Bono deliver us from all intelligence…

I discovered this while trawling old entries on Graham Linehan’s Why thats delightful blog when i should be working. I can claim it as research but really it gives me an excuse to drink tea and laugh my arse off. The best bits are the comments page with great links from subscribers.

This reminds me of the best protest sign ever. At a mass protest in Dublin against the Iraq Invasion. “WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU NOW BONO?”

Proving the 6 degress of separation theory in the same protest was another great sign that read ” Careful now! down with this sort of thing!”  6 degrees of Father ted.

This below makes me so fucking ill from rage.

ag scriobh…one month of nerd

Well, just an update. Tully AKA Turlough Gunawardhana came over just before the weekend and layed down the piano for a song we wrote together in about five minutes. I love songs that happen like that, it’s very easy with Tully as he is a master of melodies. We had to get the piece recorded as he is about to become a da today i think. A mini Tully wow. I lent him my nylon string to do some writing as he has a crap one with two strings and every time he is here he picks up a guitar and writes something. So he is under orders to write five songs in the next month or i will kill him. His solo project will be great i think.

So Tully left and i headed into meetings with a team of potential writers and the BBC for a few days to work on a children’s tv series called Badly Drawn Roy. It was interesting hearing all the writers and talking with them during breaks. So this week i am writing a treatment on one of the episodes. I had been involved in writing a lot of the ideas for episodes so i think i should be in line to write a few of the scripts. Fingers crossed.

The writing i am finding a lot of fun and challenging as i have no training whatsoever in scriptwriting and all the other writers are very well educated in that respect.

This will be the second series I have been involved in writing. Last year I wrote or co wrote 11 episodes of a children’s animation called Funky Fables which is set to screen on children’s BBC in September this year. That was cool coz i got to write shows with my sister Eveanna who is a brilliant writer, funny as fuck and really knows what she is doing when it comes to words.

The writing is very handy because i can do it anywhere and i usually have a lot of downtime travelling between places on tour so instead of reading i just whip out the laptop and start messing around. And it’s a different world to the music. It is all about gags and making people laugh.

Lots of people listen to the music and think i must be a chronically depressed prick who never laughs or has fun. Then they come to a show and find i have trouble not joking and talking in between songs. The thing is you can’t have one without the other. Comedy is just depression compressed anyway. I can’t imagine being in the middle i am always see sawing between the two. Fuck it, it’s interesting.

So I don’t lie on a bed of nails (actually my bed is shit and the futon is like the Himalayas and i feel paralysed each morning) or wear a habit and bang my head with a board whilst chanting Latin in a low voice just for kicks. I prefer to get my nerd on and watch 15 episodes of Battlestar Gallactica in a row or Father Ted for the fifty millionth time

Fuck i really am rambling.

Why was i writing this post?

Oh yeah, this month and may will be mostly writing scripts and working on a small animation for the Irish Film board, so apologies on yet another delay on finishing this album. Only Tully has heard it so far and gave it the thumbs up…he reckons its fairly different and a good progression.

But to make up for it i am going straight back in the studio to work on a packet of songs written on a loop pedal with vocals. I have no idea what it will sound like in reality but it’s fuckin deadly in me head.

So two releases from me within a year. I promise.

i feel better…

all hail the 58

I was recording some vocals yesterday through a really nice microphone but it didn’t suit the song so i picked up a cheap Shure SM58 (the one you see just about everyone singing through onstage) and sang the song with it. And it worked perfectly. It’s lo fi quality and colour suited what i was doing.

The guitar was recorded with its sister microphone a sm 57. You can pick both of these up for a 100 squids or so or cheaper second hand. The point of the matter is don’t let your circumstances dictates your desire to create something.

I often get emails from people asking if they should save up to go into a studio or what is the minimum needed to record something.

The answer is use what you can find, beg , borrow or…ok don’t steal it.

It doesn’t have to be expensive. Your circumstance will add a colour to your voice/song. Apple tree was recorded in a damp flat straight into a computer with a cheap 57 in front of a cheap practice amp for the guitar and the vocal was sung with a 58. It was only supposed to be a demo. But i never could re create the feel of it again, especially with the vocal.

I don’t have half the gear i would like but having to work around those limitations forces me to come up with sounds and ways of doing things I would not have touched before.

And that is the crux of the matter, performance, feel. This will always win out over expensive studios. A good song well performed with spirit will carry no matter what. If you don’t believe me then pick up a Robert Johnson record. Or Black Sabbath’s first album recorded on 4 tracks. Some of those classic Bob Marley tracks sound the way they do because they had to bounce all the bass and drums down to just one track.

Why am I writing this?

So you don’t get paralysed by “Oh i don’t have the right gear” or “I will just wait and something will come up”

Fuck it, just get out there and do it. This applies to art, life, music…

Fuck paralysis by analysis.

Saturday Morning, coffee and blood

It’s saturday morning and i am reading about 8 people gunned down by machine gun fire for protesting in Sichuan next to Tibet. And some people are still saying the olympics should not be boycotted or dipped into politics.

Do they remember Hitler and the olympic games?

I understand the competitors have trained all their lives for this moment. But at the very least Politicians from all countries should boycott the games as a protest.

Fair fucks to everyone who tries to disrupt the torch journey and risk getting the shite kicked out of them or locked up or worse (if they are in China). More power to your elbow…

madness…

I spent yesterday doing different takes of a song on a nylon string guitar trying to get the best performance and feel.

I love the sound of nylon string and would play it live but i change tuning all the time and nylon string is a bastard for having “memory” and trying to go back to previous tuning.

Anyway here is a clip from my favourite guitarist duo Rodrigo y Gabriela. This gets scarier the more i watch it. There are so many things going on with Gabriela’s part that sometimes i just laugh.  Even if you are not a fan it is worth it to hear a cool mexican/dublin accent.

See these guys live if you get a chance.