Adam and Darcie are a husband and wife team from Provo, Utah. Having released their debut The Valley Where I'm From, a couple of years ago, they recently signed to Irish record label In...

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Aloof as ever, Mark Kozelek of Sun Kil Moon and previously Red House Painters, had a very quick word with Anna Murray ahead of his Andrew’s Lane gig this Thursday. Do you regret the demise o...

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A review of the album 'Un' by Dan Black Review Snapshot: A clumsy, witless attempt at dancefloor-friendly electro-rock, the solo record by The Servant’s lead singer is quite awful. N...

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A review of the album 'To Be Still' by Alela Diane Review Snapshot: The Californian folk singer-songer steps up a gear with a fantastic second album whose careful production and crafted so...

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On April 8 2008, not only did I lose my father-in-law to cancer but I also lost one of my best friends.  Alan Smyth was in the prime of his life when he first got sick and during his illness often joked that he would be 'the healthiest man in the graveyard.'  The dignity with which he fought his cancer and the strength and sense of humour he showed even when he knew it was a fight he could not win shows just what type of person he was. 

During Alan's illness I saw first hand how tragically under funded cancer care is in Ireland.  The Irish Cancer Society is dedicated to changing this and so I swore when Alan died that I would do my bit to try and raise funds for them.  Therefore, on October 26 I will be running the Lifestyle Sports/Adidas Dublin City Marathon to raise funds for The Irish Cancer Society.  In the build up to the Marathon I will be running the Adidas Race Series, starting tomorrow (Saturday July 18) with the Irish Runner 5 Mile Challenge in The Phoenix Park.  This race series will also include The Frank Duffy 10 Mile Challenge (August 15) and The Dublin City Half Marathon (September 26).

Now, this is where you come in!  I have set up a charity page called Steve's Year of Running Dangerously.  Initially, I had hoped to raise 500 euro for the Irish Cancer Society but as I have already raised that amount I have raised my fundraising total to 750 euro.  Should I exceed that amount I will raise the amount to 1,000 euro and so on.  Ideally, I will raise as much money as possible.  Any donation, no matter how big or small, will be equally appreciated by me and, more importantly, by The Irish Cancer Society.  It will also be possible to sponsor me for up to one month after the Marathon is finished (for the cynical amongst you who don't believe I can complete it!) so, as Alan would say, let there be no panic.

I can't think of a better way to finish this blog than with a song that always reminds me of Alan and one that I will definitely be listening to as I make my way around The Phoenix Park tomorrow for the first of the Adidas Races Series.

Prefab Sprout: Cars & Girls

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2009 sees the third year of one of Ireland's fastest growing and most interesting music festivals: Cork X Southwest. The August bank holiday will see picturesque Skibbereen awash with music-lovers...

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The Good

Magnetic North
The type of Northern Irish music that usually makes headlines around the 12th of July is not the sort we would typically report on here at CLUAS.  However, over the course of last weekend's Oxegen festival there were four Northern acts that stood head and shoulders above most of their Southern peers.  While both Duke Special and Iain Archer reaffirmed their undoubted talent, General Fiasco and, especially, And So I Watch You From Afar blasted their way on to my musical radar.  Seeing General Fiasco was a happy accident but, after their performance at the launch of Hard Working Class Heroes, And So I Watch Your From Afar were a band I was never going to miss. Both were beyond brilliant and (with a little help from my Belfast born friend) I will be paying much more attention to the Northern Irish indie scene in future.

Stage Managed
I know from experience that musicians are not the most punctual of people.  Indeed, I can count on one hand the amount of times a band/musician has turned up for an interview on time.  However, over the course of Oxegen 2009 almost every single performance started on time. There were one or two notable exceptions (there always is) but kudos must go to the Stage Managers for harassing the bands into punctuality.  It certainly made my job as a reviewer much easier.

The Gig's The Thing
Say what you want about the quality of their music but there are certain bands that sound 100 times better in the live arena than they do on record.  In this case I'm thinking specifically of Republic of Loose.  I've never been convinced about their songs and yet, every time I see them live I find myself singing/dancing along.  They are the great showmen (and women) of the Irish indie scene and, indeed, only Roisin Murphy's stage show comes anywhere close to matching The Loose in terms of entertainment value.  I wish someone would upload their cover of Wanna Be Startin' Somthin' to YouTube soon though!

Ride On
I've reviewed Oxegen for CLUAS for the past two years and generally make use of the VIP parking that us 'media types' (snigger) get to avail of.  However, given the weather conditions on Saturday I decided to make use of the free 'Park 'n' Ride' facilities at Goff's on the Sunday of Oxegen 2009.  Should I get to review it again for CLUAS next year this is the only way I'll be travelling.  It's quick, it's free and it's much more convenient than trying to make your way out of a muddy field in the middle of Naas.  Why anyone would drive when this facility is available is beyond me.

The Bad

Rain, Rain, Go Away
Of course, there is nothing that MCD can do about the weather but it's such a shame that Oxegen always seems to take place in the rain.  It would be a much nicer festival if it took place during the summer!

Muddy Waters
Whilst MCD can't control the weather; they could certainly expect it and have planned slightly better for it.  The conditions on Sunday, in the IMRO tent especially, were little short of shocking.  This tent is located at the bottom of two slopes and so suffers more than most of the tents in bad weather.  However, it's nothing that some of the sawdust that was laid out on the entrances to the festival site could have fixed.  As funny as it was seeing people lose their wellies in mud, it felt as if it could be easily stopped.

This Must Be, Pop
As bizarre as it is that I've used an N'Sync lyric in the heading, it's even more unusual how, erm, popular, pop music was at this year's Oxegen.  Lady Gaga, The Blizzards, The Script, Katy Perry; all pop, all popular.  As Jim Carroll pointed out in his blog on Oxegen, perhaps this is the direction the festival is going.  It's certainly what the kids seem to want from their music festival experience.  While I can see the attraction for MCD in doing this, I wouldn't like to see Oxegen lose all its indie bands.

The Ugg Boots

(VIP) Very Important (I Get) Pissed
There is nothing more frustrating, when you're covered in mud and soaked through by rain, than wandering back to the media area to find people in the VIP bar looking spotlessly clean and bone dry, doing their best to be noticed by anyone with a media pass and a camera.  It's a music festival, get out and see some bands!  You probably didn't pay for your tickets so at least support the bands by standing out in the rain for a few minutes.

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While for many surfers the WWW often resembles a modern Wild West where just about anything goes there are - believe it or not - some formal standards in place. The particular standards I'm talking about are for HTML code: how HTML should be used when creating a webpage (and how a browser should interpret HTML and present it on a page). The setting of the standards is overseen by the all important World Wide Web consortium (also know as W3C, which is headed up by Tim Berners Lee, no less than your man who invented the World Wide Web).

Now to be honest, up to about a year ago, CLUAS did not care about these standards and there was not a single page among our thousands that was even close to being compliant. This did not stop me having a begrudging respect for websites that spouted on about their "W3C compliancy". I was after all only too keenly aware that CLUAS would need to overcome a proverbial mountain to enter the hallowed corridors of compliant websites.

All the same, last year I looked into it and I started - slowly - to update our HTML code, with a little change here and minor tweak there, all with a view to making as many as possible of CLUAS.com's thousands of pages compliant. To be honest it was initially just one of those pointless personal challenges you set yourself once in a while, the motivation of which few people would ever understand (and if they ever did understand the motivation they'd doubt your sanity).

The exercise is ongoing however already the result is that already a massive number of pages on CLUAS.com are at last complaint to W3C's "HTML 4.01 Transitional" standard. Basically the vast majority of pages whose address does not end in .aspx are now complaint (for example 73% of last month’s top 100 most visited "non aspx" pages are now compliant).

So what about these non-compliant .aspx web pages? Well these pages are generated using the DotNetNuke content management system we use and just a handful of them are already compliant (to the different "XHTML 1.0 Transitional" standard). However the level of their compliancy will improve in coming months as the next release of DotNetNuke Blog Module (which is used to publish our album and gig reviews, blogs, and interviews) should be fully compliant, meaning in one swoop huge numbers of CLUAS pages will step in the world of compliancy.

So why bother about compliancy? Put simply there are a number of advantages, such as:

• File size and loading times are reduced.
• Sites are easier to update in terms of content or styling because of the smart structure (i.e. separation of content from styling) that is implicit in W3C compliant websites.
• Greater assurance of future proofing your website - if a site obeys established rules, they should continue to work in browsers and devices of the future.
• And having a compliant website means the webmaster feels all smug and elitist compared to pitiful other sites that have not clue about the wonders of compliant HTML code.

The gas thing is that while all this effort may result one day in CLUAS.com being a website fully compliant with W3C standards, the next generation of HTML standards for web pages are already in the pipeline. So we may have to start this compliancy effort all over again…

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A review of the album 'Dark Days / Light Years' by Super Furry Animals The Cluas Verdict? 7 out of 10 Full Review: A few months ago I compiled a playlist of my favourite Super Furry ...

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A review of the album 'The Spinning Top' by Graham Coxon Review Snapshot: 15 tracks of pure eloquence, beauty and expert finger-picking from the Blur guitarist's seventh solo album. Th...

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