriter template. Watch out.

Digital T will be back in March, no doubt displaying the usual embarrassment of electronic riches currently to be found in Belfast. Bellcrash, Welt and the Digital Boogie crowd should all be around to carry on their fine work from last year. It will also be good to hear what Eamonn Creen has lined up on – shockingly – the first full album from BASIC. Shine Recordings was launched in December by Jon Carter’s ‘Humanism’, and February will see them putting out The Ruckus Juice EP from Justin Robertson. Tunes from Slam, Tony Thomas and Gaetano Parisio are all slated for release, while Phil Kieran’s presence will, it’s safe to say, be felt in forthcoming records. This could be an absolutely massive development for local musicians. Here’s hoping it won’t be long before they’re shouldering the big names out of the way. If you need a hint on how it should be done, check out Spree’s ‘All Mine/Watari’ when it’s put out on Basic Recordings in March.

And what about the news that Donegal degenerates, The Evangelists – the band, remember, who sold their health for rock and roll – are planning to meet up with maverick American impresario Kim Fowley for some recording sessions in Glasgow? Fowley’s quixotic path through the US underground scene of the last thirty years has seen him hook up with the likes of Gram Parsons, The Modern Lovers and Joan Jett. The Evangelists, meanwhile, when they aren’t residing in medical research clinics, have spent two years falling off stages from Maghera to Muff, carrying on like a cross between The Buzzcocks and the Anthill Mob. A match made in garageland heaven, I’d say. Let’s hope they install a camera in the studio.

News, also, from the North that The Undertones are, and have been for some time, busy in Derry recording new material. Which camp do you fall into? Those who think that this is a deeply misguided enterprise, doomed to be a sad, Fergeal-less disappointment? Or do you think that if John O’Neill can write about the pain and foibles of adulthood and encroaching middle age half as perceptively (and melodically) as he documented the trials and triumphs of youth, then it’s well worth the risk? Considering the joy that the band’s four LPs have given us, the least we can give them is some space and the benefit of the doubt. Good luck, fellas.

Beyond music, Glenn Patterson’s new novel, Number 5, is out in April, and sees him re-establish his reputation as the most humane and quietly indignant literary excavator of the North’s sectarian division. Like all of Patterson’s fiction, the novel starts off suggesting: ‘There were other ways’, and ends up proclaiming: ‘There are other ways’. Essential reading, pretty much. And smoke signals are also starting to emerge concerning the publication of the new novel from the recently Granta-endorsed (and about fucking time, may I add) Robert McLiam Wilson – his first since 1996’s truly period-defining, Eureka Street. Not much is known about Extremists, but Belfast’s premier villain-baiter has been badly missed over the last few years. It’ll be a relief to have him back.

So, that enough to keep you going?