Dot writes: I’ve been flirting for a while with the idea of starting to buy vinyl. As a 37-year-old mum of two who never had the knack of being either an encyclopaedic music nut or in any way cool even when I was a 22-year-old working in a record shop, I don’t fit the part, but what the hell. Let not society’s ageist and sexist stereotypes limit my bold consumer choices! People are always saying that vinyl sounds warmer, sharper, just better somehow. CDs and mp3s both work by breaking the musical information into little bits and, in the case of mp3s, throwing a lot of it away. And I’ve had a further nudge from The Basics (a band I am very fond of, as excitably demonstrated in this gig review from last year), as they (probably Kris, in fact) recently posted on Facebook to ask who would buy their new album* on vinyl when it is released. First I thought no – I don’t have a turntable. Then I thought, well, it could be worth it in the short-term, as it would come with a digital download so I’d be able to listen to the music that way and have the physical copy for the artwork, which is much better in a larger format. But really I would want to play it. Records are for playing.
See? Much bigger artwork on an LP…
So, in order to play the new Basics record that I plan to get, I need to do the following.
– find somewhere to put them. That would have to be the front room.
– to make the space in the front room, get rid of the television.
– to make the front room into a listening space for adults rather than a telly-watching, lego-strewing, sofa-dismantling space for children, move their toys into their bedroom and buy a new sofa-suite.
– to make the space for the toys in the bedroom, rip out the built-in wardrobe.
– to make the bedroom halfway bearable after ripping out the built-in wardrobe, completely redecorate the room and put in a new carpet.
– to find the money to buy the system, sofa suite, paint and new carpet, come up with a workable blackmail plot, since we don’t seem to be doing too well at saving right now and what we are saving is earmarked for the next trip to NZ.
– to come up with the blackmail plot, engage in covert surveillance of prominent figures, the only one of whom I’d have much of a chance of watching is probably the head of the university where I work (not that I’m aware of any blackmailable activities on his part, but you can do a lot with editing, I believe).**
When I am sacked and sent to prison, you’ll know I did it all for The Basics.
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*Current indications are that the album is called The Age of Entitlement and is likely to be out in August, though the release date hasn’t been confirmed. There should be a single soon, Roundabout (a sensitive meditation on the traumatic human cost of certain types of traffic intersection) (previewed here).
**It’s ok. I wouldn’t really do this. After all, at the moment the only camera I have is the crap one on my phone.
After just over two months sitting on my hands after packing in the old job, I’m now gainfully employed again. Hip, hip… I’ve had a finger and a half of my special ‘getting a job’ Scotch which is about 30 years old and way out of my regular price range (but I won it as a scholarship gift). It’s truly a beautiful, beautiful drink, but I don’t think it’s so very much better than, say, a 15 year old whisky, or better enough to justify paying more than 50 to 60 quid. When it comes to pricing whisky (in this country at least) there’s a minimum floor created by the truly massive duty on alcohol which together with VAT amount to close to €14 per 700ml bottle. Then there is the fact that whisky is a very expensive commodity to produce, since it has to be warehoused for a minimum of three years in oak barrels before it counts as whisky (think how much vodka the distillery could have made in the meantime instead of making that bottle). So the manufacturer, distributor and retailer all have to make a profit out of the balance over €14. That covers production costs, wages, marketing, materials etc etc. A micro-sized distillery probably has to retail for €40 at a minimum to make any sort of return on investment. So basically €50 doesn’t buy you much of a premium in whisky. That’s just your average product. However, actual price is merely influenced by the fundamentals like duty and cost of goods to produce. it’s also affected by rarity and marketing. So the actual price can go way up. Obviously the older the whisky gets the rarer it is (because inevitably some whisky is sold young). The reason I say it’s not worth paying too much for whisky is that, in my opinion, the pleasure you get from whisky doesn’t increase in line with price. To a degree more mature whiskies taste better than younger whiskies, but only up to a point, and they don’t necessarily increase in proportion to the increase in cost. You’re not buying the sensation on your taste buds. You’re buying the right to have that sensation instead of someone else having it. The qualities of the sensation itself drop out of the picture. All this means: Don’t let the snobs fool you about whisky. Drink the stuff you like and the stuff you can afford and be happy with that. Sure, if someone gives you an expensive bottle, enjoy that too, but keep things in perspective.
I visited a friend in London yesterday and we did a nice tour of the microbreweries there taking in Camden Town brewery, Kernel, Brew by Numbers, Partizan, and the London Fields brewery. Actually, Kernel was closed (it was a Saturday) so we only saw the outside. These breweries all have tap rooms open at the weekend to sample the beer at the brewery. I don’t know if any of them brew at the weekend.
A great day out!
Fermenters outside Camden Town BreweryCamden Town brewery packaging roomKernel breweryBrew by NumbersFermenters at Brew by NumbersBrew by Numbers brewery under railway archLoft space at Partizan breweryDave Porter brew house in use at Partizan breweryFermenters at Partizan brewery
Dot writes: people who live in Ireland or Britain grimly expect rain in the holidays, or at least a mean stiff wind. However, this week we’ve had blue skies and some astonishing warmth. (Astonishing warmth = 18 degrees in Dublin. Woah.) I took Thursday off work (my mum is visiting, I’m allowed) and we had a family trip into Wicklow to climb Great Sugarloaf, eat a leisurely lunch at Mount Usher Gardens, and then tour the gardens. We’d worried it might be too early in the season for the plants, but there was a wonderful display of flowers – daffodils, bluebells and frittilaries on the ground, rhododendrons and magnolias in the trees. Here are some pictures, mostly taken by my mum.
Today I had a lot of baking to do. Mum took the boys to a playground while I shopped. Then Frank helped with the baking.
Portmarnock Beach, 9 July 2014The same rocks, 7th April 2015. My mum in stripes.
Dot writes: It’s a little hard to be sure because the pictures are taken from different angles, but it certainly looked to me when we were there as though the winter storms must have dumped a load of extra sand on Portmarnock beach. That large rock in the foreground seems much more buried now.
My mum is visiting. The sun is shining. I worked in the morning and then we went to the beach. It’s suddenly warm enough for the boys to run around making sand-castles in their underpants. (That is, run around in their underpants making sand-castles.) I paddled in the sea and it was cold but exquisitely clear.
Dot writes: last night Ken and I went to see Courtney Barnett play at Whelan’s. This was special not just because she’s very good but because this was the first time we’d ever been to a gig together, even though we’ve been a couple for almost twelve years. (We’ve managed to attend some contemporary dance performances.) Anyway, she was my pick – I’d come across her in my erratic explorations of Australian music over the last year – and happily Ken liked her. Or, rather, liked them, since, although Courtney Barnett writes, gives interviews and is discussed as a solo artist, she plays with a band, currently a trio, and speaks in the first person plural, as in “Have you all bought our album?” (Big cry from the crowd of “Yes!”) There’s a nice chemistry between the band members and they look as though they could all be cousins, which is maybe something that happens when you spend a long time in a van with people.
We were going to the gig with friends and the arrangement was to meet them in a pub opposite the venue beforehand. However, the friends were running late and I wanted to make the most of this rare chance to hear live music, so we crossed the road in time to catch part of the support act, Fraser A. Gorman. At first we both regretted it, Ken because we’d left a craft beer pub for somewhere with a truly terrible selection (the day was saved when some bottled O’Hara’s was spotted behind the bar), and me because, well, I was initially unimpressed by Fraser. It was a solo performance with guitar and intermittent harmonica, and it’s quite hard to wow people who don’t know your songs with that slender equipment. But he had a humorous way with the crowd and after a bit he played a number I’d checked out earlier, and we decided we liked him after all. Here’s a nice video of him exploring a carpet.
Then there was the usual hiatus before the main act, during which our friends turned up and the crowd increased. The crowd was tall. Courtney Barnett is popular with tall people. I felt I was pretty lucky in my view of the stage, all things considered.
A predictably terrible photo taken with my phone
So – it was a blistering set. I’ve read other reviews that say this: the sound is much heavier live and this band really rocks. They opened with “Elevator Operator”, which is also the first track on the recently released album. Courtney isn’t a loquacious front woman, saving her more expansive eloquence for her lyrics, and she has a dry way with transitions between songs: “Hello! That was the first song. This is the second song. We’ll say hello after that one too.” The second song was “Anatomy of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York)” and I don’t recall if she did say hello after it or not, but they went on pretty rapidly into “Lance Jr.”, a song from her first EP. The bass line and chord progression remind me of a Nirvana song I haven’t pinned down yet (“Lance Jr.” is the first song in this live performance – see what you think). Even though it was only the third song in the set Courtney and her bass player, Bones, flung themselves into a big instrumental rock-out before coming back to the verse.
Essentially they played most of the album, not in order, plus some key songs from the earlier EPs. A particular stand-out was “Depreston” (“this song has only two chords, which is…average”). It was maybe the quietest song in the set and the crowd’s voices (including mine) emerged surprisingly sweetly over the pared-down instrumental line to sing along with the chorus. Although Courtney Barnett incorporates a lot of specifically Australian details in her lyrics, this reflective song about viewing a house that’s simultaneously a property in a boom market and a place of human memories has an obvious resonance in an Irish context: “If you’ve got a spare half a million / you could knock it down and start rebuilding.” “Avant Gardener” also went down a storm, and I found I knew most of the words.
The gig was sold out and there was a happy energy in the enthusiastic crowd. “Did you see us last time?” Courtney asked. A small but appreciable portion of the audience shouted “Yes!” “Trick question! This is our first time here.” Clearly these people would have liked to have seen her before; maybe some of them had, somewhere else. She’s nice. She took big swigs of water between songs because “my mum told me to drink lots of water on tour.” I was trying to work out what was on her t-shirt; our friends pointed out it was Torvill and Dean!
The main set finished with the recent single, “Pedestrian at Best”; you could feel it coming for a while as it was the big song that had been missing earlier. For me this was the only slight disappointment of the evening, because although it’s another big rocker the best thing about it is the clever, ranty lyrics, and they were a bit hard to hear in the sheer mass of noise; the sound was up painfully loud at this point. But it was certainly a cathartically shouty closer. Then in accordance with convention the band returned for an encore (“actually we do know some more songs”): “Aqua Profunda” from the album, and what Courtney described as “a cover of a cover”, her version of the Divinyls covering the Easybeats’ “I’ll Make You Happy“. This was a really satisfying finish to the show, offering a slight change of style that still fit well with the rest of the set and showed off how she can sing. Singing your own songs is one thing, and she often goes for a trailing-off, half-spoken style that prioritises the words over the tune and has, also, a down-to-earth dryness about it, a possible suspicion of the emotionality and indulgence of full singing; but the fact is she has a strong voice, deep and throaty, and I probably like her cover of “I’ll Make You Happy” more than the Divinyls’ one.
In sum: we had a great time listening to Courtney Barnett. I’ll be buying the double EP “A Sea of Split Peas” to add to the album (I got “Avant Gardener” as a single). There’s a huge buzz around her at the moment and it’s thoroughly merited. She writes clever songs and performs them with passion, and she doesn’t feel the need to dance around in her bra, which is also good. Happy punters here.
Further terrible photo taken with my phone. The backdrop is lights projected onto a sheet.
Dot writes: this evening I felt a very strong urge to listen to Siegfried’s Funeral March from Götterdämmerung, which I succumbed to as loudly as I dared once the kids were in bed. It prompted me to reflect on how early exposure to Wagner probably helps to explain my love of melodic hard rock; I do like music that is passionate, overwhelming and vast, and I am not bothered by lack of irony. This in turn made me think whether one could have a twinning arrangement between classical and popular genres. Maybe electronica could come to an agreement with early Baroque. Performances of Mozart’s operas could have little signs in them mentioning their exchange programme with quirky female-fronted indie-pop groups. Folk and renaissance music have been mixing it up for years. Any further suggestions?
Ken and Dot's Allsorts 