The CLUAS Archive: 1998 - 2011

Entries for August 2007

23

Duke Special live in Portlaoise, Ireland

Duke SpecialReview Snapshot:
The Duke returns to the town of a previous nightmare gig, but this time wins the audience over, not once, but twice, with successive concerts within hours of each other, and proves that he's the perfect gentleman, both on and off stage.

The CLUAS Verdict? 8 out of 10

Full review:
My six-year old daughter is one of Duke's youngest fans, so we brought her to see him live, and not only did she witness a great performance, she got to meet him, got the autograph and photo, and the T-Shirt literally.

As part of The World Fleadh, Duke Special was back in Portlaoise to perform twice in one night, beginning with an intimate gig at the Dunamaise Theatre. He opened the show with 'Some Things Make Your Soul Free' and 'Closer To The Start' before telling the crowd how happy he was to be here as part of the World Fleadh.

After the uptempo 'Brixton Leaves', some of the crowd wanted to know where the missing members were. According to Duke "one of them was washing his hair, his chest hair. I've said too much already, but I will introduce those who are here if that's okay" he joked, before mentioning Rea Curren on vocals and accordion, and Chip Bailey on percussions.

The show continued with 'Everybody Wants A Little Something', then a song about a failed Bank robbery ('Don't Breath') and 'The Ballad of A Broken Man'. A cover-version that he's currently recording 'Catfish' was next, and it went down very well as he duetted with Rae while explaining that it's from a musical that was never finished. "I'd love to bring this out on wobbly vinyl" he added.

During 'I Let You Down' Chip went berserk on the drums, running up the stairs of the Theatre between drumbeats, which had the audience hysterical. He then treated us to his new single 'Our Love Goes Deeper Than That'. It was so new in fact that Rae needed the lyrics written down for him.

'You Don't Slow Me Down' was introduced as a song he imagined in a film featuring two French lovers. He goes on to recall a previous gig in this town supporting either Bell X1 or Juliet Turner explaining he has a tough time of winning the crowd over. "Now it's great to play Portlaoise" he emphasised.

Next up were 'Salvation Tambourine' and the brilliant 'Freewheel' before finishing with a couple of songs including 'Lastight I Nearly Died' which got the audience singing along to, for perhaps the only time of the evening.

The encore consisted of 'Drink To Me Only' and finishing up with 'The Slip of a Girl', a song he says is synonymous with Portlaoise. During this his Scottish sound guy added some reverb to Duke's vocals, provoking him so say, "What the hell was that".

There's no denying this was a relaxed, but yet, polished performance. I'm just privileged we got to witness it in such an intimate surrounding, because the bigger venues are just around the corner for this special talent.

Mick Lynch


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23

Sinead O'Connor live at the Sziget festival (Budapest)

Sinead OReview Snapshot:
Solid renditions of her staple songs, but the wrong venue for Sinead O'Connor, who played after a jubilant Razorlight to a crowd more up for rock n 'roll than an artist

The CLUAS Verdict? 5 out of 10

Full review:
Sziget’s sound system, cranky earlier in the festival, wasn't helped by a strong breeze that seemed to carry patches of opening song Emperor's New Clothes to the nether regions of the venue. Sound quality aside, it was obvious from the start however that a large section of the crowd was undecided between O'Connor or burgers.

Sinead O’Connor’s inclusion on the Sziget 2007 bill seemed ill judged, particularly since she was put on the main stage after Razorlight and before Faithless, neither of whom share fanbases with her. It didn’t help that she kept us waiting about half an hour over the announced start time.

O'Connor engaged the waverers by playing 'This Is to Mother You' early, getting lots of help from a talented touring band and in particular her two female backing singers.

Hair shaved back down like the old days but looking a bit dowdier now, she wore the jeans and t-shirt of her younger days but kept on stage banter to a polite minimum.

'Thief of Your Heart' steadied the ship just as this risked becoming the freak show of the evening. The girl who tore up the picture of the pope, explained older audience members. “She used to be a priest.” O’Connor's past is the kind of confrontation with authority that goes down well in Hungary, still reasserting itself after years under the Soviet yoke.

The whole stage place was won over briefly for 'Nothing Compares to You'. There were lots of instrumental tangents and vocal shadings which  were at times lost to the sound system and the carnival size of the venue.

The pain of the performance was obvious though in O’Connor’s facial expressions during 'Thank You For Healing Me', jerking her head back from the mike with a distracting regularity that had audience members worrying loudly.

Kept till last, 'This Is the Last Day of Our Acquaintance' reminded everyone what Sinead O’Connor is, a great artist. But the main stage of a muddy, sprawling, beer-and-burgers rock festival wasn’t the right place to showcase such a talent.

Mark Godfrey


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22
It’s strange for us non-natives to find that the Communist party in France is not only active but thriving, with several French towns run by Communist mayors – including Gennevilliers, the Paris satellite town next to ours where the BBC usually go when they want to depict France’s immigrant community and urban tension. We have an image of Communism inextricably linked to totalitarian repression and walls tumbling in 1989 – or else with improbably-romanticised iconography; Dubliners who eat at Mao and drink at Pravda would be outraged at the thought of a restaurant called Adolf or a club called Mein Kampf.
 
But in France the Nazi occupation is still (just about) within living memory; many streets around where your blogger lives are called after fallen Resistance fighters with names like Gabriel Péri, Guy Môquet and Pierre Brossolette, and the Communists stood up and fought against the occupying forces, at least in the public perception.
 
And the original communes were in Revolution-era Paris (manned and womanned by the communards who inspired both Karl Marx and Jimmy Sommerville) and the word still denotes an area of urban government in France. That’s part of the heritage of today’s French Communists, and the far-left bloc still reaps 5-10% of the national vote – more than the French Greens but less than the far-right.
 
Anyway, the French Communist party and extreme-left community have a daily newspaper called L’Humanité, and each September the paper organises a large outdoor music and arts festival in the Paris area. Fête de l’Humanité is traditionally the last big bash of the Paris summer season.
 
This year’s Fête de l’Huma, as it’s commonly called, takes place over the weekend of 14-16 September at La Corneuve (just north of Paris, between the Stade de France and Charles de Gaulle Airport), and features a mix of French and international stars. Top of the visiting delegation must be Iggy and the Stooges on the Saturday, with Razorlight going on just before them that evening, while Friday features Aussie rockers the John Butler Trio and South African folk singer Johnny Clegg. Of those, only Clegg strikes us as being any way political in even the loosest sense of the word (although that noted trans-Atlantic commentator Johnny Borrell says there’s trouble and panic in America; hope our US friends are okay).
 
Of the home-grown heroes, the stand-out names on the Friday are Clarika and Olivia Ruiz, two female singers who infuse the skiffly sounds of chanson française with a more robust pop swagger. Ruiz, a former TV talent show finalist with a childlike squeaky singing style, is now a big star in France thanks to the success of her most recent album, ‘La Femme Chocolat’. Local indie heroes Luke are on Saturday’s main-stage bill, while Sunday’s headliner is ageing protest-rocker Renaud.
 
There will be other cultural happenings at the festival – including a rugby event to coincide with the World Cup, taking over France in September.
 
As the festival is organised by socialists and intended to be within the means of the modestly-paid proletariat (unlike the Rugby World Cup, sadly for us), weekend tickets cost only €15 and are available online from FNAC. On-site camping costs €7. Caution - due to the World Cup, cheap flights may be hard to come by.
 
More info (in English or French) is available on the festival’s website. Here’s headliner Olivia Ruiz in the video for her charming single ‘La Femme Chocolat’:
 

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22
World Fleadh Festival 2007 (Portlaoise)
The Proclaimers, Katie Melua & others live The CLUAS Verdict? 8 out of 10 Full review: A 1:00pm start on Sunday was always going to be tough on he opening act, and Nizlopi drew the shor...

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21

What do The Rolling Stones today and a lion taming act in a circus have in common ? Quite alot actually. Let me explain. When you see the lion taming you have to understand that, great act though it is, the lions and their tamer are pure artifice. The lion is portrayed as the king of the jungle, a fearsome man eating beast. The tamer is portrayed as brave hero, gallantly holding back the lion with nothing more than a whip and a chair, making this terrifying creature submit to his or her will and encouraging the deadly big cat to perform a series of dainty tricks. The problem is; both the lions and their tamers are in on the act. The lion is usually a hand reared pet who in the golden age of the circus often slept in the tamer's caravan. The tamer on the other hand knows that if the lion was really wild and ferocious a whip and a chair would be as much use as a feather duster. So what you have is a show, primarily for children, where real danger and pure emotion have been replaced with amused guffaws and theatrical flourish.

Nowadays, The Rolling Stones are alot like those circus lions, as far removed from the dark mystique of Altamont as our tame lions are from their forebears in the Coliseum; where they happily munched on Christians for the amusement of the Emperor Nero and his blood thirsty Roman subjects. For example, when Keith Richards stumbled on stage solo in the middle of the concert at Slane to mumble winningly, the audience happily remarked to each other, "Ooh, there's Johnny Depp's dad from Pirates of the Carribean 3'. See what I mean?

The band that played Slane last weekend wasn't THE ROLLING STONES, of myth and legend, it was a bunch of canny old men with one eye on the clock and the other on the money. A savvy bunch of pensioners who long ago realised that nostalgia and a well tended brand name can keep you going long after passion and sincerity have disappeared along with your natural hair colour. I admire them in much the same way as I admire those toothless lions and their beloved tamers, I even applaud them and when they have gone the way of the traditional circus I'm sure that the world will be a less colourful place but, do I feel anything inside when I watch them play ? Nope.



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21

JujutsuYesterday the Consumer Association of Ireland published the letter they sent to MCD after receiving complaints from hundreds of ticket holders for the Barbara Streisand gig in Celbridge. The letter seeks a refund in addition to compensation for the complainants that contacted them.

Will MCD cough up? Many doubt it and that what awaits us, once they send in their reply to the CAI, is another round of phone-ins to Joe Duffy featuring some of the punters in question, the CEO of the CAI and a PR person from MCD going on the defensive with a list of banal talking points. And then it'll all quieten down, until the next concert controversy.

Surely there is an alternative here? An opportunity for MCD to turn this around? Instead of taking a position of 'no compromise' in the face of consumer uproar and having to go on the defensive, why not take control of the conversation and turn it around to their benefit? There's many ways this could be done but here's one 5 step plan for MCD to do exactly this:

  1. Reply to the CAI acknowledging some shortcomings in the organisation of this particular gig that effected a small proportion of patrons and agree, as an act of goodwill, to take it on the chin and reimburse these ticket holders (limiting it to those that had contacted the CAI up to the date the CAI sent their letter). Cost? My back-of-envelope calculation says we're talking about 100k Euros.
  2. Ensure the report of the 'specialist committee' that MCD set up to investigate what happened at the gig (it is due to be published the week of Sept 10th) has a set of solid generic recommendations for organising & managing events of this nature.
  3. When the report is published issue a press release welcoming the report and accepting its recommendations in full, stating that they will be fully reflected in a new 'Customer Charter' for all MCD events, to be published by the end of 2007.
  4. Commit to placing the 'Customer Charter' at a visible place at all future MCD-managed events and provide a freephone customer contact service on the charter for patrons who wish to complain about any aspect of the event's organisation.
  5. Then invite all the other promoters in Ireland to either:

         a. Draft a similar Customer Charter for their customers, or,
         b. Propose the text of the MCD charter as a model for all promoters.

With this sort of approach they can, Jujutsu-like, turn what has been a PR disaster into a PR coup, one that puts its competitors on the back-foot and raises the game for the entire industry.

Update: An hour or so after this entry was first published Jim Carroll posted on his blog that Aiken Promotions have recently published a 'customer care policy' on their website. I dug around a bit in the search engines and was able to conclude (from various cached copies of the Aiken website's home page) that the 'customer care policy' was published by Aiken sometime between July 17 and Aug 3rd (i.e. just after the Streisand concert debacle). So the opportunity for MCD to lead the way on this front has been taken from them by their main competitor. The Aiken policy however I note is not complete (e.g. no customer care line in place) so there is still room for MCD to up the ante and offer a 'charter' that is far-reaching and sets a high bar for the rest of the industry.


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21

Barbara StreisandThe Consumer Association of Ireland (CAI) today published a letter it sent to MCD, motivated by 95 complaints representing 343 ticket holders to the Barbara Streisand concert in Celbridge.

No matter what you think of Madame Streisand's music (or, for that matter, of people prepared to cough up a fortune to sit in a field and listen to it) the letter presents a long list of complaints from a large number of punters.

The letter seeks not only a refund but also compensatation for the complainants for "their lack of enjoyment of the concert" (although I do note that the lack of enjoyment they talk about is not of the musical kind).

Citing the The Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act, 1980, the letter also claims a breach of the 'law of contract' and that the punters in question are - therefore - entitled to a "remedy". Hmmmm. Roll on MCD's reply, which - it would seem - we can expect the CAI to publish on their website.


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20

Kevin Spacey as Christopher Walken as Harrison Ford as Han Solo.

The Theme from Star Wars as performed by Lego Figurines.

 Star Wars on a banjo

 Disco Dancing Storm Trooper in Tokyo


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20

This weekend’s Festival of World Cultures in Dún Laoghaire (24-26 August) doesn’t feature any music we’d normally consider as being French – no bal de musette or Piaf-style torch songs or even Parisian DJs stepping two-by-two off the nearby ferry.

However, Algerian-born traditional singer Rachid Taha has spent much of his life in the former colonial centre, is enormously popular there – and he was present at one of France’s seminal musical events (of which more later). In many ways Taha represents an important aspect of French culture today.

Traditional Maghreb music from north Africa, the wailing vocals and swirling rhythms that soundtrack holiday programme reports from Tangiers and Tunis, is known as rai – but Taha, always scornful of genres, wittily deflects such talk by referring to himself as Rai Cooder or Rai Orbison.

Like Tinariwen and Toumast, the Tuareg bands of the Mali Sahara, Taha has electrified the old style with modern punk and electro sounds – and very contemporary lyrical concerns. His songs, sung in Arabic, deal with questions of identity; his excellent 2004 album was called ‘Tékitoi’ (phonetically, Tay Kee Twa), a txt-msg style compression of “T’es qui, toi?” meaning “Who are you?”

Four decades after Algerian independence from France, national identity remains a live issue here. Racial discrimination – casual or official – is still rife: non-whites in Paris live in constant expectation of identity checks and police harassment that whites like your blogger never experience (in almost three years I’ve never been ID-checked). Taha’s first band was called Carte De Séjour, named after the French residency permit. His 1986 punked-up cover version of old crooner Charles Trenet’s ‘Douce France’ was banned from French radio just because of its aggressive attitude and implicit attack on bourgeois France.

(The recent film Indigènes, released in Ireland as ‘Days Of Glory’, exposed the injustices faced by North-African-born French soldiers in World War II; as a direct result of the film’s agitation the unequal pension paid to those surviving Maghreb veterans was brought up to the same level as for French-born soldiers. France’s huge ethnic-origin population faces such petty racism every day, and one hopes that Rachida Dati, France’s justice minister, can make real progress – she’s the daughter of Moroccan-Algerian parents.)

Rachid TahaWhatever about political radicalism, Taha is associated with one of the revolutionary moments of French music – the 1981 five-night residency by The Clash at the Theatre Mogador in Paris. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this series of concerts determined the course of French rock for the following fifteen years. Taha was in the audience, as was young Manu Chao and his future band Mano Negra, members of Les Negresses Vertes (another fine ‘80s band) and other future French rock stars – all were inspired to form bands, mix punk with traditional music… and wear leather trousers. This was the template of nearly all French bands until Daft Punk’s dancefloor revolution in the mid-‘90s.

Some accounts credit Taha with a more central role. After one show he met Joe Strummer and Mick Jones backstage and gave them a copy of his recordings. The following year, The Clash released ‘Rock The Casbah’ – directly influenced, claim the French music community proudly, by Taha that night (There’s no evidence, though, that Taha inspired Strummer’s epic Paris disappearing act the following year).

This blast of French pride would seem to be borne out by subsequent events. Taha recorded his own Arabic version of the Clash hit, retitled ‘Rock El Kasbah’, for the ‘Tékitoi’ album – and Jones and Paul Simenon have joined him onstage to perform the song, most recently at Taha’s April 2007 London concert.

 

Check out Taha’s music at his Myspace page and make sure you catch him FOR FREE at Newtownsmith Green in Dún Laoghaire next Sunday (26 August) – his live show is thrilling, the trousers are still leather and even his cover of ‘Rock The Casbah’ stands up favourably to the original. Here he is performing it with Jones on French TV show ‘Taratata’:


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20

Its fair to say that any band which takes their name from a memorable quote spoken in the movie 'Amadeus'  by the Emperor Joseph II about the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart probably doesn't intend to ply their trade with three chord tricks but Tu Meni Notes went far beyond any concept of what a reasonable level of musical proficency is within a band enviroment in their pursuit of a new golden age of instrumental guitar rock.

Formed in Galway by a group of classically trained musicians who were sick and tired of being in a series of bands with slackers who were more interested in the jazz woodbines than the jazz solos, Tu Meni Notes set out to bring back the kind of virtuoso rock that led to, among other things, Deep Purple Live At The Royal Albert Hall, Joe Satriani and Pat Metheny. 

The game plan they came up with is worthy of a standing ovation alone. Briefly, once they had formed they went off and rehearsed for two solid years without ever playing a single gig. Two years of 8 hour sessions with a 10 minute tea break grudgingly thrown in. Thats not counting the endless hours of solo rehearsal time the individual members put in to ensure they didn't get shown up at official band rehearsals; a sort of arms race of virtuosity if you will. Not content with that, they drew up a set list of almost impossible to play numbers, the kind of tunes that make your hands cramp or fingers bleed halfway through, and to top it off, when they finally felt they were ready to perform in public they booked themselves into Galway's scruffy mecca of hard rock, Sally Longs, for 8 gigs on consecutive weeks knowing full well that they would be playing to a crowd that knew their guitar rock inside out and would be very vocal in their dismay if the band didn't cut the mustard.

And you know what? Tu Meni Notes rocked the roof off the house. Then, after eight triumphant concerts, they split, the band having imploded under the insane, self generated pressure to deliver razor sharp, note perfect performances night after night. Here is the band at the height of their short but white hot career, tackling the Rach 9 of fusion, Al Di Meola's "Race With The Devil On Spanish Highway".
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Nuggets from our archive

2005Michael Jackson: demon or demonised? Or both?, written by Aidan Curran. Four years on this is still a great read, especially in the light of his recent death. Indeed the day after Michael Jackson died the CLUAS website saw an immediate surge of traffic as thousands visited CLUAS.com to read this very article.