Category: Music

IIa. Domestic Minimalism is an archive of 21 essential songs from the I Want Too Much era of A House. The band recorded these in Dublin’s Sun Studios before departing for Inishbofin in late autumn 1989 to record the album in the Doonmore Hotel. The Sun Studios collection lived until recently on a lost cassette in Fergal Bunbury’s garage. Domestic Minimalism lasts under an hour. No song outstays its welcome.

Domestic Minimalism contains versions of eight songs that A House put on I Want Too Much. Though I know these well, as you do a thousand listens later, they still sound new. A core function of Domestic Minimalism is to remind us that how we hear and respond to songs that inhabit us never stops changing. Dialogues evolve over decades. There are memories associated with albums of a lifetime but the music is not nostalgia. AHOUSEISDEAD but their songs are not.

The remaining 13 songs on Domestic Minimalism are not on I Want Too Much. ‘Why Must We Argue’ was on side B of the CD single of ‘I Think I’m Going Mad’ but none of the remaining dozen were released until now. As such, another thing Domestic Minimalism does is to expand what we’ve heard from A House.

I Want Too Much, along with every A House album, gives generously to the listener, but there can only be so much shared on any album. The Sydney singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin, talking about her masterpiece Crushing, once told me how “bizarre” it was to be snapshot-portrayed and defined by her songs: “I write something privately. I record it semi-privately. And then you go and perform that version of yourself repeatedly for like a year and a half. It’s very strange. I love it, but it’s strange.”

This quote came back to me after Fergal Bunbury recently said much the same thing: there’s far more to any band than everything they’ve released. Even a decade-long wide range of recordings conveys just a fraction of their experiences, emotions, and opinions. For an act to release the unreleased lets us know them better.

If we needed a third reason to immerse ourselves in Domestic Minimalism it might be that the title directs us to a different way of hearing A House: ‘Marry Me’, ‘Now That I’m Sick’, and their contemporaries being called minimalist.

This would not have occurred to me. Not least because the review that directed me to A House, Lorraine Freeney’s Hot Press double six for I Am The Greatest, used “baroque” to describe ‘When I First Saw You’. That made sense and if I recall one thing from Inter Cert Music, it’s that baroque means Bach, who was not much of a minimalist.

Terry Riley, Philip Glass, LaMonte Young, and Steve Reich are credited as musical minimalism innovators, while a 2023 book On Minimalism provides a list of artists from multiple genres. Kraftwerk, The Velvets, Donna Summer, John Coltrane, Lubomyr Melnyk, Arthur Russell and Floating Points & Pharaoh Sanders are among them.

Eamonn Quinn, of Louth Contemporary Music Society, who Riley and Glass have collaborated with, helped me understand minimalism by giving me a digestible definition: “Minimalism is characterised by repetition, pulsating rhythms, and overlapping phrases”. 

Another helpful thing that I’ve read about minimalism, and I’ve experienced in listening to Glassworks by Philip Glass, is that minimalism at its best provides hypnotic repetition.

Domestic Minimalism does this all the time.

There are patterns in Domestic Minimalism. Songs open with spartan arrangements. ‘Now That I’m Sick’ was central to I Want Too Much and is equally so here. Its intro is a recurrent, jarring, discordant single note, A flat. Fergal Bunbury has told me “my perfect guitar part would have one note, repeated, forever”, and you can hear that here, while in ‘Why Must We Argue’, the opening notes extend to two.

In parallel, Dave Couse emphasises the lyrical subjects of songs through vocal repetition. He opens “Now that I’m sick” with those words and follows this dire state with many others — now that I’m timid, stupid, hungry, poor, angry — until he ends where he started: sick, sick, sick.

In ‘I Never Had Any Medals’, which opens the album, there’s a metallic melodic riff and choruses in which Dave Couse sings “never” twelve times in a row: “I never never never never never never never never never never never never had any, had any medals”. In ‘I Hope That You Fail’, the chorus seethingly states the song title, then, as Couse crescendos, his voice restates a single word: “I hope that you fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail”.

Even in songs two and a half minutes long, single highly selected words can be repeated such that they become a meditative mantra. And this from Dave Couse, a lyricist who does not lack verbosity.

On Domestic Minimalism, superb songs we haven’t heard, that could have comprised a Protest Songs alongside the Steve McQueen of I Want Too Much, include ‘Small Pieces of Me’ (“With your fair hands / And your big mouth / Rip my heart out”) and ‘You Break Me Up’, a song that would, guitar-wise, be nicely covered by The Wedding Present. 

There’s ‘I Can Hardly Stand’, which opens with another isolated guitar note, a solitary G this time, and flies through a diatribe: “It doesn’t matter who you are / Where you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve got / In fact probably the less you’ve got / The more likely you GET HIT”.  ‘Never Saw Johnny’ is a marked contrast, a bleak poignant portrait: “Coping with this life / Rewards Johnny an early grave / Ooh I never saw Johnny.” 

As the album ends with ‘Marry Me’, we’re back to minimalism that even I can recognise. Dave Couse describes his adoration of the subject of the song (“You’ve cheekbones designed by an architect / And a figure of porcelain / Ready to crumble in my hands”), then he and Fergal Bunbury sing “Marry me” in the final chorus about sixty times. Each time I hear ‘Marry Me’ and tap my foot to try and count the recitations I end up in a trance. I guess I have personal experience now of hypnotic repetition.

So when I started immersing myself into Domestic Minimalism, I found the idea that these songs are minimalist opuses absorbing. I’m always wondering why I fell for a particular set of songs. Maybe this explained my lifelong love for I Want Too Much. On Miminalism quotes Michael Paradinas, μ-Ziq, about hearing Philip Glass for the first time when he was 16: “I thought, what the fuck is this? It’s brilliant, and it hasn’t changed for 12 minutes.” I heard I Want Too Much at 17 and this rings a bell.

Still, I have concluded that I appreciate the songs on Domestic Minimalism not just because of their technique. Not a surprise, I suppose. There is renowned minimalist music I find unaffecting. I go back to Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians every so often to try to connect but no luck so far. It does very little for me though it’s an acclaimed archetype of this genre. Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh once told me that a group of gifted musicians playing a Steve Reich piece sounded “nearly more humans as robots rather than humans as animals”, and I think I know what he meant. I’ve never been drawn to dispassionate technical brilliance. It’s a gap in my music appreciation I can’t do much about. That would be the post-punk in me.

But of course The Ramones had minimalism too. The Buzzcocks’ ‘Boredom’ has a two-note solo and the song is a CPR. Bands like these pretended they didn’t know how to play. They let on they were unaware of the majesty of their sound but in simplifying their arrangements to the fewest chords they could, they cut to the cardiac chase.

I keep thinking of that Kraftwerk title Minimum-Maximum. When I’m listening to musically minimal songs, I want the emotional maximum they also provide. Minimalists like The Velvets, The Ramones, John Coltrane, Kraftwerk, Lubomyr Melnyk and A House are magicians as much as scientists because they find exactly the right notes in the right order and they play them over and again: that’s how they move you.

I want songs that strengthen, sustain and guide me, still as I head for 50. I want songs that make me cry, sigh, beam, and dream. I want shivers up my spine. I love minimalist music only when, like A House’s oeuvre, it is vulnerable, brave and beautiful. With extra points for funny.

I need songs that I can treasure and I need the time spent with them to be as well spent as the time spent doing anything else on earth. That’s a lot to ask, too much maybe, but it’s not when A House is around. Some songs do all of this nourishing necessary work. 21 of them are here.

By Joe Kelly.

Part 1

On a family picnic in Co. Wicklow in the 1970s, the childhood Nick Kelly fell into the river Slaney and nearly drowned. When he was fished out by our dad, he said he’d seen God.
The boyhood Nick Kelly wanted to be a priest when he grew up.
The college-going Nick Kelly studied Philosophy and lost his faith.
His mother was his greatest champion. His faith returned after the deaths of our parents, and God became his friend.
Nick spent the last few months living in Wexford where he got to know the people and places. It was the happiest I’d seen him for some time.
Last week Nick Kelly decided he wanted to leave Wexford, to be with God. 

Part 2

When Nick came into this world he was made mostly of heart and soul. The other bits had to fit into the space that was left.  
Throughout his life his key skills were love and kindness.

Heart and soul
Heart and soul
Nick Kelly – Heart and soul.

The 5 year old Nick Kelly learned about loyalty by choosing to support Liverpool in the 1977 FA Cup Final. His loyalty endured. Nick went to Anfield several times to see his chosen team. 
Nick applied that loyalty to all his friends in the years that followed, and that was reciprocated.

Heart and soul
Heart and soul
Nick Kelly – Heart and soul.

Our English uncle Chrissy would bring our dad Jazz records, and Elvis and Beatles records for the kids, Teresa, Anne, Catherine, myself and Nick. So started the music in our house.

13 year old Nick Kelly goes to his first concert with his older brother and his big sister and he is hooked.

Rock and Roll
Rock and Roll
Nick Kelly – Rock and Roll.

Nick’s English Teacher in school saw something special in his writing and encouraged him, and suggested books for him to read. His Arts degree included English, so Nick devoured ever more books.

Nick Kelly – filled with books
Books and books 
and books and books.

Nick found friends at each stage of his life. He had more female friends than anyone I know, because they saw he was so kind and caring. 

Heart and soul
Heart and soul
Nick Kelly – Heart and soul.

Nick rejoiced in journalistic schooling from the older hacks who’d earned their stripes over many years from the school of hard knocks. The campus was the late night bars of Dublin City. 
Nick loved all the arts, and was a scholar of most of them. Art galleries, plays, movies and film festivals, TV dramas, and the radio and TV music programs of the day. As a result of this, Nick had an expansive view of everything. His concert reviews were never similar, as he’d eke out references from the stage and match them with the likes of an Andy Warhol painting or a Harold Pinter play.
I vividly remember Nick breaking down a favourite song of ours named ‘Scott Miller Said’ – by a favourite Irish band The Revenants. I got the gist of it – a song about loss as it happens. But Nick dug deep into the cryptic references and their meaning, from across the artistic spectrum.

Nick would see in technicolour what others would see in black & white.

Memories of Nick on the telephone in our family home interviewing the world’s biggest or best musicians, in New York or LA, un-phased by the magnitude of the star because he could hold his own, recording the conversation on a Sony Walkman he won in a raffle when he was a kid. 

Rock and Roll
Rock and Roll
Nick Kelly could match them all.

Nick didn’t care about owning a house or a car or the other trappings of life. His treasure trove was in his heart and his head.
He was a true romantic.

Heart and soul
Heart and soul
Nick Kelly – Heart and soul.

Nick was forever losing things: phones, wallets, keys, coats, the lot!
His guardian Angel was a busy man!
The guardian angel and St Anthony – the patron saint of lost things – set up a support group for Nick to help get his stuff back.
Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, Nick’s passport falls out of his back pocket and flies off in the wind. Nick walks on obliviously. On its way to the East River the passport gets stuck in the railings of the bridge. A passer-by grabs the passport and runs down the bridge to return the passport. 
It was a regular habit that when things went wrong, they would generally turn out all right.
About once a year the Guardian Angel would have to enlist St Jude – the patron saint of lost causes – to help Nick get out of trouble. Nick kept them in employment, and they loved him too.

Nick Kelly – filled with love
Loves his family 
Loves his friends 
Filled with sunshine
Filled with joy
Filled with the wonder of a little boy
Loves the animals, dogs and cats
The felines sit upon his lap.

Filled with words and words and words
Guitar chord changes and a long fretboard
Pure artistic eye and ear
He’d tell you about it over a pint of beer.

He was kind and generous, there is no doubt
He would give you his last penny and go without 
Filled with poems and quotes galore 
Checking the half time scores at 4. 

Music festivals and a two-man tent
Nick Kelly was heaven sent.

Part 3

I got the news about Nick after stepping off a late night plane in Heathrow airport. As there were no more planes back to Dublin I got one the next morning.
As I walked into Dublin’s Terminal 1, I heard some people talking about a rainbow. When I looked out the window, there was a full and beautiful and sharply coloured rainbow on the tarmac and you could see the whole length of it clearly. I’d never seen anything like it before.
I took it as a sign from Nick that he had reached his chosen destination.
Around about now, I expect Nick is going to the retirement party for his Guardian Angel, they’ll be reminiscing about all the chaos and fun they had. I’m hoping Nick applies for the role to be my Guardian Angel… with some help from St Anthony of course!

Delivered by Joe Kelly on November 1st 2023 at St Pius X Church, Terenure.

A problem I’ve always had with respect to my musical fandom is that when artists whose early songs I love keep making records, I tend not to listen to their new stuff. This goes even for artists who, after reaching perfect peaks early on, carry on creating fine work. Like Bill Callahan after A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, Will Oldham after I See A Darkness, or Lambchop after ‘Theöne’. “New stuff” meaning anything they’ve done since 2005, 1999, and 1996, in that order.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this.

One is that there is so much music out there, old and new, that you can spend literally half your waking life with tunes playing, soundtracking hours every day, and you still miss out on so much that would be so good to hear. You learn this sometimes when you ask people on Twitter to recommend songs on a certain subject and they reply with songs by acts whose work you are embarrassed to realise you barely know. Like John Prine or Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits or the Doors; but the list is loooong.

Another reason is that when an artist releases something pristine early on I tend to move on because that work is as good as it gets. Not completely—I thought The Magnetic Fields’ Charm of the Highway Strip was perfect but stuck with them through 69 Love Songs, and then I was full—but largely. I don’t quite understand this but I guess I think: they can’t improve on that so let’s not waste time. Let’s give them thanks and try someone else.

In the case of Lambchop, they had released two great albums when they ended the second, 1996’s How I Quit Smoking, with ‘Theöne’, a song that instantly lodged in my heart, which was longing for love. ‘Theöne’ told you what it was like to meet the person with whom you should share joy and meaning. It’s the words, mostly simple enough, and the quaking, hopeful but uncertain, vocal of Kurt Wagner: “But don’t you know / This must be true / I can do nothing / But think of you / So there’s the phone / And here’s the number / You are the one”.

Technically, Lambchop ended the album with ‘Again’, a short sweet replay of the string section’s shimmering contribution to ‘Theöne’, which indicated that even they knew how special ‘Theöne’ was. How could you not?

How I knew, partly, was that like a handful of songs, ‘Theöne’ guided me when I needed to make the biggest decision in my life: who do you wish to spend your life with, and how do you tell her?

Telling someone you like them is mostly not easy, and pre-Sharon me had no idea what to do, but it turns out that when you meet Theöne, the one you’ve dreamt about for years, and you know it’s her, and you can picture a real-life future together, then telling her you love her is kind of easy. Not telling her would be more difficult. Having great songs to guide you can help you make these big decisions, the best decisions you’ve made.

When I say this, I am thinking of ‘Theöne’ and ‘This Is What She’s Like’ by Dexys Midnight Runners, in which Kevin Rowland articulates with wordless vibrant vocals the lightning love that Michael Corleone felt for Apollonia in The Godfather Part I, that he now feels for a non-fiction person. He is trying to describe this to Billy Adams and by the end of the song he is understood: “You-a, do you get my drift? / Oh yeah, I’m starting to get the picture”. I felt too that I understood this when I met Sharon, in 2001, but because Rowland rhapsodises without words I couldn’t do what I could with Lambchop’s song, which was to sing it to her, into her ear, in Neary’s of Chatham St of all places. This was very early on! We’d been together about a week and I just knew I needed no-one else ever. So it seemed like Lambchop had done as much as they, or anyone, could.

It’s fairly recently that I’ve given much thought to whether this reason for moving on from an act makes sense or is slightly silly. Maybe stick with them? Maybe they have more to offer. And maybe if you stay with brilliant artists who recount how they fell in love, they will later tell how they are experiencing lifelong love.

Actually, no offence brilliant artists, but I don’t think that happens too much. Songs tend to be about when love starts and when it ends. The stage curtain being opened and then being closed. Not the play itself.

There is obviously nothing wrong with songs being about how love ends. That can help the lonely listener cope, with experiences like being left by a lover or being the one who must leave, which brings Julia Jacklin’s ‘Comfort’ to mind: “I’ll be okay / I’ll be alright / I’ll get well soon / Sleep through the night / Don’t know how you’re doing / But that’s what I get / I can’t be the one to hold you when I was the one / Who left”.

Though I tend now to be more attentive to how it is to lose someone you love because they have died.

I’ve listened to Sufjan Stevens’ new Javelin a good few times. Sufjan’s albums are compelling, even compulsory, right from the off—then your relationship with them, that dialogue, develops and enriches as you listen again and again. Sufjan is someone I haven’t applied the stop listening rule to. I first heard him in 2003 when Michigan came out and I’ve been enraptured by Illinois and Carrie & Lowell in particular since, but all his solo and collaborative albums have diamonds in them, like the title track of The Ascension and ‘Lacrimae’ from A Beginner’s Mind, with Angelo De Augustine. Reasons for not moving on from Sufjan are the constant fascinating changes in artistic style and the subsequent returns to his quiet and courageous vulnerability, like in Illinois’ ‘Casimir Pulaski Day’, Carrie & Lowell’s ‘Fourth of July’, and Javelin’s ‘Goodbye Evergreen’.

‘Goodbye Evergreen’ is, I’m fairly sure, Sufjan’s eulogy for a man he loved and has spent his life with who has literally just gone. My understanding is that the song is about his partner of fourteen years, Evans Richardson, who died in Spring 2023. Sufjan has not said this specifically but he has dedicated the album to Evans and it is hard to see or hear the song any other way: “Goodbye, Evergreen / You know I love you / But everything heaven sent / Must burn out in the end”. This is the opening verse of the album and he starts singing these words in the album’s opening half-second—speaking of courage. Evergreen seems to work as a nickname for Evans and I hear in it that this love is alive. It’s winter where the singer is but the trees haven’t lost their leaves.

I often wish I knew less about the specific subject matter of a song, as if knowing the story makes it less relatable; but is that right? Sufjan’s tribute to Evans, that is not in the song and that he published just after the album came out, includes qualities and feelings that are universally familiar: “This album is dedicated to the light of my life, my beloved partner and best friend Evans Richardson, who passed away in April. He was one of those rare and beautiful ones you find only once in a lifetime—precious, impeccable, and absolutely exceptional in every way.” Knowing who Carrie was didn’t stop me adoring that record and knowing whose death is being mourned in a song like ‘Goodbye Evergreen’ doesn’t stop that song from helping anyone listening who’s going through grief, or one day will, which is all of us. What a huge gift from an artist.

So listening to Lambchop and Sufjan and other songs that give me goosebumps it occurs to me that songs are largely about when love starts and when it ends.

But I am in love now with someone to whom I conveyed this love in 2001, to whom I gently, daftly, but clearly and autobiographically sang ‘Theöne’, and who replied in kind. (Honestly I can’t write that line without sitting here shaking my head, still stunned.)

I think of Teenage Fanclub’s ‘I Don’t Want Control Of You’ here. Norman Blake sings “I don’t want control of you / It doesn’t matter to me / Don’t want this love to stay the same / But grow with every year” and I remember how that sounded in 1997. And I’m crazily lucky to have gotten to the other side of that song. After all this time it’s still growing. Blake suggests that the growth, evolution, increasing enrichment by love never ends. 1997 me could have been forgiven for not allowing himself to believe that this incredibly fortunate fate lay ahead.

So my question mentioned early in this post, for Twitter yesterday, was as follows: “Thinking about love songs. The greats seem to be about seeking, finding, and declaring love. Lambchop’s ‘Theöne’, Dexys’ ‘This Is What She’s Like’. I can’t think of many songs that tell the story of sustaining love. Still feeling the lightning years later. Any good examples?” And I got some good examples. Thank you so much everyone who came back to me.

I was able to note that there are fine, fine songs by people I don’t know at all or enough, who I should know and now do, a little at least. I was able to note that there aren’t huge numbers of these songs out there sent to me so I think my sense that this subject matter is difficult to sing about is mostly right. And I noted that one or two of these songs hit the cardiac bullseye though only one so far made me cry. (Thanks Michael Mee.)

Not as in this is sad, but as in Ben Folds ended an album, Rockin’ The Suburbs, with ‘The Luckiest’, a song that I related to completely, realising, not for the first time, that lifelong love is all you can ask for.

Now I have heard even since hearing this song that Ben Folds’ relationship that inspired the song is over. They broke up. So when he sings that he wants to grow old with this person, and that dying in old age shortly after the partner dies seems the right way to go, you know one of them no longer feels this, or both. (Folds jokes “I’m sorry, I know that’s a strange way to tell you that I know we belong”, but it’s not really a joke.)

You know that the happiness described in the song isn’t there as it was. But you also know that happiness can’t be eternal. It can be as long as it lasts and I don’t think happiness can be any purer or stronger than it is in the song, or, to be honest and awed, than it has been for me since Sharon and I bumped into each other in 2001.

The fact that Ben Folds’ relationship ended does not weaken the song. The feelings he sings about are real. They will always mean something even as and when they change. And change can, will—must, eventually—happen for all kinds of reasons.

There’s no better way for me to end this piece than using the opening verse and chorus of ‘The Luckiest’, as the song does exactly what I asked, articulating the pure pleasure of seeing the same person every day and being unable to imagine being happier than seeing her face, holding her hand, waking where she is. I would ask that anyone who has made it this far plays the song, if you don’t already know it. If ‘The Luckiest’ breaks your heart, as it may, it’ll also mend it: “I don’t get many things right the first time / In fact, I am told that a lot / Now I know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls / Brought me here / And where was I before the day / That I first saw your lovely face? Now I see it everyday / And I know / That I am / I am / I am / The luckiest.”

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 my heroine (they did). Most pieces are from the 90s and after all this time it seemed worth saving whatever pieces I can find by late teen and twentysomething me and Pritt-sticking them into an A3-sized sketch book. That way I can look at them the odd time, Sharon can too, and the kids can read them so that now and then they can find an album review I wrote when I was their age: Oh my God Dad didn’t have a clue even then did he.

Something I like about having written for Hot Press so long ago, in such early days, is that I get to read in quite a lot of detail what I thought and how I felt about songs when I was quite different than I am now. I get to read my young self amateurishly but ardently navigating what felt like complicated works. At times I changed largely for the better because of attention I had to pay to albums Hot Press gave me, on condition that I dived into them. Not a problem! I’m thinking of The Breeders’ Last Splash, The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen, Kristin Hersh’s Hips and Makers, Neil Hannon’s Promenade, GBV’s Alien Lanes, Tindersticks’ Tindersticks and Palace Music’s Viva Last Blues. Right now I’m particularly recalling and revering Smog’s 1997 Red Apple Falls.

That Smog album was the last one I reviewed before having to take a break from Hot Press because I had to start being a doctor in July 1997. It was a good place to stop. Red Apple Falls was and still is such a fine expression of how life can fill with colour as you grow up and that things that have felt tough can become easier, gentler, less lonely. I’m not saying this is universal — D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ was a popular but dubious notion — but it’s possible even when teenage you thinks it’s not. (Smog’s ‘Teenage Spaceship’ from 1999’s Knock Knock, deserves its own post: “Flying around / The houses at night / Flying alone / A teenage spaceship / I was a teenage spaceship / Landing at night / I was beautiful with all my lights”.)

Smog’s Wild Love drew me into Bill Callahan’s writing in 1995 and its musical and lyrical sparseness were appealing, particularly the song ‘It’s Rough’: “Oh, it’s rough / Baby, to live / Oh, it’s hard / Baby, to survive / Everyday lately / My mind feels like glass / Ready to be smashed / Ready to be smashed”.

I remember liking songs off Wild Love because they were not what I considered overconfident songs, like most were, that expected us to aim for thrilling loving relationships and to be unsatisfied until we found one. ‘It’s Rough’ just asked you to be aware that you weren’t going to have the love you needed in your life and the song seemed to wonder if there was much point in carrying on: “Oh, it’s hard / Baby, to survive”. This seemed sensible and better than wanting the thing you couldn’t have. Of course you never stopped wanting it.

Wild Love was bleak and was followed by the arguably darker The Doctor Came At Dawn. When I met Callahan just before the daunting 1996 Doctor album came out he told me, “There’s a lot of death on the new one. I was just thinking a lot about death lately… just passing visions of coffins, vultures, things like that. That’s all”.

1997’s Red Apple Falls was distinctly and rapidly different. Much of the immediate evidence of the emotional shift was the music not the words, like the soothing French horn that intros the opening song, ‘The Morning Paper’. It was the stirring pedal steel that enhances the comical ‘I Was A Stranger’ and the trumpet that colours ‘Ex-Con’, along with “Whenever I get dressed up / I feel like an ex-con trying to make good”.

Some of the clearest change was lyrical in that relating to Callahan’s Red Apple Falls lyrics meant looking outward more than inward, cautiously but genuinely welcoming potential relationships rather than confining yourself, as Wild Love had, to inevitable aloneness. In the case of maybe the album’s standout song, ‘To Be Of Use’, Callahan works to figure out how we might make things better for those around us, even should life remain rough: “Most of my fantasies are of / Making someone else come / Most of my fantasies are of / To be of use / To be of use / To be of some hard / Simple / Undeniable use / Oh, like a spindle / Or oh, like a candle / Or oh, like a horseshoe / Or oh, like a corkscrew / To be of use / To be of use”.

I guess why these records continued to mean so much is that when you knew Wild Love and The Doctor Came at Dawn, then you heard Red Apple Falls, you could feel the heavy hopelessness lifting. You have to be aware of the early work to know that those awful bleak frozen feelings, should they be familiar, aren’t going to stick around. You have a songwriter sharing his emotional evolution experience and letting you know that viewing the future as being empty is an illusion. ‘To Be Of Use’ gets easily added to a playlist of songs that give me goosebumps mostly because of the hope that Smog song brings in contrast to the song from the year before. But ‘It’s Rough’ has to get on the playlist too because those songs are effectively partners; yin and yang.

‘To Be Of Use’, especially where it exists among the songs that surround it, is a permanently perfect moment. This four-syllable phrase, so simple, so short, so tattooable, has stayed with me and not only when using a corkscrew, though I’ve hummed it nearly every time I’ve opened wine. Mostly over the last quarter century when I’ve been trying to establish if what I’m doing at home or at work should help or might not. I don’t think you ever quite know if what you’re doing will improve things for those around you. You’re not in control.

But having a Smog-inspired to be of use as your goal means you have constant signposting in a direction that is, on average, over a lifetime, going to be better than its opposite. It makes decent life easier and should mean you do less harm than good. And it makes you appreciate the music you’ve lived with. When you are young and an artist you love has suffered and struggled in a way that is relatable and is now telling you that things have changed and can change for you, you can believe him. He has been there and he is coming out safely the other side and you can follow him. Talk about to be of use: songwriters can do no more than this. No-one can.

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 masterpiece. I certainly seem to have been quite into that album when I wrote the below review of their final show as A House in March 1997. I’ve been perusing old Hot Presses in the last few days with a view to scrapbooking pieces from a pile of dusty and damp HPs I’ve had in the attic for donkeys. It’s just over thirty years since I started writing for HP — my first live review was of A House in the SFX in June 1993 — and some of the issues are from before then, like the 1988 one with Graham Linehan’s Zig and Zag interview as the cover story. I was surprised to find a number of pieces that I’d forgotten I’d written and of all of those maybe forgetting this one was the most surprising. Of course I remember going to the final show of my favourite Irish band but I did not remember that I’d written it up. I’m proud I was asked given what I would consider the high magnitude of this moment and the piece was OK to read. There are typically bits of my bygone writing that I’m not hugely fond of decades later, but I’m glad I got to publish my feelings about this band when they closed the final curtain.

A House / Revelino / Harvest Ministers (Olympia Theatre, Dublin).

BOTH REVELINO and bill-openers Harvest Ministers strutted their sturdy stuff — but on the occasion of A House’s final farewell, they’d both have been outclassed even if Black Francis and Gene Clark had been on stage not just in spirit but in person.

“The best Irish band ever” was Brendan Tallon’s heartfelt tribute to the headliners and it made sense. In as much as these titles mean anything — list-making belittles everyone, and exactly what criteria you might use to decide that this band is any more blindingly beautiful than Neil or The Stars or The Sewing Room or Sunbear or The Smiths by the grandparent rule I neither know nor care — then A House are the ones for me. When I first saw them, I was entranced with them; when I first saw them, I was in awe of them; and while they may not be the only ones that I-I-I-I, the only ones that I-I-I-I will ever need, they’re as close as I’m ever likely to let a group get. (Note for those not in possession of I Am The Greatest: those last few lines are very funny and profound indeed. Just so you know.)

So, although A House have their detractors for both musical and stupid political reasons — not as many as Fergal Bunbury likes to think, but they’re there — just about everyone in this in this packed and ancient theatre shares these sentiments, making for an atmosphere unlike any other gig I’ve ever attended… there are grown men weeping openly. There are grown rock hacks with the snuffles, and they only get emotional when they’ve missed a free bar.

Mind you, A House do rub it in. They kickstart with ‘Kick Me Again, Jesus’, from when we were young and the whole world just had to be theirs, and there are massed going-grey groans. ‘Patron Saint of Mediocrity’ pops up early, and I wish my ex-friend who says all Dave Couse does is write list songs, sure anyone can do that, could have been there: ‘Patron Saint’, a list song and proud of it, is as overwhelming as ever, with a swagger and a fury and a naked depth of feeling that defies belief. “I’m not a genius”, he proclaims. Well… if you say so.

‘Shivers Up My Spine’ is even more than usually appropriate, ‘I Am Afraid’ also (“I am afraid to die / But it’s something I must do”), and even though I could have, and have in the past, done a better version of ’13 Wonderful Love Songs’ than its authors do — it’s all new-fangled, ambient and atmospheric when it should be a magnificent crushed cry, as easy listening as steel claws down a blackboard, and a verse is missing — it is the one song I’d been praying they’d play as it all ends, and I’m a crumpled heap, but happy.

The end comes with a few key tunes: ‘Here Come The Good Times’, ‘No More Apologies’, which they doubtless regard as their anthem, and it is a wondrous thing so long as it’s not about the music biz, but it is, and then ‘I Can’t Change’, terrifically sad but serene, just the mood of the entire evening.

The best Irish band ever, gone because no-one gave a bollocks about them, but gone with a wry sigh, good humour and a painfully great last night on earth. They’ll be missed.

Shivers up my spine? God, yes.

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 heart for the entire last ten days, so that I can’t let go of it. “Love is real / Real is love” is a May mantra.

It’s hard to be sure why a song implants itself like this, particularly one you’ve heard hundreds of times, and writing can help figure that out. Then maybe you can stop listening obsessionally and move on to the next song. Still, right now I want to keep listening to ‘Love’. Every so often you go through a phase with a song when others seem unnecessary: this song does everything that songs are supposed to so it’s the only one I need.

Which begs the question: what are songs supposed to do? Can one song do it all?

I mean: songs do all kinds of things. They keep us company. They make strangers into friends. They educate and exhilarate. They speed up then slow down your pulse rate. They provide an auditory environment that improves focus and aids writing (thank you Stars of the Lid). They soundtrack a mosh or a Macarena.

But I’m thinking here about songs that operate on a particular level, that are existential as well as exciting. Not to be too hierarchical but I bow most deeply to songs that tackle core questions we are trying to answer ourselves and can’t. Songs that help us make sense of life when it seems strange and nonsensical. Songs that find peace for us when we can’t find it. One song can do all that for a while and usually this is through our dialogue with the song rather than its monologue. The listener is a co-writer. I listened to ‘Blue And Grey Shirt’ by American Music Club on repeat in late 1992, early 1993, because when Mark Eitzel sang “I sat up all morning / And I waited for you” I knew exactly what he was saying and no-one else said it like him. I needed to listen to his generous song of loneliness to process that awful emotion. The song, which was of love as well as loneliness, was of immense practical emotional help. I haven’t needed it since, but it still means so much and I’ve needed many other songs along the road. John Cusack in High Fidelity asks: Which came first, the music or the misery? It is so obvious that it was the misery. Music is not toxic. It is nothing but healing.

Part of why ‘Love’ is loveable is because of its context. It comes on halfway through John’s 1970 Plastic Ono Band, his first solo album, also known as the Primal Scream album, which has John’s enduring emotional injury arising in childhood as the subject of most of its songs. ‘Love’ comes on and soothes for a while although ‘God’ arrives soon after (“God is a concept / By which we measure our pain”).

The album starts with ‘Mother’, in which John addresses his mum, Julia, and his dad, Alfred. Alfred, who had left John and Julia when John was three, was alive in 1970. Julia had died in 1958 when John was 17. She had not taken care of him for more than a few weeks since he was five. The lyric of ‘Mother’ begins: “Mother / You had me / But I never had you / I wanted you / But you didn’t want me”. John’s mother was the subject of ‘Julia’ on The White Album too but that was a shimmering declaration of filial love (“So I sing the song of love / Julia”) rather than a song about being abandoned (“Mama don’t go / Daddy come home”).

The album ends with ‘My Mummy’s Dead’, a song in which John still sounds grievously wounded, although differently. He sings the brutal lyrics in a nursery rhyme melody as if the only way he can sing them is pretend they are fantasy: “I can’t explain / So much pain / I could never show it / My mummy’s dead”.

So in the midst of all this skin-peeling pain comes the grounding, gratitude and grace of ‘Love’.

‘Love’ is not healing in some straightforward way. It has its own ambiguity: “Love is needing / needing love” is sung by someone who spent childhood years without enough love and who had, when leaving his first wife Cynthia, left his first-born son bereft of paternal love as he was left himself.

Still I think ‘Love’ can be said to be mostly healing because it says: even when you went through all the abandonment John went through since age three, you can fully experience love (“Love is you / You and me / Love is knowing / We can be”). Then, pained though ‘God’ is, John ends that song declaring that he no longer believes in anyone but “Yoko and me / And that’s reality”, and ‘God’ becomes an epiphany in that moment. Even for a Beatle—a person at the highest peak of human achievement—there is no moment more exquisite than the moment union with your soul mate begins. When your perspective on life changes because you experience life through her eyes, not just your own, and your life is so much richer than it was ten minutes ago.

Hence, those of us who are not Beatles can experience the pinnacle of happiness, which for John was not his career peak (‘A Day In The Life’ in 1967) but was meeting Yoko in the Indica Gallery in 1966. Like my Mam and Dad meeting in the TV Club in 1966. Like, for me, the July 2001 Monday when I walked into the Pearse St Drug Treatment Centre having just started training there, when I found Sharon working as a nurse and when she smiled at me and the rest of the room blurred and faded from sound and view. Or the moment a few weeks later, about 48 hours into our offically going out, that we each realised we wanted to have a baby, each said so, and neither of us panicked and ran away. Or early 2002, when Sharon and I returned from Paris and I was expecting the pining melancholy I’d always experienced on a return from holiday but I realised: wait it doesn’t matter at all where I am any more—not if she’s there. I don’t have a 1967 Sergeant Pepper moment to compare these to but they were more ‘Oh My Love’ moments anyway: “Oh my lover for the first time in my life / My eyes are wide open / Oh my lover for the first time in my life / My eyes can see”.

What ‘Love’ reminds me is that a song meets you emotionally where you are and a fine song may do this once while some songs meet you many times when you are in different places throughout your life.

I am connecting with ‘Love’ in May 2023 in a way that I could not have done at Christmas 1990, when I first heard the Plastic Ono Band album. Back then my notions of love were mostly as you would expect from a socially struggling adolescent listening to The Smiths. The song detailing my “love” life at the time was ‘How Soon Is Now’. The scene from the club where you’d like to go, “So you go and you stand on your own / And you leave on your own / And you go home / And you cry and you want to die”, felt true and not melodramatic. Just as Morrissey’s praise of death by double-decker bus in ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ felt like a perfect, pure way of sharing a fate with the one you loved while now it seems tragically life-negating. The Morrissey lyric argues against sharing everyday life with a person you love, because they may find it difficult to love you back, because the lightning bolt of early love can’t last and because the daily is dull. Every day is like Sunday, Morrissey would later add. Well, not if you love they’re not.

What other songs say is that young love matures, expands, and improves, like the love in Teenage Fanclub’s ‘I Don’t Want Control Of You’: “I don’t want control of you / It doesn’t matter to me / Don’t want this love to stay the same / But grow with every year / And every day I look in a different face / The feelings getting stronger with every embrace”. In 1984’s ‘Grow Old With Me’, a song that’s so beautiful but hard to listen to as John Lennon never got to enact it, John sang“Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be / When our time has come / We will be as one / God bless our love”, an attitude to sticking with, or merging with, your true love that I share now so much more than that of ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’. “Love is living / living love”, sings John Lennon in ‘Love’, and in 1990 I didn’t understand him. I didn’t listen. Now it’s the truest couplet.

In fairness to Morrissey, ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ and even ‘How Soon Is Now’ feel lyrically alien in 2023 not because of anything he said forty years ago but because at this time soundtracks to loneliness, Smiths songs that gently squeeze your solitary shoulder, are surplus to requirements. I have stupendously lucked out with an utter lack of loneliness in the last twenty-two years since I met my one true love and I can’t remember what loneliness even feels like. (16-year-old me would be: Wow.)

Like other John Lennon songs, ‘Love’ is one I find more poignant than I might otherwise because he didn’t have long enough and things ended so quickly. It focuses my mind on music’s attempts to find meaning in life including making peace with the difficult fact that life often ends too early. Even in normal length lives, loss does loom. I think I am attached to this song now because it is such a simple gentle statement of what is most important in the life you share with your loved ones. When you recognise that life is not infinite, you find yourself feeling like you were twelve years old two days ago and you find yourself also asking: what is the best way of using the time that is left?

The answer is in this song and it is stated clearly without drama: it’s to give and receive love. To do so casually day to day, hour to hour. Don’t put off the precise expression of love and make sure that all those you love and value know it. Earlier I wrote that ‘Love’ does exactly what songs are supposed to and for ‘Love’ to provide elegant guidance on how to experience love and maximise its joyful expression seems to be as useful as a song can be. Life doesn’t go on forever and if you were to be in your final hours knowing that everyone you loved will always know that you loved them—as my mum knew last June, to pick a not entirely random example—then that exit is as good as it can be.

In ‘Love’, John equates loving and receiving love with other acts. Love is touch, touch is love. Love is reaching, reaching love. Love is asking to be loved. I think of his line “Love is touch, touch is love” now, and I gratefully recall some of the many hugs I’ve been glad to have. I think of our youngest child, who, watching Teen Titans or Totoro on the couch or reading The Beano, whether heading off to sleep or just after waking, likes having his head on your chest and his hand on your belly. I don’t know if I’ve paid more attention to this because of an increasing awareness of the hasty passage of precious time, but I do know that there’s no experience more precious than this, and that an everyday event can be the most magical one.

It was wonderful that John Lennon, who was given so little love as a boy, could develop his ability to love others heading into his thirties. As the years pass, the most important thing about love is how it continues. Its recipients benefit from it not just when it’s given but throughout their lives. Others benefit too. Think of the grandchildren whose Granny and Granda taught Daddy how to love. Love goes on.

I sometimes think about John’s ‘Love’, the acts and states of being that John equated with love, and the song’s haiku brevity, and I wonder—did he leave anything out?

Well. Love is comfort, comfort love. Love is courage, courage love. Love is caring, caring love. But love is not completely straightforward. Love is concern. Love is grief. Love is trepidation. Love is longing.

To say that these are positives and negatives is to realise that loving someone is not only elevating your life to heights it cannot otherwise attain but also that loving someone is setting you and that person up for mighty loss. At some point sadness like no other will ensue. One could say that the worst thing about a person dying is not what they themselves lose but the pain their passing causes to those who loved and love them.

In John’s ‘Love’ I hear him sing “Love is you / You and me / Love is knowing / We can be”. I hear the present tense in this but in a song like ‘Love’ I also hear an eternal tense. Though we won’t both be around forever, our love lives on and our relationship remains. Love you gave is love you can still give even after death and it stays imprinted in the person you gave it to. I feel that in what my Mum gave, which I still carry in my bones.

That’s why giving love right now is the best use of what time you have. Love causes grief but also strengthens those you love so they can be as strong and happy as possible and that’s what I have to believe matters most. John from early on and right through The Beatles felt not good enough until Yoko arrived. When we are loved enough, for long enough, love can ease the feeling of failure that is so familiar, that constant worry that we can never be a good enough person. Love can ease this agitation. Love is real, real is love, sang John, and he covered almost all bases in this perfect song. He could have added one thing: love is peace, peace is love.

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 Summer St in Boston, the donut shop on Polk St in San Francisco, or Penny Lane in Liverpool, but were I in those cities I would be making pilgrimages to those places because they are in superb songs by Throwing Muses, Sun Kil Moon, and—surprise!—The Beatles. I did visit Summer St on my J1 in 1994, with the Muses’ Red Heaven on my Walkman, possibly puzzling passersby because strolling the scene of this song was making me smile. I didn’t make it yet to Polk St, from ‘Glenn Tipton’, or to Penny Lane, but I did stand outside Paul McCartney’s north London house for ten minutes in 2019, which is totally fine and not sad.

‘Personality’ by Whipping Boy, from side two of Heartworm, does this work of creating local folklore as well as any song. ‘Personality’ is one of half a dozen Heartworm songs that I could write about in a column dedicated to songs that send shivers up my spine. (‘Morning Rise’, the closing song, missed out only because I’ve gone on about it enough.) Aungier St and Dame St, where ‘Personality’ is located, have felt special since Autumn 1995, when Colm O’Callaghan gave me a pre-release cassette of Heartworm, and on my way home to Ballinteer on my bike my heart and mind melted. On Aungier St I always hum the song and sometimes walk a little on air because of the following lines: “The fantastic thing about the female / Is that she was put on this earth to be admired and adorned, not abused / Or so the Senator said one night in J.J. Smyths / Where all the punks had played and the jazz men have their day.”

Now, I have to say that is not the only reason Aungier St has sparkle: I used to essentially live on Aungier St as my wife Sharon lived on the top floor of an Aungier St flat during our early days. Good times.

I headed in to J.J. Smyth’s a good few times in the aftermath of Heartworm coming out. (As an alternative to The Long Hall, a fine pub on the cover of a fine Jubilee Allstars album—listen here.) I saw the late Louis Stewart there, a jazz man having his day, and other times I sat with a book and playing Heartworm, feeling at the centre of things. One of the song’s verses ends with “All our lives spent Underground”, meaning in the club at the junction of Georges Street and Dame St, where bands in the mid to late 80s lived and learned, like A House, Something Happens, Into Paradise, Power of Dreams, and Whipping Boy.

‘Personality’ does more than capture and beautify or beatify a place. It captures a time. The song opens with a gorgeous rising, falling, echoing guitar intro by Paul Page leading to Fearghal McKee narrating one of the more memorable couplets in music: “I want to marry a personality / Someone who looks just like Koo Stark”. Even in 1995, few knew who Koo Stark was, apparently a famous photographer since the 1970s but best known in the 1980s as a partner of Prince Andrew’s, so pinning the song to that period. The song contains lyrics I’ve never properly absorbed or understood (“Sunken dreams for Mr Field / Sold out to the Longman Oz / Solid days and Liquid nights / Red boy loved our pavement fights”), which has not hampered my appreciation of the song. There’s no harm when songwriting stays mysterious. Lyrics don’t need logic.

That said, sometimes Whipping Boy lyrics are hazardously direct. My son Michael, who is eleven, got into Whipping Boy this year when he heard ‘When We Were Young’. Michael is finding his way, as you do, mostly immersing himself in electronic music about which his Dad has no clue, and he made an iPod playlist for bedtime wind-down not long ago. There wasn’t too much serene ambient music on this playlist and there was no Max Richter. Eleven of the twelve songs were pneumatic drill dance and the twelfth, though not techno, was ‘When We Were Young’, another song that does the opposite of assist sedation. What Michael and I have not done—yet—is talk through what the words of the song mean: “Babies, sex and flagons, shifting women, getting stoned / Robbing cars, bars and pubs, rubber johnnies, poems”. I guess some of this is on the way, in ten or so years if Michael takes after his not-quite-Casanova 1990s dad.

Walk up to the corner of Aungier St and Longford St Lower now and you won’t find J.J. Smyth’s. It closed in 2016. It was replaced by another pub. For all I know, the Thomas Moore Inn is cropping up in someone else’s lyrics; I’d like to think so. The Underground became a gentleman’s club (air quotes) called Lapello, a depressing fate arguably worse than demolition. Another Dame St Underground opened in 2017 but closed in 2020. Venues that took over from The Underground as a nurturing ground, like the legendary Attic, did not last too long, although while the Attic survived it nurtured some of the finest music I’ve known to emerge from Ireland.

J.J. Smyth’s and The Underground being gone is paradoxically partly why I love ‘Personality’: the song evokes a vivid memory of places crackling with energy that moulded people including those playing the song. It documents how important it is to have formative homes from home where we meet ingenious inspiring mentors who encourage us to try new things. Fearghal McKee sings “People grow old / They get bored, they forget to take a risk”, but they didn’t do that in the Underground while it was hopping. I admit I don’t know where today’s analogue to the Attic or Underground or J.J. Smyth’s is. There are reasons for this. I don’t flounce around town as I did in my early twenties. I rarely get to gigs and they are mostly in the NCH. Nineties me is unimpressed. And as far as I know, it is becoming impossible to run a ‘Personality’-style creative cradle, small venues having been described this year as “on their knees” because of urban rent and the aftermath of COVID.

‘Personality’ is not all time-stamping. The opening couplet of the second verse is “I wish I were in a bright green field / Staring at the bright blue sky”. If I am walking on grass and the sky is clear, Fearghal’s vibrant voice and Paul’s radiant riff come back to my mind and it feels like I’m in the song as I’ve been for nearly thirty years. Songs that elevate the most everyday of experiences are crucial like songs that elevate a street corner or a time in the life of a city that in was not all great. Songs remind us that everyday experiences must be savoured. You don’t experience beaming primary colour nature every day and you will only experience it for so many years. You remember now when you were young and if you become eventually elderly you will remember when you were older, maybe longing to return to those days. We don’t get to.

What we get to do is to have blissful experiences alongside the bad ones as long as we live. Rammed lightning gigs. Lying down out the back of your house under a May cherry blossom, closing your eyes, and soaking up sun before it inevitably rains. Connecting with songs that are old, new, or both as they continue to evolve. Laughing with the love of your life with wonderful music in the air. Ageing as slowly as possible alongside her, she who transformed your life when she accepted and reciprocated the realisation that the dawning closing lines of Heartworm rang true: “I can’t help thinking that I love you”. Savour this: it’s as lucky as anyone can get.

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’ is a song that was released on The Beatles’ Apple Records. I first dived into the Beatles in 1987 and I have read tons of books about them, including books about Apple Records, all of which feature Mary Hopkin as she was the first artist other than The Beatles to release on The Beatles’ own record label. Maybe this illustrates something pretty obvious that I only realised here when coming to the end of the piece, which is that music was not always as immediately universally accessible as it is now and your 1960s kitchen might sometimes need to be silent.

Hopkin’s first single on Apple was ‘Those Were The Days’, with a B-Side of Pete Seeger’s ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’. That number one single was produced by Paul McCartney in 1968, when he didn’t have much else on except releasing The White Album, prepping Let It Be and Abbey Road, trying to figure out how to keep The Beatles going, and falling in permanent love with Linda. Mary Hopkin’s second single had a McCartney song, ‘Goodbye’, on the A-Side and ‘Sparrow’, written by Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle, who Mary Hopkin praises highly to this day, on the B-Side. The Apple release schedule around the time Hopkin was releasing these songs included ‘Hey Jude’, ‘Revolution’, ‘Get Back’, ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, and ‘Something/Come Together’. Late brilliant Beatles if poignant because we all know what happened next. The Clash told us quite a while ago that phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust but still: that is quite the environment to be mixing in.

How I encountered Mary Hopkin’s ‘Sparrow’ was that in September I tweeted about bird songs. I have another Tidal playlist called ‘Tern! Tern! Tern!’, which is an amusing (chortle) play on Byrds words. I was looking to replenish the playlist. It opens with the Byrds version of this song by Pete Seeger and then the second song is ‘I Like Birds’ by Eels, because I am quite a concrete thinker. As it happens, the title is also a play on Hopkin words given that ‘Turn! Turn’ Turn!’ was one side of her first single. I did not know this until literally today, December 21st 2022: lifelong learning! One reason I was tinkering then was because Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, which provides ‘Turn! ‘Turn! Turn’ with its lyrics, was a reading at my mum’s funeral in June: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven / A time to be born, and a time to die”.

I asked Twitter friends to send me songs about birds for this playlist and lots of people did. Much to my surprise, Mary Hopkin was a respondent. Even more surprising that I didn’t know the song given that I instantly knew who she was, knew that she was a central person in the Beatles’ Apple Records and have been a tad on the Beatles obsessional side for two-thirds of my life. It quickly turned out to be—let me see what I said in October—dizzyingly beautiful. ‘Sparrow’ came out as a single B-side and was not on Hopkin’s 1969 album Post Card, which seems bananas, but no more so than ‘Penny Lane’ not making it to a proper Beatles album. I guess The Beatles were like: we’ll have another one in the morning. ‘Yesterday’ arrived in a dream.

So this is a song from a period and place that I love, non-revolutionarily—Beatles London in the late 1960s. Apparently some of the work was done in Paul McCartney’s house on Cavendish Avenue, to which, as a forty-five year-old, I walked miles in pilgrimage to stand outside, pausing en route outside Abbey Road. But that is not what draws me to this song or to any of the Beatles songs done since he moved in there in 1965. Equally, there is relatively little connection via autobiographical memory to this song. Not none, but I only just heard it. That feels freeing: it’s the song not so much the associations. Although it has to be a little bit of those.

One key thing is that this is a song about the glory of little flying things, a subject on which I support the song. The most normal of flying things, if any can be normal. Since the start of the pandemic I’ve become more attuned to and invested in birds. I live in the country in Kildare, we have a few fruit trees and hedges with berries around the house, and we would always have robins, blackbirds, magpies, tits and sparrows flittering around. When I had to work including conducting clinics from home from March 2020 for some reason I decided to stock up on feeders and seed including nyjer, which attracts the brighter finches, the gold and green ones and the punk-pink redpolls. I saw goldfinches far from the house and given their then-rarity and obvious beauty I wanted them nearer, and they are now. Our local nyjer supplier likes me, I think.

I saw so many sparrows that spring! To the point that I under-rated them. I would be disappointed by the sight of a sparrow as much as by the sight of a crow. With crows you might think you have seen a buzzard and crows are equally graceful in flight, but then when you see it’s a crow you are disappointed. This is not fair. What did the crow do wrong? Similarly in spring 2020 I would think I’d seen something like a dunnock, redpoll or wren, but it would turn out to be a sparrow and I’d be like not another one.

As Hopkin, Gallagher and Lyle point out, this is completely missing the point. Their point is that although just brown, black and grey, and as common as muck, building nests from gutters all over England, the sparrow is a glorious creature. Hearing ‘Sparrow’ makes me like Sparklehorse’s ‘Hundreds of Sparrows’, a song I’ve played hundreds of times, a bit less. Why is each sparrow worth so little? Who is devaluing and misvaluing? Beings and phenomena and experiences do not have to be kaleidoscopic or rare to be precious. Experiences like hearing a sparrow sing, watching a leaf fall and land, or holding your son’s hand are at least equal. The clear reminder that Mary Hopkin provides of this in ‘Sparrow’ is maybe why I love this song the most.

‘Sparrow’ opens with a quick church bell and with the song’s protagonist setting the scene: “On Sunday morning everyone will leave the house / Dressed for the Sunday service”. The music in the church itself sounds good and it sounds like the singer needs it: “When Eleanor sings in the choir / It’s like a lark in summer”. The protagonist goes directly from this comparison to her praise of the sparrow, generally considered less lofty than a lark: think of ‘The Lark In The Clear Air’ or Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. She follows by appreciating the song and motion of the oft-ignored bird: “The sparrow sings, the sparrow flies / With mighty wings he reaches / As high as any other bird / He shall inherit all the earth”. She sings this twice. There is choral accompaniment emphasising what she says. The choral accompaniment heightens for the second chorus, to press home her love of this bird that R.E.M. might, if they paid attention, call the king of birds.

Something fascinating about ‘Sparrow’ that I am mostly noticing as I listen to it and read the words while writing this essay is that the song’s protagonist needs the song of the sparrow. It is as if the music of nature keeps us going—some of us at least—and it is because there are times that we lack that music that we made the man-made kind. She follows the first chorus with uneasiness about the silence of the evening; forgive me if right here I think of the night-time bird-song silence in The Beatles’ 1968 ‘Blackbird’ being broken only by the forlorn male looking for a mate with no hope of finding one.

In the second verse, Hopkin sings “A wealth of silence will descend upon the town / In colours of the evening / The thought has troubled me before / I know alone I need a sound to fill each moment / I had to find it out my way / They couldn’t stop me leaving”. The sounds in this village, though glorious, are not quite enough to keep someone who needs to be immersed in music at all times. I have to say—this all sounds familiar given the length of Goosebumps playlist, the songs on which that I heard first, thirty-five years ago, are Beatles songs that were in the air in Abbey Road and Apple fifty-five years ago when Mary Hopkin was in those places.

‘Sparrow’ ends surprisingly and, I think, amazingly. The day starts on Sunday at church and amidst nature. A grounding time and solid places. Then the protagonist moves towards evening and misses the morning singing so takes steps to retrieve her intimacy with music. There is no choral accompaniment or religious grandeur to the final verse, which ends on a note of uncertainty, which can also be taken as excitement: what’s next? The protagonist is young, I think. I don’t like equating characters in songs with their performers but it sounds like its protagonist is a woman of twenty-ish who is deciding on her future. She is stretching out and moving away from home because there is not enough music around. She needs music to live so she needs to leave.

I listen to this today and think: well this was 1968. You could not just reach over in a village amidst making a lentil pasta sauce and put on, as I’ve just done, a song from twenty-three years earlier that you suddenly acutely needed to hear. When you need music to survive, you go where you will find it. Sometimes that is the source of the sound of a lark, in a church or ascending from a field. Sometimes in summer it is hedges where sparrows reside. Sometimes, though, it is not those. As the final verse reminds us, humans, despite our faults, are not all bad, because we create music when and where other creatures will not. So the protagonist ends the songs away from the village, stepping into a new life replete with music and possibilities: “Through the blue and hazy drift of after two / A saxophone is moaning / I rise and step into the cool night air”.

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 almost exactly in my educational and social development where my eldest child, the beautiful, warm, compassionate and funny Olivia is right now. She is of course a completely different child than I was. Ethically engaged, climate-conscious, interested in animal welfare, aware of and respectful of natural variation in gender and sexual preference, while in 1987 I was just afraid of being called gay or nerdy or bad at sport, two of which I definitely was. When Sign O’ The Times arrived I was slightly younger than she is now because I wouldn’t turn thirteen until the end of first year in April 1987 and she turned thirteen just after starting in secondary in August. But man—I was a stupid kid. I don’t blame me entirely and our generation has probably done a better job of providing ethical guidance to our kids’ generation than the generations did before fist-clenched Catholicism declined in Ireland but it also seems quite late now to educate a generation about, say, an extinction crisis that there is little prospect of resolving.

Sign O’ The Times was released on March 30th 1987, while The Joshua Tree had been released on March 9th, 1987. What a month! As a boy in a boy’s school in south Dublin, I didn’t get Prince at the time. There was one boy in the class who did and told us all about him. This boy was more mature than I was. You could tell this through conversation, in the sense of what he talked about as well as the depth of his voice, and you could tell it in the P.E. changing room. This was at a time that there were boys who appreciated the sexual aspects of Prince’s music more than others who were on the threshold of puberty but really unfamiliar with it and its sexual implications. So a song like ‘It’ would have been a puzzle (“I want to do it baby all the time, alright / Because when we do it girl, it’s so divine, alright”). We would have had to pretend we knew what Prince was singing about and just try to escape down the corridor before being proven as bullshitters—look, there’s a badger with a gun! ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ would have been completely baffling and kind of still is.

It was safer in school to stay in the realm of male non-sexual songs like ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ and even what appeared non-sexual like ‘With Or Without You’. You could like ‘With Or Without You’ and write U2 on your schoolbag without signalling that you understood the longing in Bono’s voice. You could like ‘The One I Love’ by R.E.M. without knowing what it meant for someone to be a simple prop to occupy your time, although I remember older boys boasting about getting together with, having sex with, then discarding girls. At that age I was also just about hanging on to religion, planning to get to Heaven, so the saviour-like aspects of Bono’s performance were still a way of connecting with that band. These were the aspects that resulted in Paul Wonderful of The Joshua Trio riding a donkey into the Baggot Inn in December 1987, shortly before I went about losing my religion for all time in 1988. And it was intoxicating to have a band from Dublin that was so huge. I grew up in Ballinteer and my family home is less than two miles from Danesmoate, where Adam Clayton lives and where The Joshua Tree was rehearsed and in part recorded. I remember heading up to our local Superquinn after the album release, queuing behind a man who was buying a box of Corn Flakes and recognising him as the bass player in the biggest band in the world. I left him alone.

It was about three and a half years later, the summer of 1990, when I fell properly in love for the first time, in the Galway Gaeltacht, that Sign O’ The Times hit home. I remember after my late summer departure from the Gaeltacht that we went on holidays as a family to Donegal, where my Dad is from. I was angry that I had to go because I wanted to stay in Dublin and hang with my first ever girlfriend so holiday snaps are of me looking sullenly out to sea in a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt. We stayed in a house in Drumboe near Stranorlar where my Dad was born and where his father, my Granda, lived until his death in late 1982. Dad did not grow up there because his mum died when he was one year old, so he was reared by amazing aunts in Convoy, a village a few miles away. I sat out in the driveway of Granda’s house listening over and again to Sign O’ The Times, draining the car battery by using the car’s tape deck, focusing on what I considered the core songs: ‘Sign O’ The Times’, ‘The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker’, ‘I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man’, ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’, and ‘Starfish And Coffee’. By the time we got home the flame of young love had dwindled and I was dumped.

‘Starfish And Coffee’ is a spectacular song. I wonder now if I connected to it because it dealt so clearly and funnily with the problem that everyone of the age I was then has, which is fitting into school and society despite your idiosyncracies. Prince and his friends Kevin and Lucy are at school first thing in the morning, observing classmates and studying human behaviour like Björk would a few years later. Prince’s classmate Cynthia Rose is like no-one else and stuns him and Lucy. Prince praises her unpredictable uniqueness: “Cynthia wore the prettiest dress / With different color socks / Sometimes I wondered if the mates were in her lunchbox… Cynthia had a happy face, just like the one she’d draw / On every wall in every school / But it’s all right, it’s for a worthy cause / Go on, Cynthia, keep singin’.” The song’s chord structure is really simple and you can play along if you are middling on an acoustic. It has the same chords as Johnny Cash’s ‘Hey Porter’—fact. There are no solos like Prince played on ‘Purple Rain’ or ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ or on that live version of ‘When My Guitar Gently Weeps’ that, when Prince died, many deemed the high point of his career (not me).

So ‘Starfish and Coffee’ occupies a particular slot on a complex challenging album.

Prince is everywhere on Sign O’ The Times. He is sexually voracious and questioning (‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’: “Is it really necessary for me to go out of the room / Just because you want to undress? / We don’t have to make children to make love”). He is politically enraged and exhausted in the title track: “A sister killed her baby ’cause she couldn’t afford to feed it / Yet we’re sending people to the moon”. He sounds maybe preeningly self-satisfied on ‘Slow Love’ and a little spiritually self-righteous on ‘The Cross’, never my favourite song on the album despite its epic closer anthem status. As a bit of maturity set in, early teenage disappearing into the rear view and voice cracking then deepening, ‘It’ and ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ became brave and fascinating songs, while the happily mutally agreed rapid coupling in ‘The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker’ made a young man think: can that kind of liaison happen in real life? No: it couldn’t. No-one was going to ask me to take a bath with my jeans on and if they did—let’s imagine that something similar happened, once, on a J1 summer—I would, unlike Prince, panic, say no, and head for the hills. But it was a nice introduction to the work of Joni Mitchell outside of ‘Big Yellow Taxi’: “Oh, my favorite song, she said / It was Joni singing / Help me, I think I’m falling“.

‘Starfish and Coffee’ is one I love on this record because it takes a breath in the middle of all the surrounding intensity. It is easy, energising and relaxing. It is pro-human, pro-diversity, pro-surprise. It is an encomium of someone young who is always courageously going to be her own person. In our teens, and later, struggling to form shipshape identities, we needed to hear this kind of thing from someone who was himself, until his desperately disappointing early death, immovably his own person. It was the only Prince song of that period or probably any that could get on The Muppets. Millions of kids will have seen it, understood it, and taken it with them through their childhoods. Prince, Cynthia Rose, and her socks must be happy with that outcome.

I interviewed Dustin O’Halloran by email in 2015. Email interviews can be good and bad. Often bad. Maybe my worst interview of all time was an emailer with Jóhann Jóhannsson, then and now one of my favourite artists of all time, around the time of The Miner’s Hymns. At the time of this Dustin O’Halloran interview I had seen Jóhann with Dustin and Hauschka in the Sugar Club in 2012 and I had (a Google and a Gmail check tells me today) already interviewed Jóhann. Emailers depend on how engaged the interviewee is and how often you get to follow up a question. Dustin had some time it seems and was willing to share it. I loved his response to my question about him and Adam Wiltzie as Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney. That I was dying to know.

In 2006, Dustin O’Halloran became a household name in hip households when a trio of his sparse, lovely solo piano pieces landed on the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. ‘Opus 17’, ‘Opus 23’ and ‘Opus 36’ had an immediate emotional resonance that made you wonder where you’d already heard them when you hadn’t, and elegant memorable melody has remained O’Halloran’s calling card throughout a prolific decade of solo work, film scores, and A Winged Victory for the Sullen.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen (AWVFTS) is O’Halloran’s collaboration with Adam Wiltzie, one half of drone pioneer duo Stars of the Lid. In 2011, AWVFTS’s eponymous debut contained the immensely gorgous, elliptically titled ‘Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears’. You could see the lineage here: Stars of the Lid were behind ‘Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage’, wherein they perfected the art of hiding a breathlessly beautiful piece of music behind a half-daft name. You don’t always want people to know how much you mean it, particularly when you really mean it.

AWVFTS, who play in the Pavilion in Dun Laoghaire on February 10th, released their second album, Atomos, the score of a contemporary dance piece, late last year. Like AWVFTS’s debut, Atomos is a spacious, enveloping meeting of musical minds, a summit between texture and space and unabashed melody. As the Pavilion show approaches, Dustin O’Halloran took some questions from State, talking about the art of collaboration, the great state of film music, and why sometimes it’s not so bad when the music stops.

State: You and Adam Wiltzie have collaborated on two albums now, coming from apparently quite different musical backgrounds. I’m interested in the process of collaboration and how you decide on a collaborator.

DOH: For myself I think good collaborations find you. I met Adam pretty randomly in Italy when I was living there and we became mutual fans of each other’s music. When we started working on music we didn’t realize what it would become or if it would even work. It’s all been a serendipitous surprise really. I think we both have learned a lot from each other… and also give each other space.

Ultimately, a good collaboration brings you out of your own head and helps you find places you would not have gone otherwise. I think Adam and I have pushed each other to new places, especially with our new record Atomos. We really tried to find the boundaries of our music and it’s nice to feel that; to know you can grow. I think we still have some more music to make together.

You said in an interview in the Quietus, “Adam and I have such different ways to work”.

Well, we have both been making records for a long time, so you tend to have your ways of working. It’s hard to be more specific, but I would say Adam really is great at using space, finding parts that you would not otherwise hear and stretching them out; creating a sense of timelessness. I think I’m more into the details of arrangements, crafting out subtle details.

You’ve cited Erik Satie as an influence. In The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross wrote of Satie’s Gymnopedies that it “discard[ed] centuries of knotted-down complexity in favour of a language at once simple and new”. Does that ring true to you and is that something you took from him for your own work?

I think Erik Satie was really a break through in contemporary music and maybe one of the first minimalists. He created strange and simple melodic structures that were deceptively simple. I have always been attached to this kind of musical language and try to seek out what is necessary. I’m not much into over-embellishment, or playing notes just to fill space. I think every note should count.

Is it always obvious in AWVFTS who did what? It would appear obvious – the shifting cloud-like STOL-style chords are Adam, the poetic piano and strings are you. But I remember reading Elvis Costello saying that when he collaborated with Paul McCartney they switched roles—Elvis went as sweetly melodic as he could while Paul shoved way too many words into one note. I’ve always imagined that one of the pleasures of collaboration is not being yourself and I wonder whether your musical personality changes.

Yeah, I think people would be surprised and who did what. We really switch roles a lot and especially with the new record we both rubbed off a bit on each other. Sometimes I would work on guitar sounds and Adam would work on strings. By the time we finished the record it was hard to remember who did what.

Can you say something about the experience of scoring a ballet? This is a first for you, as far as I know. It seems like a very different task to scoring a film.

When Wayne McGregor asked us to score his new dance piece, neither of us had ever worked on a dance score. It was totally new ground and we were intrigued. It’s a contemporary dance piece, not ballet, so all traditions were out. Wayne really wanted to push the boundaries of dance and what dance music can be, which is why he asked a group who barely has any rhythm in their music, I suppose. We didn’t know how it would all work, but when we saw his choreography I was really blown away at how wonderful it worked together with the music. It created this shell for the dance to live inside and felt really fresh to me. If you ever get a chance to see it, I highly recommend it. Their dancers are just incredible. What they put into it is just staggeringly beautiful and intense. Wayne is definitely one of the great artists of our time and I feel lucky to have been able to work with him.

AWVFTS are on on Erased Tapes, along with Nils Frahm, Peter Broderick, Rival Consoles and numerous other great acts. Like Rough Trade in the 80s, Domino in the 90s, Bella Union in the 2000s, they just seem like the most incredible detectors and nurturers of talent.

Robert and Sofia at Erased Tapes work pretty hard to bring the music they believe in to the people. I appreciate this a lot, especially since it’s so tough to keep a label alive these days. I think it’s a good moment for the label and like all things time will move on and fads will change, but hopefully the people fighting the good fight will be able to continue.

Your pieces on the Marie Antoinette soundtrack and your solo piano albums were important for my musical development as a listener. Along with other works of similar vintage (Jóhann Jóhannsson’s IBM 1401, Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks), this work directed me towards contemporary music and from there to a greater appreciation of classical or composed music in general. They were gateway works; let’s say I probably wouldn’t be quoting at you from an Alex Ross book if I hadn’t heard ‘Opus 17’ in 2007.

Thank you, I appreciate that! We all have our gateway music that leads us down our paths. For myself, I have found through the works of others being able to really appreciate more atonal pieces: Xenakis, Bartok, Schoenberg, Scriabin and so on.

How did your involvement in the Marie Antoinette soundtrack come about?

The pieces I did for Marie Antoinette came after I released my first solo piano album. Sofia Coppola’s music supervisor Brian Reitzell heard it and played it for Sofia. She was writing the script at the time and I guess it struck a chord as they asked me to write a few pieces for the film.

Secondly, and in asking this I’m aware you’ve been playing piano since you were four—is composed music something you’ve always been steeped in? A related question (asking as a dad of small kids)—how did your parents get you into the piano as a pre-schooler?

My mother was a ballet teacher and she really encouraged me to play. But trust me, I hated practising. I think what was really encouraging is after I had finished my practising I would sit and write things on the piano, and I think this planted a seed. Even my early teacher was really encouraging and let me play one of my first pieces at a recital. I was probably nine years old.

On film music: It seems you can’t put on a movie anymore without hearing yourself or Max Richter or Jóhann Jóhannsson, and Ólafur Arnalds is right now being heard by more than five million UK TV viewers every week on Broadchurch. It is a great time to be a lover of film music – from the listener’s perspective. Is it a great time to be a film music composer?

Yeah, I think it’s a good time all around for composers. There is more interest among ensembles and orchestras in playing living composers and films are using more interesting artists; a changing of the guard, I suppose. I think Jóhann Jóhannsson is definitely one of the living greats. Our studios our actually right next to each other and he is good friend. I do enjoy scoring films. It’s a big challenge and you usually end up with music you would never had written for yourself. It’s such a big collaboration between directors and actors and cinematographers and so on. But I also feel it’s really important to continue writing for yourself as well. Where there is no compromise and no timeline. It’s where you really find yourself, I think. When it comes time to work on a film you really draw from this well of ideas that you need to nourish.

Any other film composers you rate highly?

Recently I really enjoyed Mica Levi’s score for Under The Skin. I think it was a really unique and special score. I just saw it performed live with the film and it made me appreciate it even more.

A local question: you’ve visited Ireland on a number of occasions now and you are, in fairness, an O’Halloran. Have you had much of an opportunity to explore Irish traditional music or Irish contemporary music?

Sadly, beyond playing shows I have not had a chance to explore Ireland. Obviously I have a lot of heritage there and it’s something I really plan to do at some point. Somehow I always feel a kinship there… and I’m glad we have had such a nice response to our music there!

Finally: in interviews with you, we read about Satie and Debussy and other touchstones for you that are pretty intuitive. Is there any music that you are into that we would be surprised by?

I have been going through a period lately of not listening to much music at all, so maybe that’s a surprise. I find after writing and working on music all day, the sounds around me are really interesting and I want to give my ears a break.