Loaded: 16/10/09
Friday October 16 2009
I was 17 when Suede released their debut album in early 1993 and it muscled in on any study I was hoping to do for the Leaving Cert that summer. I can't think of an album that has had a more profound impact on me.
I probably listened to Suede and its exceptional follow-up Dog Man Star hundreds of times during my college years and for some time afterwards. Back then, I couldn't imagine a time where the gap between listens would be measured in years, not days. But that's the way with even the great albums -- they get supplanted in your affections by other great ones.
Last week, I saw one of the architects of those seminal albums, Brett Anderson, play a show in his home town of London and it really rolled back the years. It didn't matter that the other musician who shaped the early Suede sound, Bernard Butler, wasn't present, or that Anderson played a comparatively short set. No, what mattered was that he gave a performance that was intense and brilliant and brimming with energy and just about erased in my mind those poor late Suede albums and his listless solo ones.
He was taking part in the now annual Jack Daniels Birthday JD Set, an invitation-only event for competition winners that also featured Carl Barat and Jon McClure of Reverend and the Makers fame.
What made the gig that bit more special than other corporate ligs was the band that played with Anderson, Barat and McClure -- a hand-picked troupe of veterans all the way from Tennessee who call themselves The Silver Cornet Band. They acquitted themselves very well on such early Suede delights as The Wild Ones and Killing of a Flashboy and on the Velvet Underground cover Venus in Furs, during which Anderson was joined by Barat and McClure.
Former Libertines man Barat went down quite well, but the charmless McClure was out of his depth -- even if he did enlist ex-Sex Pistol Glen Matlock for a surprise version of Pretty Vacant.
- Hard Working Class Heroes gets under way in Dublin once again this weekend and as well as the usual quota of good, bad and awful acts playing, there will be a series of workshops to help bands make sense of the industry.
Mentor Speed Sessions will run from 10.30am to 1pm in the Button Factory, Temple Bar, tomorrow and Sunday featuring "international industry and media professionals". They will be on hand to answer, one-on-one, any questions you may need to help navigate the pitfalls of this unforgiving business. Anyone interested needs to sign up in advance at hwch.net/industry.html.
In addition, four Industry Panels will take place over the weekend covering such topics as the inexorable rise of online media (Day & Night's blogging wunderkind Niall Byrne is on that panel), getting your music on hot TV shows, why the record label is far from dead and everything you wanted to know about touring.
- A couple of weeks ago, I took part in a panel discussion on music journalism at the Hot Press Music Show at the RDS and a member of the audience, who plugs fledgling bands, complained about how difficult it was to get said bands coverage. Well. fledgling outfits could learn something from Dublin-based duo Mail Order Messiahs, whose debut album Plain boasts smart, eye-catching artwork mocked up to look like those classic Air Mail envelopes.
Produced by Jimmy Eadie, who has worked with Jape and Redneck Manifesto, Mail Order Messiahs -- aka Dar Fahy and Mike Liffey -- will launch Plain with a Hard Working Class Heroes gig in Think Tank, Temple Bar, tomorrow at 8pm. The soulful, electronic album provides slow-burning pleasures.
- Geffen is a name synonymous with such iconoclastic figures as Nirvana, Neil Young and John Lennon. Now, the label founded 29 years ago by maverick industry man David Geffen, is set to debut its most controversial signing yet -- Pope Benedict XVI.
The octogenarian German has lent his vocals to an album of hymns called Alma Mater: Songs from the Vatican.
Quite what Benedict makes of labelmates Ashlee Simpson, Snoop Dogg and The Game is anyone's guess.
- John Meagher
Irish Independent
