Ticket Stubs: Fanapo, Van Morrison and the ghost of Christmas twee

Break the fourth wall of stardom

A new app popped into The Ticket’s inbox during the week. Irish contemporary music collective Crash Ensemble are taking part in a trial of Fanapo, an app that allows music fans to video a question for a band, and have the band respond.

Creating connections with fans is big business. As the music industry increasingly values niches and core groups of fans instead of trying to reach everyone at once (unless you’re U2, who missed that memo), access makes fans feel special, and then their expectations about that access need to be met.

At the Web Summit this year, Lauren Wirtzer-Seawood, head of digital at Beyonce’s Parkwood Entertainment company, said that Beyonce checks every single piece of online content broadcast from her HQ no matter how small. Over on Instagram, Madonna is having plenty of fun giving everyone a glimpse of her body. Justin Bieber’s Instagram videos are all about him looking cool, skateboarding and playing ice hockey. But generally, these interactions are actually one way. Act gives to fan, and then fan dedicates their life to tweeting obsessively back (if act in question is One Direction). So Fanapo then, offers the opportunity to get an interaction, as opposed to a broadcast.

There is something surreal about the ability to get so close to musicians that their Tweets and Facebook updates drop into your feed, but once musicians break the fourth wall, there’s no going back. The more existential question we need to ask ourselves is whether we really want to know all of this stuff. For certain acts, being unknown has its pros, so we’ll have to wait and see if Burial gets mad into Snapchat or if Bowie adds you to his WhatsApp group.

Mocking fillers

The standard of purchasable twee is higher than ever this Christmas, making it even easier to find the perfect afterthoughts for your loved ones. The hallmark of a good stocking filler is novel impracticality – making the “I woke up like this” shower curtain a Kitschmas essential. Even more so if your shower doesn’t need a curtain. Available from

[ society6.com ]

, it’s a mere £55 (€70) to make your jacks fit for the Queen B.

Sigur Rós spread the futile festive cheer with their Vardeldur Candle, the studio-scented custom lump of wax that smells like the recording of their sixth album. And for only 30 beans. We’re torn between that and the Sigur Rós cosmetics bag. Will it match the Beyoncé curtain?

Breakable gifts are a must for Christmas. But gifts that melt will also suffice, so check out the Star Wars Death Star ice sphere mould. It gives minutes of ice-making merriment, and the perfect accompaniment for whiskey (ask a nearby adult to help you with this part).

Or get something that can be regifted. Figurines in their original packaging are a top choice here, such as the Monolith Action Figure from 2001: A Space Odyssey (strange magnetic fields not included). Equally useless are Sol Republic’s headphones for cats – designed specifically for Deadmau5’s feline friend, Professor Meowingtons. These are a mere $1,000 for the most unusable – but regiftable – stocking filler on the market.

Giving them something they already have is tradition, so look for the vinyl recording of Pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit to Ireland. This also gives you an opportunity to shop local, since it’s available from every charity shop nationwide for €2. But don’t put too much effort that would ruin the magic of the afterthought.

Van Speaks

Stop. The. Presses. Van Morrison graces the stage of Dublin’s Olympia theatre on December 10th in two guises: that of performer and that of public interviewee.

Frankly, we’re not sure which we’re looking forward to the most – the man’s gigs can range from the sublime to the oh so so, but we’ve never seen him being publicly interviewed before, so that alone could be worth the price of the ticket.

Subtitled Lit Up Inside (the title of his recently published book of selected lyrics, a slim volume that has been on the receiving end of at least one vituperative critique), the evening is in two parts.

The second part is the gig with a four-piece band; the first segment sees Morrison being interviewed by Scottish writer Ian Rankin across a Q&A session that lasts up to 30 minutes. Interspersed with the conversation will be readings of Morrison lyrics by poet Michael Longley, and an overview of his career by Dr Eamonn Hughes.

Something of a night, then, for Morrison fans, but it’s instructive to know that this event, while billed as a “once-off for Dublin”, has been staged before (at London’s Lyric Theatre last month, where Edna O’Brien read Madame George as a poem). Reports of Morrison relaxing into the interview (genially and knowledgeably probed by Rankin) have filtered through: he smiles, he laughs, he talks of his love of music.

One question: for the Dublin gig, surely music lover Roddy Doyle should have been asked to be the interviewer? After his Roy Keane book, he’d be used to dealing with mavericks renowned for fractious behaviour.