I WALK ABOUT; NOT TO AND FROM

More Lists

2009-07-10T11:30:00.009+01:00

It's ages since I've written here and that's simply because I haven't had anything much to say. But my - to coin a phrase - lust for lists is as strong as ever, so here goes:

THE BEST MUSIC I'VE HEARD SO FAR THIS YEAR
Happy to Meet and Sorry To Part. Joe Burke, Michael Cooney And Terry Corcoran
Lucifer: Book of Angels Volume 10. John Zorn/Bar Kokhba
Faraualla. Faraualla
The Liffey Banks. Tommy Potts
The Singer. Teitur

AND THE WORST...
Together Through Life. Bob Dylan
Two Suns. Bat for Lashes

THE BEST BOOKS
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. Denis O'Driscoll
In the Wake of Giants. Gerald Potterton

AND THE WORST
Brooklyn. Colm Tóibín
Netherlands. Joseph O'Neill
The Knife of Never Letting Go. Patrick Ness
The Truth Commissioner. David Park

In the Wake of Giants

2009-01-28T19:53:00.006Z

One of the hallmarks of any great book is how much it makes you interested in something you normally couldn't care less about. Such is the case with In The Wake of Giants by Gerald Potterton*. Its subtitle (Journeys on the Barrow and the Grand Canal), caught my eye in the bookshop, not because I have any interest in boats, but because both waterways are fairly near me, and I have a deep interest in local history and general goings-on in my area (the Irish midlands, specifically County Laois).

The author is a County Meath farmer who, the blurb tells us, "dislikes most sports" (straightaway, a man after my own heart) and, in the proverbial nutshell, this is his account of the places he sees, and the people he meets as he dawdles along in his narrow boat (better known to terrestrials like myself as a barge). "Deadlines for destinations", he says, "have no place and would largely defeat the purpose of leisurely cruising along the water." An observation that, in light of the overall title of this blog, strikes another strong chord with yours truly.

This is no formidable tome bulging with technical jargon and arcane knowledge; on the contrary, it is a compelling, human story full of everyday life and everyday people by a man who, initially didn't know much about boats at all, but who is certainly no daw – there’s a Laoisism for you - when it comes to navigating the shifting depths of language. I loved his lively, anecdotal style, his evocative pictures of the countryside, the bits and pieces of river lore, his philosophical musings and, occasionally outspoken comments on - Brace yourself, Bridie - hooliganism, shop assistants, the EU, Sinéad O’Connor, Bord Bia, teenagers, tractors, traffic accidents, solitary walks, cabin cruisers and their owners. And that’s not the half of it! I was particularly taken by his views on the evironment and the whole energy crop/ food production debate. His boat, incidentally, was the first in Ireland to be fuelled on pure plant oil.

On the debit side, I might refer to the surprising misuse of the word ‘geyser’ and the phrase ‘rite of passage’, not to mention the fact that that whoever edited the Smoke On the Water chapter seems to have nodded off (too much Heavy Metal?) but, all in all, this is only nit-picking.

I find it hard to believe that I've actually written this piece at all. That's how good this book is. Did it make me see the Midlands through new eyes? It did. Did it make me - a townie who wouldn't know his starboard from his port - want to embark upon a similar journey? It did. But then I recalled his experience at one particular lock and I definitely tought twice about trying to be Odysseus of the Midlands....

*Published by Ballyhay Books, Laurel Cottage, 15 Ballyhay Road, Donaghadee, Co. Down, Northern Ireland.

Music Everyone Should Hear

2009-01-24T13:00:00.005Z

This list is in constant flux but at the minute it's:

Rain Dogs. Tom Waits
Revolver. The Beatles
Quintet in C. Schubert
The Sunset Tree. The Mountain Goats
Marquee Moon. Television
Mekanik Destrukiw Kommandoh. Magma
String Quartet Opus 18 No. 1 Beethoven
The Revealing Science of God. Yes
The Cygnet Committee. David Bowie
Inné Amárach. Téada
Faraualla. Faraualla
The Bootleg Series Vols 1-3. Bob Dylan
Tír na nÓg. Tír na nÓg
The Lord's Prayer. Roy Harper
The Sky and the Ground. Pierce Turner
The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky
Music For a New Society. John Cale
Hark the Village Wait. Steeleye Span

Liam Clancy's Voice

2009-01-16T14:35:00.009Z

Of the hundreds of albums I heard in 2008, none continues to haunt me like Liam Clancy's The Wheels of Life. And the paradox is that it's not a brilliant album per se: occasional murky production and saccharine arrangements plus superfluous guests* all conspire to detract from it. But transcending all my reservations, and making it an essential purchase, is the sheer quality of Liam Clancy's singing. In these days of Auto-tuned mediocrity, his voice is a precious instrument, full of the joys, fears and foibles of humanity; a golden gift that moves his listeners and causes us to look deep inside ourselves. And surely that is the aim of all artistic endeavour?

I never thought anyone could surpass Kate and Anna McGarrigle's version of Talk To Me of Mendocino but, into a mere four minutes here, Clancy distills a vast universe of emotion. One moment his voice is full of regret, the next it is hushed with resignation; elsewhere it trembles with defiance in the face of mortality. The way he sings those lines about the Rockies will stay with you forever. Even better is his version of Shane McGowan's The Broad Majestic Shannon. Here, the addition of a single extra word transforms what is already a brilliant song into a magnificent elegy, a heartbreaking caoineadh for a great songwriter who has, temporarily I hope, sadly lost his way.

I could go on and on about the greatness of Liam Clancy's singing. Bob Dylan called him "the best ballad singer I ever heard in my life" and, on the evidence of this album, if he had left 'ballad' out of that sentence I don't think he'd have been guilty of gross exaggeration.

*(the one exception is Clancy's duet with Tom Paxton on The Last Thing On Mind - a performance guaranteed to make old folkies quiver with nostalgia and wonder where the time has gone.

The Mind of a Grocer's Assistant #4

2009-01-01T18:52:00.004Z

The best books I read in 2008. In no particular order...

Julius Winsome. Gerard Donovan
A Wounded Thing Must Hide. Jeremy Poolman
Skin. Jeremy Poolman
Things the Grandchildren Should Know. Mark Oliver Everett
The Road. Cormac McCarthy
Heads. Gerry Anderson
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. John Boyne
Travels in the Scriptorium. Paul Auster
The Gathering. Anne Enright
Two Caravans. Marina Lewycka,
On Chesil Beach. Ian McEwan
The Humours of Planxty. Leagues O'Toole
To Major Tom. Dave Thompson
Bowie, Bolan & The Brooklyn Boy. Tony Visconti

And the worst...

A Spot of Bother. Mark Haddon
His Illegal Self. Peter Carey
The First Verse. Barry McCrea
The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Moshin Hamid
All Summer. Claire Kilroy
Confessions of a Fallen Angel. Ronan O'Brien
My Kind of America. Jeremy Poolman
Terrorist. John Updike
The Fall of Light. Niall Williams.

The Mind of a Grocer's Assistant #3

2008-12-27T18:26:00.005Z

The best albums I heard in 2008. In no particular order...

Dreams of Breathing Underwater. Eliza Carthy
The House I Was Reared In. Christy McNamara
Dig! Lazarus Dig! Nick Cave
The Wheels of Life. Liam Clancy
A Hundred Million Suns. Snow Patrol
Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea. The Silver Jews
Modern Guilt. Beck
Tell Tale Signs. Bob Dylan
An Mileoidean Scaoilte. Johnny Connolly
What the Toll Tells. Two Gallants

Oliver Cromwell's Head

2008-11-19T13:51:00.020Z

Centuries after his death, the name of Oliver Cromwell still arouses fierce feelings among many Irish people. The outrages at Drogheda and Wexford - accepted as historical fact by most historians with one courageous exception* - and his notorious order that the Irish go "to Hell or to Connacht" are still quoted with barely-concealed venom.

Cromwell died in 1658 and was honoured with a state funeral. Following the Restoration in 1660, his corpse was exhumed by vengeful Royalists and dragged through the streets of London to Tyburn where, according to a contemporary account, it was "hanged by the neck until the going down of the sun". The head was then hacked off, dipped in tar, and attached to a spike on the roof of Westminster Hall. There it remained, ravaged by the elements until, after a storm, it finally fell to earth. The story goes that it was found by a soldier, then disappeared again until the eighteenth century when it turned up, being hawked around markets in a succession of freak shows. Many years passed before Oliver Cromwell's head was finally - believe it or not, as recently as 1960 - laid to rest within a chapel of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His alma mater.

Hearing that story**, a list of names sprang into my mind.... Hitler, Pol Pot, Fred and Rosemary West, Jeffrey Dahmer, Denis Nielsen.... The list is probably endless.... Is it less sinful to desecrate the body of a patently evil person than that of your average good citizen, the proverbial man in the street? And what about the head of Saint Oliver Plunkett (like Cromwell, hanged at Tyburn), still gazing from its glass shrine in a church in Drogheda? Should all human remains, irrespective of the lives they led, be allowed to rest in dignity and peace?

*Cromwell - An Honourable Enemy: The Untold Story of the Cromwellian Invasion of Ireland by Tom Reilly.

**Cromwell's Head by Jonathan Fitzgibbons.

I'm Looking Through Ewe

2008-11-18T18:58:00.007Z

Scientists at University College Dublin have concluded that infrared photography can capture the unique pattern of blood vessels in the retina of a sheep. The upshot is that Irish farmers will now be able to indentify individual animals by looking into their eyes. The results will presumably be stored on a computer (with loads of RAM?) somewhere in the Department of Agriculture, but the practical use of this discovery totally escapes me. Will every newborn sheep have to line up for an ovine mugshot? (Baad baad Larry Lamb). As it walks into the abbatoir, will it have to pass some boffin with a laptop?

Random Thoughts on Drummers

2008-11-18T17:28:00.005Z

Apart from the occasional great song - mostly on UP - REM lost the plot when Bill Berry left.

Ringo Starr is vastly underrated.

Dave Grohl should stay behind the drums

John Bonham's thunderous playing on When the Levee Breaks is one of the few highlights of Led Zeppelin's overrated career.

Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh by Magma (led by drummer Christian Vander) is one of the most unusual and innovative albums ever made. Having lived with it for more than thirty years, I still hear new things in it.

Blog Challenge. Songs That Mean A Lot To Me (The Mind of a Grocer's Assistant #3)

2008-11-12T14:59:00.013Z

Trying to pick a definitive FAVOURITE SONGS OF ALL TIME is a fairly futile exercise, but here's twenty that mean a lot to me:

Baby You're A Rich Man. The Beatles
The Great Song of Indifference. Bob Geldof
River. Gary Dunne
Dante Tír na nÓg
The Revealing Science of God. Yes
Chicago. Sufjan Stevens
The Hills of Greenmore. Steeleye Span
Angelina. Bob Dylan
The Lord's Prayer. Roy Harper
Tom Traubert's Blues. Tom Waits
Lola. The Kinks
Last Stop This Town. Eels
The Vigil. Jane Siberry
The Answer. Pierce Turner
You Are the Everything. REM
Wasteland. Dan Bern
Slow West Vultures. The Mountain Goats
Sanities. John Cale
The Cygnet Committee. David Bowie
Do Wah Diddy Diddy. Manfred Mann
Take It Where You Find It. Van Morrison

Where It All Began....

2008-11-08T15:43:00.001Z

In My Family History There's...

2008-11-07T15:04:00.012Z

A Volunteer, who during the Irish War of Independence, dressed up as a woman and proceeded to 'befriend' the Black-and-Tan on guard duty at the local railway station. At the opportune moment, he/she produced a chloroformed handkerchief and... mission accomplished... took the key to the shed where arms were stored.

A nine-year-old girl who fell from a swing on a second-story porch. She lived for an hour and a half before dying in hospital from a fractured skull.

A shop-boy who, in 1932, sold "the first wireless that was ever bought in Timahoe"

A father of eight who abandoned his wife and family and disappeared, allegedly to the silver mines of Montana.

A young women whose emigrant's suitcase included eggs for her uncle in America. The fighting cock that eventually hatched gave rise to this riddle: "He was born in America, reared in America, fought in America and died in America but his parents never left Ireland. Who is he?"

A teenager whose first car was a "fawn-coloured 1927 Ford 14.9 Saloon with timber panels on the inside and petrol cans strapped to the outside."

A child who lost a finger in a turnip pulper in Ratheniska.

A nursing nun who fell in love and ran away with a young TB patient.

A farmer who sued a cattle dealer over the sale of a cow. He was assured by the dealer that it was a perfectly healthy animal but when he brought it home it became sick and died in two days. He claimed that the cow had pneumonia and was drugged on the day of the sale. The judge agreed and awarded the farmer £31 1s, 11d.

The organiser of the Robert Emmets, the first Gaelic Football team in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

An emigrant who stole a sack of corn at a threshing dance and sold it to the local malthouse to buy his passage to America.

A young man who won a smoking competition. He smoked two ounces of tobacco in the fastest time.

Time

2008-11-04T14:24:00.003Z

If I live to be a hundred, I know that I'll never have time enough to re-read all my favourite books, listen to my old LP's (something I've been promising to do for ages), undo the wrongs I've done, change permanently the things I hate about myself, learn to properly play the three Laois reels (something I'll never achieve as I simply haven't got 'the nyah'- that je ne sais quoi that distinguishes those with traditional music in their souls from secondhand players like myself), stop worrying about things I did or didn't do, learn to appreciate what others take for granted, realise that, through all the years I sneered at them, those corny pop songs spoke of fundamental truths. Time is the enemy. Every second hurts; the last one kills

In a Local Bookshop

2008-11-04T00:24:00.002Z

ME: Have you Middlemarch by George Eliot?
ASSISTANT: The calendars are all upstairs.

Racquet's Revenge!

2008-11-03T22:31:00.012Z

As a child, the nearest I ever got to a football team was being allowed carry a bucket of half-time oranges to those lucky enough to represent our school. (I've always felt that I danced on to the pitch with a certain athletic grace, but sadly never enough to be promoted to even last sub.) Over the years, I played the odd (in all senses of the word) game of tennis, and I recall that, for a couple of months circa 1965, I was a regular spectator at local rugby matches. A deep interest in the intricacies of the oval ball? Not a bit of it. A deep interest in the sister of the guy who threw the ball out of the scrum.

Anyway, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that I haven't a sporting bone in my body. (Though sometimes, for nothing other than pure relaxation, I do watch football on tv). So why am I writing about sport at all? Two reasons, both of which are somehow connected in my mind. First of all, for the last few months I have been afflicted with a very painful case of tennis elbow. I am receiving treatment, but I can't escape the feeling that there's poetic justice - if I were religious, I'd say divine retribution - in the fact that this, of all ailments, makes it impossible for me to play my beloved musical instruments. And the second reason? One of the big regrets of my life is that I failed to encourage and enjoy my sons' interest in sport; when their mother watched their matches, I should have been there, even carrying the oranges. I wasn't, and I have to live with that.

Music in a Box

2008-10-26T22:45:00.013Z

I help run a small music club here in the middle of Ireland and, in our two-year existence, one thing has become very noticable and is, I think, a bit sad. I refer to the narrow-mindedness of so many people - musicians included - when it comes to music. I always knew that such compartmentalising (phew!) was out there, but I had no idea that it could be so prevalent and rigid. I know a man, for instance, who refuses to listen to anyone except Bob Dylan; someone else who has no time for anything recorded before 1980, and someone else again whose listening is dictated by what gets good reviews in the 'quality' English newspapers. Not to mention the retired teacher who absolutely adores every genre of music as long as it's a jig, reel or hornpipe. Or the friend of mine who refused to listen to REM after they signed to Warner Brothers. Or the young lad whose epithet for anyone who doesn't like the obscurest American Emo rhymes with banker. Am I immune to all this? I am not. Put me within an ass's roar of Oasis, Madonna, tribute bands, Country'n'Irish, warbling cailini with harps, or massive Brunnhildes belting out Wagner, and I'm gone like the proverbial hare. Prejudiced, moi?

Viva la Silver Revolución

2008-10-23T16:18:00.014+01:00

On the same day - October 22 - that 10,000 students voiced their anger at the increase in student registration fees, 15,000 elderly men and women took to the streets of Dublin to protest against our government's callous treatment of the over-70's in the recent botched Budget. I have heard some young people express surprise - a mixture of amusement, condescension and admiration - at the militancy of what one newspaper dubbed 'The Silver Revolution' but I don’t think it’s surprising at all...

It is a cliché to say that the success of any government should not be measured in crude economic terms - how many jobs are created, houses built, foreign companies lured into the country - but by how well it treats its oldest citizens. Those who have worked hard, paid taxes, obeyed the rule of law, all their lives. In its abject failure to provide a proper health service, and now, by the terrible distress it has caused over pension entitlements, the Irish government is guilty of betraying those who most deserve recognition, security and respect. It has now backpedalled furiously, reversed unpopular decisions not because it was the right thing to do, but for fear of backbench revolt. But it is too little, far too late. Our Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Mr Cowen and his cronies are now feeling the wrath of citizens they took for granted for too long; men and women who, significantly, lived through the convulsive birth of Rock’n’Roll and the hurricane of change in the Sixties, endured the deprivation of the Seventies and Eighties; a generation of rebels with a cause; with reignited fire in its belly, defiance in its soul, revolution in its blood. Viva la Revolución!

The Mind of a Grocer's Assistant #2

2008-10-21T18:32:00.003+01:00

Just to even things up, BOOKS I DISLIKED SO MUCH THAT I ABANDONED THEM*

The Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion
Oh Play That Thing. Roddy Doyle
The Free and Easy. Ann Haverty
Amo, Amas, Amat. Harry Mount
Norwegian Wood. Haruki Murakami
Yonder Come the Blues. Paul Oliver and others
The Final Passage. Caryl Phillips
A Spot of Bother. Mark Haddon
The First Verse. Barry McCrea

* Being the unfortunately fastidious person that I am, I employ a ruthless rule of thumb: If I'm not enjoying any book after reading 25% of it, I give it up. On the few occasions that I ignored my own rule, I've always been sorry that I did.

The Mind of a Grocer's Assistant

2008-10-21T17:23:00.004+01:00

One of my all-time heroes, James Joyce, once remarked that he had a grocer's assistant's mind. Apart from nationality, the only thing I have in common with the great man is a fondness for lists. Something I inflict on friends and acquaintances, sometimes even hapless strangers on trains. And now it's your turn. In no particular order, here are the BEST BOOKS I've read in the last couple of years:

Shade. Neil Jordan
The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini
Notes From a Coma. Mike McCormack
The Canal Bridge. Tom Phelan
We Need To Talk About Kevin. Lionel Shriver
The Mayor of MacDougal Street. Dave Van Ronk,
There Are Little Kingdoms. Kevin Barry
Redemption Falls. Joseph O'Connor
Dancing in the Dark. Caryl Phillips
Lost in Music. Giles Smith
Only Say the Word. Niall Williams
The Book Thief. Markus Zusak
Julius Winsome. Gerard Donovan
The Road. Cormac McCarthy
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. John Boyne

Random Thoughts On Great Musical Performances.

2008-06-29T14:40:00.006+01:00

What makes a great musical performance? Extreme vocal or instrumental prowess? The special atmosphere conjured up by less than perfect technical dexterity? The performer’s ability, by dint of unique phrasing or the enunciation of a single word, to connect with, confirm or challenge some aspect of the listener’s experience? The unclassifiable, yet somehow spiritual response the artist evokes? The feeling in the listener that you have been transported somewhere else; for the duration of the performance you transcend your everyday existence; you become a different, better person. Does a great performance always make you cry? Make you smile with satisfaction? Make you warm inside? Does a great performance arouse feelings of anger at the injustice of this world? Feelings of love, hatred, pity, contempt for our fellow travellers on this earth? Provide a flash of recognition, an epiphany of how magnificent a creation is a human being; what imaginative feats this bag of spirit, skin and bone is capable of? Does a great performance make time stop and for an instant render us immortal?

We could ponder this conundrum until the proverbial cows come home, and finally agree that the answer is probably bits and pieces of some or all of the above, but when it all comes down to dust, the answer for me lies in a mysterious transmission from artist to listener, that je ne sais quoi that I can never quite put my finger on but that definitely puts its finger on me.

In Search of the Blues

2007-02-28T12:48:00.000Z

I've just finished In Search of the Blues. Black Voices, White Visions by Marybeth Hamilton and I would thoroughly recommend it to seasoned blues fans rather than those who are just getting into this great music. The reason for my reservation is that Hamilton frequently challenges much received wisdom; in fact, she slaughters so many sacred cows that, to fully appreciate her approach, it is advisable to be familiar with some of her 'victims' here. The chapter on John Lomax and his dealings with Leadbelly is a real eye-opener and makes for very sad reading. Elsewhere, the disintegration of Lomax's relationship with his own son is just as moving. Also fascinating is her account of the tragic James McKune and the Blues Mafia, and her thoughts on the ambivalent effect the arrival of the phonograph had on the art of blues singing. It had never before crossed my mind that the new technology might have had, as Hamilton outlines, any deleterious consequences. The book's title, incidentally, refers to the activities of the early collectors rather than the author's own journey through the Deep South. If you've already read, say, Robert Palmer's Deep Blues and Alan Lomax's The Land Where the Blues Began, this should definitely be your next purchase.

Andy Irvine @ éistmusic

2007-01-24T14:21:00.000Z

Sometimes, but only very seldom, mind you, something appears in the space between performer and audience. Something you can't put your finger on, but something that definitely puts its finger on you. When this happens, the space is blown away, and artist and audience are united in an aura that sends shivers up your spine. The power, the magic, of great live music. Those of us privileged to hear two incredible performances by Andy Irvine over the week-end at éistmusic, a great new music club in Portlaoise, will remember the experience for a long time.

Approaching Bob Dylan's Modern Times

2006-10-16T20:52:00.000+01:00

Since its Irish release on August 25, I’ve been listening to Modern Times in all sorts of situations; on the house stereo, in the car, walking in the countryside, even in a hospital bed recovering from surgery, and I’m sorry to have to say that apart from two great moments….

But before I go any further, let me tell you where I’m coming from. Though I suspect that my family might call me something else, I would describe myself simply as a big Bob Dylan fan, . I have all the official albums, hundreds of bootlegs, scores of books, fanzines and DVDs. I go to as many of his concerts as I possibly can; I am familiar with many of his musical antecedents; I know a fair bit about his family origins, and hardly a day goes by but I think of some aspect of his life or work. But one affliction I hope I don’t suffer from is blind devotion. Unlike many Dylanologists (How I dislike that word, but at least it beats Bobcats and Dylanophiles, not to mention a species I’ve actually been addressed as – Hi Bobaroo! – but thankfully never encountered in the flesh) for whom everything Dylan does is absolutely perfect, I am the first to admit that no artist is flawless, and that sometimes – too often on recent albums – Bob Dylan most definitely has shown the proverbial feet of clay.

My involvement with Dylan’s music goes back a long time. I have a vivid memory of being perched on the dinner table – my folk-club stool – pretending not to watch myself in the kitchen mirror as I murder Blowin’ in the Wind. I can see my sunburst Egmond (bought the previous Christmas for one pound, seventeen and six); I can feel the strings an inch above the fretboard, my D, G and A painfully prised from Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day. When I’d finally mastered the three-chord-trick, I remember daydreaming about all the songs I was going to write – JD’s Dream, Talkin’ Coote Street Blues, The Lonesome Life of Bridgie Farrell – but, thankfully, none of them – as James Joyce said about a story he had once tried to write – ever got “any forrader than the title”.

Over the next few years I immersed myself in Irish and English traditional music. In college, I played mostly Beatles, Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon – the ladies weren’t too impressed by The Verdant Braes of Skreen – but, with a clarity that is luminous, I can recall one Major Dylan Moment when B. P. Fallon, an Irish DJ later half-famous for appearing on Top of the Pops with John Lennon, played the just-released Nashville Skyline from start to finish; a few of us huddled around the transistor, horrified by the voice crooning through the static; our reaction presaging Greil Marcus’ notorious response to a later Dylan album: What is this shit?

Blood on the Tracks reignited my interest – I remember staying up late to work out the open tuning; the small-hours silence broken by my brand-new Yamaha FG180 – but when he found Jesus in the late 1970’s I abandoned Bob Dylan again. The slick production on Slow Train Coming really turned me off but, as I discovered many years later when the Internet introduced me to the vast new world of bootlegs, the live performance of those religious songs inspired some of his all-time greatest singing. Although I liked bits and pieces from the 1980’s – I and I and Most of the Time remain firm favourites – it wasn’t until the late 1990’s that I really got back into Dylan – the Internet played a large part in this – and, with the zeal of the ‘re-converted’, I listened to everything, attended as many live concerts as I could; read more esoteric stuff than was good for anyone’s health…

So, why have I given you this potted history of my adventures in the realms of Dylanology? Primarily because I love writing about anything to do with music but, on a more subliminal level, I suspect that it has something to do with establishing my credentials as an informed fan, someone who’s entitled and qualified to be as critical as he feels.

**** From the earliest days of his career in Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan has ‘borrowed’ from other songs and performers. Song to Woody, his first major composition, for instance, uses the melody of Woody Guthrie’s 1913 Massacre – which, in turn, derives from the old ballad One Morning in May – and its most striking line about the men “That come with the dust and are gone with the wind” echoes the plight of Guthrie’s migrants in his Pastures of Plenty: “We come with the dust and we go with the wind.” No doubt, the young Dylan intended his song as a sincere tribute – On his arrival in New York, he described himself as a “Woody Guthrie jukebox”. Liam Clancy, for reasons not unrelated perhaps to one of the themes of this essay, said he was like blotting paper – and I would accept it as such and say no more, were it not for the huge amount of similar appropriations throughout his long career. A few random examples: Blowin’ in the Wind adapts the melody of the old slave song No More Auction Block (Dylan’s rendition of which, incidentally, at the Gaslight Café in New York in October 1962 is, to my ears, one of his most moving live performances); Farewell is closely related of the well-known Leaving Of Liverpool; Restless Farewell and With God On Our Side use the tunes of The Parting Glass and The Patriot Game respectively, while I Pity The Poor Emigrant and I Dreamed I saw St Augustine do the same with Come All Ye Tramps and Hawkers and Joe Hill. And I haven’t even mentioned the myriad of blues phrases that have found their way – or been dragged – into countless Dylan songs. I might have no problem with any of this if he simply acknowledged these ‘borrowings’, but no, each of the above examples – plus many, many more – are, according to his official website, copyright Bob Dylan.

Such borrowings, inspirations, thefts, appropriations or whatever you want to call them are usually defended by Those Who Idolise Bob (TWIB) by (a) calling them 'allusions' (b) referring to 'the folk process' (c) Quoting T. S. Eliot. Let’s examine each of these. (a) There is a world of difference between allusion and downright pilfering. The former is an implied or indirect reference. For example, the yellow dressing-gown worn by Buck Mulligan in the opening lines of Joyce's Ulysses – a veritable cornucopia of allusion – alludes to the portrayal of Judas in Christian Symbolism, thereby reinforcing our impression of Stephen Dedalus' opinion of Mulligan. That's an allusion. Another definition of which might be: A word or phrase that amplifies what actually appears on the pages, a verbal incendiary device, if you like, that explodes in your head with a hundred possibilities. But there is nothing allusive about changing a word or line or two in someone else's work and calling it your own.

(Before I go any further, I think I should say something about my already apparent obsession with James Joyce, and also the reference to TWIB above. The two constants, the presiding deities, so to speak, in my cultural life are Bob Dylan and James Joyce, and, most days, something to do with one or the other comes into my head without knocking. Get a life, clear your head, I hear you snigger and maybe you’re right.)

As if it were an article of faith, TWIB steadfastly maintain that Bob Dylan is capable of doing no wrong. Think Papal infallibility for Catholics. Apart from such extreme opinions, TWIB are also capable of behaviour that might be considered unusual. I have met various members of the tribe who listen to absolutely nothing except Bob Dylan’s music; I know someone who has a huge library of books about Dylan and has never opened a page of any of them. I know someone else who has a roomful of bootlegs, but has never listened to the original Blood on the Tracks and has no desire to. Instead, the experience is being saved for some Profound Moment, some Grand Epiphany when, no doubt, the mystery of life, which came first, the chicken or the egg, how much is the doggy in the window, will all be revealed.

Anyway, back to (b) above. For almost a century now, in the so-called developed world, there has been no such thing as 'the folk process'. Before the introduction of mechanical recording, and subsequent means of mass communication, such a process, based on oral composition, oral transmission and the fallibility of human memory, did obviously exist, but this is no longer the case. If we accept that the sine qua non of ‘the folk process’ is oral composition and transmission, then, in terms of composition, Bob Dylan never was a folk artist. It’s as simple as that. He may, of course, pace our coffee-house friend in Talkin’ New York, have been a folk singer, but that’s another day’s work.

T.S Eliot’s comment – in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism – that immature poets imitate; mature poets steal, is often trotted out by TWIB as a justification for Dylan’s ‘borrowings’. But what isn’t so freely broadcast is that, in the same paragraph, Eliot also says that “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.” To my mind, it is that final clause that is applicable to much of Dylan’s recent work.

The liner notes of the archly-titled “Love and Theft” album of 2001 proclaim that all songs are written by Bob Dylan. Needless to say, there is absolutely no acknowledgement of the disparate sources he has plundered to write these songs. For example, the very first notes you’ll hear are a direct lift from Uncle John’s Bongos by country duo Johnnie and Jack from 1961. And so it goes, right through the album…. As diligent research by fans all over the world has revealed, there seems to be no end to Dylan’s borrowings, inspirations, thefts, appropriations or whatever you want to call them. Scraps of blues lyrics and folksongs, the entire melody of a Billie Holiday song, nursery rhymes, the violin riff and melody from a romantic ballad recorded by Bing Crosby and others in the 1930’s; hackneyed jokes; lines from various novels and, most unexpectedly, extensive and, needless to say, uncredited ‘borrowings’ from Confessions of a Yakuza by the Japanese author, Junichi Saga, all became grist to his voracious mill. Earlier on, I referred to my own symptoms. On “Love and Theft” Bob Dylan seems to be suffering from an acute dose of a Textually Transmitted Disease (TTD), a malady that comes dangerously close to plagiarism.

A few extra words on the subject of plagiarism might not be out of place here. We would all love our heroes to create ab nihilo in the burning forge of genius etc. etc., but that's simply not the way it works. When it comes to his sources, Dylan is as much of a magpie as, say, that man Joyce again (who ransacked everything and anything from Aesop to Zarathustra), but, for me, the problem is that he is so lazy with his pilfering. Unlike Joyce, who transmutes what he pilfers into something new and wonderful on the page, Dylan imports his spoils wholesale and seems content to leave them there with little or no connection to anything else in the same song. This wasn’t such an issue in his earlier work, but that’s something I’ll return to in my comments on Nettie Moore below.

But, but… – and this is a massive ‘but’ – in live performance he takes the recorded blueprints by the scruff of the neck and, by dint of miraculous phrasing, outrageous inflection, in short, sheer vocal genius, twists and turns, cajoles and forces them into vibrant, sinuous, mesmeric works of art. To coin a cliché: The stage is to Dylan as the page was to Joyce and it is on stage that, I believe, his true greatness lies. And having said that, I still wish to God he wouldn't steal so much. I think that the practice diminishes his art and I fear that historians, particularly those who have never heard recordings of his live performances – I’ve just had a sudden flash of a Nobel Prize Committee gathered around a table, confronted by mounds of bootleg recordings – will consign him to the lower ranks of artistic achievement. But, then again, why should we worry about posterity when, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, it has never done anything for us?

**** Given Dylan’s love of old music (as his radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, abundantly illustrates), it comes as no great shock to find that the title Modern Times is deeply ironic and there’s not a genre here less that half-a-century old. In fact, I won’t be at all surprised if your first reaction is ‘Where have I hear that bit before?’ And if you have more than a nodding acquaintance with the blues and the history of popular music, you probably have heard much of Modern Times before. There’s been a lot of Internet talk about how it and “Love and Theft” represent some sort of repository of American musical culture; how brilliantly Dylan has drawn on the sentimental melodies he heard as a child and, later on, blues pulsing up from stations south of Minnesota, and presented us with a fond tribute to his musical forbears. Listening to some Dylan apologists, you’d be forgiven for forming the impression that “Love and Theft” and Modern Times are more sacred, historical artifacts than living, breathing works of art to be enjoyed, loved, disliked, talked about and argued over. Of course it’s good that Bob Dylan recognises where he has come from – something he’s known from way back, incidentally, and doesn’t need to prove to anyone – but that, per se, is no reason why any album by him, or anyone else for that matter, should be glorified. Take Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, for instance. Of course, it’s of Monumental Significance, Seminal Importance, Incalculable Influence etc., etc., etc., but if it didn’t portray such a vast range of human behaviour; the joys, the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to (Allusion or Theft? Discuss.) and if we, in turn, weren’t moved and changed by the listening experience, it would, so to speak, have no business stirring outside the doors of the Smithsonian.

Before I get off my soapbox, I’ll mention something else that irks me about TWIB. Too often I have found that if you express anything less that utter admiration for an album, you will be told (a) that “you just don’t get it” (b) you haven’t listened to it enough, that it’s a grower, give it more time…. If you reply that, on the contrary, you’ve been living with it for months, you’ll be told (c) Whoa, give it break for a while, you’ll really love it when you come back.. So, poor doubting Thomas just can’t win. Which raises a subsidiary question I’ve always found interesting: How many times must a fan lend an ear till he knows that an album is great? (It’s alright, Ma, it’s only an allusion). Seriously though, at what stage does familiarity breed mere familiarity, a sort of cosy recognition that is easily mistaken for liking, even loving a song? Is it possible to hold a definitive opinion of any work of art? In spite of all my pronouncements here, I don’t think it is. Do I contradict myself? With apologies to Walt Whitman, very well then I contradict myself. And, having got all that off my chest, let’s, at last, turn our attention to Modern Times.

Things get off to a flying start with Thunder on the Mountain. There’s nothing remotely original about its 12-bar rockabilly structure and melodic echoes of Johnny B. Goode, but Dylan’s vocals are absolutely outstanding. The savage indignation in the way he attacks

“Shame on your greed, shame on your wicked schemes
I’ll say this, I don’t give a damn about your dreams.”

never fails to move me and provides the first of the album’s Great Moments. This song is one of the very few that doesn’t outstay its welcome and its dozen verses – apart from a baffling reference to Alicia Keys – contain some great writing. Consider, for instance, this arresting blend of the sinister and amusing.

“Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches/I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages.”

The first time I heard that, the beginnings of a smile were swept away by memories of news reports from Burma, Sri Lanka or Uganda: every time I’ve played it since, I see those young shoulders weighed down by bandoliers, the defiant stares unable to kill the childhood in their eyes.

Next up is Spirit on the Water, a woefully protracted piece (twenty quatrains!) which, despite its biblical opening and subsequent blues borrowings, is a middle-of-the-road ditty in which romantic Bob finds twenty ways of saying “I’m wild about you, gal.” The lyrics are exactly what you’d expect from this genre, but even his heartfelt vocals – listen to the resignation he brings to the eighth verse – can do nothing for lines like

I been in a brawl/ Now I’m feeling the wall
I’m going away, baby/I won’t be back till fall.

Did Bob Dylan really write that? One redeeming feature though: if you stick around, you’ll eventually reach a lovely coda for harmonica and guitar.

It’s with the next track Rollin’ and Tumblin’ that all my tidy opinions, all my logical conclusions are blown right out the window and I’m simply overwhelmed by what I’m hearing. Again, there’s nothing original here: the melody and the opening lines have been around since, as my mother used to say, Oul’ God’s time. Hambone Willie Newbern recorded it in 1929, and it has subsequently been pressed into action by Muddy Waters, Canned Heat, The Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart, to name but a handful. The liner notes say ‘All songs by Bob Dylan’ but only the lyric here is really his. And, for once, I don’t care. I just don’t care. I love the stinging guitar intro, what sounds like a pizzicato fiddle but is probably guitar chords, and some great lyrics:

“The night is filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom.
I’ve been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumbling tombs.”

From the mouth of anyone else, these lines would be no more than gothic histrionics, but into them Dylan distills a veritable universe of mortality and loss. And it is his magisterial growl that presides over the track. Listen, for instance, to the self-loathing in the last word of verse seven, or the terror he evokes with the last four words of the next verse. Or, best of all, the way his voice soars into the very opening words of the song. This is Bob Dylan singing like only Bob Dylan can, and the shivers up my spine let me know that this is the album’s second Great Moment. Hearing singing as good as this sometimes fills me with dread at how short is our time on earth…. My brain tells me that, at nearly six minutes, the whole shebang is far is too long, but, again, I don’t care, and it is the one song on Modern Times I can’t wait to hear live. Why do I like this one so much and not others? I have no idea. As Van Morrison testified all those years ago on Summertime in England, “It ain’t why, why, why. It just is.…”

Then, from these sublime heights we fall headlong into When the Deal Goes Down, a beautifully-sung mishmash of Victorian poeticisms and well-meaning platitudes on the transience of life. (It is actually enhanced by the evocative video, one of the very few instances I can recall where a song is thus improved, and the reason is obvious: the pictures distract from the words.) By the way, those of you who enjoy spotting arcane correspondences in Dylan’s music might like to compare the drumbeat that starts Like A Rolling Stone with its more anaemic counterpart here.

Shortly after the album’s release, an American disc jockey, Scott Warmuth, googled the lyrics and found that its romantic references to frail flowers, precious hours, moonlight, visions in the skies etc. weren’t written by Dylan at all, but lifted more or less wholesale from various poems by Henry Timrod (1828-1867), a Charleston native who currently joins Dylan in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. But I’d wager that Mr Timrod would turn in his grave if he knew that his words had ended up alongside some of the other lines here. Consider, for instance:

The moon gives light and it shines by night

and

Well, I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes.

Again, I ask you, did Bob Dylan really write that?

Despite the great singing – listen, particularly, to the dismissive emphasis he places on that nothing in line five – Someday Baby is an inconsequential piece of work, nine verses crying out for a middle-eight and a fiddle or mandolin solo instead of the run-of the mill guitars. Inspired, I have been informed, by Muddy Waters’ Trouble No More, this track comes across like J.J. Cale in one of his less somnolent moments but, after a few listens, its copy-and-paste guitar figure is guaranteed to lull anybody straight into the arms of Morpheus.

Workingman's Blues #2 is already a particular favourite of many Dylan fans, but I find its mixture of anthemic love song, rural and urban imagery, blues references, and incongruous political observation somewhat less than convincing. And, again, its mention of ‘a lover’s breath’ and ‘a temporary death’ are straight from Mr Timrod. But it’s not all bad news: I love the evocative “Starlight by the edge of the creek” and the pathos he brings to something as simple as

Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking
That you have forgotten me.

Beyond the Horizon is a gush of sentimentality that blatantly rips off the melody of the well-known Red Sails in the Sunset. If Hallmark ever runs out of soppy sentiments, this song will prove to be its saviour. The shadow of Timrod is again discernible in the second half of this quatrain:

My wretched heart’s pounding
I felt an angel’s kiss
My memories are drowning
In mortal bliss

but did Dylan himself really resort to “an angel’s kiss” and, elsewhere in the song, such threadbare clichés as “I’ll build my world around you?” and “I’ve got more than a lifetime to live loving you.” If so, how the mighty have fallen.

Nettie Moore – part of whose chorus is taken directly from a nineteenth-century song with the same title – is ostensibly an elegiac love song, but what is “Well, the world of research has gone berserk/Too much paperwork” doing in the middle of it? Or what’s the story with the judge? On a similar note, has anyone figured out what the narrator being “hit from behind” has to do with anything else in Ain’t Talking? Non-sequiturs, have, of course, always figured prominently in Dylan’s work, but the difference is that, unlike the earlier surreal flashes that detonated whole series of images in your head, here they are such damp squibs that even Dylan’s singing can’t ignite them.

Musically, this could have been the most interesting track – That G major chord in the second line gives a refreshing jolt to each verse, but when you hear it for the tenth or twelfth time, it soon loses its impact – but much of its potency has disappeared before we get anywhere near the end of its almost seven minutes. At the risk of being burned as a heretic by the Torquemadas of the Dylan world, can I dare suggest that this would be a far better song if he had scrapped half the choruses and verses 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Yes, I know there’ll be very little left, but, to paraphrase a line from another Dylan song, the fibreglass would be disposed of and only the gems remain.

Typically, Dylan claims complete credit for The Levee’s Gonna Break but, despite its mostly new lyric, it still owes a substantial debt to When the Levee Breaks recorded by Memphis Minnie Kansas Joe McCoy and his wife Memphis Minnie in 1929. Led Zeppelin fans will also be familiar with an epic version of the song (which, I might note, does share credits with the original writers) but Dylan’s is a repetitious 16-verse saga that might get us jivin’ in the aisles at concerts, but as a listening experience, really tested my endurance.

And so we come to the final track. Ain’t Talking is nine minutes long but, as far as I’m concerned, that’s as near as it gets to being any sort of epic. The lyrics, which embrace bits and pieces from dozens of other songs – including, incidentally, Wild Mountain Thyme which Dylan massacred at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival – range from the interesting

I practise a faith that’s been long abandoned
Ain’t no altars on this long and lonesome road

To the apparently trite

Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’.
Eatin’ hog-eyed grease in a hog-eyed town

Despite the subtle mix of acoustic and electric guitars, the music is mainly a two-chord construction that seems to go on forever and the Picardy third which finally brings things to a close is as welcome as the flowers in May. Honest to God, this should have been edited with a chainsaw.

And there you have it. Today, October 16, 2006, – Who knows how I’ll feel in a year’s time? – Modern Times is tediously protracted, derivative, melodically flat, and for the most part, lyrically banal. The arrangements are equally unimaginative and played by musicians (the guitarists especially) who seldom rise above the sort of stuff you'd expect from any competent covers band. But as someone rightly pointed out to me, this is not necessarily their fault. What they are playing obviously pleases their boss because, as is well known, Dylan is merciless when disposing of band members who, for whatever reason, fail to meet with his approval.

It is the singing that provides the album's only consistent redeeming feature because, for the most part, Modern Times is an easy-listening, middle-of-the road, blues-by-numbers collection which, if it wasn't by Bob Dylan, I would never have given a third or fourth listen. And maybe it’s those precise traits that account for the album’s popularity. It is Dylan's first Number 1 in the US since 1976 – he is, incidentally, the oldest living person ever to have an album enter the Billboard charts at the highest position – and has been a huge hit all around the world. It has been equally well-received by the critics (One website that monitors reviews gives the album’s approval rating at nearly 90 per cent), so what do I know? All I do know for certain is that, most of the time, Modern Times does not move me at all. I also know that, more than forty years ago, Dylan wrote that he not busy being born is busy dying. In terms of the creativity evident on Modern Times, I can’t stop that phrase from ringing in my head.

Toadstools

2006-10-15T12:30:00.000+01:00

Most days I walk through a wooded area on the outskirts of our town. Recently I've noticed a new phenomenon; small groups of foreign nationals, eyes fixed to the ground between the trees, filling Dunnes Stores and Lidl bags with toadstools. I've no idea what they'll do with them. If they're for gastronomic purposes all I can say is bon appetit; if they have other uses, is this any different than what we natives do with alcohol?

Frank Zappa

2006-09-30T20:29:00.000+01:00

I've just finished Frank Zappa by Barry Miles and seldom has any biography had such a profound and unexpected effect on me. So much so, in fact, that I'm going to find it very difficult to listen to Zappa's music for a long while. Why? Because a lot of the songs I always took to be satirical, I now know to be mere explicit descriptions of his real-life predelictions. No-one expects their heroes to be saints, but we also don't like to discover that they have feet of clay or, in Zappa's case, so to speak, feet of mephitic slime. Yes, Stink-Foot does come to mind. Anyway, it gave me no pleasure at all to read about his caveman attitude towards women (a trait, incredibly, shared by his wife Gail), his cavalier treatment of band members; his general misanthropy, and utter hypocrisy in nearly all aspects of his life. The fact that he was also a control freak seems, by comparison, only a minor addition to this litany of failure.

But most damning of all was the way he reared his children. They were allowed do exactly as they liked: Their totally inappropriate - but, for them, perfectly normal - behaviour at school, for instance, would be hilarious if it wasn't so shocking. They watched porn and horror films with both parents (who, incidentally, seldom communicated unless it was about business) and, when they became teenagers, Gail insisted that they shower with any overnight guests to save water. Yes, that is hard to believe. The only rule in a house - where inflatable sex devices and pornographic cartoons lay casually strewn about - seemed to be Thou shalt not bother daddy when he's working.

His cruelly-christened daughter ("If it's a boy call him Motorhead. If it's a girl call her Moon Unit," Zappa blithely instructed his heavily pregnant wife as he leaves for London with another woman) tells of how her father's obscene lyrics "made her shy, almost repressed about my own anatomy" and, in another heartbreaking incident, she begs for some sort of normal relationship with him. And the result of her pleading? Valley Girl, one of his most successful records. I hope the Zappa children turned out safe and healthy, but the more I read, the more I couldn't get Philip Larkin's line out of of my head: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad..."

Barry Miles is a reputable biographer who knew Zappa very well, but that doesn't, of course, mean that he might not have a lorryload of axes to grind. You shouldn't, of course, believe everything you read, but if you like Frank Zappa's music, maybe you should avoid this book. As depicted here, he was a human being with very few redeeming qualities. Even his hostility towards drugs - which would surely be to the average parent's credit - comes across as just another of his wilful perversions.

The Most Battered Bridge in Ireland

2006-09-12T16:47:00.000+01:00

In August 2006, Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail) announced that, over the previous five years, more than 720 railway bridges had been hit and damaged by lorries, at a cost of €25.5 million to the company. I was intrigued to learn that the bridge I grew up beside merited the invidious title of The Most Battered Bridge in Ireland, 2005. This unfortunate edifice - under which I walk a few times each day - suffered a total of 22 direct hits. And in fourth place, with 8 hits, in the Top Five of Stricken Structures? The bridge over the Mountrath Road. Clearly, Portlaoise is not the place to be if you're a bridge. On a serious note, it seems that, despite all the signs and warnings, some drivers, in charge of forty-tonne battering rams (which I have seen being forced under the bridge and nonchalantly driven off), are either illiterate or totally heedless of the safety of others.

Bill Bryson

2006-09-11T20:10:00.000+01:00

Hanging around Liverpool airport, I was stuck for something to read so I bought The Lost Continent. The blurb gave the impression that it would be light and amusing, exactly the sort of reading you want while waiting for a plane. It describes Bryson's 14,000 mile car journey through small-town America and, sure enough, it did turn out to be light and amusing - even, on occasion, funny enough to make me laugh aloud - and, frequently, I found myself nodding my head in agreement (especially at his endorsement of a long-held opinion/prejudice of my own: "Can there anywhere be a breed of people more irritating and imbecilic than disc jockeys?").

One unexpected feature was his seemingly relentless obsession with fat people. He rarely loses a chance to regale us with derogatory details ("... a fat young woman with a pair of ill-kempt children moaning in a loud voice about her financial problems...", and, nine pages later, "... a fat woman asleep in the front passenger seat, her mouth hugely agape."), so much so that I ended up wondering what his problem was. He's not exactly sylph-like himself.

Last night I happened to see a South Bank Show profile and there it was again, this childish glee in poking fun at those bigger than himself. Also present was the unmistakable whiff of smugness. Not to mention hypocrisy. He was constantly bemoaning the fact that so many residents were deserting the centres of small cities like his native Des Moines, yet he chooses to live in England.

Beatle Week

2006-09-01T21:37:00.000+01:00

We're just home from Beatle Week in Liverpool, an event I would recommend to anyone with any love for my favourite band. It was our first visit and while we were prepared for wall-to-wall Beatles music from all sorts of tribute bands, and meeting all sorts of fans, what we didn't expect was how utterly moving the week would be; how beautiful the city would be; that there'd be a fire in the hotel....

The various venues were crawling with Beatles of every species known to music: Hamburg Beatles, Cavern Beatles, Help Beatles, Sergeant Pepper Beatles, Abbey Road Beatles, Post-Beatle Beatles, all decked out in the appropriate finery. Normally, I am cynical about tribute bands (To be frank, I think they are all parasites living off the work of others) but, seeing them in some sort of context, in their natural habitat, so to speak, I was surprised to find my antipathy suspended. I suddenly saw them doing what they do, not out of creative bankruptcy or lazy plagiarism, but out of sheer love of the music (someone told us that none of the bands - apart from those appearing at the Liverpool Empire - received any payment. Could this be true?) and, in the process, bringing great live Beatles music to those who, like us, had never seen the band live. You could, argue, of course, that such people would be better off listening to the original albums, but it was obvious that they'd already done that, as almost everyone at every performance, irrespective of native language, sang along with every word of every song. Every song I heard reminded me yet again of what a brilliant band the Beatles were and more than once I felt that shiver up the spine.

The best bands we heard were Beetle One, four young lads from Brazil whose enthusiasm was matched by a musicianship that raised the roof of the Adelphi Hotel. I didn't even have to close my eyes to be back in 1963. We also liked The Bootleg Beatles and, from the Czech Republic, a band called Boom (complete with brass, choir and strings) whose sheer joy to be playing Beatles songs in Liverpool overcame their nerves and endeared them to us all.

Throughout the week there was a great sense of esprit de corps among fans who ranged from recent converts through eagle-eyed collectors, to manic obsessives. I know it's sentimental, very flowers in your hair, man, but it was a lovely feeling to see complete strangers, who hadn't a word of each other's language, smile in recognition of their common bond, great timeless music....

Even away from the music, there were many magical moments: Passing that shelter in the middle of the roundabout; standing at the gate of Strawberry Field (sic); meeting some of the original Quarrymen, seeing the actual instruments they played; staring at the Beatles childhood homes all brought lumps to my throat. The Magical Mystery Tour was great but it's a pity that the organisers, the National Trust (who own Lennon and McCartney's childhood homes) and the company that runs the outstanding Beatles Story at Albert Dock, don't put their heads together and come up with an integrated package. On this note, if you're thinking of attending Beatle Week, be aware that you must book separately for The Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles Story and entry to the houses. Book well in advance for the latter as, quite understandably, only a dozen or so visitors can be accommodated at a time.

Someone told us that, after London, Liverpool has the most listed buildings in England. We were overwhelmed by the variety and beauty of the arcthitecture: If, like me, you had the idea in your head that Liverpool was a dour, industrialised place, your eyes will definitely be opened. If you see nothing else, make a beeline for the two cathedrals. Behind the Anglican one you'll also find St James' Garden, an oasis of peace and quiet and, for the interior lighting alone, make sure you visit the nearby Catholic cathedral which rejoices in the local name of Paddy's Wigwam. If you don't know it, find it on-line and you'll understand the brilliance of that soubriquet.

Maybe we were just lucky, but the Liverpudlians we met went out of their way to be helpful and extend the sort of Cead Mile Failte we're supposed to have a monopoly on in Ireland. The only downside to our week was the Indian restaurant whose food was great but whose surly, overworked staff seemed surprised that we should enquire why each course - including coffee - took half-an-hour to arrive. I am not exaggerating. Maybe we should have booked the meal before we left Ireland at all.

Finally, two surreal scenes: When fire broke out in the hotel, we were all evacuated. Picture us, standing outside in the middle of the night, residents and miscellaneous local revellers, accompanied by two Russian accordionist, singing Beatles songs in the rain... some wit at the back shouting for 'Burning Down the House' and 'Light My Fire'. On another occasion, at eight o'clock in the morning, I blinked in disbelief as six Beatles - in full moptop regalia - approached along the hotel corridor....

On returning home, incidentally, I found that my tolerance for tribute bands was indeed ephemeral. But that's another story....

White Bicycles. Making Music in the 1960's

2006-08-18T19:05:00.000+01:00

They say that if you can remember the 1960's you weren’t there at all. Joe Boyd, famed producer and general man-about-music, definitely was there and, on the evidence of this fascinating book, his memory is perfectly intact. If, like me, you first got into music in the Sixties, White Bicycles will bring back stuff you’ve forgotten for years. (You'll also smile with satisfaction as you recognise the allusion in the book's title.) If you’re much younger, you’ll be captivated by how vividly it evokes the sights and sounds of that seminal decade.

Blues… Folk… Psychedelia... Pink Floyd at UFO (which, every night bar Fridays, was the Blarney Club run by an affable Paddy)... the Incredible String Band and their bad luck at Woodstock... Nick Drake… Fairport Convention… Bob Dylan (the account of Newport 1965 is the best I’ve ever read)… They’ve all come into Boyd’s orbit and are brilliantly brought to life here. Elswhere, he is scathing about digital recording; South African racism and white liberals; the narrow-mindedness of the Jazz scene and, in one the most striking passages, inspired by a bland performance by Aretha Franklin, he castigates those artists and their fans who settle for “self-congratulatory affection” where “the music is caught in the middle, lifeless and predictable”. The final chapter is a compelling comparison of the Sixties and our world today, and the book ends with an elegiac coda which fuses the intensely personal and the zeitgeist.

Two Films

2006-08-18T13:23:00.000+01:00

We watched two films this week which, by coincidence, dealt with the dynamics of family life; in particular the emotional fallout from divorce. And that’s about the only thing they had in common. The Squid and the Whale is a well-intentioned, but simplistic moral tale marred by a predictable screenplay and one-dimensional characters. I couldn’t escape the feeling that what we were watching was a mere transcription of the director's own life with none of the magic, the je ne sais quoi that elevates the mundane into something special. In complete contrast, The Ballad of Jack and Rose is a moving, multifaceted experience with complex, unpredictable people (though one of the sons does come close to your common-or-garden angsty teen), and an unexpected, but totally plausible narrative. Alongside Transamerica, this is the best film I've seen this year, followed by Breakfast on Pluto, Brokeback Mountain, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

Music on the Move

2006-08-17T17:00:00.000+01:00

Since my retirement, I’ve been indulging my twin passions, music and walking. The former has been a huge part of my life since the halcyon days of Radio Luxembourg; the latter is a recent activity, prompted by (a) my wife’s hints that maybe I wasn’t the golden Adonis she fell for thirty years ago (b) the simple, selfish fact that if I didn’t get some exercise, the heart might also start complaining (c) the acquisition of a dog, a Yorkshire terrier named Ziggy (no, he doesn’t play guitar) who demands a daily romp in the countryside.

I was never a walker; in fact, the only exercise I got was strolling around the classroom. And all my interests were sedentary as well. But it’s amazing how quickly things can change and now I’m as surprised by my new love of walking as I am by how quickly I seem to have forgotten all the years I spent teaching. The MP3 player, of course, allows me to combine my passions and this has led to some interesting discoveries.

I often think about how the environment affects my response to the music I’m listening to; also, the influence of music on how I perceive my surroundings. It goes without saying, I suppose, that there is a huge difference between how the same piece of music sounds in urban and rural environments. Furthermore, it’s amazing how the same music can sound brilliant on a dull day but ordinary enough in the sunshine and vice versa. If there’s a logic to all of this, so far it has eluded me. And I suppose that’s one of the reasons I love music so much; my favourite pieces have a protean quality that, depending on mood, time and space, can mean a hundred different things, transport me to a hundred different places (“Music is another planet”, according to the French writer, Alphonse Daudet) while, at the same time – and here’s the paradox – they exude a familiarity, a comfort that I respond to. And whether we like to admit it or not, we all – from the most doctrinaire avant-gardener to those of us who warble in the shower – need and love to be comforted.

Music on the move also creates a symbiotic audio/visual experience which has confounded some notions I’d more or less taken for granted. Contrary to all my expectations, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony sounded redundant in the meadows of Togher, while the ominous drums and blaring brass of Shostakovich were brilliant in the wide-open spaces of Cúil na Móna bog. Other memorable if unlikely combinations were Frank Zappa’s The Grand Wazoo and a snowy morning in Emo Wood; the sun splitting the trees along the Watery Lane, Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall apocalyptic in my ears. Vic Chesnutt’s Is the Actor Happy? and anything by Howlin’ Wolf or Johnny Moynihan sounded great everywhere, but I still haven’t found anywhere that makes the latest albums by The Streets or The Futureheads sound anything other than the shuffle of tired minds over the same old ground.

Up Up And Away

2006-08-14T15:06:00.000+01:00

I'm due to have gallstones removed in September. The other day, in the supermarket carpark, I met an acquaintance and we got talking about our respective health. I told him about my impending operation. His response? "The first cousin's daughter, only a young wan, had that keyhole surgery and it nearly blew her up. They filled her with some sort of gas to make room for the instruments and, I swear to God, she went up like a balloon... right up to the shoulders. She was like the Michelin Man...."

Thanks Joe (name changed to protect the guilty).

Books of the Year So Far

2006-08-12T17:11:00.000+01:00

Shade. Neil Jordan
The Mayor of MacDougal Street. Dave Van Ronk
The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini
The Canal Bridge. Tom Phelan
Notes From A Coma. Mike McCormack
We Need To Talk About Kevin. Lionel Shriver

Dylan no poet

2006-08-05T16:06:00.000+01:00

I see that Bob Dylan is included in the new Oxford Book of American Poetry. I am ambivalent about this: I am always delighted when his work is exposed to a new audience, but I don't believe that Dylan is a poet. He is a songwriter and singer whose lyrics, for the most part, lie dormant on the page until his voice breathes, sneers, howls, rasps life into them.

Above most other singer/songwriters, Dylan is praised for being a poet and criticised for his vocal shortcomings. In a recent programme on Irish radio, for instance, one fan declared that his hero was "the greatest poet since Shakespeare" but who "unfortunately hasn't a great voice". I dislike the constant comparisons to poets and poetry because they imply an acceptance that poetry is a superior art; one to which all serious songwriters should aspire. Why should they? The same applies to prose and film: Why should they be praised for being 'poetic'. Even architecture and sport. How often do we hear that old warhorse 'poetry in motion' paraded into action? (The Victorian critic Walter Pater, incidentally, maintained that all art aspires towards the condition of music. Now, there's a man after my own heart.) If I hear another "Well, I don't really like Bob Dylan, but his songs are so poetic", I swear I'll... I'll think of something.

In 2003, Christopher Ricks, Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, published Dylan's Visions of Sin, a massive tome whose analysis to my mind, is based on a single spurious premise: Dylan's lyrics are worthy of academic scrutiny because they compare favourably with poetry, that comparing them to poetry confers some sort of artistic validation. Remember the old Keats versus Dylan nonsense? Bob Dylan needs no such validation.

It goes without saying that Dylan is enormously influential as a lyricist but I believe that it as a singer of his own songs that makes him truly great. He has, quite simply, re-defined the notion of what makes a singer great. Technical excellence, bel canto beauty, an ability to sing and maintain a unit-shifting smile: Dylan has none of these. But what he has is a protean, expressive way of singing that conveys a huge gamut of emotions and, apologies to the ghost of Johnny Cash, conjures up forty shades of nuance. When on form, his singing, the way he hits a line, a word, a single syllable even, goes straight to my soul. I don't think of the lyric he's singing, much less its meaning. All I feel is that shiver up the spine, that involuntary shudder, that rush of emotion that connects me with something I find difficult to explain.... All I know is that I am freed of the tyranny of meaning, the tyranny of time and place, the tyranny of myself, and taken somewhere else....

Having said all that, I sometimes enjoy reading his lyrics because I am one of the lucky people who have heard all his albums, hundreds of bootlegs and numerous live performances. And, above all else, it is this last valuable experience that I am able to bring to the printed word. I can read, say, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue and my memory, as it were, provides the soundtrack. And the more performances I have heard, the more enriching I find the reading experience. Today I might be struck by the anger I have heard in that lyric; tomorrow the resignation, another day the compassion....

You can argue, of course, that, in the long run, it doesn't matter a damn what we call Bob Dylan; that all I'm doing here is quibbling over nomenclature. But I think it does matter. Calling him a poet narrows his achievement and consigns him to a minority-interest corner of the arts; a niche that may enjoy greater status than songwriting but one that, to my ears, achieves very little of the resonance, the sheer extraordinary power that great singing can produce.

Mine's Bigger Than Yours

2006-08-01T18:54:00.000+01:00

Picture this: A bright spring morning, three pensioners on a bench in the Market Square comparing the size of their MP3 players....

Until the start of 2006, I usually bought about seventy CD's a year. There were artists whose albums I'd buy automatically; Dylan, Bowie, Dan Bern, Richard Thompson, Frank Zappa, Tom Verlaine to name a handful; others I'd get because I'd read an interesting - not necessarily good - review. Some were bought because they were panned by reviewers whose tastes I knew and generally disliked; some were recommended by people whose judgment I trusted; others I bought because I liked a particular genre, string quartets, say, or pre-war blues. So far this year, I've bought the grand total of five CD's, but I've heard more new music than in the previous twelve months.

I now download most of my music from emusic. I use this site for two reasons: It's great value ($9.99 for 40 tracks each month) and it has loads of stuff I've never heard before. If you're looking for the big, poptastic names that festoon the charts, this is not the site for you; but if you are adventurous, and have the time (and you do need time) to listen to the endless samples, you'll find yourself embarking on an odyssey that could bring you from homely, old-time favourites, through blues, classical, rock and world music, to the furthest reaches of avant-garde jazz. Through emusic I have discovered such great, disparate artists as The Mountain Goats (expect a longer epistle on this subject some time in the future), Extra Golden, The National, Califone, Field Music, Phosphorescent....

You're right.... I was one of those pensioners.

Humility and Magic

2006-07-26T20:30:00.000+01:00

We spent the other afternoon at Lough Boora, less than an hour's drive from home. I would always be a bit cynical about any place that advertises itself as "where art and nature meet", but, as the saying goes, Lough Boora (Say: Lock Boor-a) is something else. First there's the intrinsic beauty of the place; turf, trees, water, shifting shades of browns, greens, purples, under a huge wide-open sky. You could walk for miles here, the silence broken only by your footsteps, the breeze in the trees, the cries of unseen birds.

Then there's the sculpture which, paradoxically, is at once part of the landscape, yet utterly alien to it. Except for one large construction which reminded us of a feeding trough for cattle (nothing wrong with that, mind you, but unlike all the others, this 'trough' did not transcend its literal state) , we were both struck by the imagination behind the pieces and the different responses they evoked. My wife was particularly taken by the little grey room, while I couldn't believe that three triangles could be so eloquent. We were both knocked out by the train. Go there and you'll see what I mean.

Sitting on a trunk of bog oak on this most glorious of summer days, I found my mind straying into the dark... All the wonderful sculptures, the magic conjured by the minds and hands of gifted men and women, would, one day, just like everything else that humankind has dreamed up, crumble into dust.... disappear into the bog which, for now, they appear to dominate. In the grip of such clichés, I thought of how ephemeral we are and, not for the first time, I felt humbled by the benign tyranny of nature.

Enough of this second-hand philosophy. Boora is the ideal place for a lovely, memorable day out. You don't have to have any interest in art at all: the bog itself will stir something deep inside you. If your travels ever bring you near the town of Tullamore in central Ireland; go the extra miles. You won't regret it, but please, to coin another cliché, take nothing but your memories, leave nothing but your footprints.

Abandoning the Past

2006-07-26T11:47:00.000+01:00

Over the last year or so, I've been quite shocked to learn just how easy it is to leave your past behind. When I retired, I let it be known in local teaching circles that I'd be available for substitute work. I was hardly out of the school when the phone started hopping. To my surprise, I heard myself declining every request. In retrospect, I now realize that announcing my availability was a mere psychological safety net: If early retirement didn't suit, I had a way back into the classroom. Without losing face. But so far, I have felt no need for any such 'insurance policy' and, for the moment at least, I can never see myself in front of a classroom again. On reflection, I know I should never say never: Sometime in the future, bored with my new life, I might well end up clawing the door of the local Teachers' Centre.

In the meantime, I am quite amazed at how easy it has been to walk away from my entire working life and not miss it at all. On my last day, I left with no more than an armful of stuff (Again, I was surprised by how little I wanted to keep): I have never been back to the school (though I did drive by a few times, so maybe, deep down, I really am as nostalgic as the next man): I don't miss the pupils at all, and I have had but brief contact with one ex-colleague.

So, as the song says, how does it feel? Since leaving, I have never felt any sense of relief, trepidation, elation, regret, sadness; none, indeed, of any of the emotions that people had kindly warned me about. My dominant feeling is of enthusiasm for what I want to do over the years I have left. A great blessing I do have - and one which many other pensioners are not fortunate enough to share - is that my wife is still alive and much more youthful than I like to think I am myself. One of life's cruelest tricks must surely be to deprive any recently-retired person of his or her beloved partner. That, and the loss of health of either of us and our children are the only real fears I have.

Dylan's Imminent Album

2006-07-25T10:38:00.000+01:00

For me, the cultural highlight of any year is the arrival of a new Bob Dylan album. Modern Times is set for release at the end of August and, from the snippets I've heard, I think I'm going to be disappointed. Dylan's voice is as expressive as ever (I believe that he is one of the very best singers in any genre) but nothing leaps out from the lyrics, the musical forms are overly familiar (Soft blues, country, a few forays into crooning a la "Love and Theft") but, to my ears, the biggest problem lies with his band. I have seen them live on numerous occasions and have always been less than impressed by the two guitarists in particular. And so it seems again. From what I've heard, Modern Times exudes a grey, run-of-the-mill aura which doesn't bode well for repeated listening. I hope I'm wrong.

You're Not Touching That Carpet!

2006-07-24T23:40:00.000+01:00

On my retirement, my colleagues, well aware of my disdain for Waterford Glass or - God forbid - a picture of the school done in oils by some local artist, presented me with a top-of-the-range MP3 player....

I bought my very first lp in the early 1960's and, full of purist notions that music should be listened to with reverence, preferably in a darkened room with eyes closed, I had always been a stickler for perfect sound quality. I have been known to spend hours making minuscule adjustments to speaker positions and, in one memorable fit of sonic insanity, I even contemplated getting rid of the carpet because it muffled the sound. My mother, God bless her, told me to get lost.

I have never owned a Walkman or a Discman: To be honest, I've always maintained a fairly supercilious view of those reduced to having their music squeak into their ears. Now, my colleagues' thoughtfulness has completely changed how I obtain and listen to my music, but that's something for another day.....

Charles Lamb

2006-07-24T23:15:00.000+01:00

In 1825, after thirty-six years of hard work - one more than yours truly- the English writer Charles Lamb wrote a brilliant essay entitled The Superannuated Man. For me, the most striking line and the one that epitomizes the freedom my retirement has given me is: I walk about; not to and from. On my daily ramblings throughout our town and surrounding countryside, I am the embodiment of Lamb's observation and, like him, I can't help but take - especially when I pass a school - a certain pleasure at hearing my ex-colleagues still embroiled in the prolixity of long division; the proper usage of there, their and they're

First Words

2006-07-24T22:14:00.000+01:00

On August 30th 2005, I took early retirement from teaching: Thirty-five years of standing, acting (all teachers are essentially actors; the better the performance, the more successful your teaching) in front of children, the vast majority of whom were an absolute pleasure to be with. I loved almost every day of it, so the inevitable question is Why did you leave early? And the answer is simple: Thirty-five years is long enough doing things for other people; it is now time to please myself. The fact that I still liked the job so much after all those years, was another reason I got out. I had seen too many teachers leaving the classroom at 65, their health precarious, their attitude embittered because they hadn't quit when they were ahead.

So why have I decided to venture into the Kingdom of the Blog? Firstly, I suppose it's vanity. Vanity pure and simple. We all like to think that whatever we have to say is of some significance. Secondly, I just like writing about the things that mean most to me. And that's why at, hopefully, regular intervals, I'm going to inflict on you my thoughts on music (from Bach to Zappa, in a pantheon presided over by Bob Dylan), literature (Just finished the amazing We Need To Talk About Kevin), the family, the dog, anything that comes into my head in this small town in the middle of Ireland....