Familiar Faces #1 – The Sylvia Plath Woman

There’s this woman I’ve written about before – on another blog, in another place, a long time ago – who walks up and down my road. She does it at least once a day. In my head, I call her Sylvia Plath; based on the image of the poet haphazardly formed in my consciousness from half-glimpsed grainy black and white photos and the language of her poetry.

She walks with quick, short, nervous steps and I would sometimes see her wring her hands in a neurotic, Lady Macbeth way. She talks to herself, quite animatedly. She does it quite loudly too so when the traffic fades, her voice wafts down the road ahead of her.

Hard Working Class Heroes – A Delayed Reaction

It’s been over a week since Hard Working Class Heroes, but staying up in the heart of Dublin for the weekend and being at the centre of the Irish music industry for those few days left me with a lot of sensory and intellectual information that I had to try and process. So it’s only now that I have managed to distill it into writing. But the various thoughts, musings and reactions fall under various topics so I’ve divided them into three different posts to make it easier. For your consideration:

HWCH #1 – The Bands

State and Analogue have already done pretty good write-ups of the various different bands they saw over the weekend so I’m going to try and keep this pretty brief.

HWCH #2 – The Industry/The Scene

The first – and only other time – I was at Hard Working Class Heroes was in 2004. I was only 18 then and was pretty unfamiliar with the Irish music scene at the time. I knew The Frames of course and I knew Fred, but I had never heard of most of the other bands and so my friends and I wandered from venue to venue (back then it was all conveniently based within Temple Bar proper) watching, discovering, enjoying and hating different bands. It was the first time I saw Rulers of the Planet and Bell X1 as well as others that I have long since forgotten.

HWCH #3 – Dublin

I just know I’m going to come off as a wide-eyed culchie from the shticks to all you jaded Dublin-types when I write this piece, but it doesn’t matter.

The Whites of Their Eyes

Not every album you listen to will change your life. Not every movie you see will take your breath away. Not every book you read will dazzle you with poetic prose. Not every piece of art you absorb will alter your view of reality. Not every gig you attend will leave an indelible mark in your memory. To expect them to simply leaves you open to constant disappointment.

I consider myself to be a regular gig-goer. Sometimes these gigs are large affairs, involving touring buses, big crowds, formidable lighting set-ups and sound desks bigger than my bed. Other times, they are not quite so big but feature just as much technological tom-foolery, still-sizeable crowds and over-priced liquid refreshments. More often than not though, they’re small-to-tiny things, in a room above a pub, with perhaps less than a hundred people (a considerable percentage of whom I know), where the lighting is an unpretentious light bulb dangling from the ceiling and the sound-guy is friend of the singer’s.

In my time I’ve been dazzled by bright lights, big screens and bigger names. I’ve moved with the surge of a thousand people as a distant figure sings the soundtrack of my teenage years. These are indelible marks on my mind. But so often the power and intensity of tiny gigs is lost in the age of stadium tours and festivals.

Almost two weeks ago (shit, I’m so behind in my blogging!), I edged sideways into a room with fifty people above a tiny pub called The Whisky. We had gathered to see two English bands, Tubelord and Blakfish, who most of us had only discovered several months before when they played in the grotty upstairs of Fred Zeppelins. What unfolded that night proved to be one of the most intense gigs I’ve experienced.

Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

So The Girlfriend left for Edinburgh almost three weeks ago, to do a post-grad that could last the bones of two years. We decided to break up (though that phrase sounds inappropriately harsh), given that the intensity of her course and the distance would not be conducive to a happy relationship and we’d rather end it and remain on good terms and in contact rather than have the thing fall apart bitterly several months down the line. The right decision? Maybe; it is always trial and error in these matters. But needless to say, I’m pretty upset. After three years, an important part of myself is absent. Everything speaks of her. The intermittent texts and emails can’t hope to match the daily calls, the physical contact and the reassurance of her presence.

But I don’t write this blog to pour out my innermost feelings to one and all; it’s just not really my thing. So I turn to the real subject of this post. Since she’s left, I find my listening habits predictably turning to the more melancholy aspects of my collection. Plenty of guys with their guitars – Elliott Smith, Dylan, Bright Eyes and Rice. The more wistful and baleful Sigur Ros moments and some of the lonelier Efterklang bits. A spot of Sufjan and a portion of Bell X1 here and there, as well as plenty of other stuff that fail my memory right now.I mean, don’t get me wrong, there have been intervals of more upbeat, less despondent music – I’m thinking particularly of Tubelord, Why?, Kanye West and Fight Like Apes- but on the whole, my current soundtrack has been matching my situation.