by David Kenny
They are scarred by the road. Knackered, but having a blast. When they get home for a couple of days’ break, after a few hours, they end up in Pockets’ house. They can’t stay away from each other. They admit to having become institutionalised by touring, leading to endless conversations like this:
Tom: ‘You’d miss an aul’ truck stop, wouldn’t you, when you’re at home? Not specific or anything, just the idea of them.’
Pockets: ‘I’d like to leave my house and be able to go across and have a good selection. Maybe win some cash prizes.’
Tom: ‘No. You’ve got too much choice at home.’
MayKay: ‘I’m sorry, I definitely don’t miss truck stops. Do you ever just find yourself sitting at a truck stop and eating or something and being like, “I was here before. Don’t know when, don’t care when, never gonna find out.” Oh my God.’
Tom: ‘You should buy a paper.’
MayKay: ‘Buy a paper?’
Tom: ‘Yeah, then don’t be in a truck stop, because you just zone out.’
MayKay: ‘I’ve never seen you read a paper.’
Tom: ‘You’ve never seen me read a paper?’
MayKay: ‘I’ve never seen you read a paper in a truck stop.’
Tom: ‘I read papers in truck stops, yeah.’
MayKay: ‘Anyway! I don’t know if reading in a truck stop makes me like them any more.’
Tom: ‘It makes me like them.’
MayKay: ‘Well, that’s good. You’ve found a method. I have not yet. I’m sure I will.’
As for the music? It’s odd genius (Pockets describes it self-deprecatingly thus: ‘Hook, verse, hook, verse, end of song. The end. That’s it. Run it through a distortion pedal.’) Obsessions with 1990s popular culture, an incredible talent for catching a melody, then another one, then another one, and ending up with a pop song that has fifty times as much catchiness as anything near it. Feminist, occasionally violent lyrics; almost cartoon-like, and full of strange fantasy. The result is near-perfect pop befitting of a culture where pop doesn’t exist anymore; music that’s simultaneously assaulting and comforting, stupid and remarkably intelligent.
There’s a seven-second song called Megameanie on their forthcoming album, as well as what’s probably one of the most beautiful post-breakup songs ever written, Snore Bore Whore, which runs over five minutes and contains among other things a sample from the narration of newscaster George Putnam on the 1965 anti-pornography propaganda film Perversion For Profit, primal screeches from MayKay and beautiful keyboard parts. It’s the song that reinforces the fact that, despite their appearance, anti-coolness, and tendency to bang pots together on stage, they are truly remarkable songwriters.
After playing a few practical jokes that involve soaking each other in the dressing room showers and chucking chairs about, they bounce on stage. Confronted by skinheads hugging their girlfriends, waiting for the blokey Oasis-aphiles Kasabian to come on stage and not these weirdos from Ireland, it could all go horribly wrong. Does it? Of course not. They’re that good, you see. Do you not know that yet?
Modern Nursery Rhymes: a lyrical journey into the heart of Fight Like Apes
Knucklehead
Hold up stay fresh / Don’t let that
beast consume you yet / You’re
looking like a rack of lamb / And
you’re talking like a caravan / So, no pressure, no
pressure / You’re spending tea time with / Fran
Drescher, Fran Drescher / From that awful TV
show ...
Do You Karate?
And he hides behind the guise / Of making life a big surprise / Until you realise / He doesn’t even know you like stars
Snore Bore Whore
It’s getting better / I sleep well again and now / And I saw my successor yesterday/ And I smiled ’cause she looks like a cow / But none of that matters / ‘Cause she’s been your cow for a while / So none of that matters / ’Cause there’s something she does that makes you smile
Jake Summers
Hey! You! What’s your face? / I’ve got a pocket full of fist / You got a stupid face / Hey! You! Know your place / You’re like Kentucky Fried Chicken / But without the taste / Hey! You! Get some grace / You know you’re Driving Miss Daisy all over the place / Hey! You! You’re taking up space / And you’re a f**king disappointment to the human race
Recyclable Ass
I’d love if my ex-boyfriends / Would stop getting with new girlfriends / And stay single forever / Just in case I change my mind / Woo-ta-ya, that one’s a home-wrecker / Woo-ta-ta, looks like Woody Woodpecker / Woo-ta, just let me know and when / So I can take you off my list, you recyclable men
TOM DUNNE
Unlike me, my kecks were up for the crack
3 October 2010
Week number two of my new fitness regime and it’s already gone pear-shaped. Week one – buying runners – went well, but week two – wearing them – went horribly wrong. I made the mistake of bringing them to a gym. I’d forgotten what a testosterone-fuelled pit the whole shower area can be. And I’d also packed my sports bag in the dark, selecting from the underwear drawer an item that would have further effeminised a lady boy.
I’d have been safer wearing my wife’s underwear, particularly as the other men present seemed to be a group of body-building bouncers from various eastern European countries, many of whom could well have been war criminals. ‘Don’t hurt me, I work in the media’ cut no ice here. Nor indeed did the words ‘mercy’, ‘help’ or ‘hello, sailor’.
The real mistake I made was thinking I could buy my own underwear. This is a fallacy of mine linked to a belief I still vaguely have that I am an independent person who can survive in the world without adult supervision. Wiser heads than mine believe shopping for underwear is beyond most men, and they are right. ‘Leave it to your wife,’ they say, but I am nothing if not old-fashioned.
I thought I knew what I was doing. ‘How hard can it be to find white kecks with a red waistband?’ I asked myself? But it’s not that easy in real life. The underwear boxes are vaguely homoerotic and I’m not sure it would reflect well on you to linger over them. I spotted the ones I thought I needed and was just about to pounce when I saw similar ones with a more fetching gold-coloured band. ‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘live a little. What harm can it do?’
The answer was quite a lot. They weren’t the same. The back, an area for which I think the word ‘generous’ should be used at all times, was more akin to a G-string than a comfortable seating area. The front had been designed during a cotton shortage but made up in dynamic uplift, support and pinpoint definition what it lacked in common decency. ‘Don’t ever wear them out,’ my wife told me solemnly, ‘unless you intend to leave me.’
I couldn’t bring them back. That would have involved me holding them up in front of a beautiful young sales assistant and telling her, ‘I’m not this type of man.’ And that would have exposed me to the possibility of her looking at the box and saying, ‘No, you aren’t.’ I thought of trying to offload them onto a friend but my wife argued it would be too public a questioning of his sexuality. ‘He’ll come out when he’s ready,’ she told me. So they languished in a drawer until they ended up in my sports bag. I realised the mistake as I sat naked and wet after the shower. Naked and wet and among a group of men who lift weights four hours a day, drink weird protein things and have ‘packages’ that would disappoint a hamster.
So I took the only option: Commando. Yeah, I know. What must they think of me? Still, they didn’t get my name and will remember me only as the ‘Commando’ guy who can dry himself really, really fast! No, honestly, really, really, really fast.
Now, what will I wear in the afterlife?
10 October 2010
Did you know that the follow-up question to ‘Is there anybody there?’, much loved amid mystic circles, is actually ‘wearing anything nice?’ I didn’t either, but it is. Dead people wear clothes and only right too. It was one thing for the young bo
y in The Sixth Sense to see dead people, but if he’d also been exposed to his aunt Gertrude – naked as the day they found her body in the coal shed – well, even Bruce Willis would have blushed.
It was a psychic that told me. Now psychics, cleverly, maintain that in reading terms I am dead to them. ‘You are dead to me,’ they say, eyeing me suspiciously. ‘I feel no energy from you, nothing,’ they add. My wife says the same, but they also hint that my deceased kin on the other side are in no rush to contact me anyway. Even she doesn’t do that.
This psychic, like the Sixth Sense boy, also saw dead people when he was a child. ‘Were you not terrified?’ I asked him. ‘No,’ he told me, ‘you see, for a long time I didn’t realise they were dead. They were so normal to me.’
I wondered aloud, ‘Had they clothes on?’ He seemed surprised, ‘Of course, of course they had clothes on.’
He thought I was wondering if the ladies might be in the naughty naked nude. But I wasn’t, really. It’s just, you would have thought, when the mystery of death is at last revealed and the veil between this world and the next is lifted, you wouldn’t have to worry anymore about being caught wearing the jumper your mother gave you.
Be just our luck, wouldn’t it? To be badly dressed for eternity.
He was losing me now. I was thinking random thoughts? If we have clothes do we have to have presses? Who irons? Do colours still fade? – when I suddenly heard him telling me that he is often asked to help in missing-person cases.
Then the words ‘car key’ appeared mysteriously in my mind. I hadn’t seen my car key in two days. Operative word here is ‘key’, not ‘keys’. I lost the spare ages ago. The garage had told me I could only order a new one if I had the log book. The log book was locked in the car. I started screaming the words ‘where are my keys?’ in my mind and asked him if there was anything he wanted to tell me.
His answer was so vague that even now I struggle to remember a single word of it. It was like a James Blunt B-side. Initially it seemed to be going nowhere but then suddenly it petered out. It was like a ghost itself. He may have answered my question but I just can’t be sure. I might have imagined he answered it, or dreamt it.
In the absence of the car key I asked him if my producer should get engaged. He became very serious: There was a very dramatic pause for effect. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, I’m sorry, tell her “no”.’
She isn’t dating or even planning to.
We found my keys under a curtain, bedroom variety as opposed to netherworld.
They’d just been on the dark side for a bit.
Moving to the raw beat of the lesbian witches
17 October 2010
The vegetable man – as in he who sells vegetables – has gone all Lewis Carroll on me. I had thought the day’s headline – ‘Taxes to rise’ – deserved a mention, but when I did, he eyed it derisively and raising his eyes to the beautiful sunny day said cryptically: ‘Why assume that’s any more real than any of this?’ This, from a man who knows his onions, seemed like a fair point.
I tripped lightly from the park resolving not to buy any more papers. As An Emotional Fish once sang: ‘That’s the trouble with reality, it’s taken far too seriously,’ and I hadn’t really taken reality seriously since the ‘incident’ on a Something Happens tour in 1995. The one with the lesbian witches.
Ah yes, the lesbian witches! We’d been touring a while, you see, and the distinction between a bit odd and utterly barking had been wearing thin. Boston, where we were playing, was Salem, Massachusetts territory and a support band made up of witches was par for the course. The fact that they were also lesbians made it mildly more original but Boston’s Buy and Sell magazine was full of second-hand gear from previously failed similar bands. The lesbian witch market was a notoriously competitive one. The dressing room was below the stage, so while they played, and we read poetry and discussed manly things, we couldn’t help but hear their set.
Forty minutes in it took on murderous intent. The vocals had given way to insane Apache-like whooping and the onstage dancing seemed to have an American Indian war party quality to it. It felt like the ceiling would soon come in on us. What was happening on stage we wondered?
Our best guess was that it was some kind of Indian massacre. The most likely scenario was that a member of the audience was being burned alive on stage as the band danced around him naked. There were other theories but this seemed the least far fetched. It was time to investigate. It wasn’t quite what we’d expected. They had just all gone a bit mad, jumping up and down and running around. You’d find more choreography in a bouncy castle. It was very intense so we stood side stage, sipping beer and trying to share the intensity.
Then we noticed the drummer. She had taken her top off. We gulped beer in unison. We were just the main band come to offer the support act a little morale uplift. We certainly weren’t four lads from Dublin come to look at the topless drummer. Topless female drummers were commonplace to us, our demeanour suggested.
She was remarkable. Her torso made Christian Bale look flabby. There literally wasn’t an inch of excess flesh and as she flayed that kit into submission we stood enthralled. Nothing north of the border moved an inch, literally nothing!
I handed her a towel as she left the stage. ‘Great gig,’ I said. ‘Thanks, man,’ she replied. I’ve thought about the way she said ‘man’ ever since. I don’t think it was an insult. As she dried herself off the reality/unreality debate ignited briefly in my head. I was going to enquire what sticks she used but thought better of it. Ah, we band of brothers.
When did we become so damned good looking?
21 November 2010
‘No mud ducks!’ we used to say. We were unsure where it came from but it was written on the dressing room door to encourage only models and aspiring soap stars to enter. It must have worked. We were left safely unmolested for our entire time in music. I thought I was finished with that phrase. Until I saw the ladies of PricewaterhouseCoopers!
Keen to be as PC as the next man, I banged the table. ‘What kind of narrow-minded, sexist beasts would rate female co-workers on a scale of one to ten,’ I cried. ‘Oh, those sleazy bean-counters.’ I pointed the story out to our accountant, Doreen (an eleven, easily!), and our foreign affairs correspondent, Maureen (a twelve, possibly a thirteen, some days even a fourteen!).
But then the strangest thing about the story struck me: All of the girls in the PwC story were beautiful. Eleven random Irish people, all stunning: what are the chances? There were no exceptions. They were eerily similar in looks, with a whiff of The Stepford Wives about them, but you couldn’t argue with the attractiveness. The phrase ‘No mud ducks,’ just fell from my lips.
The following day, another photo adorned many papers. This time it was the girls, and one boy, of TCD. It was yet another ‘Faux Nude Calendar to Raise Funds for Charity’. It too was notable for an absence of mud ducks. There wasn’t one amongst them. ‘This country is in a mud duck crisis,’ I thought, ‘and once we had so many.’
And didn’t we just. Not many people know this but the 1983 UCD calendar, then simply called ‘Semi Naked Hairy Students’ was withdrawn due to a lack of same. Only two students could be found that wouldn’t frighten the children and the idea of a two-month calendar simply wouldn’t wash, much like its subjects. The follow up, ‘Hairy Lads in Wool’, was also cancelled while ‘Hairy Girls in Sweaters’ was a surprise hit in Denmark. It was the era of gender uncertainty. The engineer handbook of 1985 gave the class breakdown as 120 male, twenty female (definitely) and sixty students about whose gender the college authorities commented that they ‘wouldn’t like to say’.
So what’s happened? When did Ireland become beautiful? Somewhere along the way, improved diet, foreign travel, changes in the gene pool or exposure to Beverly Hills 90210 seems to have made us a beautiful race of people. Children born after 1988 would seem to bear no comparison to the misshapen, malnourished and wizen creatures that brought them into this world.
‘Look,’ the tourists will say, ‘you can almost see the famine in their eyes.’ I had experience of this once in Davis, California. We played there. The audience were unspeakably beautiful. Young, fit, tanned and toned, they looked at the stage with a mixture of pity and awe. Mostly pity though, which is not a great card to play when trying to seduce someone. Useful in marriage, however.
PAUL LYNCH
Film reviews
2012
15 November 2009
2012, the new blockbuster from Roland Emmerich, is something of a disaster. But what else is new? You would think we had enough doomsday already, what with a global economic recession, never mind Hollywood being intent right now on remaking all your favourite 1980s movies. But Emmerich can’t help himself. This is the guy who zapped the planet with extra-terrestrials in Independence Day, shook us almost to death with Godzilla, then fridge-freezered us en masse in The Day After Tomorrow. Now he’s moving the ground beneath our feet. 2012 begins in 2009 as the sun begins emitting dangerous radiation and picks up in 2012 when the earth’s core melts magnificently.
Stuck in the middle of this oncoming cataclysm is a sprawling ensemble cast running for their life. There’s Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Adrian Helmsley, a level-headed scientist who predicts the disaster. There’s Danny Glover as the US president, and he’s exactly how you would imagine Obama in three years’ time: cranky and crumpled like an old suit. There’s Woody Harrelson’s quirky turn as prophet of doom Charlie Frost. While centre stage is John Cusack’s Jackson Curtis, a crap novelist, limousine driver and ex-husband of Kate (Amanda Peet). His job is not just to save his kids, get rid of the ex-wife’s annoying surgeon boyfriend, reunite his nuclear family and somehow get his family to the secret location where the world’s governments have built mysterious ‘ships’ to save an elect few [this is a thinly-disguised recession movie: the world is collapsing, the plutocrats are out to save themselves, good luck if you’re an ordinary punter]. But he also has to tread a fine balance between solemn and cheesey.