Priceless Moments in Music - From the Vault - 2006

Another piece from the DefunctoBlog... this from 2006. If nothing else, it's a pretty good display of my fixation on two particular musical groups at that time...

WARNING: THIS POST INCLUDES A RIDICULOUS NUMBER OF SPOTIFY LINKS!

From the Vault - 2006: Last Night A Video Changed My Life

This was originally posted at the Old Blog That Is Old, Feb 2006. A few edits for clarity only...

As I have a habit of doing, last night I was flicking through the music channels on the telly. I rarely find anything I really really like and even rarer find something I've never seen before.

Last night, one of them, Magic, played "Barcelona" by Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballe. I have seen chunks of this, clips of this, but never the whole thing, not until today.

On Phantoms, Morrison & The Would've Been Question - From the Vault 2005

Another archive bit, this time from Jan 2005. I went to see The Phantom of the Opera in a rare family trip to the cinema. It was an excruciating outing in some respects: I don't love seeing movies with other people in general, and the rest of the party seemed determined to irritate the frak out of me throughout...

Of course, The Phantom of the Opera is not a great movie. It's not as bad as some folks would make out, and I don't think it's aged well but it's not awful.

This is another post that feels like it's from 'before'. Before the real darkness set in; before I pulled myself out of the hole; before, before... I've edited somewhat, partly to make my meaning absolutely clear, but the content remains essentially the same... and in places I've noted where my younger self was basically starry-eyed, naive and wrong. We live, we learn. What a naïf I was...

This stayed with me for a long time after I posted it, opening with a single, simple question:


Would I love Jim Morrison if he were ugly?

The London That Nobody Knows - From the Vault 2014

A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to take part in a one-off choir project called Snapshot Songs, composed by the magnificent Stuart Hancock, in collaboration with various London groups, writers and artists.

London is much on my mind today, as it so often is. Like Dracula, I take strength from the soil (concrete) of my homeland. Being Irish, Not In Ireland, I will never truly belong in the Motherland no matter how I love it, no matter how much I yearn for it... but my people have been in this pocket of London since before the Industrial Revolution, it seems... and I love my Finsbury St Lukes and Barbican, and whatever you want to label it...

Philip Lynott at Ni-ni-nineteen - From the Vaults 2005

I wrote this in 2005, on the nineteenth anniversary of Philip Lynott's death. At the time, I was hugely, almost entirely consumed by the music of his band, Thin Lizzy, and of the work he had given us. This is what I felt and thought then.

Re-reading now, I miss the apparent simplicity of my feelings then. I've edited a little for clarity and length, but otherwise, this is as it appeared on my LJ (aw, bless) in January 2005.

We have now been thirty years without our Philo, but that's a post for another day.

~wavy timey-wimey lines~

No more. More.

I used to blog nearly every day. Nothing particularly good or interesting... that was the old days of Livejournal, after all. Lots of Harry Potter or whining, as I recall.

I haven't said much new for a while, except trying to fold the truth of Bowie's death into my reality. I keep thinking of things to blog about, but they don't seem to stick.

I think I stopped believing my thoughts have any particular use to the world. Not when our civilisation seems hell bent on destroying itself. My thoughts are as nothing to the world, not compared to some of the truly tremendous bloggers out there, the brave and smart women and men who are shining bright lights into the manifold ways in which society works to keep so many people oppressed in one way or another, and often more than one.

I, I, I... maybe I got sick of the absolute self-absorption that characterises the way I blog.

Nah, that can't be it.

Maybe I ran out of things to say. I can only declare and express my love for various dead musicians in so many ways, after all. I can only wallow in the stagnant puddle of self-pity a little while without people abandoning me entirely.

*

Fear keeps my voice still, too. Fear what our government is doing and what it means for me and the people I love. Fear that I really won't amount to much or get my dreams to come true. Fear that I will become the worst of myself after all. Fear that I will try and try and nothing will come of it.

Fear that everything that matters to me will be taken away. Fear that every nice, good, fun, happy moment must be followed by six more of unhappiness, pain, miz-uh-ree and whatever else it is that keeps me in the dark cage of my own devising.

I tried, after all. I did everything I was supposed to do. I finished my novel - and it's good - and I sent it out into the world. I got healthy at last, I rewired my brain, I did my very best.

I tried and... nothing. I did all the things I thought I was supposed to do and... nothing. More of the same. More waiting for my life to start, more moments of hollow, howling despair.

That's the petulant brat in my head who thinks she's entitled to everything just because she asked nicely and isn't a horrible human being.

That's the brain weasels talking, of course. That's the writer's block talking.

No more of that. Maybe there's still more to say about those dead musicians, maybe there's more for me to observe about the world as it crumbles... nobody else sees the world as I do, after all.

Not Ready To Shut The Book - From The Vault - 2010

I found this while trawling through old work and... well, it felt pretty relevant. It was actually written as 'homework' for a creative writing class I did some years ago. The idea was to get out of one's usual writing comfort zone (specific branches of Costa Coffee, in my case) and see how it went.

Writing Somewhere New

I am doomed to failure.

I probably know it from the moment I slouch into Barbican Library. I love libraries but I don't spend much time in them because I get too easily distracted from any purpose I might have had on entering. I am doomed, utterly doomed, to failure from the moment I walk aimlessly through the stacks and find myself in the Irish History section.

I spend an hour with a book about political cartoons of the Irish Question/Troubles/War and then resolve to find somewhere to sit with my computer so as to actually write. I avoid the London Collection for the same reason I should never have gone near Irish History, and have a narrow escape in the Arts Library when I skirt dangerously close to books about Flynn, Errol. Down the stairs to the Music Library in search of a table, I realise I am doomed, utterly doomed, to failure when behind the table I have staked out, I see a shelf of old rock music encyclopaedias.

Caught in the Death Star Tractor Beam, I check all the books for references to the usual suspects: Gallagher, William Rory. Lynott, Philip Parris. Morrison, James Douglas. The laptop resting in a bag slung over my shoulder is forgotten: it is not heavy enough. With viciously grotesque, simianised Irish faces still dancing in my short term memory, after an hour flicking through three hundred years of hatred towards me and my people, I am looking for love.

The Illustrated New Musical Express Encyclopaedia of ROCK proves to be the specific tool of my downfall. It is from 1977. Opening the pages is the closest I can get to a dream I once had. In its pages, Rory and Philip live. More than that, they are at the height of their powers. Calling Card and Jailbreak are new, contemporary, popular.

A reference to Rory being the butt of cynicism and jokes surprises me. Much too much time and understanding has passed since then for this to be at all true now, and anyway, who speaks ill of the dead? Three entries later, Marvin Gaye hasn't been yet shot by his dad. On the next page, Gary Glitter has already staged the first of countless comebacks, but he's not the country's most notorious paedophile, not yet...

Jerry Garcia on page 96, most loved George Harrison on page 103, moustachioed Steve Marriott on page 112... they live. They are gorgeously alive. Then, my heart stops.

Oh dear God: page 139, where John Lennon lives. He lives. I will not write here, I know it. Not in a place where I am distracted into a world when Lennon lives.

Still, I know of a man...

I flick back to page 68... Morrison is already dead in the column inches for the Doors. He is in his first renaissance, and has only been gone for six years. It feels like nothing compared to thirty-nine. I am seduced right back into the dangerous daydream, but I have at least turned my computer on.

Pages 54-55 give Clapton far more attention than he deserves, the soulless old *cough*. He is with Patti Boyd by now. I know what pain there is in store for him, and I am sorry for it. Yet I know what a hypocritical bastard he is, and for a moment I am overcome by the 20-20 vision that being from the future provides.

On page 231, my Philo lives, but once I close the book he will be dead almost twenty-five years. Richard and Linda Thompson have already divorced, but on p 234, Ike and Tina are still going. I know what he does to her behind the velvet curtain, and I despise him.

Between the covers of The Illustrated New Musical Express Encyclopaedia of ROCK, my heroes live. I will not write here. I am too lost in a dangerous daydream of the impossible, and I am not ready to shut the book… not just yet...

CW 2010.