HotPress’ master scribe eminent book-rocker Peter Murphy has his own blog! With the blogging equivalent of a champagne bottle, Interpol and Tom Waits baptised the latest addition to HP.com Blogs (the other being Anne Sexton on XXX). Expect the deliciously unexpected of relevations and an unparalleled peek at the man behind some of the magazine’s iconic features.
Check out today’s installment discussing his deep-rooted love for Eighties marvels The Triffids.
Check out this vid from Manina Film, an A-Z of festivals featuring several Irish musicians:
Here’s what they’ve got to say -
“Manina Film and the soon to be launched Irish Music Television have come together to bring you ‘The Festival Show’. In this we will be covering all the major festivals throughout Europe this summer. To kick the whole thing off we filmed an ‘A to Z’ Guide to summer music festivals including Glastonbury, Oxygen, Electric Picnic and Benicassim. Featuring Irish bands The Mighty Stef, The Kinetiks, Humanzi, Dark Room Notes, Dirty Epics, The Minutes, Ham Sandwich, The Chapters and Trev Radiator.”
An utterly selfish post dedicated to mine own blog this morning: Jazz Biscuits thinks orange and blue fonts are yuk and I should stick to clean black. To absolve my conscience and provide you with examples:
Queen Kongposted a video from their launch of new single So Brand New at Kennedys’ on Feb 28. The song Death Threat features Leanne Harte getting feisty on lead guitar to QK’s spontaneous thrashing. I’m all for mix’n'matching but that’s one diverse collaboration…
Anyone else hooked on Drop-D right now? I spent a sweet few hours this weekend rummaging ’round the annals of the site, catching up on their forum-goss and latest interviews from ASIWYFA, Butterfly Explosion and Captain Moonlight…all three of those bands are set for fine times with the Northern rockers receiving raves for Saturday’s show in Galway, the Captain’s going old-school in The Cobblestone on Friday and Butterflies explode back into gigging at AC30 in Whelans this weekend with the eagerly-awaited (on my part for sure!) premiere of their new drummer!
If you buy anything this week, it should be schoolbooks for Cameroon (according to the relentless flood of messages on Facebook - am I the only one bored of this vacuous, necessary waste of time?) but *I* think you should buy this:
So whaddya think regarding fonts? Is orange harsh, does royal blue offend your sensibilities? Do I go NayNay Winehouse and revert back to black? You know what to do….
Have you heard the good news? Cap Pas Cap will descend upon our church Crawdaddy on Wednesday February 20th with British beat-pharoahs These New Puritans. There won’t be a neon evangelist in sight.
Cap Pas Cap are the armchair devils of musicians’ nightmares, epitome-of-cool tune perfection cruelly taunting similar creative efforts of Irish independence by sheer quality. All vice has a price; an intense heightening of self-esteem and smugness in your own good taste ensues when 2006’s Not Not Is Fine reaches its glorious apex in See and A and you pledge CPC vinyl-tithes for life.
Last Friday I met the very giggly bunch known as We Should Be Dead in the Library Bar for a photoshoot. Their self-titled album was released the same day and they were in good spirits so we ran amok a bit, I wanted them to climb into a laundry trolley and run screaming through the corridors but was distracted by the tiniest hotel lift in existence, which we commandeered for some old-fashioned uproar.
Later that night they played Crawdaddy. What a gig! I’ll post the photos here tomorrow. The photoshoot pics are for the mag so I can’t release them yet. Another shoot with Ham Sandwich tomorrow means I might just get those laundry-cart snaps…
Walking down East Wall Road in the rain, conjuring and discarding ideas on how to spin this interview, my feet splash through puddles in time to Seventeen. Wild piano mirrors my urgent state of mind while traffic finds itself dubbed to rumbling drums. As track seams into track, I realise that this music was made to walk, breathe, live to: filled with purpose and intent, it will take you where you need to go.
Lube: Project X began as a three-piece in 2004 to eventually whittle down to LPX, moniker for Leigh O’Gorman’s singular work as an experimental electronic musician. Regular gig/club nights of scintillating Irish talent were established under the Electric Fix promotions label until its demise in the former half of 2007 when Leigh moved to High Wycombe in Warwickshire, England to complete a degree in music management.
A lengthy muffler of influence and personality peel away to reach the core of this man and his methods. Dig the ten-foot scarf: it’s his second, the first having been stolen at a gig in Cork.
“Maybe the scarf will resurface in a decade, a la Bono’s stetson?”
I ask, ever mindful of the value in potential-celebrity garb.
“That’d be amazing - at least then I can stitch the two together. You always knew in (Doctor Who) episodes that when Tom Baker fell in a hole, the scarf would be used. Only once did that not happen!” Trust him. Aside from encyclopaediac knowledge of BBC’s finest vintage, Leigh is also an authority on Hollywood teen stars. “I worked in a video store for four years ’til August 2007. Dullest. Job. Ever!! We had to push new releases yet at the same time were not allowed to watch anything above ‘12′ rating. So I watched nearly every Lyndsey Lohan and Hilary Duff film repeatedly for the last four years…and I’ve still never seen any Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, ET or Matrix films!”
At the launch of Seventeen at the BoomBoom Room, January 7th.
“As with TV and music, I’m more drawn to films from the Thirties through to the Sixties. I’m just not pushed to write much in the way of classically structured pop music (intro-verse-short chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus-refrain-end).
I love Sandinista! by The Clash: it’s a lesson that you can do anything with music and you should never confine yourself within a structure.”
