The CLUAS Archive: 1998 - 2011

Blogs

From 2007 to 2010 CLUAS hosted blogs written by 8 of its writers. Over 900 blog entries were published in that time, all of which you can browse here. Here are links to the 8 individual blogs:

29
 
Once named one of the 25 most influential Americans by Time magazine, Trent Reznor is back in favour and form. Following an album release earlier this year by his band Nine Inch Nails (NIN) a summer on the European festivals circuit is being bookended with a headline slot at the Beijing Pop Festival on September 8 and 9.

 Reznor, whose brand of industrial pop-rock minted millions in big-label revenue since 1989's bleak debut Pretty Hate Machine, is a personal hero for Jason Magnus, president of Rock For China Ltd, which organises the Beijing Pop Festival. A real estate developer who realized a dream by running the first edition of the pop festival in 2005, Magnus admires the band’s anti-establishment views and the anti-Bush sentiments of the band’s latest album, Year Zero.

“NIN always stayed relevant,” saysMagnus, who gushes with admiration for the public relations campaign behind the band’s new recording. “They are still filling stadiums and still challenging their listeners. Their live show and production values have always been fresh and different.”
 
It was always clear that the band had fans in China: NIN albums like Downward Spiral, a staple of most mid – 1990s college dorms is reliably present in small-town CD shops from Shanghai to Urumqi. Few logos are as ubiquitoius as the blocky NIN on the cheap black t-shirts of rock fans on a weekend night in any of Beijing’s rock bars.
 
The band always wanted to play China, says Magnus. “They’ve been very keen, it was always a logistics question.” The US band is tacking China onto an Asia leg that also takes in Korea, Hong Kong before the band flies to Australia. A large crew (30, compared to an entourage of 17 which comprised the entire entourage of last year’s headline act, Placebo) and freight load will break records in China, says Magnus. “They’re bringing 15 tonnes of equipment, Placebo brought four.”
 
Aside from landing NIN Rock For China has been clever with the line up: whatever happens there will be a big turn out for what’s being claimed as the first outdoor show in almost 20 years by socially inspired local bard Cui Jian. The “godfather of Chinese rock” as he’s labeled would surely show up himself to see the other big American name at the festival, Public Enemy, tapes of whom he’s credited with inspiring segues into social-conscience rapping later on in his career. 
 
Chinese rock fans have a historical bent, says Magnus. Other Americans on the main stage include anti-establishment icons the New York Dolls and Marky Ramone from defunct punk legends the Ramones. “I really wanted legends from different genres. I’m not bringing acts out for expatriates but for the Chinese fans and contemporary artists don’t have followings here,” says Magnus, who points to the rousing reception given to hard rock journeyman Sebastian Bach at last year’s festival as proof that local fans like old gold rather than current hot tickets like the Killers and the Strokes. “…I’ve noticed a lot of kids wearing New York Dolls and Romones t-shirts, so we bought them.”
 
Paying for big names like NIN is difficult in China, where rock remains a niche taste in a music market already sapped by CD piracy. NIN are charging “more than 100 percent” more than last year’s headline act, Placebo, charged. The pop festival pays its acts largely from sponsorship.
 
Unlikely corporate sponsors include credit card company Mastercard and US-based office technology provider R & R Donnelly. Both companies sponsored the festival last year too. New sponsors this year as Hennessy VSOP and perfume brand Dior. “We prefer to stick with the tried and tested brands who were involved last year. We are aware of the limited potential of the market here. Festivals don’t have a long history in China.”
 
Troubled TV maker TCL sponsored the 2005 festival but this year the only Chinese sponsor is the local edition of Sports Illustrated magazine. “Companies have different internal reasons for sponsoring,” says Magnus. He won’t comment on whether sponsorship fees have risen on last year’s figures.
 
Ticket prices have risen from RMB150 per day in 2006 to RMB200 this year but remain “ridiculously good value” for the 15,000 people a day - “near enough capacity” - expected by Magnus. China remains price sensitive. “In general people in China buy one day tickets.” Ticket sales, handled by state owned Piaowu Tong ticket company split 50/50 between one day and weekend.
 
Copious paperwork and permits needed to get the groups in necessitated the abbreviation of the group’s name to PE. Bureaucracy is a way of life for festival organizers in China, who regularly dispenses batches of free tickets to smooth over permit processes. Over 2,000 people brought tents last year. “I really liked that, it adds to the vibe.” Campers are not allowed to stay overnight in the park however, and must be out with the rest of the crowd within an hour of the last song of the night.
 
Magnus has been wrangling with security about shortening the barrier between crowd and performers. Uniformed security guards, required by local law, last year stood to attention facing the crowd. “We want them to change their uniforms,” says Magnus. “It would be really important to the vibe of the festival.”
 
From London, the main stage’s sole Brit attraction, Brett Anderson will be on a second visit to China. A February 2003 showing with his then group, Suede, was poorly attended. “It was holiday time so a lot of people missed it,” says Magnus, who predicts a big turn-out this time round for the former Suede front man, currently in the midst of a coolly received solo career. “We’ve been getting phone calls all year from fans asking if we could bring Suede. As pioneers of Brit pop they’ve got a big following...”

Lesser known foreign bands include Britain’s the Crimea, who play with locals Joyside and Muma on the Hit Fm stage, sponsored by a local radio station.

 


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27

Those of you who've been with CLUAS for a while may remember that I was an Adams evangeliser. I reviewed his first two solo records for these hallowed pages - Heartbreaker and Gold. These records, alongside the final Whiskeytown album Pneumonia, represented Adams at his most vibrant and vital. Acclaim was immediate and fulsome. Over time, Gold has tarnished but the other two represent an early 21st Centuty zenith in singer songwriting. The stage seemed set for Adams to achieve superstardom. 

Except things have not gone quite according to plan. Adams has dated famous actresses, developed a proper drug habit, fallen off stage. All the while, he’s been churning out album after album. Five official album releases later (13 unofficial releases streamed from his website) and Adams’ latest, the rather excellent Easy Tiger, has been met with a collective shoulder shrug from most music critics. Another Adams record stuffed with plaintive melodies, country-rock leanings, sad songs about sad girls…

Yet Adams has remained a big live draw. Playing two Enmore Theatre shows in a row has demonstrated his marketability here in Sydney. Having seen him play three times before, each one being a dramatic and memorable night, I was excited. The band trotted onstage in almost darkness and played in the blue hue of a few Chinese lanterns over the centre of the stage. Calls of "Turn the lights up!" started almost immediately. The crowd murmured as Adams kicked into Goodnight Rose, the lovely opener from Easy Tiger. I could not pick where Adams was standing onstage. The gloom was distracting but the band’s sound was clear, chunky and strong. Adams was in fine voice. Over the years, his voice has definitely improved. Dear John was an obvious early highlight as was Wild Flower from Gold. Intricate melodies delicately played and sung.

It’s hard to pinpoint where it all went horribly wrong. I could point at the band which seemed to play at the same intensity all evening. That’s not to say that weren’t competent. Just that without light or a focal point on stage, the music was found lacking. And there were too many samey guitar licks. It could have been that Adams let Neal Casal, his lead guitarist, interact with the audience. Adams’ only outburst was to admonish us for "not knowing how to act" as the band took an early intermission. That legendary stroppiness was there in spades. Maybe it was because he played lots of new or obscure songs and the lack of familiarity grated on those of us who know that he has many classics in his back catalogue.

Maybe the effort that Adams clearly demands of his audience is not repaid with interest by him and his band. It was obvious that the calls from the crowd resulted in a set change – did we deserve to be punished? Does this sound familiar?

Even faced with what was clearly a below par gig, the Adams apologists were immediately out en masse. Under the byline ‘Seems Like the Greater They Are, the More You Have to Like It or Lump It’, the Sydney Morning Herald’s chief music critic Bernard Zuel reckoned the show had been Dylanesque in its wilful awkwardness but that it had moments of brilliance. Whilst the article is mostly piffle, does he have the nugget of a good point there?

 

The debate on this Adams Blog sheds further light on what was an infuriating night. Is an artist being disrespectful to the paying public by being difficult and awkward? Can these recent awful Adams and Rice gigs be attributed to Dylan’s behaviour on his Never Ending tour?

 


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27
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24

Blogging will be light from me until early September. In meantime here's a few links that caught my eye recently:

  • It turns out that YouTube's Terms & Conditions state that it can license any content uploaded to its servers as it sees fit. CNET have the details. Any independent bands uploading, for example, DIY videos of their music to Youtube should sit up and take note. A similar broo-ha hit the interweb last year for MySpace but a campaign - spearheaded by Billy Bragg - got them to dilute down their terms. Will YouTube, like MySpace before them, soon do the decent thing?
  • Major US ISP throttle Bit Torrent: if such policies become more widespread among ISPs could it reduce the usefullness and efficiencies of the Bit Torrent protocol? Maybe the time if ripe for the long awaited version of BitTorrent that that is capable of using a secure protocol...
  • Is interest in hip hop collapsing? So asks Time magazine. Sales are down, big time. And not just because of this interweb thing putting downward pressure on CD sales...

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23

When writing about Limerick it’s all too easy to make cheap jokes at the expense of some of the counties, shall we say, less attractive elements. Now, Key Notes is not the kind of blog that likes to stick the knife in so it won’t. Instead it’ll have a stab at discussing Limerick’s role in the Irish music scene (okay, it's stops now, promise).

Limerick, home to Ireland’s fourth largest city, is at the very centre of the countries south western tourist region with the Shannon Estuary and Shannon airport playing important roles in attracting visitors to the region (though not from Heathrow). Musically, Limerick has provided the rest of the country an eclectic mix of talented and influential musicians and composers; Dolores O’Riordan, Bill Whelan, Richard D. James and Johnny Fean to name but a few.

While Dolores is still plugging away, her ex-Cranberries band mate Noel Hogan is working with Vesta Varro on a follow up to their debut album Exit Here. Despite being named on NME’s Hotlist for 2007, Vesta Varro are actually quite good. Wearing the influence of Matt Bellamy & Co.’s penchant for spine shatteringly explosive rock proudly on their collective sleeves, Vesta Varro are a band with masses of potential and in lead singer Damien Drea have a vocalist with the ability to make you forget what you were supposed to be doing, as happened me the first time I heard Coming Back.

 

On a totally different planet, never mind note, are Giveamanakick. The only way to truly experience what this band has to offer is in a live setting. I can still remember my first Giveamanakick gig, how could you forget seeing someone shouting into a gas mask! However, both Is it Ok to be loud, Jesus? and We are the way forward disappointed. This blog hopes that, having spent the past three years honing their skills with support slots to the likes of Deftones, Dinosaur Jr. and The Presidents of the United States of America, Giveamanakick’s third studio offering can finally live up to the verve and vivacity of their live shows. 

One of the great things about writing this blog is discovering something new and not being ashamed to admit to not hearing it before. This is the case with Headgear, a Limerick band (though not by birth) discovered by chance while this blog was conducting "research" in an establishment that may or may not have been a public house. However Key Notes heard about Headgear it's glad it did. Flight Cases, the sophomore release from the band contains my new favourite song, Harry Truman. An amalgamation of sounds that the band itself describes as ‘mongrel music’ there’s something about this band that suggests they have a lot to offer the Irish music scene and beyond. Below is the video for Singin' in the drain

As this blog continues its quest to find the best bands from outside Dublin it would appreciate your help. Who has this blog missed in Limerick? Also, this blog’s next stop will be Meath; any suggestions of bands to be featured can be mailed to keynotes@cluas.com

 


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23

A Chinese pop star’s ambition to be the world’s first musician to sell one billion downloads is the reason behind an unlikely collaboration between a pop star’s dreams and a nascent Irish dotcom company’s ambition. Dubbed China’s Whitney Houston, Wei Wei is aiming to set a world record by selling more than one billion downloads to mobiles from her http://weiwei.mobi site, designed by a Dublin-based Internet firm, by the end of 2008.
 
Beautiful and well connected (she’s reportedly on first name terms of several of China’s politburo), label-less Wei Wei released her latest album, Wei Wei 20 X 20 Celebration Collection (it marks her 20 years in showbiz), exclusively on her website, designed specially to be mobile-phone friendly.
 
The 34 year old singer decision to shun traditional CDs and download stores like iTunes (the album was later made available at iTunes) for her latest release was helped by her being chosen to sing at the opening ceremonies of next summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing. “This will be one of the world's biggest-ever media events.”
 
“Accessing the internet from mobile phones is the future of the internet and allows me to reach my older fans as well as the younger generation who use mobile phones much more than PCs for accessing the Internet,” said Wei Wei in an email.
 
Designed by Dublin-based dotcom firm dotMobi, the .mobi domain makes websites more suited to mobile phone using music fans, says Vance Hedderel, director of communications at mTLD Top Level Domain Limited, dotMobi’s parent company. “Sites built using the .mobi domain can be accessed from most internet-enabled mobile phone, no matter which operator the user is subscribed to.”
 
“That means an artist like Wei Wei can ensure her material is available to the widest possible global audience without restrictions. End users don't have to be tied to an operator's portal to get the music they want -- assuming that the music they want is available on an operator's portal -- and they can be sure that the money is going directly to the artist, who can use those profits to make more material available.”
 
Press material surrounding the Wei Wei release described Wei Wei as “China's biggest music star” will surely be refuted by more recent arrivistes like Liu Yifei, winner of last year’s hugely popular Supergirl reality TV pop show. She's no longer top of China's pop scene yet Wei Wei’s prices are premium: songs like the Red Flower and Welcome to Beijing cost US$4 per download. Mobile phone ring tones adapted from tunes like See You 2008 cost US$3. Songs on itunes typically cost US$0.99 to download.
 
“Yes, they’re expensive,” conceded Wei Wei manager Bjorn Bertoft. “But Wei Wei is a hugely popular star.” Shooting to public prominence after winning the Young Singers contest on national TV in 1986, Wei Wei has been China’s favourite face at large sporting events, singing at the opening of 1991 Asia Games in Beijing and performing a duet with famously randy Spanish pop star Julio Iglesias in at the East Asia Games in Shanghai two years later. In her 20-year career, Hohot-born Wei Wei has sold more than 200 million tapes and CDs and has recorded hundreds of songs, both in English and Mandarin.
 
Famous for her interpretations of Chinese songs like Telling to the Spring and Sparkling Sky (she also covered Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Changes Everything), Wei Wei has ambitions beyond China, a market with its own copyright and piracy pitfalls for musicians. The woman who claims Swedish group ABBA was her inspiration to learn English, moved to Stockholm in 1999  to begin an assault on the English language market. The move was described by the artist at the time as a way “to capitalise on the growing global influence of Chinese popular culture.”
 
Wei Wei flies to Beijing at least once a month for concert and TV appearances - she also sang at the start of the Beijing marathon and the closing of the Nanjing Crawfish festival last year - but records in Sweden. Her 20X20 album was polished by fabled production team Johan Åberg and Robban Habolin, writers/producers for Cher and Christina Aguilera. The Inner Mongolia native spent an hour signing autographs at the dotMobi booth during the international telecommunications conference, 3GSM World Congress, in Barcelona in February. Based in Stockholm since 1999 with four sons from her estranged marriage to a Swedish-American husband,
 
Selling direct-to-consumer downloads rather than CDs helps curb music piracy, says Wei Wei. “This is a major problem in my home country… This is an important shift in music history. In China, the market for CDs was over a long time ago. I am going to concentrate solely on digital technology,” says Wei Wei.
 
Her other claim is even more intriguing. “It's also an environmentally friendly way of distributing my music.” So no more plastic CDs then? Certainly, the global music industry has been struggling to adjust itself to a post-CD world. Large music companies at first tried to suppress online music sharing sites like Napster before eventually selling content on licensed on line traders like iTunes and Realplayer.
 
dotMobi is the informal name for mTLD Top Level Domain, Ltd, a joint venture company based in Dublin, Ireland with offices in Washington, DC and Beijing. Sites and Internet services operating around .mobi are optimized for use by mobile devices. The company is hoping that it can create critical mass by tapping into China’s 400-million strong mobile user base, the largest in the world. The standard has the backing of leading mobile operators and network equipment makers as well as Internet content providers, including Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia and Samsung.
 
Working with Wei Wei opens doors in China, one of dotMobi's five largest markets. In the early part of 2008 the company’s Beijing office plans to unveil content directory to make it easy to find mobile content that works on mobile phones, and a device database to make developing mobile applications easier and less expensive.
 
Other musicians are following Wei Wei’s lead. Independent artists Tila Tequila and Jennie Walker have recently also built .mobi sites. “Having weiwei.mobi has been a very good demonstration of what is possible,” says Hedderel.
 
Wei Wei and FC Barcelona soccer heroes Messi, Deco, Márquez and Puyol give a gentlemen's salute to female soccer players with "Go-Girl-Go (Fly With Me)", a theme song and a music video for the Women’s World Cup which China’s hosts in September. “Wei Wei is a national icon in China, familiar to more than a billion people,” claimed an early dotMobi press release. Hardly. But familiar to enough of people to carry the company into the Chinese market.

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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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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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Nuggets from our archive

2000 - 'Rock Criticism: Getting it Right', written by Mark Godfrey. A thought provoking reflection on the art of rock criticism.