velvet underground

Miscellaneous nostalgic items I come across #58

By a cunning process of elimination, I’ve deduced that I illustrated this headboard when I was in late second or early third year i.e. some time after the release of Suede’s debut album in March 1993 (I’ve clearly copied the Suede logo) but before the release of Pulp’s His n’ Hers in April 1994 (or else that surely would have figured.)

I’m not sure how much peyote was floating around Ballyhaunis in the mid-nineties, but I had (until now) blotted out all memory of having ever liked The Doors. Read the rest of this entry »

Record Store Day – April 17 2010

And slowly answered Arthur from the barge:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

– Morte d’Arthur (Tennyson) Read the rest of this entry »

New Age (1970)

CAN’T TELL ME NOTHING (2007)

Babysitting my three month old niece Lola today. We went for a walk to Kilmainham Hospital and sat down and I sang her songs from my iPhone. Her favourites? Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds, The Kinks’ Lola (obviously, although if she grows up to be a promiscuous, transvestite man I may have to accept some of the responsibility), Danny Kaye’s Inchworm, and the Velvet Underground’s I’m Sticking With You.

She absolutely hates Kanye West and cried every time I put him on. But her favourite song by a country mile (as I was later to discover)? Read the rest of this entry »

AFTER HOURS (1969)

Published: Mongrel Magazine, March 2004

The March of the Wooden Soldiers

“Forever let this place be a cry of despair
and a warning to humanity, where the Nazis
murdered about one and a half million men,
women and children, mainly Jews,
from various countries of Europe”
Inscription at Auschwitz-Birkenau

THE northern gate at Birkenau is deserted as the taxi driver shoos us out into the snow. We stumble forward, bleary-eyed and dumbfounded by the sheer scale of what’s in front of us. Read the rest of this entry »