Merriol:
Holly stop putting that
toothbrush up your bum!
Holly:
But it is an OLD one!
Holly stop putting that
toothbrush up your bum!
Holly:
But it is an OLD one!
Fade to black:
Earlier in the day I was idly flipping through the Celtic Connections programme that had fallen out of one of the Sunday papers. I'm not a great country folky, twighlight of the celtsy musicy sort of person.
Huge Parenthesis coming up -skip the next paragraph - it has nothing to do with what happened today.
It is a little known fact that 90% of the music posing as "Celtic" released after Clannad re-drew the whole sound of Scottish / Irish "traditional" music (which they did when they recorded the soundtracks for the movie Harry's Game and the Robin Of Sherwood TV series back in the 1980s) is bogus shit. I was lucky enough to see Clannad live in a tent somewhere in county Sligo in about 1979. They were great, a great fusion band Jazz and Jig. the whole tent was rocking (it was windy and the beer was cheap). I still own one of their albums. Then some fecking eejit bought them a synthesiser and they started making money. Previous to this Irish / Scottish music was all pipes, fiddles, accordions, getting pissed, and having a rare old time playing the theme from Captain Pugwash at various speeds - sometimes backwards. After Clannad it's all misty doe-eyed waffling around, haunting close-harmony vocals and loads of echo... ..loads and loads of echo. It's tedious and anodyne dribble.
A forinstance of its utter dribblyness; last year sometime we were having lunch down at the Tourist Information Centre where this sort of bland musical dross is compulsorily played in the background by the terms of their lease. After half an hour I realised we were just listening to the same track over and over again.
I went up to the counter and mentioned to Stewart, who professes to like this sort of music, that the CD was stuck.
"So it is!" he replied, taking a look at the CD player. "It's on repeat. It must have been like that since I came in at 8 o'clock this morning, and I never noticed." - I rest my case.
What the fuck was I trying to say?
Yes! A-aha! I remember. Celtic Connections. Right, yes. I was flipping through the Celtic Connections catalogue thingie when I realised I actually wouldn't mind seeing a couple of the acts: The Klezmatics who I have always meant to get around to checking out after having heard just one of their tracks on a documentary about Jewish music many years ago - and the wonderful Thea Gilmore who I discovered more recently on an old, second-hand, compilation magazine cover freebie CD. Her CD Rules For Jokers is just dead pure brilliant. (note to record marketing people - getting your acts on freebie CDs does eventually sell copies).
I remarked in passing to Merriol that if had been in Glasgow I wouldn't have minded seeing them. About ten minutes later, when I had stopped running around doing stuff long enough for her to catch up with me, she shoved an envelope into my hands.
Inside were two tickets for the Thea Gilmore gig.
How?????
I love that woman.
She doesn't want to go, so I will have to take someone else.
Form a queue.
2 comments:
I wanna go...
(re: celtic music. Thank god you said something. I thought maybe I'd gone mad, but I surely know the difference between traditional music and modern. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I am pretty sure that traditional music of any kind does not have reverb, or rely much on electricity in general. And where the hell did all those slurry penny whistles come from? "Brave Heart" and Enya, I think. The misnomer annoys me, too.)
Enya was in Clannad.
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