Dancing About Architecture

Journalism students alert: if you’d like to get some practical advice on journalism without having to pay a dime, Una Mullally of the Irish Times is hosting a series of conversations in Dublin on the subject, with guest speakers including Jim Carroll, Kathy Sheridan, Susan Daly, Patrick Freyne, Shane Hegarty and, er, me. Click on the link for more info.

The Works, starting on RTE on Thursday, Jan 26th

Starting from this Thursday, Jan 26th, I’m delighted to say I’ll be involved in a new weekly television programme on RTE 1 called The Works.

Designed by the same excellent production squad who brought you The View, The Works will be presented by John Kelly and feature arts reporting from Sinead Gleeson, Kevin Gildea and myself. We’ll be popping into artists’ studios, reporting back from film sets, going to arts launches, interviewing actors, authors, musicians and other arts practitioners, and generally getting out and about in the name of the arts.

The below is a bit of a taster for what you can expect — hope you enjoy it!

My Bressie interview, published in the Sunday Business Post, Sept 2011

“I listen to pop,” says Niall Breslin. “I love pop. I write pop.”
Breslin has to talk a lot about his love of pop these days, which must be at least a little annoying for him. The Killers don’t have to justify their pop leanings. Neither do the Script. But Breslin has baggage. Once a professional rugby player, Bressie, as he’s now known — looks exactly like the kind of tough guy who might front a Queens of the Stone Age-style rock band.
And for six years, with his band The Blizzards, that’s at least somewhere in the region of what he did. Breslin made two albums with The Blizzards. They had a hit single in Ireland with Trust Me I’m A Doctor and entertained thousands at festivals like Oxegen. Brash, tuneful and rhythmic as they were, however, The Blizzards struggled to flip their small-time success into a big-time career.
In January 2010, the Mullingar-based outfit called a halt to proceedings. Breslin moved to London to chase the bright lights, pursue a songwriting career and make his first solo album. Hats off to him, he’s managed it in jig time — it’s a matter of days before his first, defiantly pop-oriented album Colourblind Stereo is released by Sony Music.
Sitting in a hotel in Temple Bar, Bressie is half cool indie musician (the freshly inked tattoo stretching up his forearm, the trendy sideburns) and half Big Friendly Giant, a handsome man so large and tall (6’6”) that it seems like no chair will ever comfortably accommodate him — and certainly no tabloid newspaper would ever miss him emerging from a nightclub.
As his kaleidoscopic musical approach might suggest, Bressie is an interesting bunch of guys. Chatty, down-to-earth and direct, he’s confident in himself and blissfully relaxed about what people know about him. Not for him the anxious denials or refusals to share opinions on anything more controversial than the price of cheese.
His Facebook page has more than 2,000 friends on it, and he’s perfectly happy to have fans see pictures of him in a kilt at a family wedding (his mother is Scottish and his father Irish). His Twitter page, meanwhile, is as revealing of his foibles as his tunes — he’s as likely to talk about himself accidentally bashing his head off the oven as he is his new single.
It’s important to Bressie to be one of the lads — he lives with three Irish friends in an apartment in Hampstead Heath in London. “Our entire direct friend group in London are all Irish. Irish people aren’t funny, but when we’re together we’re fucking hilarious. The English are like, `I have no idea what you’re talking about’, but we’re pissing our pants laughing.”
But Bressie is also climbing the pop industry ladder — and with pop music comes pop gossip. In recent times, his name has been linked in the papers with everyone from MTV presenter Laura Whitmore to the model Caprice. “It’s just hilarious,” he says. “The Caprice rumour, I got a call off my mum about that. She said: `I thought you didn’t like blondes.’ ”

Songs played on Sunday Morning Coming Down, Jan 8th 2012

Hi folks,
Below is a list of the tracks (hopefully all of the tracks, though I might have skipped one or two) I played on the Sunday Morning Coming Down on Phantom FM on Sunday, when I was covering for Pearl.

Track listing

‘Oliver’  Gemma Hayes
‘Solitary Man’  Ólöf Arnalds (cover of the Neil Diamond track)
‘Ti Ti’ Interference
‘Frailach’ The Frames
‘Ships In The Rain’ Lanterns On The Lake
‘Undertow’   Suzanne Vega
‘Whole Made Of Pieces’  Jónsi
‘Shelter ‘    Birdy (cover of The XX track)
‘Hold On’  Tom Waits
‘Heatwave ‘ The Blue Nile
‘The Wizard’ Bat For Lashes
‘Deeper’   Wild Beasts
‘Bats In The Attic (Unravelled)’ King Creosote & Jon Hopkins
‘Saturday’ Sparklehorse

My SBP Jonathan Franzen interview circa Freedom

Jonathan Franzen Interview

First published in The Sunday Business Post, Ireland, circa Sept 2010

Words: Nadine O’Regan

At a party in London last week, a pair of glasses was stolen. These were not just any glasses. These spectacles were ripped from the nose of one Jonathan Franzen, aka the author of The Corrections and Freedom, aka the most significant figure in the literary world right now. A ransom note was found for £100,000. The prankster/culprit and the glasses were apprehended with the help of a police helicopter.
The act was only the most recent indication of how big a star Franzen has become. There are others: Barack Obama is reading his new novel, Freedom; Time magazine put him on its cover — with the heading `Great American novelist’ — the first living writer to achieve the honour in ten years; and, after a spat that attracted global attention in 2001, Oprah Winfrey loves him again. Furthermore, the reviews of his new novel, Freedom, would make even his most garlanded contemporaries weep blood tears of envy. There’s a new term for it: Franzenfreude.
It’s not often that a novelist makes you feel like there’s a rockstar in the room. But as Franzen walks into the boardroom of the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire for this interview, it’s impossible not to feel a little nerdy thrill, along with that sense of impossibility that he’s actually here — it’s like someone more seen on television than in real life has just stepped out of the box and into your living room.
I’ve interviewed Franzen once before, in 2001, and the author looks just the same as he did then: tall, good-looking in a geek-chic way, with hair that’s flecked a distinguished grey.
“How have the past nine years been?” Franzen says, chivalrously introducing himself by gamely claiming to recall our first interview. Is he ready for me to turn on my dictaphone? I wonder. “I’ve assumed the position,” Franzen says, with a weary smile.

My Kristin Hersh interview

The Paradox view

Published in The Sunday Business Post, Ireland, on 30 January 2011

By Nadine O’Regan

‘I love Father Ted,” Kristin Hersh remarks, as she stands with her husband in a Dublin hotel lobby, chatting about her impressions of Ireland. “The kids love it too. It’s brilliant.”

It’s not often you find yourself trading Tedisms with a US alternative rock icon who paved the way for Courtney Love, Nirvana and the Pixies, but then you shouldn’t count on the expected from an encounter with Kristin Hersh.

Fine-boned and small of stature, with a fashionable fringe and round blue eyes that surprise you with their brightness, Hersh looks barely any older now than she did in the 1990s, when she sang with Michael Stipe on Your Ghost, the hauntingly odd first single from her brilliant debut solo album Hips and Makers.

Although Hersh is always likely to delve into the subjects of magic, bipolar disorder and suicide in her conversation, and has suffered more than most in her life, the 44-year-old Throwing Muses founder is also remarkably easy company: funny, unassuming and whip-smart; and amusingly delighted when I tell her that for many Irish admirers, she is an indie-rock pin-up.

Hersh has come to Dublin to promote her memoir, Paradoxical Undressing (published in the US as Rat Girl), which sees her return to the diaries she began in 1985 when she was 18.

Hersh has spent four years working them up to publication standard, and it shows: the book is brilliantly put together and beautifully, sharply written. An acid portrait of youth, it would frighten the horses and then some.

At heart, the book is a story of survival: Hersh was diagnosed first as schizophrenic and then as having bipolar disorder. Beneath the humour and insight, there’s a lurking, obliquely expressed fear of what she might do to herself.

Born in Atlanta and raised in Rhode Island, Hersh formed her band Throwing Muses when she was just 14, a scrappy thing who spent several of her teenage years homeless and refused to wear a coat, or even glasses to help herself see properly.

Songs were not compositions Hersh actively crafted. They were compulsions. They grabbed her by the throat and held on tight.

‘‘I hear the songs and copy them down,” Hersh says, settling down to a cup of tea in the bar of Buswell’s hotel. “My job is not to get in the way. That’s harder than you think, particularly if you turn music into a career. But it’s not hooks that bring a song home, and it’s not a moral that you already know. It’s surprises. It’s vitality.”

The songs began as ambient noise in Hersh’s head after an accident where she suffered a double concussion. ‘‘I was riding my bike to a teenage job, and an old lady careened into me. I flew way up into the air, and went limp, and the ground rose up. I believe it was the double concussion that made me start hearing music. The notes would continue until they were a cohesive piece. Eventually, I realised that no one else was hearing this sound. It was frightening but also beautiful.”

If that sounds like mumbo-jumbo to you, buy one of Hersh’s nine solo albums and consider the music. Strange chords and unusual time signatures dominate. Hersh has a refined, complicated sense of melody, but she rarely sings notes that go with the chord. She sings notes that seem not to belong, and yet also fit perfectly. There’s mathematical logic in them, but it doesn’t conform to the expected rules. When she was starting out, in the thrashier, more primal indie-rock band Throwing Muses, her sound would alarm even herself.

‘‘You can’t call what I do singing or entertainment,” she writes of her early offerings in Paradoxical Undressing. ‘‘I hiss and yell and wail. Sometimes I make seagull noises, unfortunately. Music is something I have almost no control over.”

It wasn’t long before a more sinister aspect started to appear alongside her songwriting gifts. The young Kristin became convinced that a house she sometimes stayed in had an evil aspect that was infiltrating her work.

‘‘In the Doghouse,” she writes, ‘‘sleep stopped coming, days stopped ending – now sleep doesn’t come and days don’t end. My songs are different, too, and when I play them, I become them: evil, charged.”

The diaries become clipped, terse in tone. In the song fragments Hersh includes, a momentum builds. ‘‘I’m losing my person,” she writes. ‘‘I don’t even look like a nice girl anymore. I look like the songs sound because I am like the songs sound.”

Hersh began to hallucinate a wolf in the night, a snake in her bag.

Realising that her songs were trapped inside her, she decided to set them free – by cutting her body open with a razor. It’s hard to talk about suicide attempts in a cosy bar in Dublin with two old biddies beside us, earnestly chattering about the price of tea, but I ask Hersh quietly nonetheless if it was only during the 1980s that she felt, as she writes, that ‘‘I don’t belong on this earth. I’m not good enough’’.

I’m foolishly expecting a happy answer because Hersh herself seems so wonderfully bright and sweet-natured. But she pauses and, when an answer comes, it sounds a little reluctant and awkward.

‘‘It’s been tough for the last 25 years,” she says. ‘‘Right now, I take supplemental lithium in very small doses and mega B vitamin doses.‘‘Even with children, depression can convince you that everyone is better off without you. I can be depressed and manic at the same time. It’s happened many times. I know lots of suicides, and I cannot judge them. I miss them, but I know that cloud, and I know it probably has something important to say at times.”

There are also physical repercussions for those suffering from certain forms of depression – you’re reminded of Kurt Cobain saying that he took heroin to stop his stomach pains. ‘‘I’m pretty sure Kurt was bipolar,” Hersh nods. ‘‘The physical pain that mania and depression cause is something people don’t talk about. There’s a huge desire to kill the pain.”

Like Hersh, Cobain was ambitious at the beginning of his career – sending notes and demos to record companies – and angry with himself later on, making it clear on his records that he felt he’d sold out: ‘‘Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old’’ (Serve The Servants).

For a while, Throwing Muses too played the record industry game, tweaking their songs to make them more radio-friendly, doing a million interviews and guest hosting MTV’s alt-rock show 120Minutes. Hersh’s stepsister and Throwing Muses member Tanya Donnelly also later formed her own band Belly, which notched up Grammy Award nominations and hit singles in the shape of Feed The Tree and Gepetto.

But Hersh ultimately wasn’t willing or able to follow the easy route. ‘‘When you are essentially sponsored by someone with a vested interest in the marketability of your product, your product is going to be dumbed-down,” she says. ‘‘Real music happens in basements and bedrooms and bars. Keeping a song at home is like keeping a kid in a closet – and yet, to squirrel my way through this bimbo of an industry to get real music to real people is an exercise in frustration.”

Hersh had a disastrous experience with Warner Music over what should have been her greatest commercial success, her first solo album Hips and Makers. ‘‘Hips and Makers was in the black the day it was released, as it only cost a few thousand dollars to make,” she says. ‘‘But the day I left, they declared it in the red, so I never made another penny off it.”

But in 2007, Hersh set up Cash Music (www.cashmusic.org), an organisation through which she and other artists could record and release music without any need for a record company.Her most recent album, Crooked, is every bit the equal of Hips And Makers – and if the world was a fairer place, it would occupy a spot in the home of anyone who loved indie music. These days, Hersh has a peripatetic existence.‘‘I never really stop running away, and now I take my whole family with me.”

She and her husband Billy O’Connell – who is clearly deeply protective of her – are currently house-sitting with their children and pet squirrel in New Orleans, in a mansion they’ve filled with their ‘‘crappy furniture’’ and strung with Christmas lights to make it homier.

This year, the couple will be married 20 years, and they still hold hands walking down the street.

When the time comes for them to leave, they will move city again, as they have been doing every year since 2005,when they lost their house in a flood in Ohio, three weeks after Hurricane Katrina. When Billy pops over to say hello, it transpires that they’ve been giving some thought to moving with two of their children for a while to Ireland – perhaps Wicklow – after New Orleans. ‘‘We’re always in cities,” says O’Connell. ‘‘We want to see the countryside.”

Professionally, the next step for Hersh is a second volume of memoirs. ‘‘I loved writing this book,” she says. ‘‘I didn’t at first because I wasn’t good at it. It took me four years to learn how to push out a scene.But I found I was good at falling back into memories, even without the diary.”

And, of course, there will be more albums, both from her newer band, 50 Foot Wave, and from Throwing Muses, who will go back into the studio in a matter of months.The music will be uncompromising and direct, recorded without the interference of a record company.

‘‘The listener doesn’t want it to suck, and neither do I,” Hersh says with a smile. Although she might not have the material success of some of her contemporaries, Hersh has something she knows is far more valuable: artistic satisfaction. ‘‘The music sounds the way it’s supposed to be,” she says.

Prince: the CD challenge

So I’ve decided to take on what may perhaps prove to be an impossible challenge: in advance of the Malahide Castle gig on Saturday I’m out to prove to committed Prince hater Conor that Prince really is deadly — and he’s just been listening to the wrong tunes — or not giving them enough attention.

With that in mind, I’m compiling an album of Prince material for Conor — comprising not just of songs Prince wrote and played on, but also songs he wrote for other people, and I’m throwing in a couple of covers musicians have done of his songs. I’m including some obvious stuff, but I’m adding some more obscure songs in there too — ones that aren’t so much about Prince crawling semi-naked across the bathroom floor (observe the videos) but more about simple quality tunes. (Mind you, ‘simple’ is not really a word in Prince’s vocabulary.)

Conor’s going to review the album, alongside Prince rookie, 17-year-old Robyn Maguire, on the show on Saturday. So far, with a large amount of help from my Prince fanatic buddy Adrian, this is the track listing I’ve come up with. Fingers crossed it does the trick!! Cannot wait til the Malahide Castle gig on Saturday.

Girls & Boys    5:24                  Prince
When You Were Mine    3:48    Prince    Dirty Mind    Pop/Funk
Starfish & Coffee    2:48    Prince      Dream Factory
Love…Thy Will Be Done    4:25    Martika       (written by Prince)
Sign ‘O’ the Times    5:03    Prince    2 Sign ‘O’ the Times    Rock
When Doves Cry    5:56    Prince & The Revolution     Purple Rain    R&B
She’s Always In My Hair    3:26                Prince
Darling Nikki – Foo Fighters     (cover of the infamous track)
I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man    Prince
Private Joy    4:31        Prince
Alphabet St.    5:40    Prince       Ultimate: Prince    R&B/Soul
Purple Rain    8:42    Prince and The Revolution       Purple Rain    Rock
Manic Monday    3:05    The Bangles         (written by Prince)
Rockhard In A Funky Place    4:32    Prince      The Legendary Black Album

Crimson & Clover    3:50        Prince
Joy in Repetition    4:47       Prince
Bang Bang    3:21        Prince

My Misterman review (From SBPost 17/07/11)

Misterman by Enda Walsh, Black Box Theatre, Galway, until July 24. 
Rating: *****

The business of living isn’t always easy. No one knows that better than Thomas Magill, a lonely, thirty-something midlands dweller, who is battling demons from within and without.

Living in a warehouse cluttered with tape-recorders, scrambled eggs and teddy bears, Thomas fills his days with activities – visiting his father in the graveyard, buying his mother biscuits and promoting religious improvement around the town of Inishfree – in an effort to stave off his darker tendencies.

Based on that description, Misterman – by internationally acclaimed Irish playwright Enda Walsh – should perhaps be the most miserable of plays, a torrent of self-loathing and woe. But Misterman is not what it seems.

While at one level Walsh’s reimagined play (first staged in 1999) represents ‘‘that very simple thing of what it is to be alive’’, as Walsh would have it, it’s rarely outwardly miserable. In fact, it’s one of the sharpest, laugh-out-loud funniest and most acutely well-observed plays I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching.

Misterman is ostensibly a 120-minute monologue from Cillian Murphy in the role of Thomas. But a large number of voices (along with an excellent score from Donncha Dennehy) also inhabit the stage. Some come at you from the Beckettian tape-recorders placed around the cavernous space – such as the voices of Thomas’s Mammy and the ‘angel’ Edel, which Thomas has recorded in his travels around the town.

Others are revealed by Thomas himself, as Murphy, giving an extraordinary performance, morphs himself into other characters, by dint of note-perfect changes in his vocal register and body language. He’s Mr McAnerney (‘‘Your poor dad.Now he was a great man,” he tells Thomas), the bully Dwain Flynn (‘‘You fucking headcase!” he screams at Thomas), Simple Eamon Moran (a potential religious affiliate) and Timmy O’Leary (‘‘the boy who treats his mother like an old dog’’).

So total is the transformation in each case that you find yourself thinking Murphy (unrecognisable in a dirty, buttoned-up shirt, his beard unkempt, his striking eyes almost hidden by hair) could do a great job of being a stand-up comic.

The wit of Walsh’s script,meanwhile, is dust-dry, the ripostes blunt and pithy. ‘‘D’ya know what I’d do if I didn’t have my senses? I’d kidnap ya,’’ one old biddy (also played by Murphy) tellsThomas affectionately. ‘‘The guards would have to lock me up.”

Line by line,Walsh moves to inextricably link the everyday with the grotesque – and the darkness waiting beyond. If there’s a slight dip in quality in the later stages, as Thomas moves towards a more naked expression of pain, this is no more than a small gripe.

This is the kind of play that makes you feel incredibly lucky to have seen it. Misterman is a stunning achievement.

Sunday Morning Coming Down playlist

Hi folks,
A few people were looking for my playlist from this morning's
Sunday Morning Coming Down -- I was covering for the wonderful
Pearl on Phantom --- check out her show at 10am every Sunday and
see her show details here.

Anyway,  here you go -- I had lots of fun doing it up!

Playlist for Sunday Morning Coming Down 
Father Us    3:26    Marry Waterson & Oliver Knight  from The Days That Shaped Me
Wren    4:18    Norabelle  from the album   Wren
Frailach    3:02    The Frames   from    Liss Ard Vol.1
Joi & Karen    3:25    Johann Johannsson    from   Englaborn
Cruel Time    5:36    Owensie  from Aliens
Marz    3:58    John Grant   from  Queen Of Denmark
Most Beautiful Widow In Town   3:19    Sparklehorse  from Vivadixiesubmarinetransmission
Set The Tigers Free   3:24    Villagers  from  Becoming A Jackal
Revelator   6:21    Gillian Welch   from    Time (The Revelator)
He War   3:30    Cat Power    from You Are Free
Lost Cause   3:47    Beck    from Sea Change
Slow Dynamo   2:44    Valerie Francis   from  Slow Dynamo
A Deeper Understanding    3:25    Kate Bush   15/04/201119:07
Don't Let It Bring You Down (LP Version)   2:57    Neil Young  from  After The Goldrush
Dynamite   4:26    Stina Nordenstam    from Dynamite
July Flame Laura Veirs   3:48      from the album July Flame
Complicated Shadows    2:57  Elvis Costello
Aimee Mann3:34       It’s Not Going to Stop

Burn Baby Burn — the death of Rock?

Pop Goes the Rock
30 January 2011

By Nadine O’Regan

Niall Breslin is leaving his newly-adopted hometown of London this afternoon.

He plans on being out of contact in Kent for awhile, as he’s got some songwriting to do and he wants a little peace of mind.

The songwriting won’t be for his band the Blizzards, though.

Just two years ago, the Mullingar pop-rockers had a top three hit in Ireland with their song Trust Me I’m a Doctor. In Breslin, they had a frontman that girls swooned over and even non-musos admired (Breslin is no skinny indie kid – he used to play rugby for Leinster).

And when they played live, they rocked good and hard. By Breslin’s own admission, they hadn’t yet made the album that would break them into the big time, but they had the potential – and, seemingly, the hunger and drive – to do it.

But the Blizzards disbanded over a year ago, unwilling to battle any further with an industry that refused to let them through the door, no matter how loudly they threatened to break it down.

Now two of the band run a pub together In Mullingar, another has gone back to college to study classical music, and Breslin is working as an all-genres songwriter and producer for 19 Entertainment, the London company founded by Simon Fuller, the brains behind the Spice Girls and American Idol.

When Breslin, 29, talks about the rock music industry, he can’t help it: his tone turns terse and a little angry. ‘‘What kills me about the rock thing is that the music fans who I call the purists love real music,” he says. ‘‘They love the underdog bands, the bands that are a little more left of centre. I can’t understand how these bands can’t sell albums if real fans love them.

“Why can we get Rage Against The Machine to number one to piss Simon Cowell off, but we can’t get bands we love into the charts? People are giving out about it, but they’re not actually buying these albums.”

Breslin’s experience is typical of a young rock act trying to make it in today’s music business.

These days, the only show in town is the one provided by chart-toppers such as Rihanna, Katy Perry and Jay-Z. Rock, as made by young people, is not at the races. A recent report in the British music press revealed that only three rock songs made it into the top 100 singles of 2010 in Britain – and one was a re-release of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, which was first released 29 years ago.

‘‘It is the end of the rock era,” said veteran DJ Paul Gambaccini. ‘‘It’s over, in the same way the jazz era is over. That doesn’t mean there will be no more good rock musicians, but rock as a prevailing style is part of music history.”

In Ireland, Rihanna, Katy Perry and Cheryl Cole ruled the Irish singles charts last year. In 2010’s top 100, only four singles could be classified as rock, and that’s by a rather generous definition: folk-rockers Mumford & Sons featured twice, and the relatively poppy Heathers and Journey (again) made the list.