Well, nobody's perfect..

Saw a reference to this in the Irish Times today and thought I'd post it..

It begins: Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

And ends: He never married.

And he seemed like such a catch.

George Melly died this week too. Now that, by contrast, was a debauched, wreckless life very well lived..

REM in Dublin

I went to see REM in the Olympia last night. It was a pretty decent show - the last of their 'rehearsal' shows this week featuring mostly new songs and obscure old ones. None of the hits. Funny thing about them was that you couldn't really tell the new songs form the old ones. I don't think anyone could ever accuse REM of evolving. The template hasn't changed for 25 years. Essentially they've got 2 songs. The ones with the catchy chorus and Mike Mills harmonising in the background (those would also be known as the popular ones), and the other one which is mostly Peter Buck banging away on a Rickenbacker while Stipey shouts about The Man and generally makes a bit of a racket. Sometimes they can overlap a little but it mostly comes down to those two.

Still it was nice to see them and it was a good night out. As usual there were a lot of people talking through the whole thing. One guy behnd told his friend that 'going to see REM is a life experience - like going to a wedding'. No, I don't know what he meant either..

But perhaps the most exciting thing about the show was the ticket (above). Remember when concert tickets were differnet for every show? These people do. In the days before generic ticketmaster printouts. Also in the day before you were charged extra for the tickets being run through a laser printer. How come we were never charged for design and print costs of tickets 15 years ago but now that they're automatically printed there's a charge. Did someone say rip-off?

A couple of things..

I'm not going to bang on about that Diana concert yesterday. Clearly it's fairly critic-proof. However everybody needs to see this terrible P Diddy performance from the show. Or as Jamie Oliver said, Mister P. Diddy. Anyway, this is just shocking. What's he on about? More importantly, what's he on?!!

Ricky Gervais' bit was a mess too. Did he really go out there not knowing how long he'd be onstage? It was a little bit funny and a little bit embarrassing. That's the 2nd time I've seen him doing his funny dance at a charity concert. He must be starting to think that despite the awards and tv shows and live tours, the silly dance is what they'll show on tv when he dies. He's going to have to try to get away from that but I'm not sure recreating it in front of huge worldwide audiences is the way to go about it. A bit of a shocker that a comedian couldn't entertain a crowd for 4 minutes. I guess he's not that kind of comedian. Still - he's rich and I'm not, so he wins.

Finally another thing that tickled me was one of the prince's comments at the start about 'if our mother was here, she'd be first on her feet to clap and sing along'. But wait, surely if their mother was there, there'd be no need for anyone else to be! Perhaps I'm simplifying things.

Anyway, it was all rubbish but it's hard not to be taken in when the rubbish is this good. It's Donny! It's Jason! It's, em, somebody else.. I dare you not to sing along.

The party line?

Logged on to breaking news this morning and was intrigued by the 'Top Story' on the left hand side. It's a little hard to read here but this is what it says: "Former Fianna Fail backbencher Pat Carey will hold his first engagement as a junior minister in Government today" Well I don't know what normally goes on in the Dail but it looks like Pat is trying a bit too hard to make a good impression!

Rise and Shine

I woke up this morning (duh-duh-da-duh-duh) to an interview with Brendan Shine on Radio 1. He's an old Irish country singer (Irish country being a very unique and selective musical genre) who had a huge hit in 1979 with a song called 'Do you want your old lobby washed down?' I remember singing it with my mother on the way to school when I was a nipper.

Anyway, it was a nice little interview, made all the nicer by the fact that i was listening to it through that lovely drowsey 'Saturday morning, don't have to get up for work' feeling. During the interview he was asked about the 'lobby' song. It really was a massive hit in Ireland back then and is pretty much what he's remembered for. The interesting thing was that he attributed the song's popularity to the fact that RTE Radio 2 was launched in 1979 and the airplay it got there propelled the song to the top. It's true - I remember it was always on the radio back then. This got me thinking: What would it take for something like that to be played on the radio today? It just wouldn't happen. I remember listening to Larry Gogan's chart show in the early 80s and amongst the usual hits of the day - Kajagoogoo, Duran Duran, Queen, Joe Dolce etc., you'd have Irish curios like Paddy Reilly's The Fields of Athenry (number 1 for about 231 weeks in the '80s), the Furey Brother's Sweet Sixteen, Foster and Allen 's Bunch of Thyme (i think that's what it was called) and many others. Nowadays you wouldn't have a chance of getting anything like this on the radio.

Is this a good thing?

To show you how bad things are with mainstream radio, here's an example of something I heard on (I think) xfm in London last week. The DJ was taking requests from listeners and amongst the kinds of things you'd expect to hear on a popular radio station in 2007 - Lily Allen, The Killers, Arctic Monkeys and the like, came a request to hear Prince's When Doves Cry. The DJ played it and afterwards said something along the lines of this: 'See - we'll literally play anything on xfm'!! I nearly fell over! Have we reached the stage that one of the biggest hits by one of the most popular and influential recording artists of the last 25 years is being percieved by broadcasters as a bit leftfield and obscure? I mean has it really come to that? If that's the case, then Brendan Shine really has no chance!

Incidentally, Brendan has a new single out. It's called 'The first time you called me granddad'. They played a bit at the end of the interview and it's lovely. But it's Saturday morning, I have a free weekend and maybe I'm just feeling benevolent towards popular music's forgotten men. Men like Brendan Shine. And Prince. And it's not often you'll see those two side by side!

Finally, on the subject of Radio 2 or 2Fm or whatever it's called nowadays, I read that when it was launched in 1979, its slogan was "Comin' atcha". 28 years later, their slogan is "Livin' the Life, Lovin' the Music".

The more thin's change....

Ring them bells

Saw this in London on Sunday. Rang it. No answer. What now?!

40 years in the life

I was watching this on BBC2 earlier. So it's Sergeant Pepper's 40th anniversary. I'd be moved to congratulate the boys if it wasn't for the fact that, well, it's not like since recording it, they've done anything to get it this far. 40 years married - now that's an achievement. 40 years in a job is too, especially in these modern days but the Beatles just made the record and quickly moved on too wives, more drugs and solo careers. You do get the feeling that these celebrations are the brainchild of lazy tv and radio producers. I was watching Paul McCartney being interviewed on The Culture Show tonight and got to thinking that he really must get sick of all these questions about the past.. Lauren Lavern has a very watchable quality but, by her own admission, she lost the run of the interview. Tell us again about meeting John Lennon.. I can tell that bloody story as well as he does.. Right down to the check shirt, Lennon's beery breath and the rendition of 20 Flight Rock that so impressed the sneering, teenage Lennon.

Anyway, where was I? Yes - Sgt Pepper's anniversary (which, by the way, isn't its anniversary. I read earlier that it was actually released on May 24th 1967 so the schedulers are a week off). In tonight's show, the record's engineer, Geoff Emerick, was drafted in to record the album again with the cream of 2007's recording crop using the same equipment that was used on the original. Ignoring the fact that the cream of 2007's crop threw up some uninspiring names - Travis, Bryan Adams, Stereophonics, Kaiser Chiefs and a Johnny Borrell-less Razorlight (which really isn't something worth dwelling on), to name a few, you had to wonder why they bothered. The idea seemed to be to not only record the songs using the same equipment but also to record them as close as possible to the originals. So let's get the bass right up in the mix on With a Little Help from My Friends, let's get the comb and paper out so Travis can recreate the garbled ad-libbing in Lovely Rita. It all added up to a big nothing. The bands seemed a bit hamstrung by the technology and the end product was what you'd expect it to be: a bunch of people singing Beatles songs but nowhere near as well as The Beatles did. There's a lot of it going on.

I was wondering earlier what would have happened if they tried somthing like this in 1987 when the record was 20 years old. Who were the cream of 1987's crop that might have been involved. And then I remembered that they did do this in 1987! Remember Wet Wet Wet and BIlly Bragg's double A side number 1? Turns out there was an album with it that I'd forgot about called SeargeantPepper Knew My Father. Included in the line-up that time were: The Christians, Hue and Cry and Frank Sidebottom. I'd have to admit that, in fairness, it's getting better, but can't they just it leave it alone?

Anyway, I wonder will they be celebrating the 40th anniversary of this in 2047..