The North shall rise up

Small but massive Glasgowbury is set to shudder the Sperrins on July 21. Everybody should be there.

Glasgowbury is the soul-child of Paddy Glasgow, local hero, singer-songwriter and cultural proselytiser, who willed the event into being in the summer of 2000 to promote proper bands and raise funds for the Ulster Cancer Foundation, www.ulstercancer.org, whence, since, it has grown and grown.
The ’07 line-up features 40 acts from Northern Ireland, plus a couple of aliens from faraway lands like Donegal. Positive proof there’s nowhere as hubbubing with genius and thrill as the North.
Chic Lisburn hobo Duke Special headlines, fresh from his sensational Ulster Orchestra date at the Waterfront which gob-smacked the grandees of Belfast. This is the first time in history that the words “Lisburn” and “chic” have appeared in the same sentence, a measure of the transcendent magic of the man.
Oppenheimer: soft-spoke Belfast duo, slick, sweet melodies and fuzz-box rasp, currently sound-tracking the implausible antics of Ugly Betty. They include Hunter S. Thompson, Stephen McCauley and the movies among intriguing influences.
Stuart Bailie, who knows what he’s talking about, says Cat Malojian “carry a hint of remorse, like the scratchy feeling of Sunday’s best shirt.” Come along and ask Stuart what he’s talking about. All I know is that the Lurgan pair’s ‘Life Rolls On’ sounds like tracks you’ve never heard from The Band.
Derry’s Skruff have been pole-axing the Waterloo Street sin-set for the past couple of years with gleefully-hurled slabs of grunge-ska. Manager Colum Eastwood tells me “grunge-ska” makes no sort of sense, but what would he know, being a SDLP councillor? Come to Glasgowbury, make your own mind up.
Homegirl heroine Charlotte Dryden says Belfast three-piece In Case Of Fire are “staring in the face of commercial music so intensely, that it’s buckling, blinking and running away screaming for its mammy.” After the last time, there’s no way I’m giving her an argument.
Belfast Qatar band The Jane Bradfords tore Sandino’s apart at an anti-racism gig a couple of months back. Their ‘Hide from the Cold’ was number one in Qatar last winter, easily the least interesting thing about them.
Get-outta-my-fucking-way slash-and-burn blast-band fightingwithwire release debut album Man vs. Monster in September after a couple of years gigging to gather up choler and rage. Don’t be afeared of affront man Cahir O’Doherty. Or do.
Farago have recently played London, Belfast, Innishfree and Finland, which is eerie when they’re playing every night at a pub somewhere in Derry. Perhaps they are pop’s Padre Pios, with powers of bi-location. For sure, they can be in two places on the tonic solfa simultaneously: clever harmonies, catchy melodies, serene mastery of material, saintly enough for me.
Jackie Hayden hailed Paul Casey’s ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ as “a brilliant slice of contemporary pop-rock;” same for the overall oeuvre of an exceptional singer-songwriter and slide guitarist of near-genius. Paddy Nash is a sensation waiting calmly to happen. Plus, there’s Scary Biscuits, General Fiasco, King Coma, Swanee River and a rake of others I havn’t heard yet but will. And the Innisowen Gospel Choir. And Henry McCullough, the only Irish act of whom the word “legend” can be used without inflicting damage on the English language.
The festival site is at Eagle’s Rock, Draperstown, which you get to by skipping up dirt roads that dance into the mountains in search of adventure, or, alternatively, by turning right just past the Castledawson roundabout on the road from Belfast to Derry. Under an hour from Belfast. You’ll do it in three from Dublin.
Glasgowbury is easily the most authentic and certainly the most interesting festival of the summer, set against the russet and ochre and olive and green of the Sperrins, a one-man banquet for the soulful to guzzle on, Paddy Glasgow being The Man. Maybe see you there. You won’t regret it.

I was compelled, in the last issue, to provide chapter and verse to refute preposterous claims by Christopher Hitchens, Max McGuinness and former Irish Catholic editor David Quinn that Russia, France and chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix had all been convinced, prior to the Iraq invasion, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Christopher, Max and David had argued that Tony Blair could hardly be blamed for believing in Iraqi WMD when leading opponents of the invasion had believed the same thing. On this reading, while Blair (and Bush) may have gotten it wrong, they’d acted in good faith. I think I can fairly say that I have demonstrated that this is untrue.
Now, along comes John Waters. I don’t know if John called up the trounced trio and spoke along the lines – Stand back, Let me have a go. If he did, bad mistake.
In his Irish Times column (July 2) John declared: “At the time [of the invasion] virtually everybody believed that Iraq had some form of major weapons programme, including the late Dr. David Kelly, whose suicide was the focus of the Hutton Inquiry, and who had come to know at least as much about Iraq’s arms programmes as anyone else.”
True enough, David Kelly, a specialist in germ warfare, senior weapons adviser to the Ministry of Defence and former UN weapons inspector, was one of the world’s leading experts on Iraq and WMD. But that’s the only fragment of fact in John’s assertion.
Here’s what Dr. Kelly told the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee three months after the invasion, on July 16 2003: “I have no idea whether there were weapons or not at that time [of the compilation of the “dodgy dossier” the previous September]. It is possible it was not the case... I have referred to that: the issue of the 30 per cent probability of Iraq possessing chemical weapons.” He said that he had arrived at this estimation, having had “full access” to the available intelligence.
This starkly contradicted Tony Blair’s assurance to the House of Commons that the intelligence services were “certain” Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, and the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Kelly was pressed on the contradiction at a closed session of the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee on July 16. He responded that the 30 percent estimate “is what I have been saying all the way through... I said that to many people... It was a statement that I would have probably made for the last six months...”
In an article written just before the invasion and later published in the Observer, Kelly reckoned that “the current threat presented by Iraq militarily is modest.”
Kelly, then, took the same view as France, Russia and Hans Blix – that maybe Iraq did have hidden supplies of WMD, but the intelligence fell far short of establishing this as fact. This demonstrates beyond any doubt that Blair was lying when he declared in his introduction to the dodgy dossier that, “What the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons... I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current.”
I mentioned last time that it’s wearying to have to trudge through this argument again when, really, there’s no argument left in it. But what’s happening here is the cynical rewriting of recent history for thoroughly disreputable reasons. And we can’t allow that, can we?