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Pantheistic Joy: Nick Drake’s Made To Love Magic, HP, 2004.
Brief intro as this is a brief piece. I love Nick Drake. Surprising, right? His is music that it is always the right time to put on. When Sharon and I lived in Malawi in 2006-07, we had Pink Moon with us and my memories of travelling mountain roads southwards in a little dodgy Corolla…
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Sex & Death & Rock’n’Roll: Neil Hannon Interview on Casanova, HP, 1996.
I interviewed Neil Hannon in person twice in early 1996 for this piece. Once in the Mean Fiddler on Wexford St, where, if I remember correctly, which is debatable, he was about to support Gene. And again in Setanta HQ somewhere in London, the first time I ever got to go to London. On the…
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Glad The Pixies Bit The Dust: Breeders’ Last Splash, HP, 1993.
In 1993, I gave Last Splash by The Breeders 12/12, a Hot Press double six, as indicated in the final para of this brief review. The powers that be in HP were like: nope—this is a kid. (I was.) But they didn’t remove the line saying why I couldn’t deduct any points (“this record was…
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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…
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Not Of This Earth: The Stone Roses’ Second Coming, HP, 1994
In late 1994, I was asked to review Second Coming by The Stone Roses. That felt like a moment of arrival in Hot Press at the end of my second year. This was BIG. Bill Graham had reviewed the first. I made sure I didn’t read any other reviews, though after I submitted my encomium…
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All Possibilities: Badly Drawn Boy’s One Plus One Is One, HP, 2004.
Badly Drawn Boy: “One Plus One Is One” (XL). WITH HIS faux-bumbling nom de plume and head-scratching demeanour, not to mention the welded-on woolly hat, Damon Gough has perfected the act of the accidental auteur, stumbling haplessly into the spotlight. But you don’t win the Mercury Prize (The Hour Of Bewilderbeast) or soundtrack multiplex movies…
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Love Is Stronger Than Death: Sun Kil Moon, HP, 2003.
Nothing to say here. Just that this was a fantastic record and unexpectedly so. In 1994, I’d been in San Francisco making a pilgrimage to AMC sites and ignoring RHP sites like Grace Cathedral Park. Didn’t care, but this record nearly ten years later tranformed my relationship with Kozelek. Seventeen years ago, my wife’s near-twin…
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Triple Espresso of an Album: David Byrne’s Grown Backwards, HP, 2004.
Just wanted to post this alongside the accompanying live review. Fabulous album all these years later. Lead Us Not Into Temptation, David Byrne’s soundtrack to Young Adam, was sublime, one of the best records of last year. Take a recent immersion in film scores and a well-known wildly wandering muse, and it’s no surprise that…
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Energy in Excelsis: David Byrne at the Olympia, HP, 2004.
This is a short review of a David Byrne show in the Olympia that I went to with my wife and we both really loved. Grown Backwards is the only solo album of his I have spent proper time with. That formal excellence aversion I mention below: I think that never went away. Right now,…
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Around the Fire You’ll Have Planxty Playing: Stephen Malkmus Feature, HP 2001.
Just a couple of things about this piece. It was titled Swede Dreams in HP, and still is on the HP site, because when I interviewed Stephen Malkmus his impending debut solo album was going to be called Swedish Reggae. So I, or someone, popped that headline onto the piece. By the time the piece…