Telling It Like It Is

Slavoj Žižek interviewed in yesterday's Observer:

He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. "I will tell you the truth now," he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. "Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah." He flicks furiously through the pages. "Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka's last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality."

or, as we put it:

A philosopher for our age, if by that one means a philosopher lacking any rigorous empirical standards of reference. Anything's fair game as a source of evidence for Žižek, including Wikipedia, Newsweek, and Lacan, FFS. This is just bricolage in the service of producing original and novel interpretations of the world without having to measure them against any objective criteria. His books offer the jouissance of avant-gardism while reinforcing the idea of philosophy as conspicuous consumption. The perfect postmodernist thinker, and I don't mean that as a compliment.

First as farce, then as tragedy.

It's Friday. You Know It Is, It Really Is.

Frank Sidebottom - Great Big Zoo Scrapbook

In Memory of Frank Sidebottom & Chris Sievey

I first became aware of Frank Sidebottom when the local TV news magazine ran a piece about him having the hump with Sting and Madonna for nicking his song ideas out of his suit while it was at the dry-cleaners in Timperley Village. I was in stitches from the word go. Living in Timperley meant that there was ample opportunity to see him live, not just at the Summer Carnival, but regularly at the local Labour Club or even at the International in Manchester, and if that didn't satisfy the craving he had his own radio shows and released records, sometimes an LP a week.

During the late 80s he seemed to permeate so many parts of my life: in football he was Tommy Doc's "assistant" at Moss Lane on Saturday afternoons, on Sundays I'd play against his Timperley Big Shorts in the Pub League, and he was on kids' TV on Saturday mornings where one of his co-stars was an old schoolmate of mine. Even the busstop I used every day for work had a flyer for Chris's band, The Freshies, jammed behind the plastic where the timetable should be.

After a hiatus for much of the 90s/00s during which Chris worked successfully in animation (he won an award for writing Pingu), Frank returned with his own telly show on Channel M, not dissimilar to his Fantastic Shed Show of 1992, but with more innovation, such as his experiments in 3D TV. And he started touring again. Last year he played a residency at the LMRCA club at the bottom of our road, which meant I saw him 10 times at a fiver a throw, and every night he had me in stitches, even when he had a hangover. It's these shows I'll probably remember him for as I made many new friends there and they had something of a street party spirit about them.

I only met Chris once. We shared a few beers after his first show abroad in Darmstadt, Germany, a show I flew out specifically to see. He was obviously a very creative and mischievous bloke, but you'd wouldn't have guessed who he was if he hadn't been the only other Englishman there.

I'm so sad he's passed away as I know he had some many things planned in all different types of media. Hopefully they'll see the light of day and he'll get a bit more of the recognition he deserves. I'm missing him already. He still owes me 1p.

Bobbins News

Frank Sidebottom R.I.P.

Ish Friday . Lesh Boogie!

Art Brut - Alcoholics Unanimous

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #3

Sean O'Casey Bridge

It was a source of constant irritation to Joyce that Sean O'Casey had a bridge named after him when no writer had done more to integrate north and south sides of the Liffey into a cohesive and coherent lifeworld than Joyce had. Perhaps his irritation went deeper than that, though. After all, it was Casey who the kids loved; Joyce's atonal modernism couldn't compete with Casey's Stalinist sense of humour, his jaunty nostalgie de la boue, and adolescent sense of indignation. Even today, 300 years later, teenage buskers who should know better congregate on this highly unstable swing bridge to sing "The East Is Red," "Comandante Che Guevara," and "The Silver Tassie." Some of them even try to play the Uilleann pipes, as Casey did, but they tend to get moved on by the Gards as a danger to public safety. Casey also wrote "Red Roses for Me," the first Pogues album. A lot of people think Shane MacGowan got all his ideas about Irishness from going to Westminster public school, but in fact he did meet genuine Irish people, who told him about Casey and co. and whom he then parodied.

Casey, who was never one to bear a grudge, in spite of having loads, once said, "Joyce for all his devotion to his art, terrible in its austerity, was a lad born with a song on one side of him, a dance on the other. With neighbours like that it's a wonder he got anything written."

The bloke standing to the right of this scene in the casual beige jacket and trousers is about to nick that scooter.

International Financial Services Centre

Of course, the IFSC was not around in Joyce's time. This was just an urban wasteland of empty warehouses and docklands doing no harm to anyone while occasionally providing a backdrop for movies such as The Commitments, Michael Collins, On the Waterfront, and Moby-Dick. This all changed in 1987, before some of these films had even been made, when Charlie Haughey and Dermot Desmond realized that what Dublin really lacked was a conduit to enable multinationals to avoid paying tax through a combination of reincorporation and lax "light-touch" regulation.

As you can see from the photo above, with friends like that, Freedom in Ireland is always going to be a work in progress. Thus far, as with her American counterpart, only those who have money can get inside her. Yeah, Liberty's a bit of a whore, when it comes down to it. And she's fooling nobody with that book. Where's the second set of accounts, love?

The Ormond Hotel

Home to Honoré de Balzac from 1820 to 1825 and where he wrote his five-act tragedy Cromwell, the Ormond Hotel has seen better days. You'd hope it has, anyway. This is where Joyce both wrote and set Episode 11 of Ulysses, The Sirens, a scene dominated by music; to this very day, the Ormond echoes with the delights of the Terpsichorean muse, mostly from the radios of builders. The Sirens were creatures in ancient Greek mythology, part woman, part seagull, whose enchanting cawing lured sailors to their deaths on the rocky shores of the Sirens' island. The Sirens would then tie the sailors to the masts of their ships and eat their livers for eternity while shitting everywhere and making a right bloody mess, a metaphor used by Anton Chekhov for his play The Seagull and which Alfred Hitchcock more famously used for his movie Rear Window. In Ulysses, Bloom mixes his liver with mashed potatoes, to make it more palatable. And of course, it isn't his liver. It's a pig's. Or maybe a little lamb's.

Joyce wrote this episode in a "musical" style, to reflect the subject matter. A German opera called Martha is frequently referred to, echoing the previous scene set outside Davy Byrne's pub in that Guinness advert, and the episode ends with Bloom letting out a resounding fart as he passes a picture of Robert Emmet. Arse as wind instrument. Ironically, it was a resident setting light to a fart that gave the Ormond the distinctive appearance it has today.

Glasnevin Cemetery

From the top of the round tower over the tomb of Daniel O'Connell, it's possible to see all the way to Naas. And yet, oddly, the tower itself cannot be seen from Naas. This is due to the curvature of the earth or because the tower has four corners to hide round. Nobody knows for sure which.

Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Joyce wrote to Bertrand Russell that had Dublin been destroyed by an atom bomb, "it would be possible to rebuild the entire city, brick by brick, using Ulysses. Though God alone knows why anyone would want to. The place is a shithole." Russell replied, tersely, "There is no God." Dublin corporation rarely, if ever, used either letter to promote Dublin to tourists.

Ulysses is often cited as the culmination of the Modernist tradition. How fitting, then, that we should end here, at the cemetery, for Ulysses represented not just the culmination but the end point of Modernism. If what Joyce claimed for his novel is true, then it is not so much a work of art as a work of anthropology. Indeed, we might say it is the first "postmodern" anthropological text, combining high art, low culture, politics, religion, sport, working-class life, economics, sex and gender relations, and race in a wild, swirling vortex, just as they are in reality. And how fitting, too, that it was Bruno Latour, after whom Latour Eiffel is named, who observed in his book We Have Never Been Modern that a reflexive anthropology alone is capable of giving us an accurate depiction of our society, subverting the imperialist discourse that gave birth to the discipline in the first place. He clearly had Ulysses in mind. Or, if not, another book.

It is sometimes said that all those tossers celebrating Bloomsday are a secret sect of Joyce haters who are, metaphorically, dancing on his grave, making a mockery of him and his book, a work that managed to capture with incredible accuracy a living, breathing, thriving metropolis in all its complexity and subtlety. It is also said that there have been only three people in the world who have read Ulysses from cover to cover and actually understood it. Not one of them knew English. The debate rages on. It's what he would have wanted.

PRIMAVERA REVIEW (Part Two)

Friday

Yes, Pixies. They’re about to play on the main stage and Pixies-hill is crowded. They come on stage and there’s a big cheer, and when they open with Cecilia Ann, the crowd’s even louder. They’re on form and faithful to their sound and style. They played most of their classics: 'Velouria', 'Nimrod’s Son', 'Here Comes Your Man', 'Monkey Gone to Heaven', 'Where Is My Mind?', etc. I ruined my vocal chords for a couple of days yelling with 'Debaser' and 'Broken Face'… But what an experience! I’ll never forget that concert.

Saturday

Veronika and me arrive early, for the Minimúsica session, which is about pop bands playing stuff for kids. Sweet, but we soon get tired of it and go to the Pitchfork stage to catch Real State. I don’t know them, we’re told they’re from New Jersey and they became one of my favourite acts of Primavera, very interesting guitars.
When they finish we go to a small stage facing the sea and sit down to watch Gentle Music Men, a Catalan indie band. They’re pretty good and the singer’s got a nice voice. Apparently, they’re quite known for the fact that one of them is the fattest member in an indie band…
After that, I make my way to the Auditorium where I meet Pep, to watch Roddy Frame. He plays a lovely acoustic set and charms the audience. He plays mostly stuff from his solo albums, but also includes 'Oblivious' and 'Walk Out to Winter', which, of course, get a big cheer.
We don’t wait till the end, though, we need to rush to join the others and catch The Drums at some other stage. We’re far away but we can tell they’re having fun. They display their naïve pop stuff with some energy and ‘Let’s Go Surfing’ has become one of my Primavera anthems.
So, what next? Too much takes place at the same time. We’ve already missed Michael Rother presenting Neu! Music, Van Dyke Parks, The Slits and Grizzly Bear (we only arrive in time for their last song). And now, it’s a toss-up between The Charlatans and Built to Spill. We opt for the Mancunians, with the idea of going to Built to Spill after four or five songs. In the end, we stay with The Charlatans for the whole gig. Tim Burgess must have made a pact with the devil, or maybe his long hair covering his face hides the ageing process, but it looks like they’re frozen in time. And they put on a very good show. Their songs, to me, sounded better live than on record. Really, and rather unexpectedly for myself, one of the highlights of this year’s Primavera.
Next, Gary Numan. A bit of a mistery that one, we didn’t know what to expect. After half an hour there was no mistery at all. Gary’s act was pretty boring and people were leaving. And, yes, he played that obscure B-side, ‘Cars’.
Now, another choice. Lee Perry or Pet Shop Boys. They’re so similar… My American mates, Ken and Dave, go to the Pet Shop Boys and me and Veronika go to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, which was good. Not the most exciting of concerts, but the man is a legend and I think it’s worth watching him, in spite of some mildly irritating dancers on dope… At 1.30 in the morning, with the sea breeze, that solid dub-reggae sound somehow fits perfectly. He finishes on time and we can just catch Pet Shop Boys on the big screen, doing their last number ‘West End Girls’, with dancers wearing big square boxes for heads. It looks both silly and arty.
We all regroup and sit down to relax for a while, watching Orbital in the distance at 3 am… and then we go home. It’s been an intense Primavera!

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #2

Westland Row

The birthplace of the playwright and essayist Oscar Wilde, Westland Row is now, as you can see, much grubbier than it was in Bloom's time, both graffitoed and vandalized. Built in 1776 by Jacob Epstein, it now appears to be the permanent home of unkempt students from Trinity College who congregate in indolent clusters hereabout smoking all manner of substances, taking photos of one another, and generally being a nuisance to both the living and the dead. In Ulysses, Bloom pays a visit to Sweny's chemist at the bottom of the street, where he buys some lemon soap, presumably to remove all the lipstick, and a packet of johnnies "in case Molly fancies a tumble when I get home." This is what is generally known to literary scholars as dramatic irony: The reader, unlike Bloom, knows that, at that very moment, Molly is being taken up the shitter by Blazes Boylan, using neither soap nor johnnies.

Sweny's can still be found at its old location. It is now a secondhand bookstore, but it still stocks lemon soap. If you require johnnies, there's another pharmacy a little further up Westland Row, but if you ask the Sweny's staff politely, they are only too happy to lend you johnnies from their own personal stash. The store is under new ownership, and they're trying to oblige all customers. Just say that you always used to get your johnnies there.

Davy Byrne's Pub

Davy Byrne's. The moral pub. The moral being, don't drink in Davy Byrne's. Bloom stops off here and consumes a glass of burgundy and a Gorgonzola sandwich, even though Gorgonzola was not invented until the First World War and anyone who has visited this pub knows that burgundy is only ever drunk out of the brain cavity of the original Davy Byrne, whose skull is kept behind the bar specifically for this purpose, as requested in his will. It has been suggested that this cheese reference is in fact a tribute to Émile Zola, the chronicler of Parisian working-class life on whom Joyce closely modeled his own career. Others have said that it was simply a mistake, one of the several thousand historical inaccuracies that have been spotted in the work to date. Experts in the field are now generally of the view that Joyce was "making it up as he went along."

It is interesting that, per Joyce, nobody drinks Guinness in Davy Byrne's, since the pub featured in a recent advertising campaign celebrating the 250th anniversary of the brewery's founding. In one television advert, drinkers are seen outside the pub offering a toast "To Arthur!" a reference to brewery founder Arthur Guinness, and in a semi-humorous relay of Chinese Whispers across Dublin pubs, the toast becomes increasingly distorted: "To Martha!" "To Hearth Rugs!" "To Bath Plugs!" "To Garth Brooks!" "To Garth Crooks!" and so on, until it has done the rounds of Dublin and gets back to Davy Byrne's, by which time the drinkers have actually sampled the brew. At that point, they shout, as one, "To Lager!" and spend the rest of the night drinking Stella.

But that bit was cut.

The bat motif that you can make out on the wall is the symbol of Bacardi rum. It is often asserted, mistakenly, that the Bass triangle was the first brand logo to appear in a work of art, in Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergere, but this sculpture predates it by 12 years. The motif is also a reminder of another Irish novelist, Bram Stoker, who used to come into Davy Byrne's and drink Bacardi by the gallon. The bar staff let him sleep off his appalling hangovers during the daytime in the cool of the cellars, because the slightest glimpse of sunlight caused him immense agony. Thus was the story of Dracula born.

The National Museum

There are some artifacts behind these doors that date back to the days of pre-history, when humans were little more than grasping, instinctual, selfish, animalistic monsters. Take a contemporary Dublin citizen and hand them one of these items, and they simply wouldn't know what to make of them. There are no clues to how they should be used or, indeed, to how they were used. They belong to an era that we can barely conceptualize, and the presence of these artifacts only compound our confusion. That we should even encounter them in the midst of our own, advanced civilization seems so anachronistic that one can only wonder what purpose could lie behind the act of displaying them to us other than to confront us with the Other which we once were, to disprove Montaigne's assertion, "I am a man. Nothing human is foreign to me."

Leopold Bloom visits the National Museum principally to contemplate the arses of the statues within. There were a number of arseholes in here when we dropped by, too, but we didn't find them arousing in the way Bloom did. Autres temps, autres mœurs.

Martello Tower, Sandycove

At this point in our dérive, we slipped into something long and uncomfortable, namely, the 5.13 DART from Pearse Station to Bray, alighting at Sandycove in order to visit the Martello Tower where Joyce opens his novel. The DART now runs underground, and the drivers are all French.

As you can see, Sandycove is, despite its name, one of Dublin's leafier suburbs. The Tower itself, in the distance, was built by the British to spot Napoleon's forces should he attempt anything so underhand as inciting the Irish to revolt. Joyce has Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus play his modern-day "lookouts," although they fall out over the fact that Mulligan has invited an Englishman, Haines, to stop with them, thereby illustrating the tension between Irishmen of the time over their relationship to Empire. Also, there are only two beds.

There are 365 steps to the top of the Martello Tower, which is why Mulligan complains about his tea being cold when Dedalus brings it up to him. There are several witty puns about Dedalus taking years over breakfast that will escape readers unless they know this fact. Several other puns relating to cramps, caresses, and Crete cannot be fully appreciated without a full knowledge of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, who jumped off a high tower to escape King Minos. Interestingly, Paul McCartney got the name of his band Wings from this chapter of the book. The Beatles acquired their name from the Ladybird Book of Beetles.


Part the Third suivant.

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #1

In honour of Ireland's first flâneur après la lettre, Leopold Bloom, members of the Dublin Psychogeographical Society took it upon themselves this year to re-create his dérive, as described in James Joyce's remarkable novel Ulysses, and in our usual spirit of bloody-mindedness, to do it in Paris, source originaire de la flâneuristicisme and spiritual home of the Lettrist International and Situationism. The coach from Beauvais brought us, in the first acte gratuit of the day, to the portals of the James Joyce Pub, an omen, some of us imagined, a portending portal, if you will, a benevolent Delphic, nay, Homeric, augur signifying the Immortals' blessing on our adventure. Others amongst us pointed out that the bus always stops here.

The Guinness Brewery

Not, strictly speaking, the Ulyssean starting point, and thanks to the four Thermoses of room-temperature red wine we had packed and the ready availability of imbibing establishments for which Paris is renowned, Bloom's original path as described in the book soon became more of a drunkard's stagger, although we endeavoured to reach as many points of interest as we could, regardless of their chronological order in the text. Nonetheless, in many ways the Guinness Brewery constitutes a suitable starting point for our day out. "A Visit to Guinness' Brewery" is an essay topic suggested in Finnegans Wake, and as Joyce once observed, Dubh Linn, the uncorrupted name of Ireland's capital, means "black pool," identifying a subconscious motivation for the consumption of this darkest and foulest of beers by the unsuspecting natives. The brewery is thus an oneiric spring, the city's fount from which all life and death bubbles forth, dark and laden with original sin, much like Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal. Metaphorically, then, the Brewery evokes not just Dublin's alcohol-sodden Viking past but also Holles Street Hospital, setting for Joyce's Oxen and the Sun scene in Ulysses, and the place where modern-day Dubliners give birth to their own Fleurs du mal.

The tower you see in the picture gives visitors a 360-degree view of the entire city of Dublin. It also marks the precise location of the Marquis de Sade's liberation after the Brewery was stormed in 1789. In those days, the citizens of Dublin had the wit to make former inmates members of their parliament. Today's Dubliners can't even manage to do the reverse.

We were taken on a tour of the Brewery (you can see the building behind), but we were forcibly ejected at the end of the tour when we demanded our free pints of Guinness. So much for Irish hospitality.

The Phoenix Park

Ah yes, the phoenix, mythological bird ripe for all sorts of linguistic jiggery-pokery but never much good for cooking. We were surprised upon our arrival to see how literally the parks department has taken the name, the park's fields being liberally covered over with what at first sight looked to be ashes. Closer examination revealed it to be sand, however, much to the delight of our pro-Situ members always on the lookout for the beach beneath the cobbles. A couple of the capital's young bucks were engaged in what we took to be some kind of religious rite involving clubs and a round projectile. Could this be the fabled "hurling," the Irishman's national sport? If so where was the vomit and blood? Or polo, perhaps? Our map indicated that there were polo grounds around here somewhere. Or were they simply two strapping Irish lads revelling in their own strength and vigour, frolicking gamely in the sunshine on the ersatz beach, their own Sandymount Strand, while lusty onlookers furtively masturbated behind the rocks? Who can say? More than one of us on encountering this scene thought immediately of Albert Camus and his love of outdoor life on the beaches of Algeria. A Joycean link here too: So struck was he by the structure and plot of Ulysses that Camus sketched out the plan for a novel about Bloom's mother, culminating with her death at the hands of her son on June 15th, 1904. The fact that Bloom makes no reference in Ulysses to the murder of his mother for the entirety of the next day transforms this Everyman into the archetypal modern-day psychopath, an Outsider not merely by virtue of his Jewishness, but by virtue also of his lack of fellow-feeling, the affectless, blasé personality incarnate, to use Simmel's categorisation.

Of course, we know what happened next. Bloom became Meursault, the Outsider who kills an Arab for kicks. The opening line of that book?: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

La Peste is better, anyway.

Mountjoy Prison

To inmates, "The Joy." To the screws, "The Mount." To the locals, "Mounters," "Joyo," "Priso," "Ountjoyp." Home to de Sade in his senility and madness, to Behan in his cups, to several popes (frocked, defrocked and unfrocked), and, a surprise to many, quite a few little old ladies, some of whom just love the place and keep coming back simply because they enjoy the company and the warmth, others amongst them who cannot help but come back because they are so thoroughly institutionalized they cannot cope with life on the outside. Sartre once said, ridiculously, that every man is free, even in prison. What he forgot to add is that even outside a prison's walls, a man can carry a prison inside his head. The former inmates of this particular asylum are frequently damaged in this way. Once the madness acquired in this particular building gets under your skin, it can require decades of re-education, beatings, and waterboarding to flush it out of you.

There is no truth to the rumour, incidentally, that the cells are so crowded that inmates develop hunchbacks. Though critics are yet to determine why Behan wrote about an old triangle instead of the bells, the bells.

Holles Street Hospital

The setting of the Oxen and the Sun portion of the novel and the site of the Guillotine during the Revolution, here it is that Ireland's monstrous beauties are born. As Baudelaire, described by Walter Benjamin as the master expositor of modernity, once said, "the unique and supreme pleasure of making love lies in the certitude of doing evil." Molly Bloom's "Yes, yes, I said, yes," thus becomes an affirmation of evil, a declaration of nihilism that encapsulates the modernist spirit. It is fucking that leads to creation, to birth. Baudelaire's evil flowers are his poems, while Joyce generates Ulysses by fucking with language. The Revolution itself gave birth to Modernity, to Saint-Simonism, Comtean Positivism, the ontological rupture between subject and object, knower and known, mind and body. It is no coincidence to those astute enough to notice that the executioner's tool of choice during the Revolution was the Guillotine, not because of its purported humaneness or its symbolic representation of progress, but because it enacted the literal separation of body and mind. The Guillotine is Descartes' Cogito put to the task of social cleansing. And, in the same stroke, it is a symbol of rebirth, a cutting of the umbilical cord between parent and child, the birth of a new nation, a new society, out of the death pangs of the old.

A happy confluence of birth and death, then, echoing not just the Guinness Brewery where we began our day's outing, but also Glasnevin Cemetery, where I fear we shall all end up, whether it be by accident or design or misreading of the map while langered.

Part the Second to Follow.

PRIMAVERA REVIEW (Part One)

Hi all, this is my personal account of the Primavera festival in Barcelona, in two parts... Sorry about the delay.

Thursday

We arrive at 20 h, just in time for The Fall. Mark E. Smith starts mumbling ‘your future-ah is our clutter-ah…’ and there’s non-stop from then on, with the band, very solid, playing their typically repetitive but vibrant sound. They’re on the main stage and we can mostly see them on the big screen. Mark E. Smith reminds me of a guy in my local area who sleeps on a bench surrounded by cans of beer… But he’s still alive! And they’re a great act.
After that we caught The XX. I’ve heard of them but don’t know their stuff. They sound gentle and interesting, but after them, Broken Social Scene stole the show. They play quite a few songs from their last album, and, maybe it was the beers, but I can’t recall them playing a classic like ‘Anthems for a 17 year old girl’, but still, on stage they’re funny and inventive.
And after that, at 1 am, Pavement are… Pavement. Good songs and a good band… but the beers I’ve drunk are taking their toll now…

Friday

My friend Veronika and I arrive in time for A Sunny Day in Glasgow. To me, the songs are OK, pretty good, but mostly I love their live act. Too short, though, which is fine because it gives us time to go to the Auditorium to watch Low perform ‘The Great Destroyer’. The place is packed and we struggle to find seats. Well, in fact we don’t find them… We sit on the corridors and are told by security to move on somewhere else. That happened three or four times until we managed to find two seats. And as for the show… oh my god, it’s beautiful. Very moving. Definitely, one of the highlights of the festival.
When we leave the Auditorium I join my mate Pep and we both go to see Wire, whilst Veronika goes to see Here We Go Magic. They’re very noisy and mad, she tells me, but she enjoyed the show. Wire weren’t too noisy nor mad, but they were good, they played some classics (not the Elastica song, though…) and I was happy to see them live for the first time.
We join the others and make our way towards the main stage to catch a bit of Wilco. Maybe because I’ve seen them before, maybe because we were far away and I wasn’t paying attention, concentrated in getting drinks, they sounded to me a bit MOR-ish. I think really we were all geared up for the next act, the stars of this year’s Primavera, Pixies (to be continued…)

"These two need to spend six months in a third world country building schools."

Linder Sterling interviewed by Morrissey in Interview Magazine.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

John Hyatt - Boomerang Love