On The Record »

• Dexys: one of those things

  May 17, 2012 @ 8:33 am | by Jim Carroll

  Let’s talk about the passion again. It will not have escaped the attention of those who study the music media for comings and goings that Kevin Rowland and Dexys have returned to the limelight with a new album “One Day I’m Going To Soar”. There have been a couple of interviews, a stomping set of five star live shows showcasing that new record and an appearance this week on Later With Jools. For those who know Dexys merely as the “Come On Eileen” band who soundtracked school discos, there is sure to be much frowning, shoulder-shrugging and so-whatery accompanied by comments about what the band are wearing (Dexys were always at the cutting edge of satorial elegance) rather than what the band are playing.

  But for those who have spent years going back time and time again to albums like “Don’t Stand Me Down”, “Searching for the Young Soul Rebels” and even the often overlooked Celtic Soul Brothers’ thump of “Too-Rye-Aye”, the prospect of “One Day I’m Going To Soar” is an exciting one. Aside from Rowland’s solo albums (the second of these, “My Beauty”, released by Alan McGee’s Creation), there hasn’t been an album of new music under the Dexys (nee Dexy’s Midnight Runners) moniker since 1985. There were reunion shows in 2003 and occasional sightings of Rowland as a DJ, but no work attempting to match or even better what was in the back-catalogue has arrived until now.

  It will be interesting to guage the reaction to the new material beyond the heartland of older music writers who grew up with Dexys myths playing out in their imagination. Oh, how we lapped them up: the team of hard-chaws exuding pugilist charm in On the Waterfront reefer jackets and caps that met in caffs and went running together, the band who went from Top of the Pops’ fixtures in dungarees, berets and stubble with “Eileen” to release “Don’t Stand Me Down” and confuse the hell out of everyone with a much different sound and preppy, classic Madison Avenue, pre-Mad Men advertising executive tailoring (the attire was always an important part of the Dexys’ story), the stories which emerged from Rowland’s infamous Reading Festival appearance in 1999, which he talks about here.

  But it was the music as much as everything else which fired up your imagination. 1980s’ “Searching for the Young Soul Rebels” wasn’t a debut album so much as a statement of intent, Rowland and his soul warriors channeling the spirit of veteran soul men like Otis Redding and Jackie Wilson, the romantic passion of Van Morrison and the brassy soul of deepest Birmingham into a set which burned brightly.

  Two years later, “Too-Rye-Aye’s” barrage of fiddles, brass and impassioned genius (that would be Rowland aiming for the stars and getting there) made for a wonderfully rough-house affair with Rowland’s fascination with Van Morrison back when Van was decent continuing to form a startling Caledonian soul album. Brave, bold and audacious, “Don’t Stand Me Down” was the high water mark of Rowland’s soulful odyssey. Surprisingly mellow and countryified in places, “Don’t Stand Me Down” was, oddly, badly received on its release in 1985, but is now regarded as something of a lost treasure. “One Day I’m Going To Soar”, then, has a lot to live up to.

  After the jump, you’ll find an interview I did with Rowland back in 2007 when he came to Dublin to do a spot of DJ-ing. He talked about etiquette, burlesque and, yes, Van the Man. He also talked about the new songs he had written and how important it was not to rest on his laurels.

  “It’s good to move on, it would be pointless to be singing about nothing or performing old songs that don’t mean anything to me. I’m someone who has to express exactly what I feel. Anything else just won’t do.”

  

  
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• You can’t, you won’t and you don’t stop

  May 8, 2012 @ 9:02 am | by Jim Carroll

  The very first thing I searched for on the internet was information about the Beastie Boys’ magazine Grand Royal. Back in 1994, we were living in the land of dial-up modems which took forever to go through the motions, but you were prepared to wait. Hell, you had to wait. You had no other choice. I can’t remember what I found out about Grand Royal on that first search, but I know that the magazine’s approach to content – music, culture, fashion and random stuff which would have made absolutely no sense in any other context – was just what I wanted from a magazine. I wasn’t alone. Those Beastie Boys knew what they were doing.

  I’m not the only one reliving the band’s heyday in the wake of the very sad news about Adam “MCA” Yauch on Friday. It’s telling that this death has had so much of an effect on so many people from their twenties to forties. The Beastie Boys were a key band for this generation because they embraced the cultural and artistic possibilities of the age.

  Three savvy New Yorkers who hit the high spots during hip-hop’s golden age, they naturally went on to do lots of different stuff as the years passed by. Like their peers, standing still and repeating yourself was never an option. They were still rhyming – last year’s “Hot Sauce Committee Part 2″ album, by the way, is a peach – but they were also involved in everything from art exhibitions (Mike Diamond has just curated Transmission LA for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles) to film-making (Yauch’s Oscilloscope Laboratories produced flicks like that great basketball doc Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot, Irishman Lance Daly’s Kisses and tons more). Why stick to one thing when you have the chance and the talent to have a go at many things?

  But it was the music which was the real special sauce. Every single album was a spectacular bum-rush of bad-ass funky sounds (“Paul’s Boutique”, “Check Your Head” and “Ill Communication” continue to display incendiary smarts in this department and not just when it comes to canny crate-digging) and brilliant, eminently quotable one-liners and zingers. Live, they started out as snotty punk rock brats and morphed into an act who could work a GAA field (Galway, 1998) or tent (Electric Picnic, 2007) to the bone. I saw them several times over the years – those two shows, Dublin’s Tivoli in 1994 and the RDS the following year – and they never failed to convince.

  After the jump, you’ll find an interview I did with all three of them back in 1998 before that Galway show. You rarely get to interview all the members of a band together (most times, you don’t want that), but with the Beastie Boys, it made perfect sense (or nonsense, depending on their mood). All for one, one for all.
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• Archive: Youssou N’Dour

  January 4, 2012 @ 9:25 am | by Jim Carroll

  It’s not every day that one of your past interviewees decides to stand for president of his country, but I suppose Youssou N’Dour could never be regarded as your typical interviewee to begin with. His decision to challenge Senegal’s incumbent president Abdoulaye Wade in elections next month won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has followed his career’s many twists and turns, which has seen him move from worldwide crossover hits (“Seven Seconds” with Neneh Cherry) to political activist and media mogul at home with his TFM radio and television stations. Back in 2002, I spoke to him around the time of the release of his fantastic “Nothing’s In Vain” album and, yes, politics was on the agenda even then.
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• Amy Winehouse RIP

  July 23, 2011 @ 6:25 pm | by Jim Carroll

  Very sad news about the death of Amy Winehouse at her London home this afternoon. She was just 27. Whatever about those drink and drug demons which dominated coverage after the success of “Back to Black”, Winehouse was a hugely talented soul with an incredible voice and some superb songs. Interview with her first published in The Ticket in 2006 below.
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• Archive: Gil Scott-Heron

  May 29, 2011 @ 6:50 pm | by Jim Carroll

  As reported yesterday, the great Gil Scott-Heron died in a New York hospital on Friday night at the age of 62. After the jump, you’ll find an interview I did with him when he was promoting the “I’m New Here” album, which was published in The Ticket in February 2010. The piece also contains an interview with XL Records’ boss Richard Russell on working with Scott-Heron on that album.
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• A walk across the rooftops with The Blue Nile

  February 10, 2011 @ 10:09 am | by Jim Carroll

  There’s a great quote on the dust-jacket of Allan Brown’s new book “Nileism” about The Blue Nile which goes a little way to summing up this most perplexing of bands in a pithy line. No, not the quote from Chris Martin outlining his ignorance about the band, but rather “a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a raincoat”. But, of course, this being the Blue Nile, that quote will probably backtrack on itself, take a few years off to work out the phrasing and finally be released without much fanfare.

  “Nileism” looks at the strange career of the Glasgow band, a band who produced a mere four albums in three decades and a band who sadly never bothered the mainstream unduly. A pity because half of those albums “A Walk Across the Rooftops” and “Hats” contain the kind of evocative, emotional, romantic, melancholic, heartbreaking pop few others have come close to emulating. Their other two albums weren’t too shabby either – certainly, “Peace At Last” and “High” are better than anything Coldplay will ever put their name to – but somehow, the public and The Blue Nile never enjoyed a lengthy waltz together. A few loving glances to be sure, when they had a record company backing them to the hilt, but nothing to remember the following day.

  Reading “Nileism”, the reader will come across a band snatching defeat from the jaws of victory time and time again. The lengthy period between albums didn’t help. The band’s approach to touring also wasn’t a plus, though the sporadic gigs (I remember a spellbinding show at Dublin’s Gaeity Theatre in September 1990 when you could hear a pin drop during the songs) were quite special. Inter-band relationships? Yeah, that would be another one on the blame list.

  In the music business of the 1980s and 1990s, The Blue Nile happily did all the wrong things, including eventually taking one of those IMF/ECB-like advances to switch from Virgin to Warners. The band didn’t seem to realise that they’d have to pay that money back. Cue another couple of years of pondering, musing and Glaswegian angst. As Brown says at one stage, a central paradox of bandleader Paul Buchanan is how “someone so invested in their work can produce such a small amount of it, and so infrequently”. He adds that may be a matter for psychology rather than biography.

  By book’s end, it’s clear that The Blue Nile just don’t belong in this game any more. A changing record industry has run out of time and patience for a band who relied on the largesse of the old-school record label machine and who were promoted slowly and steadily in the old-school way. Of course, The Blue Nile were always a band out of time, but there are very few folks left in the business willing to take a chance on a bunch of idiosyncratic Scottish perfectionists. Brown’s interviews with managers, musicians, producers and anyone else who worked with the band at one stage or another detail how the individual’s infatuation with the band and their music led to eventual heartbreak and disappointment. Perfectionism, especially perfectionism coated with Catholic guilt as seemingly was the case here, can be a bitch to deal with.

  But, as you can hear on a song like “Let’s Go Out Tonight”, that perfectionism can produce moments of true splendour. (After the video and the jump, you’ll find an interview which I did with Paul Buchanan for this newspaper from 2004 when he was promoting The Blue Nile’s last album “High”).

  
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• Archive: Al Green

  January 11, 2010 @ 4:16 pm | by Jim Carroll

  Willie Mitchell’s death last week prompted me to pull out this interview with the great Al Green from the Irish Times’ archives. This interview is from 2005 when Green was plugging his “Everything’s OK” album which Mitchell had produced. Indeed, Green’s career might have been a whole lot different had he not bumped into Mitchell all those years ago. Interview with one of the greatest soul voices of them all after the jump.
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• Archive: Vashti Bunyan

  November 24, 2009 @ 10:00 am | by Jim Carroll

  Homelights ahoy! The Adrian Crowley and Foggy Notions-curated festival takes place at Dublin’s Whelan’s next weekend. For my money, the highlight should be the fantastic Vashti Bunyan on Sunday November 29 (with support from Andy Irvine, Minotaur Shock, Lord Cut-Glass and Adrian Crowley with Geese). Here’s an interview I did with her for The Ticket back in 2005 after she released the “Lookaftering” album for Fat Cat.
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• Archive: Jah Wobble

  October 13, 2009 @ 2:13 pm | by Jim Carroll

  Those of you looking for a good read this weather should check out “Memoirs of a Geezer: The Autobiography of Jah Wobble” in which likable, chirpy bass warrior and Spurs fan Jah Wobble tells his life story in his own inimitable way. Publication of the book coincided with news that Public Image Ltd, the band which Wobble (nee Wardle) was in with his old mucker John Lydon, were reforming, though Wobble will play no hand, act or part in that reunion. My review of the book is here and, after the jump, you’ll find an interview with Wobble from 2004 when he was plugging his “I Could Have Been a Contender” anthology for Trojan. Best interview I’ve conducted to date in a Chinese restaurant in Manchester.
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