Working class heroes?

A wafer, God’s sake. For some obscure reason, the shockingly awful song “Blue Riband Blues” is stuck in my head today. This song, sung by Mike Berry in the 1980s’ commercial, advertised Blue Riband biscuits – lightweight chocolate-covered wafers that were “the very thing”, as my late Granny used to say, to have with a […]

For Shame, I think I’m just too much of a prude

Despite the onset of adulthood, I’m still one of those people who squirms, then chortles or sucks through his teeth whenever a TV continuity announcer says that the following programme “contains sexual scenes from the start”. I do wish Steve McQueen’s new film Shame came with one of those as a preface. Or maybe, in […]

Memories of Bob Holness, 1928 – 2012

Like anyone of an age, I’m very sorry to hear of the passing of former Blockbusters host, Bob Holness. His show was essential tea-time viewing for me in the mid 1980s, being a quiz with questions I had a reasonable chance of answering correctly. Not that I was ever brave enough to apply to take […]

My first “novel” – Never Kill Farmers

It was a morning like any other. I was sitting at the breakfast table, the television flickering and droning behind me, and I was still trying to figure out why Anne Diamond was my dad’s fantasy woman. In front of me, Bill (for it was he) failed to notice the corn flakes falling from his […]

Wholly crap, bag o’ shite, etc

Sorry for talking shit yet again, and I know I really should be writing this in a letter to the Southside People or the Daily Mail, but I’ve noticed that there’s a nice new North and South Dublin divide when dealing with dog turds. On East Wall on the North side, the pavements are, in […]

Jeremys #4: Healy

Fourth in a “series” of short tributes to well-known people called Jeremy There was a short period of time when Jeremy Healy was a hero of mine. Back in 1982, before I really knew what clothes were for, I was smitten by a pair of musical designer tramps called Haysi Fantayzee, featuring Jeremy ‘Jeremiah’ Healy […]

Baby it’s cold outside – so here’s freezerRoom

In the final month of 2011, I was finally properly acquainted with the music of Cork collective freezerRoom, a band I’d heard plenty about but somehow managed to avoid. With a name like that, I’d expected them to be purveyors of stark, chilly electro or experimental neo-Krautrock. But no, they’re anything but; their sound is […]

Pointing the way to a Happy New Year

Dearie me, it’s 2012. The world is in the grip of death, famine, financial collapse, and, despite the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, there are still a significant number of lunatics running the global asylum. The New Year arrives with violent storms battering the coasts of Britain and Ireland. Even David Bowie is about to turn 65. […]