Something for the weekend…
A big thankyou to Michael Greenwell for pointing me towards this wonderfully laid-back live performance of Bob Marley’s Stir It Up. As I think I’ve mentioned before, The Wailers were the very first band I saw live. It was the mid-80s and Bob had sadly moved on by then, but it was a thoroughly amazing evening and live music has been a huge passion of mine ever since (I can only imagine how different my life would be if I’d skipped that gig and gone to see a football match or something else instead!) Not long after the gig had begun, a massive rastafarian in the audience (and there weren’t many of those in Athens at the time) handed a joint to a friend of mine who in turn passed it to me. It wasn’t my first toke, but it was an influential one………
Anyways, let’s Stir it Up why don’t we.
Hey Boy, Hey Boy
Hallo again. It’s been a wee while.
I just painted my house and replaced the CPU in my PC. Those two apparently unconnected facts actually resolve themselves into a single reason for why I’ve not been online much lately. Oh, and I’ve been spending lots of time staring out the window and trying to decide between the two thesis topics that I’d whittled it down to. In the end I’ve decided to go for the Freudian analysis of modern civilisation, rather than the “psychosis as cultural construct” idea. I’ll be hammering out a final title in the coming weeks, but that’s really just a case of tweaking words; right now I’m basking in the relief at finally making the decision and the knowledge that I can focus my research at last.
As a demonstration of just how distracted I’ve been by that looming decision, I only noticed this morning that the tickets blu-tacked to the side of my bookshelf (to see The Ting Tings) were for last Saturday. Bugger! Still, that’s a minor irritation, all things considered, when compared with the blessed relief.
Speaking of music, two tickets to see Leonard Cohen arrived in the mail this morning. As did a ticket to see Prince. The two concerts are on successive evenings in June which will present an incongruous juxtaposition, but one I’m looking forward to. I also considered buying a ticket for Glastonbury upon hearing they’d not sold out yet, but two things stopped me… firstly the fact that it might not be the best time to spend a week wrecked — thesis-wise… and secondly the ludicrous faff with the ticketing system. Next year, for sure though. I mentioned this to someone (that I was considering going) and they shook their head and complained “it’s a fairly dire line-up this year, though”. Hmmm… I had to point out the fact that (a) you don’t go to Glastonbury based on who is playing, you go because it’s Glastonbury; and (b) on paper, certainly it may not be the most exciting line-up the king of all festivals has seen, but if you can’t find a couple of days worth of music out of this lot, then you’re just not a music fan.
As I say though, next year……
The American Astronaut
Keeping with the music(al) theme, my dear friend Mahalia sent me the movie “The American Astronaut” on DVD many moons ago. I never got round to watching it, but have picked it up and thought about it on several occasions. Then I got pointed to the following video on Youbiquitube which makes me think I’ll be watching the entire film very soon…
And finally… “From the blogs”
It’s perhaps a little hurtful to note that the blogosphere continued on without me, almost as if my presence wasn’t an integral part of the rich tapestry of the world wide web net. Worth reading (or at least glancing at the first paragraph and thinking “huh?”) are:
di leo da liar (Merrick at Bristling Badger on the recent exposé of an inflitrator within the Climate Change action group, Plane Stupid)
HEF (Harry Hutton at Chase Me Ladies, I’m in The Cavalry… celebrates Hugh Hefner’s 82nd birthday in his inimitable style)
Binge drinking: bottling it again (Justin at Chicken Yoghurt is characteristically spot-on with his sharp précis of exactly why increasing the cost of booze by a token amount is unlikely to have much of an impact on a national alcohol problem)
Vote Boris: kill a child (Pigdogfucker at… er… Pigdogfucker on why, despite everything, voting for Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral elections is still the best option for anyone who isn’t a git)
Frank Wilson – Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) (Merrick — again — but this time at Dust on the Stylus, his wonderfully written music blog, offers an mp3 download of a glorious Motown track that I’d not encountered before. I’ve been playing it constantly ever since, though)
Dick Cheney and the Precautionary Principle (Rochenko at Smokewriting provides an analysis of US policy and concludes that the neo-conservative tendency have introduced “the precautionary principle” as a siginificant factor in setting that policy. It’s a good piece, though as I pointed out in the comments over there, I’m not sure it’s telling the whole story) best make up brushes test
Dig Yourself!!!
I’m really enjoying the new album from Nick Cave (and somewhat annoyed about failing to get a ticket for the forthcoming Dublin gig). I’m also enjoying his fantastic moustache which features prominently on magazine covers and posters wherever I go. Wandering around town today, the title track came on my mp3-player, and I found myself involuntarily strutting.
I think I may have watched this video one too many times.
I’m Not There
Over the past few years I’ve begun to notice more and more Dylan infiltrating my musical world. Unlike many music geeks, I’ve never had a “Dylan phase”. Nonetheless, I’ve always appreciated and respected him as a great artist. His music may not have grabbed hold of me, but it grabbed hold of a lot of people whose taste I respected. And although for many years I owned no Dylan records, it wasn’t for quite the same reason that I owned nothing by Rod Stewart or Elton John.
Unsurprisingly then, as the years wore on, I found myself acquiring the occasional Bob Dylan album, while my collection remained mercifully free of Stewart and John.
So despite never having that Dylan phase, I’ve finally got to the point where I’d call myself a fan. In fact, there’s a recording of Tangled Up In Blue on The Bootleg Series that’s become one of my favourite songs by any artist. In a certain mood, it can send a shiver down my spine and make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. When music has such a deep and direct emotional… even biological… impact, then you know you’re listening to something special.
I was intrigued then, when I started to hear about I’m Not There, the recent and highly acclaimed cinematic biography of Dylan. But the more I heard, the more sceptical I became. As a fan of Dylan’s music who knows almost nothing whatsoever about the man (or even, strangely enough, the myth of the man), I was actually quite interested in the idea of learning a bit about his life and the events that shaped his music. As quickly became clear however, I’m Not There was unlikely to be the film to satisfy that desire.
A biopic?
I think it’s important to point this out. I’m Not There is not a biopic. Or rather, it may be a biopic but you’d already have to have read a biography or seen another biopic in order to work that out. It would be difficult to say with any certainty that I now know more about Bob Dylan’s life than I did before. And the little I did know can be condensed into a single paragraph…
He started out as a traditional folk singer covering the songs of Woody Guthrie (a depression-era folk singer about whom I know even less than a single paragraph). He then started to write his own lyrics and became a folk music legend. He introduced The Beatles to pot in the early sixties and hung out with them occasionally in London (I did have a “Beatles phase”) where he also spent some time with Allen Ginsberg. He picked up an electric guitar and got called “Judas” by the folk scene. Nonetheless he became increasingly successful, but like most people who become living legends was fairly troubled by the experience. He turned to religion, and got into Jesus in a very big way for a while. Latterly he has settled down to tour and make a bunch of albums that inevitably could never have the impact of the earlier ones that created the legend in the first place.
To be honest, I’d hesitate to add anything to that paragraph despite having watched a two and a quarter hour film about the man’s life. And I think that’s kind of weird.
But of course, it can be argued (and I have no doubt that Todd Haynes, the writer and director of I’m Not There, would do so) that the film fundamentally isn’t a traditional biography. It is quite clearly not attempting to tell the Bob Dylan story in a traditional, linear, literal sense and so it’s unfair to criticise it for failing to do so.
And here’s the thing; I accept that. I understand what Haynes was trying to do, and he has to a great extent succeeded. We’re deep into the review and this is the first time I’m saying this, but let it be said; I’m Not There is a masterpiece. It is one of the most beautiful, compelling and perfectly constructed films I’ve seen in a long time. It’s got a magical, hyperreal quality to it that reminded me a lot of David Byrne’s underrated True Stories in places and Woody Allen’s underrated Stardust Memories in others. It is a magnificent piece of cinema and I’d urge all of my readers to check it out, whether or not they are fans of Bob Dylan.
It’s a masterpiece. But it’s a flawed masterpiece. Because when I’m watching a truly great film, the last thing I want is to be dragged out of that immersion in another world towards the nagging questions of my own mind. And I just couldn’t prevent myself from wondering which events were close to being direct representations of scenes from Dylan’s life and which were metaphors. The film tells the story metaphorically, but clearly strays further from literal reality in some places than in others, and the part of me that was hoping to learn something new about Bob Dylan insisted on wondering which was which.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m well aware that’s not the right way to view such a poetic and dreamlike film; but I’d argue that for fans of Dylan’s music who know nothing about his life, it’s damn near unavoidable. Did he really say that in a Press Conference? Or are they the Dylanesque words of a screenwriter? Did he ever spend time travelling America in box-cars? Clearly he didn’t do it as an eleven year-old black kid, but are those scenes entirely a metaphor for his early fixation with Guthrie, or are they also illustrative of a real period in Dylan’s evolution?
And while Haynes might argue that the point is that the young Dylan’s heart and mind were living a hobo’s life… that it doesn’t matter precisely how literal or metaphorical the scenes are… in reality that’s simply not quite true. A young man travelling from town to town, earning his meals playing folk music, is having a fundamentally different set of experiences to a young man who — feeling trapped and suffocated by suburbia — escapes to the open road in dream and fantasy.
The Players
As well as the dreamlike / metaphorical style of the film, I’m Not There is also known for the creative casting. The different stages of Dylan’s life are portrayed by different actors. So Marcus Carl Franklin is an 11-year-old hobo called Woody Guthrie. Christian Bale is “Jack Rollins”, a legendary folk singer who retires from the public eye to become an evangelical preacher. Heath Ledger is a famous actor who plays Jack Rollins in a biopic and whose personal and family life is torn to shreds by fame and public adulation. Richard Gere is “Billy The Kid”; the older Dylan, a fugitive from his own legend. Ben Whishaw is “Arthur Rimbaud” who declaims to camera in scenes which may have had a significance I didn’t grasp (did Dylan really face persecution as a leftist in his early days? Or is that a metaphor for how he felt he was being viewed and treated by mainstream America?) And last but far from least, Cate Blanchett plays “Jude Quinn”, the legendary folk singer who picks up an electric guitar.
Paradoxically, Blanchett manages to be the second great flaw in I’m Not There despite turning in the best performance (one worthy of all the acclaim it has received). She is utterly hypnotic when she’s on the screen and overshadows five other fantastic actors. But if anything, she is too good. Partly the quality of the make-up, but mostly the quality of her acting, meant that I found myself — again and again — involuntarily thinking “I really can’t believe that’s Cate Blanchett! She’s just incredible!” And of course, few things are as likely to burst that bubble of cinematic immersion, than repeatedly being reminded of the actor in the role. Which is a shame. Superficially, perhaps if she hadn’t looked so much like Dylan, it would have been easier to accept her…? I don’t know. As it was, she was the best actor in the film, but she was also the one who most exposed the film as a film, rather than an unfolding dream.
Beyond The Flaws
A flawed masterpiece is still a masterpiece. And I’m Not There is the kind of film that only comes around every handful of years. It stands head and shoulders above everything else released last year (though I say that without having seen the new Coen Brothers movie yet) and if you’ve not seen it, then I urge you to. The flaws are certainly there, but despite having spent a disproportionate amount of time talking about them here, they never overshadow the film as a whole. This is a truly great piece of cinema and if you go in expecting “near perfection” as opposed to “absolute perfection”, you won’t be disappointed.
In Rainbows
As pretty much everyone knows by now, Radiohead released their most recent album online as a Pay-What-You-Want download. It got huge publicity because of the novelty of the approach. The second high-profile album that gets released that way will get almost as much publicity. Sometime in early February the frontpage of all the tabloids will contain photos of scantily clad Spice Girls next to the headline:
Following fast in the footsteps of Radiohead come the ever-innovative Spice Girls whose new album, Looking Forward, features live versions of all their Number One singles. The new collection will be available for two weeks exclusively from the Girls’ website before it hits the shops on CD, and just as with Radiohead’s In Rainbows, fans of Posh, Ginger, Sporty, Scary and Baby will be allowed ‘Pay-What-They-Want’ during that two weeks. As well as the nine live tracks, Looking Forward will feature two entirely new songs, including the 2007 Christmas Number One, Buying Stuff at The Supermarket For Christmas (Without You).
However, the third album released on a Pay-What-You-Want basis will garner almost no free publicity whatsoever. Things get old quickly these days. And the question is; without the free publicity can this distribution strategy work? I really hope so, but only time will tell.
PS: In Rainbows is an excellent album. Not that you’d know that from the acres of news-print on the subject.
Insights that stood the test of time
There’s a big old cardboard box that’s lived in the darkness of a dozen wardrobes. (How’s that for an intro rich in potent psychoanalytic symbolism?) It originally housed a Commodore-64 personal computer, which means I’ve been moving this box from house to house, wardrobe to wardrobe, since Athens in 1985. It’s a long long time since it contained a C-64 though. Over the years it has become the repository for my old dream-diaries, letters I’ve received (and a few I never sent), personal journals filled with strange scribblings, cards, photos and assorted frozen memories. So, despite outward appearances, this is not an innocuous cardboard box. Far from it. This is something to be approached with extreme caution.
This time round I only lost half a Saturday. It helps if you open the cache with a specific target… in this case something that had survived the great journal purge of the mid-90s by virtue of being written in an old school jotter… a painfully earnest essay written after reading The Communist Manifesto for the first time. I was sixteen and just becoming aware of politics. Someone (MM) had thrust a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book into my hand around then, and I’d also somehow picked up the entirely erroneous view that being a Marxist was inherently edgy and sexy. Apparently it entailed sitting in Parisian cafés with women who looked like Audrey Hepburn.
I had it confused with existentialism.
So I’d been calling myself a communist and a marxist (and sometimes a Maoist) for a few months when it occurred to me that it’d be a good idea to read something on the subject. Besides, the expected deluge of Audrey Hepburns had never materialised, so I had plenty of free time. I read The Communist Manifesto having found the Little Red Book completely mystifying. And overnight I became a libertarian capitalist and remained that way for several years. Without a doubt The Communist Manifesto is the worst advertisement for social justice ever written.
The essay I wrote in response is called “The Big Problem with The Communist Manifesto”. As a stylistic conceit, each paragraph opens with “The Big Problem with The Communist Manifesto is…” It gets tired and tiresome very quickly indeed and makes me cringe a little, though in my defence I was sixteen! I’ve seen the same approach used by professional journalists; what’s their excuse?
That was the line I was looking for. It’s the first thing I ever wrote on the subject of sustainability. Admittedly, it was another twelve years before I returned to the subject. Still, it’s as valid a sentiment now as it was then.
Impossible to ignore however, on the jotter page immediately prior to The Big Problem with The Communist Manifesto I had written a single phrase. The three words fill the page and are written in carefully constructed letters with intricate cross-hatching. They state, bluntly, “Bowie is God”.
And yes, that too is still as valid a sentiment now as it was then. So in honour of the purity of my 16-year old self’s insight, here’s an artist-specific version of that old “First Line” quiz. Identify the following Bowie songs from their first line…
- I’ve come on a few years from my Hollywood highs
- (Hello love) (Goodbye love) / Didn’t know what time it was, the lights were low… oh… oh
- I’m stomping along on this big Philip Johnson
- Tragic youth was looking young and sexy
- When all the world was very young, and mountain magic heavy hung
- As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent, you asked for the latest party
- Oh. Ooooooooooh yeah. Ahhhhhhh!
- Let me put my arms around your head…
- Aaaaahoh. Aaaaaaaaahohhhh. Do do do do do. Do do do do dooooooooo…
- Nothing remains. We could run when the rain slows.
- Stinky weather / fat shaky hand / Dopey morning doc / Grumpy gnomes
- And so the story goes they wore the clothes, they said the things to make it seem improbable
- Day after day, they send my friends away
- Cold fire, you’ve got everything but cold fire
- Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oh! Weaving down a by-road, singing the song
Patti Smith – Live in Dublin, May 2007
The house-lights go down. A huge cheer erupts from the crowd when — from the darkness of the stage — a piano starts playing some of rock’s most recognisable chords. The cheer rises in intensity when the spot-light picks out the commanding figure of Patti Smith. She sings the words: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins… but not mine…”.
And I think to myself, “it just doesn’t get any better than this”.
Patti Smith played Dublin last weekend. She’s touring the new album, Twelve, which is an album of covers. Some people have criticised her for this, but she’s unapologetic. “If anyone asks you why I’ve done a covers album”, she said during the gig, “tell them Patti said: because I wanted to!”
I haven’t actually heard Twelve yet. But Patti Smith has always been better live than on record. She’s got that thing… It… whatever It is… and It can’t be captured on a record. You have to be there to experience It. So it matters little what the critics are saying about her version of Smells Like Teen Spirit; because if you’re lucky enough to be in the same room as Patti Smith when she’s singing, you get taken to a place where the words of critics don’t mean shit.
From Gloria she went straight into Redondo Beach and I briefly thrilled at the idea that she might be playing Horses in its entirety. In the end though, she played songs from almost every album including an encore of Babelogue / Rock & Roll Nigger that rocked like the proverbial bag of bastids. So as well as some excellent covers; Soul Kitchen, Within You Without You, Gimme Shelter, Are You Experienced and a version of White Rabbit on which — to lift a line — the whole building seemed to be playing bass; we also got some rarely-heard classics… Pissing In A River from Radio Ethiopia, Beneath The Southern Cross from the under-rated Gone Again and the soaring Free Money from Horses. Of course, Because The Night got a run out as is traditional.
And like all truly great artists who’ve been around for a while, I could have put together an entire alternative set-list of songs she didn’t play, and it would have been just as good. It’s impossible for a Patti Smith gig to ever be long enough.
The venue — Vicar Street — is a nice size. Wherever you are, you’re not far from the stage and although modern health and safety regulations mean that PA-systems are never as loud as I want them to be any more, the sound was nonetheless excellent. And most importantly, the band was awesome. Lenny Kaye has been playing guitar with Patti since the very first album and it shows. In a good way. Also on guitar is Patti’s son, Jackson, who I first saw (playing Smoke on The Water) on stage at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire when he was in his early teens! Jay Dee Daugherty — one time drummer with The Church — brings a vaguely jazzy influence to the band… though make no mistake, he can rock when the need arises. And Tony Shanahan is the new bass-player and keyboardist… from the opening chords of Gloria to the pounding backing for White Rabbit, he couldn’t have been better.
If you’re dithering about whether or not to see Patti Smith on this tour, then let me urge you to grab a ticket. There are very few people in the same league when it comes to playing live. She’s still got the passion and urgency that can pick up an entire audience and carry them with her to the sublime.
Afterwards I was buzzing. Proper buzzing. I wandered the empty streets of Dublin for a full hour before I could even consider dealing with public transport. What a gig!
Music musing
I bought the most recent Beck album a few months back. It’s called The Information. At the time, I played it once, thought “ooh, that sounds quite good”, and then forgot all about it (I was obsessively relistening to Dexy’s Midnight Runners at the time, and wondering how a band that good manage to be pigeon-holed as a one-hit novelty act by half the people I meet). Then a couple of days ago my media-player shuffled Strange Apparition to the top of the deck. It’s the fourth track on The Information, and within a couple of bars it’s clearly a Beck track. But at the same time it’s also the best track to get left off Beggar’s Banquet. Just like the song Peaches and Cream (on the Midnite Vultures album) where Beck manages to sound exactly like Beck but also like Prince in 1989, Strange Apparition manages to combine the very best idiosyncrasies of two entirely different sounds.
I do like it when musicians can incorporate their influences without drowning in them. Go Beck! Oh, and I’m going to nominate Nausea (off The Information) as the best use of bass in the past 12 months.
Speaking of influences though… for the past three or four years, almost every time I heard a new guitar band I’ve been forced to say “hmmm… it’s a bit limp really… I mean, it’s Talking Heads without Byrne‘s intelligence or the kick-ass rhythm section, right?” That’s what modern guitar music sounds like. And while I got the occasional nod of agreement, it seemed to be just me who thought this way. Because — let’s face it — people are still buying the shoddy imitations rather than getting hold of the recently reissued originals and hearing it how it should be done.
Yeah, yeah, maybe it’s just me getting old. But y’know, I don’t think that’s it… the very thing that annoys me about the recent resurgence in guitar music is precisely how old and tired it sounds.
A few days ago however, I heard a radio interview with Brian Eno and discovered that at least I’m not alone in thinking that Arctic Snow Monkey Patrol are to Talking Heads what Oasis are to The Beatles. He seemed quite freaked out by the fact that thirty years after he’d helped create a particular guitar sound, half the new guitar bands in the charts seem to be recycling it really badly. Apparently he’s currently producing the new Coldplay album. The interviewer asked what it would sound like… “Not like Talking Heads. And not like Coldplay either. That’s for sure.”
I don’t like Coldplay. But I’ll probably give their next album a listen out of interest.
Also, can someone please tell me why only about twelve people seem to have heard of The Legendary Pink Dots? The height from which they shit on most modern music can only be measured in fathoms. Or leagues. Some olde worlde hefty unit of measurement anyway. A unit that means business.
The Pink Dots are making some of the most inventive music currently being recorded. OK, granted, they do have a tendency towards the occasional bit of inaccessible psychedelic freakout. But that’s just one element of an almost absurdly eclectic sound. The most recent album, Your Children Placate You from Premature Graves, opens with two minutes of sinister piano over the sound of distant children at play… interrupted briefly by a psychoanalytic voice asking whether or not “you suffer nightmares” and if so, whether you’d like to describe them? It then shifts gear into what could best be described as a hymn. A really really fucked up hymn set against a wall of discordant saxophones. But a hymn nonetheless.
It’s The Legendary Pink Dots at their best. You know how I was saying that so many modern bands sound so very similar? How they all seem vaguely reminiscent of Talking Heads with all the best bits removed? One of the truly great thing about the Pink Dots is that there’s none of that. When you buy a Legendary Pink Dots album you’re picking up something that sounds like nothing else in your record collection. You need to leave music entirely, and head on over into literature — to Philip K. Dick — to find another “lyricist” like Edward ka-Spel. And the music seems to emerge from dark post-apocalyptic cathedrals… it’s rich and diverse, and it’s held together by an atmosphere more than a musical style.
And nobody else does saxophones like the Legendary Pink Dots. Or spooky samples.
Still on a musical theme… well somewhat… I’ve been relistening to some of the Radio Savage Houndy Beasty cds recently. RSHB was a Leeds Student Radio project run by some friends of mine (two of them have blogs incidentally… Dreamflesh and Bristling Badger) which inhabited the same soundscape as Chris Morris’ Bluejam a couple of years before he got there. And by and large, RSHB was funnier and had better monged soundscapes. Sometimes it was the deep-fried freakouts live from the studio that made the show, and sometimes it was the one-off pre-constructed pieces. This download page has a few of the best moments, while the CDs can be purchased for a stupidly low price on this page.
I really couldn’t pick out one single download as representative of what you’ll hear on RSHB. I’ll instead point you towards a couple of my own personal favourites. For anyone familiar with the classic Bauhaus track Bela Lugosi’s Dead (and thought staring at the floor, putting your hands into the pockets of your long black coat and shifting awkwardly from side to side was dancing), you really need to hear RSHB’s version… Bela Lugosi’s Dad (4.4MB mp3). Or perhaps you’d like to sample the delights of Meat (5MB mp3)? And if that all got a bit intense (as it has a tendency to do) then relax and drift off to the beautiful ambience of Rainy Porch Horse Blues (6MB mp3). Mr. Eno himself would be proud.
Oh, and if you’re In The Mood (3.2MB mp3) for some gratuitous swearing, then you really can’t go wrong with RSHB.
Photolog: The Phil Lynott Memorial
“There should be more statues with big hair”. That was my first thought upon seeing the Phil Lynott memorial (located just off Grafton Street — one of Dublin’s most-walked thoroughfares — and sculpted by Paul Daly). But as that thought sank in, it was followed by a somewhat less silly one… “I think this is the first statue of a black person that I’ve ever seen… big hair or not”.
I have no doubt that there are statues of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King… maybe even Malcolm X? But I’ve never seen them. I lived in London for a while and pretty much all the statues there are of military conquerors. My favourite of those… statues not conquerors… is the one of Clive of India surveying St. James’ Park. It encapsulates all of the ridiculous pomposity of the British establishment as well as the astonishing arrogance of Empire. Plus it has an inscription on the side which reads… “Clive in the mango tope on the Eve of Plassey” which — for reasons lost in the mists of time and a haze of smoke — was one of the funniest things I’d ever read when I first noticed it.
Anyways, most of London’s statues are memorials to white men who spent their time subjugating brown, black or yellow people. The same is true of most of Europe’s colonial nations… so perhaps in one sense it’s no surprise that the first statue (I think) I’ve seen with an afro should be in a nation that itself spent most of history as a colony. Of course, in another sense it is a surprise. After all, until very recently (the past fifteen years) Ireland was — racially speaking — about as homogeneous a nation as existed. This wasn’t because of any strict immigration policy… merely because no bugger in their right mind would have wanted to come here. For the past few hundred years people have been leaving this island in their droves, and arrivals were few and far between.
All the same, at some point Phil’s ancestors arrived on these shores and the stage was set for Thin Lizzy. I should point out that I’m not a big fan of the band (they had a guitar sound that was always a bit… ummm… widdly for me). Nonetheless, despite the widdliness, I’ll always have a spot in my heart for the classic The Boys Are Back In Town which takes me back to a very special time and place.
There are three photos in my Phil Lynott Memorial set on Flickr (and you can locate the statue on this map).