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A HARD RAIN’S A-GONNA FALL (1962)

“I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of small children…”

Dylan wrote A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall when he was 21 years old. It was 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height. The world was on the brink of nuclear war. He later said that every line in the song was intended to be the first line of a song he wanted to compose one day. “But when I wrote it,” he explained “I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs, so I put all I could into this one.”

For me, the song is inextricably associated with a world event of comparable magnitude that occurred when I was the same age Dylan was in 1962. Read the rest of this entry »

LIFE IMITATES… WELL, I WON’T SAY ART

Didn’t someone already make a film about this?

THIS IS FUNNY

Remember Max, the well-connected ‘gapper’ whose short-lived blog provoked such outpourings of bile on the Guardian’s website last year? Well imagine if young Max was back and was making music that was, like, a mixture of acoustic, funk, pop and light-hearted drum n’ base… Yeah? But it’s not a joke. Read the rest of this entry »

“TIME HAS NO MEANING HERE IN THE SEVENTH CIRCLE OF HELL, A PLACE WHERE EVEN DESPAIR DIES…”

Why do I despise Flannery’s pub on Camden Street? A candid response to that question could fill a 12-page pull-out supplement. Suffice to say: Off-duty Gardai. Off-duty nurses. Drunk off-duty Gardai copulating with drunk off-duty nurses. Fake tan. Peroxide. Rugby shirts. DJs with mid-Atlantic accents who say things like “It’s Saturday night in Flannery’s and the party is just getting started…” Read the rest of this article here.

STIR IT UP (1973)

Featuring the definitive Wailers line-up of Bob Marley, Bunny Livingstone and (an impeccably cool) Peter Tosh.

THE GLOVE IS MINE

Guess which bankrupt megastar is auctioning off a pile of their crap in Los Angelus today? (Update: Except it’s just been cancelled. B’ah.) Read the rest of this entry »

TODAY YOU MAY WITHDRAW: NIL

One of the many, many joys of freelancing is that newspapers are under no real obligation to pay you when they’re supposed to. Payment may be a day late. It may be a week late. It may even be a month late. Apologies, excuses or explanations are rarely offered. As someone who has been used all his life to being the unreliable party in any relationship I’ve ever been in – personal or professional – it’s been quite a shock to the system.

Right now, I have only €8.59 left in the world. Read the rest of this entry »

THIS IS FUNNY

THE NEW HOST OF THE LATE LATE SHOW…?

Okay, I don’t know if anyone seriously considers Gerry Ryan a likely contender to take over from Pat Kenny on the Late Late. But the possibility (however remote) is excuse enough for me to get this story off my chest. It dates back to a 1990 episode of the television programme School Around the Corner. And it’s about time I shared it with the class… Read the rest of this entry »

NOTHING CAME OUT (2001)

Really beautiful track from a band that, in retrospect, I might have been kinder to in this 2002 Slate album review… Read the rest of this entry »