Hercules & Love Affair - ruin St Patricks day

Booo to Hercules & Love Affair for cancelling their Paddy's day gig at the Button Factory. I was looking forward to doing something more interesting this year than just hitting the pubs in town along with half the population of Dublin. I even had a ridiculously glitzy outfit picked out that would only really do for a Hercules & Love Affair gig that's supported by Bitches with Wolves. Now I am just going to look silly down at the local.

Restrepo

I watched the brilliant documentary "Restrepo" on the weekend by photographer Tim Hetherington and the journalist Sebastian Junger. They follow the day to day lives of a platoon of American soldiers in the Korangal Valley in Afghanistan in 2007. A place so dangerous that they faced daily and numerous gun battles, so dubbing the valley the 'most dangerous place on earth'. The alien landscape renders them open targets much of the time, never knowing when the next attack will be. They manage to gain ground and build a small fort which they name 'Restrepo' after one of their own men who dies shortly after arriving.

The tension they face everyday is unbearable, the cameras capture them truckin' on regardless becoming a sort of family in the process. We are shown a disturbingly realistic portrayal of army life including a chilling gun battle where they are almost helpless amid the trees and hilly terrain when they are ambushed by the Taliban, losing one of their best soldiers in the process.

This documentary is really about post-traumatic disorder though and it's heartbreaking to see these young men trying to make sense of what they have seen and though they do not question why they are there we cannot help but feel angry for senseless waste of life on what seems like a doomed mission from the start.

A call to arms

I wish my sister Leah would take some more of her beautiful photos. This one below is one of my favourites and is of my other sister Ellen taken in my old apartment. Ellen has always been the dancer of us three. She used to do ballet when she was younger and you can still tell from her slender shoulders and movements. Leah is definitely the feminist dancer of us though, she likes to dance but there will be absolutely no 'look at me, look at me' sexy moves, much more contemporary is she, or is it old school ... Her friend once told me that Leah's her favourite dancer as she doesn't dance like she wants people to watch her, like so many do. While I hate the way female pop stars gyrate in their videos myself and Ellen are guilty of the most disgusting dancing years ago to annoy and freak Leah out.  We would blare out Wu Tang, Dre and songs like Mary J Blige's 'Family affair'. This was when she listened mainly to Manu Chao and Lemon Jelly. I think she was very ashamed. We did this ALL the time. That was also one of the first times I met Ellen's boyfriend. He had come around the back of the house to park his bike and saw me grinding through the kitchen window, trying to make Leah puke, doing the tackiest bump n grind dancing I could muster. So I clearly wasn't going for the cool first impression.

In So Many Ways - Computer Magic

I can't stop listening to this lovely lady that I saw listed on the Nialler9 blog.

Trend Alert for Songwriters - Get on it!

So your writing a song, and you just don't have enough words to fill the chorus, or you cant think of anything catchy enough to pho-net-i-cal-ly fill the melody. If you only could just squeeze in another syllable into that last verse it would be bangin! Unfortunately your singing range is less Mariah Carey and more Tom Waits. Hmmm.

Well I'll give you a heads up. Just spell the lyrics out y'all!! Just pick a word, it doesn't even have to make much sense. Everybodys doing it.

Well maybe not everyone, but a couple of indie bands are like Warpaint - Billie Holiday, and Noah and the Whale - L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N. The fact that at the moment their both H-O-T is all the more reason to hop to it right now. While it's a little like bringing out a clip art designed CD single at Christmas with a slightly different spelling to the X-Factor winner to confuse some mummies/grannies, it's still all above board. 

Anyway it started trending way back with Arethra Franklin's R-e-s-p-e-c-t, and then a group of blue collar workers, a cowboy and an Indian jumped on the bandwagon a few years later. 

Probably the greatest example though is that cool little monkey, Ian Brown's The Fear ... Be honest, how many people of our generation have you met that can't spell the word 'Fear' now? Not many if any.
Coined a catchphrase too . I am so aware of 'the fear' now when I'm hungover that I think bring it on myself.

NB- good idea to try to coin a catchphrase.

I do have a word of warning though - get somone to r-e-a-d-o-v-e-r-y-o-u-r-l-y-r-i-c-s or at least run a quick spell check on it to be safe, I cannot stress this enough, you DO NOT WANT TO SPELL IT WRONG, it's career suicide. Look at what happened to poor, but sloppy, Ashlee Simpson?

You heard it here first people (sort of). 

P.s. Can you think of any other spell-y out-y songs ?

Mumford & Sons - NEW SONG at Grammy Pre-party

Mumford and Sons new song, which they performed at the Grammy pre-awards party.

If you believe what you read Marcus Mumford and Laura Marling broke up at Christmas. I wonder if this is about her. I suppose it is none of our damn business. The lyrics are nice and Marcus, as ever, isnt happy unless he is playing at least two instruments at the same time and so brings in a nice bit of bass drum at the end.

I go to Italy and then blog about London...

Maybe it was our angle of approach, or the clarity of the cloudless night sky but I had never noticed how beautiful and awe inspiring London looks at night from a plane. Massive and sprawling, the sheer size of it took my breath away, highlighted against the blacked out earth like some kind of cancer or alien feeding off the land. The major roads and outer suburbs trailing out like veins from the centre's throbbing heart. It dwarfed all the cities combined we had already flown over on our way back from Bologna.

Thanks to Eastenders the Millennium Dome along the bend of the Thames was easy to spot, well it's  Souf East innit?

I asked the very cute Italian next to me if he would like to see London. I was secretly elated when he first sat next to me. The warmth of my wine already had me imagining the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Perhaps years from now our grandchildren would be begging us to tell them of the first time we met, high in the sky above London on a cloudless night. He quickly doused my dreams with a curt reply of 'I see it many time before'.

Not like this Cute Italian Man, I thought to myself as I pressed my head against the window for another look, not like this.