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Gold Soundz 9: ‘To Be Of Use’ by Smog
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been perusing old Hot Press magazines. I wrote regularly in Hot Press from 1993 to 1997 and I wrote a good few things from about 2002 to 2005, and then I stopped, except when I pleaded in 2019 that they might let me interview Julia Jacklin who was…
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With Whom to Dance: The Magnetic Fields’ Get Lost, Hot Press, March 1996.
Get Lost by The Magnetic Fields was the only album I gave double six to in Hot Press that the editors allowed to stay with full marks. Probably because I’d been there a few years at that point and maybe because I obviously liked the record a lot. I still do. I mean, when I…
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A Sign of Life: Smog Interview, Whelan’s, 1996.
The only time I ever met Bill Callahan I interviewed him for Hot Press in 1996 just before he supported Palace Music in Whelan’s. I can’t find the published interview, just the couple of pages I typed and submitted, but I think HP published it just as I’d written it. This was not my first…
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Homeward Bound: A House’s Final Show, The Olympia, HP.
AHOUSEISDEAD are due to play in Whelan’s on 21st and 22nd September. It’s now four years since Dave Couse and Fergal Bunbury started the life of AHOUSEISDEAD, playing I Am The Greatest in the NCH and Vicar St in 2019, and the upcoming shows are focusing on I Want Too Much, which some consider their…
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Ancient Afghan Whigs Hot Press Reviews: Gentlemen, November 1993 and Rock Garden, Feb 1994.
I’ve been perusing old Hot Presses that have been unread in an attic for decades and that had and have pieces in them by me and friends and esteemed colleagues. Plan is save some of them in a scrapbook as well as here. A fair few pieces are in the magazines and not on the…
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Gold Soundz 8: ‘Love’ by John Lennon
When I started writing Gold Soundz essays, the method for choosing the song to write about was to randomly pick one from a playlist of songs that give me goosebumps. Although John Lennon’s ‘Love’ is on that list, it was not chosen by Tidal shuffle. ‘Love’ selected itself by being in my ears, head and…
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Gold Soundz 7: ‘Personality’ by Whipping Boy
One of my favourite things that songs do is that they mythologise normal places. Not everywhere is Athens and even there, one is in Ancient Greece while one is in 1980s Georgia. Any place in which a song is set may be special solely because it is in the song. There’s nothing intrinsically mythical about…
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An Unexpected Duet
Wendy Smith and Niall Crumlish talk through how a song, story, and sunlight collaboration begins.
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Does Anybody Know Any Jokes? Terry Hall, RIP.
By fErGaL Bunbury. There’s been a lot to process. I am so sick of obituaries and it’s only going to get worse. This is where we are in the life of rock music: middle to old age. I suppose I first fell in love with Terry Hall in January 1980, when the Too Much Too…
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Gold Soundz 6: ‘Sparrow’ by Mary Hopkin
Mary Hopkin’s ‘Sparrow’ is an unusual inhabitant of my Goosebumps playlist because I heard it for the first time in Autumn 2022. It is not one of those songs that has thousands of associated memories to machete through to get to what the song would say if first heard today. That is itself surprising. ‘Sparrow’…
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Gold Soundz 5: ‘Starfish And Coffee’ by Prince
In March 1987, when Sign O’ The Times by Prince came out and The Joshua Tree was just out, I was in first year in secondary school. I was coming to the end of first year in a boys’ school, St Benildus’ College in Kilmacud, where I started in September 1986. That means I was…
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Gold Soundz 4: Palace Brothers’ ‘I Am A Cinematographer’
I came across Palace Brothers early on, in my life and theirs, in October 1993 when I was nineteen and ‘Ohio River Boat Song’ and There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You were Will Oldham’s calling cards. Soon, Oldham’s calling cards would be Palace Music’s ‘New Partner’, from Viva Last Blues, which Glen…
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Gold Soundz 3: ‘Gold Soundz’ by Pavement
Throughout six weeks in October and November, I was commuting with my wife Sharon from our home to Beaumont Hospital for treatment with radiotherapy delivered by some of the most expert, kindest, most apologetic radiotherapists one can imagine. They were apologetic because of the four radiotherapy machines in use in St Luke’s in Beaumont, one…
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Gold Soundz 2: ‘Apology Accepted’ by The Go-Betweens
‘Apology Accepted’, the final song on The Go-Betweens’ fourth album, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, has one of my favourite opening couplets. The late Grant McLennan opens ‘Apology Accepted’ with “I used to say dumb things / I guess I still do”. This couplet is one I recall every time I say something dumb,…
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Gold Soundz 1: ‘I Am Afraid’ by A House
In November 1991, I read a review for A House’s I Am The Greatest that was written by Lorraine Freeney for Hot Press. I had been reading her for a year or so. I had just started college and I didn’t know Lorraine but I loved her writing and highly valued her opinion. I started…
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Sacred Voice: Mimi Parker of Low, RIP.
In September, I was in hospital for the treatment of a condition that made itself evident to me only in late August. I am long out of hospital. I am having the best care and treatment anyone could have. I am recovering. Low’s ‘2-Step’, in particular the part sung by Mimi Parker, who I just…
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I Am Not Afraid: Circuit Des Yeux’s ‘Walking Toward Winter’
The words of Circuit Des Yeux’s song ‘Walking Toward Winter’ that are printed on the sleeve of their 2021 album, -io, are not quite the words that the band’s leader Haley Fohr sings. This is what moves me most about this song, and the bar is high. Other affecting elements of ‘Walking Toward Winter’ are…
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Two Hearts Have Torn Away: Julia Jacklin’s ‘End of a Friendship’
Julia Jacklin plays Vicar Street on November 3rd. This is her first show in Dublin since 2019 and the first on the European tour to accompany her August 2022 album, PRE PLEASURE. I’ve hardly been to any gigs since that pre-COVID year. Even in 2019, I only made it out to nine shows, two of…