'An infrequent conversation between fans of music, some of it long-lost’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCMy6kq5ZA0 You’d miss R.E.M. all the same, wouldn’t you ? Easily one of the best, certainly one of the most prolific and without doubt one of the most subversive of them all stepped off of the travellator for the last time in 2011, thirty-one years after they’d assembled in Athens, Georgia, from where they launched some of... Continue Reading →
It was because of Mark Cagney’s perenially classy late night radio show on Radio 2, ‘The Night Train’, that I was first alerted to the wonder of Donald Fagen and, as a consequence, Steely Dan, the band – in the loosest of terms possible - that Fagen first roughly sketched out with Walter Becker in... Continue Reading →
Jim McCarthy’s photograph on the front of ‘Exit Trashtown’ could have been taken in Cork at any point during the 1980s. In that snap, a lorry’s fog-lights pop the mist as it passes an abandoned fishing boat that’s run aground on the banks of The River Lee. Take your pick of the metaphors: you’re spoilt... Continue Reading →
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bptlyJeItOA Broadcasters Donal Dineen and the late Vincent Hanley never met and, on the surface, have little in common bar the radio. One revelled in the glare, came alive in front of an audience and was widely known by his nickname, Fab Vinny. The other has long been uneasy in the spotlight and only really... Continue Reading →
I spent many, many hours with the excellent Dublin band, Into Paradise, devising numerous schemes and strategies intended to bring them in from the cold but that only ultimately moved them further out into the margins. Through the madness, I remember fondly the time I spent as the band’s butler, a bit like Scooter from... Continue Reading →
The Blackpool Sentinel 
Recent Comments