Electricity
Member
Your fake and gay talking points, taken off a shelf? No
The Music Thread
- Thread starter Mowl
- Start date
Mowl
Member
Watched a replay
Some very good advice there for Jambo.
If he ever got up off his hole and did something with himself, then perhaps I wouldn't consider him such a useless bum.
Like you tramping around after Wouldn't/Collect/Marvin sort of gay?
Coming from you - a rusty old conduit for telegram - that's fucking gay alright.
Quote us another telegram there, Jambo.
You know we all love them.
You sniggering little twat.
Some very good advice there for Jambo.
If he ever got up off his hole and did something with himself, then perhaps I wouldn't consider him such a useless bum.
Like you tramping around after Wouldn't/Collect/Marvin sort of gay?
Coming from you - a rusty old conduit for telegram - that's fucking gay alright.
Quote us another telegram there, Jambo.
You know we all love them.
You sniggering little twat.
odanny
Member
Hey gang, can we all hold hands and sing kumbaya? I think some of you are musically inclined, perhaps some live background music? Just thinking about this nearly brings me to tears, but I'm getting off track here, how about this most awesome of tunes right here? Why don't you put on your headphones/earpods/buds and turn up this song, and tell me if you think it is totally badass, like I do.
roc_abilly
Member
That's a bit simplistic and the mafia was not the main impulse. NY was completely hollowed out ensuing a series of economic and fiscal crises. Mainly originally stemming from property speculators, real estate agents, appraisers and mortgage brokers colluding and systematically luring poor and predominantly African American people into buying homes they could not afford, utilising government insurance programmes to cover themselves. As the middle class fled the city, the creative youth stepped into the vacuum, to take advantage of the low rents.
The DJ techniques the chap in your video innovated were one product of that creative explosion, for that matter all rap and hip hop came from it.
The DJ techniques the chap in your video innovated were one product of that creative explosion, for that matter all rap and hip hop came from it.
Mowl
Member
Keith Haring is a legend.
I was hired by a bar owner who bought the lease on a pub called The Green Street Bar on Little Britain Street back in the 90's. He got me in to do the finishing on the floors, walls, ceilings, and windows before he opened his doors to the public. One evening we got to talking and he asked me if I could paint a few canvasses for him to hang in the pub. Sure, whatever you need, says the Mowl, and off he went to buy the canvasses and the acrylic paint I needed.
He gave me a copy of Haring's collected works and marked the pages and images he wanted reproduced. So I went home and did the work there instead and after a few days came back with seven/eight canvasses of his choice and we looked at where we might hang them. The copies I made were exact copies of Haring's originals: simple, primary colours, no colour mixing, just animated images of three dogs and four trees. We selected the areas on both sides of the bar to hang them so that everyone could see them no matter where they were sitting.
Job done, wages paid, off goes the Mowl.
A few days later he called me again and I came in to see him. The paintings were gone. I asked where the fuck they were and he said he sold them. Sold them? Why? The offer was too good to turn down - fancy re-doing them for me? Sure. More paint, more canvasses, and more images from Haring's complete works (which kept growing by the fucking hour, never mind the weeks). I delivered the second batch of paintings and they went up in the same place as the previous ones. He sold them too, then asked for more.
The money was great but I wasn't 100% aware of Haring's actually profile, not until I read his life story, that is. He was a darling of Andy Warhol's and none of Warhol's parties were complete without him. So I found myself copying his work for the guy who owned the pub and every time he hung them up, they sold. We were making a business arrangement - I never signed any of the canvasses - and I supplied him with as many paintings as he asked for. The money was great, I was working at leisure from home. Couldn't ask for better.
Then the pub took a nasty turn when the local heavies decided to have their evening meetings/beers in his place. Nasty element. He couldn't get rid of them without risking his pub and himself. So the paintings he had left he took home and lashed up a few maps of ireland and front page headlines in frames. Your standard 'Irish' theme design used in Irish themed pubs across the planet.
Haring features in the above ad for the documentary 'Downtown Calling' doing his typical bubble-men and stick-men, using spray cans.
He sort of invented the idea of 'live art' where he created his paintings in nightclubs filled with people. The idea was for him to express his angle on the music while the music was playing. For every new song, another shape or colour, on into the night. So I borrowed the idea of 'live art' and we hired an American guy who was visiting Dublin and used him in the Ormond Multi-Media Centre for the techno club nights. Twelve or thirteen hundred gurning punters stripped down to the waist. We were onstage (first night with live art was with David Holmes on the decks - the guy who did the soundtracks for 'Ocean's Eleven') and we put the American bloke up on the overhang by the emergency exit. He had an enormous blank canvas, box-loads of paints, and no brushes. Instead he used his hands to smear the paint all over the canvas in reaction to what he was hearing off the stage.
The final finished painting was later hung in the hallway entrance of the OMMC.
Then a few more from subsequent nights at the same mad-house venue.
Art is whatever you want it to be.
Same as music.
They both come from the heart.
I was hired by a bar owner who bought the lease on a pub called The Green Street Bar on Little Britain Street back in the 90's. He got me in to do the finishing on the floors, walls, ceilings, and windows before he opened his doors to the public. One evening we got to talking and he asked me if I could paint a few canvasses for him to hang in the pub. Sure, whatever you need, says the Mowl, and off he went to buy the canvasses and the acrylic paint I needed.
He gave me a copy of Haring's collected works and marked the pages and images he wanted reproduced. So I went home and did the work there instead and after a few days came back with seven/eight canvasses of his choice and we looked at where we might hang them. The copies I made were exact copies of Haring's originals: simple, primary colours, no colour mixing, just animated images of three dogs and four trees. We selected the areas on both sides of the bar to hang them so that everyone could see them no matter where they were sitting.
Job done, wages paid, off goes the Mowl.
A few days later he called me again and I came in to see him. The paintings were gone. I asked where the fuck they were and he said he sold them. Sold them? Why? The offer was too good to turn down - fancy re-doing them for me? Sure. More paint, more canvasses, and more images from Haring's complete works (which kept growing by the fucking hour, never mind the weeks). I delivered the second batch of paintings and they went up in the same place as the previous ones. He sold them too, then asked for more.
The money was great but I wasn't 100% aware of Haring's actually profile, not until I read his life story, that is. He was a darling of Andy Warhol's and none of Warhol's parties were complete without him. So I found myself copying his work for the guy who owned the pub and every time he hung them up, they sold. We were making a business arrangement - I never signed any of the canvasses - and I supplied him with as many paintings as he asked for. The money was great, I was working at leisure from home. Couldn't ask for better.
Then the pub took a nasty turn when the local heavies decided to have their evening meetings/beers in his place. Nasty element. He couldn't get rid of them without risking his pub and himself. So the paintings he had left he took home and lashed up a few maps of ireland and front page headlines in frames. Your standard 'Irish' theme design used in Irish themed pubs across the planet.
Haring features in the above ad for the documentary 'Downtown Calling' doing his typical bubble-men and stick-men, using spray cans.
He sort of invented the idea of 'live art' where he created his paintings in nightclubs filled with people. The idea was for him to express his angle on the music while the music was playing. For every new song, another shape or colour, on into the night. So I borrowed the idea of 'live art' and we hired an American guy who was visiting Dublin and used him in the Ormond Multi-Media Centre for the techno club nights. Twelve or thirteen hundred gurning punters stripped down to the waist. We were onstage (first night with live art was with David Holmes on the decks - the guy who did the soundtracks for 'Ocean's Eleven') and we put the American bloke up on the overhang by the emergency exit. He had an enormous blank canvas, box-loads of paints, and no brushes. Instead he used his hands to smear the paint all over the canvas in reaction to what he was hearing off the stage.
The final finished painting was later hung in the hallway entrance of the OMMC.
Then a few more from subsequent nights at the same mad-house venue.
Art is whatever you want it to be.
Same as music.
They both come from the heart.
odanny
Member
I don't know what "impulse" you are referring to, and while your social commentary may (or may not) be correct, it had little to do with my comment about the Italian mafia.
odanny
Member
The pub owner certainly had the better end of that business arrangement, but it is a great lesson in the power of advertising. It may be safe to assume you would not have had the same success if you were selling them yourself on a busy street corner, but you never know. I like the shape of that pub, in my Midwestern town of 120,000 souls we only have one building in that design, where it wraps around two nearly perpendicular streets, and it happens to be one of the oldest buidlings in town, built right after the end of the Civil War (1865, in case you forgot) and happened to be an Anheuser Busch brewery for much of its life. It now sits empty, I believe.
roc_abilly
Member
Yes, my commentary was correct. Whereas your comment about the mafia and Rudy fucking Giuliani had fuck all to do with anything. Anyway, the only reason that video came up in your feed was I posted it on this thread less than a month ago, you must have momentarily clicked on it, because obviously you know fuck all about the music, "This one is great just to watch the video" you total muppet.
Mowl
Member
In a previous role he was a gallery curator for a number of outlets across Ireland. Yet his own taste was very much in the pop art realm rather than any classicial themed work. Haring's paintings come across as a little naive in their simplicity, they're often closer to graffiti 'tagging' than actual graffiti 'art'. Dancing characters, bubble-men tumbling and falling, yet still very fluid and full of action.
Being wealthy enough to buy a pub (along with a few private investors) and then fill it with art is both a privilege and a risk. Given the location over by the early morning markets selling fresh produce, Green Street's other main landmark is the criminal courts nearby. So he had a lot of coppers in for lunch etc, but by evening time when the courts closed their doors and the markets were asleep waiting for the next morning's fresh deliveries, meant he had a regular set of customers of three main types: the all-nighters from the markets in the early morning, then the coppers and the defendants from the court in the lunch and afternoon schedule, but then in the evening it was a rogue element who used it for their own club, making plans, discussing business, etc.
It's hard to stop a heavy element using your location without causing yourself and your business some degree of risk: piss them off and they might burn you out, destroy your venue, intimidate your other potential customers, make it impossible for you to continue. Or you can charm them and treat them with some degree of apparent respect, in which case you might even make a friend for life - the right kind too, guys who'll reward your loyalty by keeping an eye on things for you. Their presence alone would be a great security system. Nobody's allowed to raid you, run up tabs, threaten you or try to shake you down for cash payments for their use of your site.
Maybe they were the very people buying the paintings. Yes, they were knock-offs, but untraceable back to me.
Someone out there decided they liked the art, so they bought it for their own walls.
My fees were great, the work was easy, enjoyable, didn't require much preparation or effort, and I could run off three to five of them at a time.
If each one only paid me say €100 per canvas, then three or four canvasses a day for a few days was great cash by the end of the week.
The only restriction was my not signing them or claiming them as my own on my CV - which suited me fine.
So even a gang of heavies in your pub can actually be great for business - if you treat them right.
They buy pop art - it's easier to understand than hanging hot classic paintings from the impressionist period, or the surrealists, or even the cubists.
That would see me liable for copyright breach - the materials would be seized if anyone blew the whistle.
Yes, architecturally, it's an unusual lay-out and one we gave some thought to before building the bar in the apex of the room, so that no matter where you sat, you were pretty much looking at the bar and its artistic surrounds. It's been undone now, but I also 'smoked' all of the windows up to around eye level of the taller man like myself. A product called Fasson in Ireland, a type of plastic adhesive contact you can cut and shape by hand: first you soak the selected area of glass with clean cold water, then lay a sheet of contact onto it, then use a squeegee to squeeze the water out leaving the contact fully adhered to the glass. It was mostly to offer the customers some degree of privacy from passing footfall.
I would have left the windows clear, it was/is a good looking and well proportioned space inside and then all the art and lighting made it quite cozy.
Hard to sell tat kind of thing to pubs up here in Helsinki, but I had another angle for the Irish bars in town: The Irish Times released a special edition of copies of the paper from the time of the Uprising. They copied the original from 1916 and sold them as collector's items in 2016. I was sent a bunch of copies by my Mam and they were a great read. But I picked the better/more interesting/shocking full-size broadsheet pages and framed them in old second hand frames. Then took them into the Irish bars around town and they sold like hotcakes.
Real Irish newspapers - from a hundred years past.
Who wouldn't want them?
You can make 'art' out of anything these days - the real trick is knowing how to sell it.
Mowl
Member
Horslips, again. Lyrically, this one's really funny. Horslips were frequent visitors to the Irish/American crowds across America, and of course when one's working those kind of circuits, you tend to come across other Irish living locally who love to step up and say hello - then tell you their life story, whether you're interested or not. I'd imagine the lads in the band met several variations of 'The Man Who Built America' in every Irish house they visited. But there's something a bit special about this song and its lyrical content.
It's not a track one might suggest playing to Irish/Americans in and around 9/11 - especially given the lyric:
'When he builds them up, tell me who's going to knock them down?'
The twin towers immediately spring to mind these days but back then it was a really harmless song about Irish drunks who work the building sites day and night. Working at hundreds of meters above ground with no safety nets. Like the iconic picture of the Irishmen sitting on the steel beams having lunch - around a kilometer above ground. Every drunk you meet wants to tell you how New York, Boston, Chicago, and other major cities were all built by the Irish, and then they took over policing, fire safety, and garbage disposal, all money-making rackets that never cease paying out.
The lads in the band might look a bit eighties, but that was the period and this was the dress code for stage.
It's actually a rather brilliant tune in that they avoid using too much of the whistles and pipes, and rely more on rock music rhythms and heavy drumbeats that you can hop around the dance floor to. I'd imagine even McCartney - on hearing it, would think it awesome. I had the original album back in the day (long since lost by now) and I studied their way of interpreting Irish traditional rhythms of the jigs and reels type instead using hard back-beats that made you want to tap your feet when sober and leap around when sloshed.
They were in many ways years ahead of even Moving Hearts, the seminal and all -time most outrageous, political, sociological, and traditional band we ever produced. Horslips came together more by accident than anything else. Barry Devlin tells the story of an English A&R calling to say he wanted to meet them in person at the old Windmill Lane studio two on St Stephen's Green. They hadn't a full line-up yet and knowing that the A&R dude was due that afternoon, Barry went out into the Green and wandered around asking total strangers if they played an instrument and could hold down a reel. They landed a line-up and waited for your man to call by.
That was the band and line-up that signed the deal that gave us 'Dearg Doom' and of course a plethora of other amazing tracks from a five-piece who didn't even know each others second names - they bluffed their way through the auditions and got their deal. Nice work, that.
It's not a track one might suggest playing to Irish/Americans in and around 9/11 - especially given the lyric:
'When he builds them up, tell me who's going to knock them down?'
The twin towers immediately spring to mind these days but back then it was a really harmless song about Irish drunks who work the building sites day and night. Working at hundreds of meters above ground with no safety nets. Like the iconic picture of the Irishmen sitting on the steel beams having lunch - around a kilometer above ground. Every drunk you meet wants to tell you how New York, Boston, Chicago, and other major cities were all built by the Irish, and then they took over policing, fire safety, and garbage disposal, all money-making rackets that never cease paying out.
The lads in the band might look a bit eighties, but that was the period and this was the dress code for stage.
It's actually a rather brilliant tune in that they avoid using too much of the whistles and pipes, and rely more on rock music rhythms and heavy drumbeats that you can hop around the dance floor to. I'd imagine even McCartney - on hearing it, would think it awesome. I had the original album back in the day (long since lost by now) and I studied their way of interpreting Irish traditional rhythms of the jigs and reels type instead using hard back-beats that made you want to tap your feet when sober and leap around when sloshed.
They were in many ways years ahead of even Moving Hearts, the seminal and all -time most outrageous, political, sociological, and traditional band we ever produced. Horslips came together more by accident than anything else. Barry Devlin tells the story of an English A&R calling to say he wanted to meet them in person at the old Windmill Lane studio two on St Stephen's Green. They hadn't a full line-up yet and knowing that the A&R dude was due that afternoon, Barry went out into the Green and wandered around asking total strangers if they played an instrument and could hold down a reel. They landed a line-up and waited for your man to call by.
That was the band and line-up that signed the deal that gave us 'Dearg Doom' and of course a plethora of other amazing tracks from a five-piece who didn't even know each others second names - they bluffed their way through the auditions and got their deal. Nice work, that.
Mowl
Member
Of course, back then the Irish had loads of work options, hence the endless trail of illegals heading over across the pond looking for a new life in a new world. Others weren't so lucky, especially the ones who set their sights on England for a new life. Paddy got lost in London. It was too big, too sprawled out and confusing for men from one horse towns. So many of them ended up on the streets due to the demon drink.
But it's all different now, right?
Right?
That one's from our own Rí Rá - of Scary Eire fame.
He tackles the story of wasted Irish lives all over the English capital city. Down and out. Homeless. Alcoholic. Hopelessly angry and bitter, trying to start fights and only to release the rage and tension of disappearing down into the sewers of modern society. As the lyric says: 'the kind of faces only scars could hide..' Shunned, looked at like dirt, they had nobody but the drink to get them through the days. It's a sad thing to see people leave their country of birth and try elsewhere only to fail miserably and become a ghost on the high streets. But that's Irish life - Ireland's too small for all of you at once, so pack a bag, fuck off, come back when you're rich.
Or dead.
Whatever.
But it's all different now, right?
Right?
That one's from our own Rí Rá - of Scary Eire fame.
He tackles the story of wasted Irish lives all over the English capital city. Down and out. Homeless. Alcoholic. Hopelessly angry and bitter, trying to start fights and only to release the rage and tension of disappearing down into the sewers of modern society. As the lyric says: 'the kind of faces only scars could hide..' Shunned, looked at like dirt, they had nobody but the drink to get them through the days. It's a sad thing to see people leave their country of birth and try elsewhere only to fail miserably and become a ghost on the high streets. But that's Irish life - Ireland's too small for all of you at once, so pack a bag, fuck off, come back when you're rich.
Or dead.
Whatever.
Lumpy Von Talbot
Member
Ha, that's great about Horslips. Always loved that Dearg Doom track, it never fails to call at all sorts of natural responses and what a brilliant mix of 70s rock guitar and the Uileann. Always a soft spot for Horslips here and pleased to hear about the A&R bluff.
I hear you about Moving Hearts and I thought they were superb, unsurprisingly given the heritage of the Planxty connection behind them. I still regard Hiroshima-Nagasaki as a raising of the ante on Horslips and their approach, just exhilarating tack altogether and real foot-tapper stuff.
Neither Horslips or Moving Hearts did enough stuff as far as I am concerned. I hear traces of it in odd corners here and there. I've always groaned about the Brummie heavy metal offerings with their Tolkien-style referencing of folk music in England but a lot of it is so stagey and bad it is their version of those two horrible bastards who dressed up as leprechauns on top of the pops- may they die roaring- and is pure Spinal Tap horsebollocks.
Horslips and Moving Hearts were proper gear. Mixing the Uileann pipes into rock format is pure genius up there with the introduction of the banjo to Irish music via the Chieftains. It just sounds right.
I hear you about Moving Hearts and I thought they were superb, unsurprisingly given the heritage of the Planxty connection behind them. I still regard Hiroshima-Nagasaki as a raising of the ante on Horslips and their approach, just exhilarating tack altogether and real foot-tapper stuff.
Neither Horslips or Moving Hearts did enough stuff as far as I am concerned. I hear traces of it in odd corners here and there. I've always groaned about the Brummie heavy metal offerings with their Tolkien-style referencing of folk music in England but a lot of it is so stagey and bad it is their version of those two horrible bastards who dressed up as leprechauns on top of the pops- may they die roaring- and is pure Spinal Tap horsebollocks.
Horslips and Moving Hearts were proper gear. Mixing the Uileann pipes into rock format is pure genius up there with the introduction of the banjo to Irish music via the Chieftains. It just sounds right.
odanny
Member
You have no earthly idea how the mafia was taken down, but in your arrogance (to say nothing of ignorance) you felt compelled to open your yap and start typing.
Rudy was a prosecutor before he was a mayor, before he lost his mind, and his reputation, and went insane.
Anyway, the only reason that video came up in your feed was I posted it on this thread less than a month ago
I honestly had no idea you posted it here, I found this on another website, and would not have posted it here if you had already done it. You might want to practice deep breathing, it helps with stress.
Mowl
Member
That one was actually written by a regular visitor to Ireland and even a few times at my Mam's old club - the awesome Jim Page. He and Christy became friends and traded songs, they'd often meet in The Hunting Lodge (now The 79er in Ballyfermot - rough auld shop that) and jam together and trade songs. When Christy brought the song in for the initial sessions for Moving Hearts, the boys jumped on it and turned Jim's simple ballad into a tour-de-force Irish traditional three minute opera of the rage of the day about nuclear power, CND, the protests at Carnsore Point and the British nuclear power station just a few miles east on the southern English coast, spewing shit into the channel that was destroying whole sea fields of fishing areas.
That was the late 70's blossoming into the early 80's and political protest and songs of conscience were de riguer. Elvis Costello's 'Tramp The Dirt Down' (be still my bleeding heart - what a fucking cracker that is) and Moving Hearts version of Page's song were hot radio items. Red Wedge members like Weller started writing more political material, even including 'That's Entertainment'. Which wasn't presented as a tune about hard times: it was a damning fuck you to Thatcher from some fairly heavyweight entertainers. Billy Bragg. The many reggae influenced bands who also dug on ska, whether white or black. Skin head or tuff gong. The type who, when they got together and put their minds to it, changed the local view on nuclear power and wrote songs about not just life's general myseries, love and death, but also government policy, poll taxes, the race question, the miner's strike, British Leyland going under, then himself, Mr De Lorean, even faster and under a mountain range of coke and deception. I still love that guy. The legacy of hundreds of years of colonialism and a British youth who wanted nothing to do with being blamed for their ancestor's actions across the entire world. They reflected the mood of the day for some very hard times all across Ireland: mass unemployment, rife alcoholism, homelessness and the soup kitchens, the Troubles fucking all our lives up living just a hour's drive from the border - stilled manned by snipers at that time, covered in barbed wire and turrets, heavy gang tactics from security going up into the North - same shit from our own guards on the way back home. Remember the Peace Train and Nell McCafferty and all the working class Irish ladies who had enough of thirteen kid families and wanted family planning - fuck the church. So they all took the train up and loaded up on condoms and pills Then set off back to Dublin with the Northern security waving them through into the Republic where they were stopped by An Garda who went through their bags lloking to siexe all of their booty. They were told where to shove their laws, the ladies numbered in the hundreds, the coppers in twos and threes.
The pills made it to their destination: the front pews of next Sunday Mass.
Fuck your bible, you rapey fucking cunts - then it all snowballed.
So don't try to tell me music can't move mountains.
It was an entirely horrid time in Irish history, yet still one celebrated in so many rebel songs.
Jim Page's version of 'Hiroshima/Nagasaki' was just voice and guitar. He also wrote another great one about the Americans installing The Shah Of Iran. I'll look for it later, but it's one of those songs that initially seemed okay for broadcast, until some bleeding heart took offence and had it de-listed from RTE national radio. Hard to find at all these days. Yet they played Hiroshima/Nagasaki multiple times a day on RTE, and those lyrics were even sharper. But that's Ireland for you - the church still had the veto on pretty much everything media-wise. Nothing, fuck all - got past those old toads.
This instrumental was the high point of most Moving Hearts gigs - and rightly so: the pipes were forged in heaven:
Mighty stuff, that.
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Mowl
Member
For Irish artists playing Irish music and referencing Irish politics, the material was always going to be difficult to accumulate. Yes, there are loads of rebel songs that rock (Metallic with Whiskey In The Jar) and even today The Wolfe Tones are seeing a mass revival they couldn't possibly have expected only a month ago, even after nailing the biggest crowd attendance ever for their stage at the Electric Picnic last week. Off the back of that huge success, they booked the Point Depot. Tickets went on sale, sold out in seconds. Booked the following night. Sold out in seconds. Now The Tones are NOT like the Hearts or even Horslips. Their bag is rebel-rousing pub songs. The men behind the wire. Come Out Ye Black & Tans. And songs about getting one over on Blighty - our eternal enemy.
Had they produced any more political content than they did, they'd have found it hard to get radio plays what with the changes taking place a few short years after their initial album. The Hearts made several more records under different line-ups - but none contained the visceral and acidic rage barely disguised in songs like 'Landlord' 'Irish Ways and Irish Laws' giving way to more purist instrumentals - usually with Davy Spillane out front - making everyone cry their eyes out - instead of smashing glasses and roaring out 'Ooh-ah, Up The Ra' all the way home from the chip shop.
Though I would suggest you try Wishbone Ash's full album 'Argus' - it's a work of art on the Tolkien/mystics level. Try this one, longish intro, but when the guitars kick in? You might as well be out in the stocks in Shakespeare's Cambridge and Oxford. Amazing bass tone, and the twin leads are even cooler, but Steve Upton's drum sound kills me. Slays me:
Try the full album - I think it aged really fucking well - some of those guitar and bass sounds are so fucking awesome.
Pretentious? A little.
But worth a shot? Definitely.
Mowl
Member
Yeah, well Jim Lockheart could veer from whistles to concert flutes, keyboards and piano to Uilleann pipes at the drop of a hat. It was pure showmanship, rehearsed, prepared, dressed for it, and clearly loving it (apart from Johnny Fean - who, as you saw in the Old Grey Whistle Test clip, fucking HATED having to mime). Unlike Foster And Allen - who not only played it live - they also dressed for the occasion - and nobody I know has gotten around to forgiving them that. Along with their trek down to Sun City - at the height of the apartheid troubles. And for what? Filthy lucre? Sorry lads - you're out: too many gaffes, too much paddy in traditional clothes.
But I liked that Lockheart didn't try to 'stage' the pipes by coming out front and doing his thing. He just raised on leg onto his keyboard to settle himself in balance. The pipes are supposed to be played sitting down (standing up with two airbags - one under each armpit? WTF?) and only one player I ever saw looked to try out the pipes in a standing mode. Can't remember his name but he joined a latter line-up of In Tua Nua after Steve Wickham left fo ther Waterboys. But the piper? In reality, he looked like a gimp with a broken leg try to run away off-stage but the bags were all tangled up around his limbs causing him to stumble trip. It looked and sounded terrible.
So yeah, we had a few players who electrified their traditional instruments: Stevie with his electric fiddle, Ronan O'Snodaigh with his electrified bodhran worn around his shoulders on bungi straps allowing him to pace around the whole stage keeping his right hand free, we ourselves in the Pussy-Assed Mother-Fuckers also electrified our piper's set: contact mics on the chanters, an overhead for spread, and a front mic for up-front PA volume. Highly volatile, as the pipes sound and act different in different places. They don't like the heat, they don't like being dragged around (our guy sat) the stage, they're liable to react to humidity, and they're a baboon suit to put on and take off again.
Here's a lower budget version of hip-hop from PAMF using Uilleann pipes NOT AT ALL how they're supposed to be used:
Ah, but when they are happy and in their right environment?
Heaven.
That said, we sent a copy of the demo of that track to Paddy Moloney, (The Chieftans) who wrote back saying he hated what we were doing, that we had some fucking nerve 'appropriating Irish music for an American market' and that he'd disposed of the track into his bin after listening to half of it. Of course, if he'd bothered his arse to listen to the pipes on the outro, then he'd have to swallow his own boxers.
How could anyone take a band called the Pussy-Assed Mother-Fuckers seriously?
It was supposed to be dumb, dur-hur-dur.
Like most crap that sells in the States.
Lumpy Von Talbot
Member
Sounds like something Ennio Morricone would have loved. Mama's Boys used to use an electrified violin which was so good it was almost cheating 
Mowl
Member
Sounds like something Ennio Morricone would have loved. Mama's Boys used to use an electrified violin which was so good it was almost cheating
THIS is a fucking MONSTER tune from Mama's Boys - the actuall Mama in question died quite recently, I read. What a fucking riff this is? I love also the way they use the metaphor of '..and she really loves to move when the needle's in the groove - oh yeah..' Super sexy and one I lifted for a local project a few years back: we used the section above as a call/response type two-part vocal harmony.
Great band - though their story is a little too close to The Darkness, another all-family, pretty-buy, ham-it-up slapstick rock and roll comedy show. Elements of Spinal Tap, references to Jimmy Page's one-piece stage suits and that whole Zoso thing from the Alistair Crowley period.
But still, if playing Mama's Boys just once to some of my Finnish and Finnish/Swedish crew had them all sit up and want to take the fucker apart for re-use and love it like I did was a gas. Of course the same is true in reverse, and they play me tunes from obscure historic Finnish artists and I too get my head turned. I must consider an evening DJ set of selected Finnish classics if I can get someone to counter it with Irish music.
Sounds like a plan?