On The Record »

• 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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• Tomorrow, In A Year

  June 24, 2011 @ 11:19 am | by Jim Carroll

  In 2010, I talked to Olof Dreijer from The Knife about the duo’s work on Tomorrow, In A Year, Danish theatre company Hotel Pro Forma’s Darwin-inspired opera. Tonight and tomorrow night, the opera will be performed at Cork Opera House as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival. After the jump, Peter Crawley talks to Hotel Pro Forma’s Ralf Richardt Strøbech about the company’s adventures in opera.
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• All City Records on the record

  February 1, 2011 @ 9:03 am | by Jim Carroll

  Many of you may already have read my piece on All City Records which ran in The Ticket last Friday. Like many of you, I’ve been an admirer of the Dublin-based label with some 50 releases to their name, including great cuts from Krystal Klear, Heralds of Change (Hudson Mohawke and Mike Slott), Onra, Dam-Funk, Ras G and many, many more, for quite some time. It was great to talk to label chief Olan O’Brien and get his views, especially on how it’s digital rather than physical sales which are keeping All City in clover, something you never hear label bosses talk about. Naturally, Olan had a lot more to say that what made it into the final piece so you’ll find some more bits and pieces from our chat in a noisy cafe after the jump.
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• DJ Shadow interview

  June 30, 2010 @ 9:11 am | by Jim Carroll

  My interview with DJ Shadow, his first in several years, from today’s paper is here. He plays Belfast’s Ulster Hall on Sunday and Dublin’s Tripod on Monday.

  The feature in the paper also included a panel of additional quotes from Shadow, but this panel doesn’t appear to be online. Those quotes can now be found after the jump.
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• Julian Casablancas on The Strokes

  January 8, 2010 @ 3:51 pm | by Jim Carroll

  In today’s Ticket, there is an interview with Julian Casablancas.

  While he is naturally talking about his banging new solo album “Phrazes of the Young”, talk also turns to The Strokes. The band have already announced a couple of festival dates for 2010 – and are supposed to be back in the studio this month working on album number four – but Casablancas was not exactly jumping up and down about it. Here’s the relevant extract (complete with some quotes which got edited out for space reasons)

  So is Casablancas looking forward to becoming a full-time Stroke again?

  “To be honest, no, but I’ll do it. It’s hard because I have to be careful about what I say about this. I do an interview here in Ireland and speak my mind and end up upsetting other people in the band and they’ll be busting my balls about what I said to you.”

  That doesn’t sound like fun.

  “It sucks. The tension and the stress of that whole time with the last album was such a downer that I’m, yeah, guarded about what might happen next. I mean, we have never really worked together, at least not in the way I understand the term.”

  It must be even more difficult when you remember the early days, when you and the other young guns were having a ball just making music together.

  “The music part is not hard, it’s all the crap that comes with it that I find hard. Working on music is when I’m happiest.

  “When we took the ferry here from Scotland last night, I got to sit and work for an hour and a half and I was so happy. I love stage one of any idea. The hardest part of it is easy because it’s fun.

  “But then when it comes to all this other shite, when you’re dealing with people and their people and trying to get things done and dealing with different ways of getting things done and all the challenges that takes, man, that’s hard.

  “What are you going to do? This is what I do, that ain’t going to change. These solo shows I’m doing now are the first time I’ve been onstage since I took a break. I didn’t miss it or I didn’t really get excited about it, but I have found, as the tour went on, that I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever have. I think I wasn’t really enjoying it before.”

• The dude from the Hideaway House

  January 9, 2009 @ 9:59 am | by Jim Carroll

  Dylan Haskins first popped up on my radar last year when there was a discussion here about the lack of all-ages venues in Dublin city-centre and some folks mentioned the Hideaway House gigs he was doing out in his house in Deansgrange. Since then, I’ve come across Dylan via his excellent Roll Up Your Sleeves documentary on DIY culture and Hideaway Records, the label which stuck out that great album from Heathers amongst other releases. He’s also involved in a lot of other very interesting bits and pieces too, including the forthcoming Change? event.

  A lot of people think very highly of him and quite rightly so. He’s someone who has already kicked off a load of interesting, fascinating projects which have encouraged others to get involved or try their hand at putting on gigs. And he could well be someone we will be hearing about for many years to come.

  There’s an interview with him in today’s Ticket, but print issue space restrictions meant I couldn’t include everything we talked about so the full transcript is after the jump.

  Be sure to check out Change? in the Project Arts Centre from January 26 to 31. It will feature lots of workshops, discussions, photo exhibitions and much more. There will also be ongoing screenings of Roll Up Your Sleeves every day from noon on the half-hour.
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• “The nuttier I became, the more money we made; the more money we made, the more they paid me; the more they paid me, the crazier I got”

  April 22, 2008 @ 2:33 pm | by Jim Carroll

  When it comes to interviews, most musicians don’t have a lot to say for themselves. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions for a reason. These are the musicians who have been through the mill, musicians who have genuinely fascinating points to make, musicians who actually enjoy answering questions which have nothing to do with what their producer or engineer did in the studio.

  When faced with a tape recorder, however, most musicians, even those with fantastic albums to talk about, let the cliches roll. New bands are the worst offenders. They have absolutely nothing of interest to say because, in most cases, they have done absolutely nothing of interest. They’ve made a CD. Anyone can make a CD. Hell, I could make a CD. Actually, hang on, apparently I’ve made a few CDs.

  The real stories are the ones behind the music, which is why the most interesting interviewees are the tone-deaf, sneaky, conniving, slippery people who pull the strings. Give me an hour’s face-to-face with Malcolm McLaren or Walter Yetnikoff any day over the boys in any band. Both chaps may have egos the size of the Grand Canyon and a tendency to be grouchy and unpredictable, but both always have great stories to tell when they get warmed up.

  Back in 2004, Yetnikoff was in Dublin plugging his amazing book “Howing At The Moon” and I interviewed him for the paper. Full interview follows for those who’ve asked about it.
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