Kings Of Leon have just been on the radio. It was their new single. ‘Radioactive’. How apt. Judging by the sound of it, to think it is in any way good you had to have been in close proximity to the reactor at Chernobyl in 1986 with a walkman on and its batteries running down. Truly, a painful experience. Try telling that though to the dozen of kids hanging around outside country town chip shops up and down Ireland sporting their ‘Metal-like-a’ tee-shirts and mulling over whether they should throw their chips in the bin and head off to the pool hall because it’s pissing rain and there really is fuck all else to do.
Nothing ever changes in small town Ireland. Twenty years ago just insert Guns ‘N’ Roses into the above instead of Kings Of Leon and the same scenario unfolds. Kings Of Leon have that particular market cornered now. And good luck to them.
Riding on their coat-tails however are Arcade Fire. The modern day Bon Jovi if you will. Similarities drawn are not musical but are due to the fact that they are both a bit rubbish and both having been taken to the bosom of culchiedom. Somehow, those chancers got to headline Oxegen whilst in every other festival in every other country they sweep up and make the tea for the likes of Echo And The Bunnymen, who themselves are found well down the bill. It truly is a strange little country this. And country town chip shop chips are generally reheated Birdseye efforts which hardly endear them to anyone’s heart either, may I add.
My first musical experience was listening to Neil Diamond’s ‘Hot August Night’ through a set of earphones about three times the size of my head. ‘Soolaimon’ was my favourite, judging by an audio cassette recently discovered adorned with a toddler’s dulcet tones. My old man who was only about twenty eight at the time, had records by the likes of Jim Reeves and Tony Christie alongside The Buggles ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ and Adam Ant. My Mam was more into the fucking Doobie Brothers and ABBA (as was my Dad but he always maintains it was purely because of the blonde one’s arse). I honestly cannot listen to either of the latter today without breaking into a cold sweat. I think it was a form of brainwashing. I truly had empathy with Paul Rudd in the 40 Year Old Virgin who snapped after hearing Michael McDonald (A Doobie Brother) warble and drone on for the umpteenth time. Michael McDonald sounds like a Bassett Hound who’s run off with somebody’s microphone and got his knackers caught on a barbed wire fence backed by middle-of-the-road piano based guff, in case you’ve missed him.
Attractas brought The Police. I purely liked them because Warren Gillan and I were absolutely mad into ‘ChiPS’ and I thought it was Jon Baker and Frank Poncharello’s band. Dad bought me my first single ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ which I played to death. Top Of The Pops became a staple of a Thursday evening. Music was going through a weird phase at that point where the men dressed as ladies and played synthesizers (my Nan, God bless her, would be up in arms at the spectacle. My mother would be in the kitchen listening to the fucking Doobie Brothers).Weird fashions, wonderful music though. I remember crying myself to sleep and then waking and screaming some more one Thursday night having seen The Stranglers ‘Golden Brown’ video and thinking the drummer had no eyes.
One such Thursday evening came an epiphany. For me, anyway. Nan was probably giving out about it I’d imagine. On the screen was this girl I fancied in an eighties kind of way, sitting there leafing through a magazine in a cafe. All of a sudden the characters in the magazine came to fucking life! A bit of a row followed with her and her comic book beau taking on a few hard geezers wielding spanners. She ended up lying beside a bin in a kitchen looking a bit worse for wear. The object of her affection, a certain Morten Harket then stumbles in presumably drunk. He subsequently went on along with his A-Ha band mates to smash The Doobie Brothers stranglehold on the family stereo as a result. Oh how right The Buggles were. I think Miriam Bulman taped ‘Hunting High And Low’ for me. I listened to nothing else until A-Ha released ‘Touchy’, which was the equivalent of aural murder. Dizzying highs to frightening lows. The phase had passed. ‘Help’ by The Beatles took the place of the original revelation in the tape deck. I think it was ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ which got me hooked. Melancholy in a Scouse drawl set to acoustic guitar and a tambourine. Worlds away from A-Ha and their synthetic assault. My school pal Roy McDermott and I got incredibly obsessed with all things Beatles. We traipsed up to Herman’s in Superquinn Ballinteer to get Beatles-bowl haircuts one afternoon. My mother said upon my return home that I had ‘a face like a full moon in a fog’. Charming, especially coming from the woman who used to cut my hair with an industrial size scissors in front of the fire of a Saturday night, rendering me helpless for a month looking like someone with a crooked fringe from Deliverance with glasses. Coupled with a pair of flares bought in Tomas Funge’s in Gorey, I looked a right tit.
This was the year before The Stone Roses made the flared trouser fashionable again. Well, at least in Manchester. Me and Roy were the 80’s equivalent of Noel and Liam. And my Dad had the talk that someone should have had with Noel Gallagher before he wrote ‘Be Here Now’. “Its Beatles this! Beatles that! You talk about nothing else! Cop on!” I could see it pained him. He loved The Beatles. And for that I felt a small pang of betrayal. And at the back of my mind there was of course the omnipresent worry that the fucking Doobie Brothers would soon be back hogging the stereo.
No comments:
Post a Comment