Happy Bloomsday! We hope you’ve been dipping into the great book today, perhaps even visiting the Martello Tower or other Dublin locations.

As you may know, ‘Ulysses’ was published in Paris by Shakespeare and Co. – not the hip boho bookshop across from Notre Dame but the original store near the Odéon. And Joyce lived here for many years, finally leaving only because of the Nazi occupation.

There are flashes of Paris thoughout ‘Ulysses’, mainly because Stephen has just returned from the French capital as the story begins. He recalls meeting shady exiled Fenians in dark café-bars, remembers seeing wealthy traders on the steps of the Bourse, and he wants to put lemon in his tea. ('O damn you and your Paris fads', says Mulligan in exasperation to him.)

But what if Joyce had set ‘Ulysses’ in Paris rather than Dublin? It could have been done. There’s a famous tower here – not Martello but Eiffel. The Seine is as ‘snotgreen’ as Dublin Bay but you wouldn’t want to swim in it. Eccles Street, Bloom’s home, corresponds on the map to Le Marais, the traditional Jewish quarter of Paris. Stephen could expound his literary theories in the Sorbonne – perhaps blathering about Joyce to American academics. For Sandymount Strand in Dublin you have in Paris the banks of the Seine, where Stephen can stroll in contemplation and Bloom can do obscene things while spying on a young girl. (This is generally what goes on along the Seine most days and nights.) And for Night-town there’s Pigalle or Rue Saint Denis or the side-streets near Boulevard Haussmann or… lots of other places that we’ve been told about.

Tonight at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris, Terence Killeen will discuss music in Joyce. Of course, CLUAS readers will already be experts on this subject, having read Rev Jules’ fine article on Joyce’s influence on popular music.

So, for the day that’s in it, here’s the Joyce-esque genius of Kate Bush and her Molly Bloom-inspired ‘The Sensual World’. The Fairlight production may be a bit dated but the track is still thrilling:

 

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Artist: Cois Cladaigh Chamber Choir
Album: Lux Aeterna
Year: 2000

Artist: Juliet Turner
Album: Burn The Black Suit
Year: 2000

Artist: Skindive
Album: Skindive
Year: 2001

Artist: Sean Millar
Album: Tarzan's Ambition
Year: 2002

Artist: Pauline Scanlon
Album: Red Colour Sun
Year: 2003

Artist: Clive Barnes
Album: Goldtooth Cinnamon
Year: 2003

Artist: Bray Vista
Album: When I Get There {EP}
Year: 2004

Artist: Bap Kennedy
Album: The Big Picture
Year: 2005

Artist: Bell X1
Album: Flock
Year: 2005

Artist; David Lyttle
Album: True Story
Year: 2007

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As Steve McCroskey in one of Key Notes favourite movies, Airplane, Lloyd Bridges famously picks the wrong week to quit drinking/smoking/sniffing glue/amphetamines. This blog, however, seems to have picked the wrong fortnight to go on holidays. CLUAS has been quite the attention whore of late, grabbing almost as many headlines as celebrity marriage breakdowns, minus the fake tan and even faker breasts. The reason for all the attention was, of course, the publication of the CLUAS top 50 Irish albums of the last decade.

The thing about a list like this is that even if it was a list of the top 500 Irish albums of the last decade, you’d still have people; you know the type, indier-than-thou, who’d be asking why such and such a band/artist didn’t make it in. That’s understandable for two reasons; firstly, music is such a subjective topic (as this blog has written about many times before) and also because the Irish music scene is so bloody small that a lot of the ‘independent’ comment is from family/friends/members of bands who either didn’t make the cut or didn’t appear as high as they would like.

As music is so subjective it would be impossible to please everyone. Indeed, Key Notes’ own top 10 (which you can find at the bottom of this blog) is very different to the collective CLUAS top 10. However, democracy rules around these parts and Key Notes can find no fault with the system Eoghan put in place for the poll and this blog is pretty confident that 35 writers represent a fair cross section of the Irish listening public.

Regarding the incestuous nature of the Irish music scene, well there is very little you can do to combat that. The anonymity of the internet (when CLUAS launched that word still required a capital letter [/flashback]) means that it can be impossible to know how independent some of the comments on lists such as this might be. Personally, Key Notes has lots of friends involved in making music (some of which he likes, some of which he doesn’t) but can honestly state that he would never let that get in the way of his appraisal of the quality of a band/album, and not just because he has to put his name to everything he writes.

However, that’s enough comment on the comment the CLUAS top 50 list received. What does Key Notes think of the list itself? Well, as already stated, his top 10 would look quite different. Upon reflection, it’s perhaps not surprising that the top 3 were such ‘safe’ albums. A great deal of all music produced represents a current scene or trend and tend to burn brightly for a short time before fading into obscurity whereas the tried and tested formula of four blokes with guitars seems to be eternally popular.

Kudos to Eoghan for all the work put into the poll (when you have people like Key Notes who struggled to put their list into any sort of order then you have to have lots of patience!) and, while Key Notes might not agree with the final order, he was never going to.  Music is too subjective for that and this site would be very boring if we all had the same opinions!

Key Notes' Top 10 Irish Albums Of The Past Decade:

1. Future Kings of Spain - Future Kings of Spain
2. Damien Rice - O
3. Roisin Murphy - Overpowered
4. Alphastates - Made from Sand
5. JJ72 - JJ72
6. Turn - Forward
7. The Dudley Corporation - In Love With The Dudley Corporation
8. Snow Patrol - When It's All Over We Still Have To Clear Up
9. Bell X1 - Music in Mouth
10. Iain Archer - Flood The Tanks

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The most significant aspect of the list as far as Sound Waves is concerned is how little hip hop appears to have influenced the Irish music scene compared to other European countries such as England and France and that is strange when you consider how influential punk was on previous generations of Irish bands such as the embryonic U2 who have cited a concert by the Clash in Belfast as a formative influence. It is not as if Irish musicians have been starved of opportunities for hearing the music, given the predominance of it on television and radio and the opportunities to see leading practitioners such as Kanye West, Snoop Dogg and Eminem play live dates in Ireland.

Instead, the dominant direction of Irish music during a period of unprecedented affluence in Ireland's history has been the kind of soft rock, singer/songwriter fare that previously emanated from 'Post Golden' California in the 1970s. It might be stretching things to say this but Damien Rice, Lisa Hannigan and Glen Hansard may just be the Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell of Celtic Tiger Ireland; the Laurel Canyon sound replaced by the Killiney Bay wail, The Troubadour at Santa Monica Boulevard replaced by Whelans on Wexford Street.

Stay stoked
The Reverend Jules Earl Jackson

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It might be hard to play but the danyen is worth learning.  Sounds like a banjo, three double strings. American broadcaster NPR did a lovely piece on street players who pluck the instrument on the streetside in Lhasa and Tibet's other few sizeable towns. It sounds like the blues, said NPR reporter Jack Chance. And it surely does, strummed to songs about farming, yak herding, lost love and occupation of the last five six decades. I spent an hour with grubby old men and defiant-faced youths on the streets surrounding the Jokhang temple, Lhasa's main prayer retreat. My photo below comes from a book about Tibet's dying crafts (much of the tourist baubles sold in Tibet are made in India or Nepal) was published in a book produced by the Dropenling craft centre in Lhasa. Showcase of the Tibetan Crafts Initiative, which protects local craftwork, the Dropenling sells danyens in various states for ornamentation from US$100. Sales are brisk, say staff - tourists like them for mantlepieces back home. Young nationalistic Tibetans meanwhile have taken to the banjo-like acoustic sounds of this lovely instrument to keep and show their traditions in a wave of a Mando-pop and Canto-pop from the Chinese lowlands.

 

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The CLUAS writers poll to find the best Irish releases of the last 10 years has, as I expected, sparked off quite a bit of commentary (I particularly enjoyed The People's Republic of Cork forums and the comments section of Jim Carroll's On The Record blog).

No matter what one makes of its results I can say it was a considerable, but worthwile, effort to pull the poll together. It was worth that effort alone to see the poll results reveal (definitively of course) that 2001-2002 was the vintage period for Irish music in the last 10 years. For those of you enjoyed the number-crunching that delivered such a conclusion here below are some more numbers on the poll:

• 35 writers cast a vote in the poll
• 9 of these writers were "CLUAS Alumni" who haven't written anything for the site in over 5 years but were active in our first half decade. The remaining 26 writers who voted only got published on CLUAS for the first time in the last 5 years.
• A total of 280 votes were cast, meaning...
• ...each voter cast a preference for an average of 8 albums (no writer voted for less than 3 albums, nor for more than 10)
• Approx 130 different albums were voted for.
• 55 albums secured votes from 2 or more writers
• 30 albums were voted by just 2 writers, therefore...
• 25 albums were voted by at least 3 writers.
• 9 acts managed to get two albums into the list and they are The Divine Comedy, The Frames, Simple Kid, David Kitt, Cathal Coughlan, David Holmes, U2, The Tycho Brahe and JJ72).
• Since its inception 40 albums have been shortlisted for the Choice Music Prize. Of these, 27 secured at least one vote in the poll but only 11 made the top 50.
• There was only one point seperating the no. 1 and no. 2 albums in the poll!

Next week, in the second part of this 'poll anatomy', I'll publish the list of albums that were outside the top 50, all 80+ of them.

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A review of the album 'Junior' by Royksopp Review Snapshot: After an uninspiring and uneven second studio album Royksopp get their groove together with "Junior", their summer col...

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Ian Sherman, the Lester Bangs of Chinese rock. So was he described in an invitation to a memorial do for Ian Sherman, music critic for the (English) Beijing edition of Time Out magazine. I was away on June 5 but there was reporedly a big turn out at a Dos Kollegas gig organised by Tag Team Records, for which Sherman wrote pithy press releases and band bios. There aren’t many following China’s rock/indie music scene who can write as well as Sherman could. One was an acquaintence and Sherman contemporary at Time Out, now a financial journalist at the China Economic Quarterly. There's also the writing musician-impressario, Jon Campbell, and wit/columnist Kaiser Kuo, a veteran of the local rock scene of even greater vintage (he played guitar in breakthrough 1980s/90s metal band Tang Dynasty). Other than that rock writers in Beijing tend to be students who become enamoured by local bands during a passing-through time here.

Sherman wrote with verve and passion and knowledge and without putting the boot in when a CD was rubbish, as many are among the avalanche of records which started to come out of local studios in the early 2000s. I’m currently trying to read the local back issues of InMusic and Rolling Stone – it’s slow work, given frequent recourse to my Chinese-English dictionary.

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A review of the album 'Which Bitch?' by The View Review Snapshot: A failed attempt by the 'Dundonian upstarts' to recreate the magic of their debut album, 'Hats Off to the Busk...

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A review of the album 'A Journal For Plague Lovers' by Manic Street Preachers

Review Snapshot:
Fourteen years ago Richey Edwards, the then lyricist and rhythm guitarist of the Manic Street Preachers, went missing at a well-known suicide spot on the Severn. And despite a handful of alleged sightings of the former Manic, was in November of last year announced dead. And now in 2009, A Journal for Plague Lovers adds another chapter to the legacy of one of Britain's great songwriters.

The Cluas Verdict? 8 out of 10

Full Review:
For those of us inclined to sentimentality, the Richey Edwards saga has been an ongoing source of enchantment, never allowing us to stray too far from Manic album releases, on the admittedly slight chance that the tragic lyricist might return. Sadly, since it has been well over a decade since his disappearance, it would seem unlikely that such a scenario might arise and so A Journal for Plague Lovers serves as the next best thing.

The use on this album of a folder of poetry left by Edwards is a source of controversy that has split opinion amongst even the most hardcore fans of the Manic Street Preachers. For some it is a worthy homage to the band member who supplied so much of the content that made 1994's 'The Holy Bible' such a mesmerising and quintessential rock offering. For others, the folder of poetry left behind embodies the most intimate of details written by the troubled icon in his darkest moments and question whether it is advisable to put these words to music after so much time has passed. According to the band themselves, the lyrics were simply too good to be left unreleased.

From the instant that the opening track 'Peeled Apples' kicks in, you get the impression that this is the Manics back to their best. There are the movie snippet sound clips that have become a common feature of their albums, followed by thumping bass lines and the familiar grungy guitar riffs of James Dean Bradfield.  On this album the Manics are typically outspoken and meddlesome. The first track explores the role of brands and consumerism as Bradfield roars out:
"The levi jean will always be stronger than an uzi" and "A series of images against you and me trespass your torment if you are what you want to be".

And without time for so much as a breath, the second song on the album kicks off. 'Jackie Collins Existential Question Time' is arguably the strongest track on the album, combining the various elements that over the years have merged to define the Manics, such as the anthemic guitar riffs, caustic lyrics and the inimitable vocals of Bradfield.

A Journal for Plague Lovers has, in parts, an uncomfortably overwrought feel to it. The lyrics are that of a confused, emotional mind struggling to get a grip on the multiplicity of mysteries in modern society.  'She bathed herself in a bath of bleach' for example, is a fairly cynical insight into the pitfalls of love and lust.

Despite the gritty and often forlorn nature of the album, it enthralls from start to finish. Undoubtedly there is enough quality on the album to whet the appetites of the now almost famished Preachers' fans (their last album 'Send away the tigers' wasn't all that great) and enough to re-ignite the interests of those who were often sitting on the fence in relation to the Welsh band. With the ominous sounding riffs and frenetic vocals, A Journal for Plague Lovers sounds more like a follow up to The Holy Bible than any other Manics release.

Kevin Boyle

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