Hot Press 44-15: The Lockdown Special

VOL:44 ISSUE:05, MAY 13. 2020

LETTERS FROM HOME

By B OB GELDOF

Sam Smith on Covid-19

I MELDA MAY DANNY O’REI LLY NEI L J ORDAN LAURA WHI TMORE DAVI D KEENAN J YELLOWL GLEN HANSARD J I M SHERI DAN

& more

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HOT PRESS / 4405 / CONTENTS LETTERS FROM HOME

10

Bob Geldof, Imelda May, Danny O’Reilly, Sam Smith, Laura Whitmore, David Keenan, Neil Jordan, Louize Carroll, James McGovern, JyellowL, Faye O'Rourke and Glen Hansard offer their deeply personal takes on the COVID-19 crisis.

REVIEWS

FEATURES

THE A&R DEPARTMENT... 20

AIRING ON THE SIDE OF CAUTION... 38

KEEPING THE STREAM ALIVE... 40

The Ocelots, Daniel Blume, The

Attics, vanity desks and kids’

From Twitter listening parties

Burma & Zali star in our round-up

bedrooms have all been

to Aisling Bea-related

of the hottest Irish music out there.

commandeered as Irish radio

rambunctiousness, we’ve some

DJs plug in at home.

excellent reasons to be cheerful

.

FRONTLINES... 42

ALBUMS...48

The Whole Hog separates coronavirus fact from fiction - sadly having constant sex won’t protect you; McCann goes all biblical in his assessment; and the emergency frontline services being provided to heroin users.

TV... 28

BOOKS... 30

LOCKDOWN PLAYLISTS... 32 FOOD... 50

LOG ONTO HOTPRESS.COM FOR MORE

SIX OF THE BEST FROM

HOTPRESS.COM VIDEO PREMIERES See and hear the latest songs from Beoga, Tiz McNamara, Laura Elizabeth Hughes, Blackbird & Crow, David Keenan, The Ballyboyz, The Crayon Set and lots more. #BuyIrishMusic

MY FAVOURITE THINGS “I consider myself blessed to have been on the planet at the same time as that man, if he really was a mere man at all,” says Pat Carty in his brilliant Prince and Sign O’ The Times deep dive. Plus, Will Russell on Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Withnail & I and Roisin Dwyer on Thin Lizzy’s Live And Dangerous.

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL From heavy metal takes on Joe Exotic’s ‘I Saw A Tiger’ to Dolly Parton tucking you up in bed, Stuart Clark brings you a daily dose of good cheer in his new blog.

TOP 10 GAMES TO PLAY IN LOCKDOWN The Sims 4, Animal Crossing and Cards Against Humanity all feature as Ingrid Angulo takes care of the gaming side of your ultimate dystopian survival kit.

TEN GREAT FOREIGN TV BOX-SETS TO WATCH DURING LOCKDOWN Harlan Coben-penned French thrillers, retro German spy yarns, Swedish comedies and Belgian murder mysteries are all on subtitle obsessive Stuart Clark’s ‘must-watch’ list.

ON THIS DAY The Beatles’ Revolver, The Police’s Roxanne, U2’s The Joshua Tree and John R. Cash coming into the world are some of the very happy anniversaries celebrated recently by Team Hot Press.

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LOCK ‘N’ ROLL STARS (clockwise from top left) Martin McDonnell, Ryan O’Shaughnessy, Junior Brother, Zaska & Zapho are among those who’ve been tearing it up online.

IF

you can’t get to a gig, the gig will come to you!

That was the thinking last month as Hot Press teamed up with the good folk from Grace O’Malley Whiskey to bring you the Lockdown Sessions.

Every night at either 7 or 7.30pm the Hot Press Instagram account has been taken over by an Irish artist performing live from their living room, attic, garage or garden shed.

Any concerns we might have had about filling the slots up disappeared overnight as literally hundreds of artists volunteered their services. It became apparent that some days we were going to have to stage multiple gigs from multiple cities.

The globetrotting nature of the Lockdown Sessions is apparent from the one three-day period when we had Shane Ó Fearghail beaming in from Vienna; Ryan O’Shaughnessy

in LA; Ruth-Anne Cunningham in London; Tiz McNamara in Toronto; and Rebecca McRedmond and Matt Rowley keeping the home fires burning in Westport.

Along with more staggeringly good acoustic performances from the likes of Emma Langford, Junior Brother, First Day Lions, The Sei, Thanks Brother, Eve Belle, Saarloos, Moncrieff, Carrie Baxter, Zaska and Zapho, we’ve had Malaki rapping up a storm and incendiary DJ sets from Alex Gough and Mona-Lxsa, which put the requisite glide in our stride and muscle in our hustle.

While we look forward to the day they become redundant, the Hot Press Lockdown Sessions will continue to bring you great music and positive vibes for as long as is necessary.

• Follow the Hot Press Instagram for all the latest Lockdown Sessions news and performances.

THE MESSAGE NIALL STOKES EDITOR OF THE YEAR

END IS NIGH Covid-19 has changed everything. On the streets of Dublin, the foxes have stepped from the margins.

Stranded indoors, we think about the meaning of solidarity. In heaven, the man with the long beard is looking down. Or is he?

It is quiet at night now. The best time to take a walk. Even in a place as well populated as Harold’s Cross, Terenure and Rathgar, in a half-hour’s tramp, you might meet three or four people. There is no problem with social distancing.

On an eerily silent Rathgar Avenue a cat is waiting. It looks lost and lonely and the thought is inescapable: it’s like a lot of people at the moment. It approaches us, comes close. Tries to make friends.

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Starts to follow, latching onto my companion rather than me. Should you shoo a cat away? What is the etiquette of social distancing with an overly-friendly feline? Has anyone got it figured out in relation to cats and dogs and other domestic animals? It’s inexplicable: four legged creatures have scarcely been mentioned in relation to Covid-19. Well, except for pangolins.

Having followed us for a stretch, the cat fades off back to where it had been standing. Waiting for something or someone. Waiting for the end of the world.

There is a feeling of spooky desolation. A car pulls away from a set of traffic lights in the distance. You see headlights penetrating the night sky, pointing up and then levelling off as a vehicle bumps

“Normally, these canny creatures of the night slip around the margins on solo excursions. But not now. Not in the reign of King Covid-19.” up and over ramps somewhere else. The laneway that runs from Rathgar Avenue to Brighton Road is empty. There is a temptation to start whistling to fill the void, the way they do before something terrible happens in a movie.

Something terrible is already happening.

Terenure Road is normally busy, with cars and buses zipping by.

Tonight, the scene is very different. Walking straight down the middle of the road is a Red Fox. As if it owns the place. Normally, these canny creatures of the night slip around the margins on solo excursions. But not now. Not in the reign of King Covid-19. A second fox joins the first in the middle of what is the main road into, and out of, town.

Alone like that, silhouetted in the centre of the street, they look

PHOTO: KAREN KELLEHER

I

hate Covid-19.

Hate is not a word I use very often. It is an emotion, an attitude, a trap I try to avoid. It is a feeling that I can’t and won’t ever apply to people. I don’t like hypocrisy. There are many aspects of the way the world works that appall me. I find Donald Trump’s every utterance repulsive.

But hatred is of a different order entirely. The Merriam Webster dictionary says that ‘hate’ implies an emotional aversion often coupled with enmity or malice. It also mentions violent antipathy. The word sits comfortably alongside bigotry. We talk about hate speech for a reason. It involves the use of language as a weapon against a particular class or group of people. Hate speech is designed to isolate and marginalise. Or to inspire violence against. Lynchings. Houses being torched. Queer-bashing. People being shot. Or bombed into oblivion.

I know that the word is sometimes used lightly. People talk about pet hates. They use it in relation to porridge. Or asparagus. But that is not real hate.

Hatred is to be avoided. Hate is to be avoided. But I am not even sure that I can stretch as far as saying that I hate hatred. I want nothing to do with it. I want to immunise myself against it.

I’d like everyone else to do the same. But that is not the same as saying that I hate it. I have an emotional aversion to it, but I lack the element of malice.

But there is one thing at least that I can say for sure that I hate, and that I will not stop hating. Not until it has been exterminated.

With extreme prejudice.

I hate Covid-19.

THE MESSAGE like desperadoes preparing for a last gunfight. Out of the shadows, a third fox appears. Is it a peacemaker? No, you can tell from their body language now that they are all in this together.

Trying to make sense of it. Ten days ago, they’d have been mown down if they’d attempted a stunt like this one, ambling down the centre of the road like there was no tomorrow. Normally, there wouldn’t be.

Is it that their hour has come at last? No. These are no rough beasts. But as humans make themselves scarce, they are stepping forward. The tribe of Vulpes vulpes are curious. They are emboldened. They know that there is something afoot. But they don’t know what it is. Or where it might lead.

Watching them take stock of the situation, neither do I. On the footpath, two-metre distances have been marked out. Handwritten notices in shop windows explain the new protocols that are in force.

Opening hours have been changed. Restaurants are shuttered. No one knows when the heavy metal might be raised again if ever. We are on a journey into the unknown, a bad trip of the kind that no one in their right mind could ever have wanted to embark on. The phrase ‘the shutters came down’ has acquired an even more powerful resonance.

On Garville Avenue, two more foxes amble. They seem less furtive now.

Less scared. On the next street, more than fifty metres away, a bicycle presses on deeper into the suburban night. Even way off in the distance, you can hear the whisper of rubber on the road.

The cat is still hanging at the corner of Rathgar Avenue. It approaches us again. Looks even more lost and lonely. Tags along for a bit and then fades away for a second time, clearly reluctant to stray too far from home. We look back and it is motionless, staring after us.

The streets are deserted entirely now. We are the only humans abroad.

Soon we will turn the key in the latch, and go and wash our hands for the fortieth time since sun-up.

Tone. We all know, from music, that it matters hugely.

It was a moment of high drama when on St. Patrick’s Day, the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, appeared in the slot normally occupied by the Nine O’Clock News on RTÉ, and spoke to the nation about the introduction of new measures, to take the battle against Covid-19 into its next phase.

There were so many ways in which he could have blown it. You don’t have to look very far to find examples. In the US, Donald Trump has been making it up as he goes along – and making it up very badly. A narcissist down to his toe nails – which he thinks are gorgeous, great toenails, by the way – he revels in the spotlight the crisis affords, and then trots out whatever shit occurs to him on the spot.

We pretty much shut it down coming in from China/ It’s going to be fine/ One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear/ This is their new hoax/ Just stay calm, it will go away.

And then: If we can keep the deaths down to 100,000 that’ll be a great job/ There’ll be a lot of death.

Try singing it.

In the UK, Boris Johnson and his government have similarly offered a spectacular example of how to bullshit people shamelessly.

(Suddenly the Tories love the NHS).

The clinical advice is that the risk to the public remains low. Our country remains extremely well prepared... We already have a fantastic NHS, fantastic testing systems and fantastic surveillance of the spread of disease.

Together we can send this thing packing within the next 12 weeks.

UK experts and scientists expect to start trials for the first vaccine within a month. We are massively increasing the testing to see whether you have it now and ramping up daily testing from 5,000 a day, to 10,000 to 25,000

and then up at 250,000.

(He didn’t say by what year).

We’re in negotiations today to buy a so-called antibody test, as simple as a pregnancy test, which can tell whether you have had the disease… It has the potential to be a total game-changer. Trials of potential vaccines are also under way with results expected by April.

Cue chorus: “Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly/ Loverly, loverly, loverly?”

And let’s not even mention Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Viktor Orban in Hungary.

Admittedly lowlife of this ilk establish a bar that’s stuck to the ground. But what Leo Varadkar had to say on St. Patrick’s Day was in a different league entirely. He emphasised the importance of recognising that we are all in

“The message that we are all in this together has to be given real meaning, in the way that the burden is shared across all sections of society when we are in recovery mode.” this together as a community. He also expressed our solidarity, as a nation, with China, Italy and Spain – the three countries that were then leading the way in terms of positive tests for Covid-19 and for fatalities. Today he’d include the USA. The speech offered none of the false promises for which Boris Johnson always gets first in the class.

It deferred to the experts in the Department of Health and the HSE. It explained the overall strategy in clear and straightforward terms. And it appealed to people’s socially inclusive instincts, to the values Irish people share and to the love that we feel for those close to us. Even political opponents knew that it was a speech that achieved the right level of gravity, persuasiveness and decency to get ordinary citizens, watching at home, on board.

He got the tone right.

That quality of engagement has been maintained throughout. The Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Tony Holohan, has been immensely impressive in the department’s daily briefings, at once delivering the bad news and explaining how the campaign to hold back the virus is going with calm authority. The Minister for Health Simon Harris has been impressive too.

I vote socialist. But irrespective of your political allegiances, it would be churlish to suggest anything other than that these three – along with Paschal Dohohue and Simon Coveney – have handled an extraordinarily difficult situation very well.

The government has also made what are, broadly speaking at least, the right decisions in relation to keeping people connected to the companies they work for, and supporting business. Of course, there is more that needs to be done, especially in relation to musicians and the arts. But they have shed ideological baggage. They have committed to vastly increased government borrowing. They have effectively taken over the private hospitals for public use. And they have done a good job of encouraging people to accept the closures, the disruption, the isolation, the social distancing, the cocooning and all the rest, with relative equanimity.

This is not to say that mistakes were not made. Should flights from Italy have been grounded sooner? Was there a failure to communicate

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effectively and in a timely way with nursing homes? To what extent might the pressures on the hospital system have been avoided if we had applied different policies in relation to health over the past ten years? Should people who elected to go to Cheltenham have been warned that they’d have to self-isolate for two weeks when they got back? But in comparison to most of Europe – with the clear exception of Germany – we have done relatively well.

Make no mistake, there is endless hardship and grief to come. Many more people will die. Far too many of them will be young. The elderly will suffer disproportionately, especially in nursing homes. Families will be denied those often comforting final moments with their parents or grandparents before they pass away. Communities will be unable to express their love, friendship and solidarity with surviving family members at funerals. Isolation will hit some people hard. People’s mental health will suffer. Jobs will be lost. Many will never recover from the financial devastation.

It reminds me of the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, appealing to the mothers of Dublin gang leaders to ask their sons to desist from the murderous feud that had seen criminals, and a number of innocents with them, falling like nine-pins in the capital.

Except, back then, the Archbishop had a greater reservoir of logic on his side.

There was an actual mother. Who could speak to an actual son. Who might be the one deciding who would get shot and who not. One phone call might really make a difference.

The truth is, to believe that Mary might be able to intervene in the rise of Covid-19, you have to also believe that, like a gangland boss, God is pulling the trigger.

That’s the problem with prayer.

If God can intervene, anywhere, anytime, anyhow – which is surely the assumption behind praying to him to solve the current disaster – then he is an inveterate swine not to just do it off his own bat. This is obviously as true of famine in southern Africa, or war in Iraq, as it is of the spread of Covid-19. But

“To believe that Mary might be able to intervene in the rise of Covid-19, you have to also believe that, like a gangland boss, God is pulling the trigger.”

The same will be true everywhere in the world that Covid-19 takes hold. We need therefore to plot a way forward that works for everyone. The message that we are all in this together has to be given real meaning, in the way that the burden is shared across all sections of society when we are in recovery mode.

That is the true meaning of solidarity.

Where is God in all of this? I saw a Roman Catholic bishop on the RTÉ news. He was saying how wonderful it is to know, Masses having been cancelled, that so many people are watching the internet broadcasts. It sounded like a forlorn hope to me. “This is a time for more prayer, not less,” he said.

It is a mantra that has been repeated again and again by religious leaders of different stripes. The Pope went as far as doing a special ‘Urbi et Orbi’ gig in a deserted St. Peter’s Square to see if that might help. Not a bit of it. The bodycount keeps getting bigger.

It is as if the priestly caste collectively imagine that the man with the long white beard is sitting up there, somewhere, listening intently. However, we haven’t yet reached the tipping point in either prayer or suffering that would make him decide: “Right, enough slaughter. Let’s bring this bloody farce to an end.”

Some enthusiasts have urged that what we really need to do is to pray to Mary, the mother of God. She can intervene on our behalf.

somehow, the scale and speed at which this pandemic is sweeping across the globe make it seem unique. Why wait till he is asked?

It is spreading all over the world. No country or religion is immune. Covid-19 has treated Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Zoroastrian, Jehovah’s Witness, Moonie, Mormon, Scientologist and followers of Black Sabbath alike, with equal ruthlessness.

Any impression that it has picked on British Tories more than most is wrong.

Even Atheists are suffering.

I’m afraid that logic points in one direction only. Either God is a brutally vicious maverick who doesn’t give a shit about human beings; or – hoping we can satisfy Mary McAleese here – ‘she’ simply doesn’t exist.

The idea of a loving God that might intervene in human affairs never made any sense. But it feels more obvious than ever now.

We stepped out into the neighbourhood again this evening. The temperature was 6°, but with no wind it felt warmer. The stars were out. Venus shone brightly. It was what we call a beautiful night.

Our footsteps echoed through the silence. We covered the same circuit.

We met foxes. Three cars. A different cat approached us and tried to make friends. Not a single human did we meet.

The end is nigh. The question is: what end?

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LETTERS FROM

HOME

The sound of many hands clapping (Notes from the Bob Bunker)...

Bob Geldof The Boomtown Rats

T

he hurricane blows. But it blows unevenly through stranger valleys of difference than those we are accustomed to. Me, I don’t have to live in a city. I don’t have to live in a crowded house or flat. I don’t have older people I need to take care of.

There’s a weird distancing. I mean I know some people who have or have had it but came through. But this distant sense of it all being something happening off in the somewhere elsewhere not immediately in front of me leads to a terrible and stupid complacency. Not exactly a certainty that it’s not going to happen to you, but that it’s somehow nothing to do with you at all. Not that you’re immune – but it’s all happening in a place outside these gates here.

There goes that wanker again. Strolling by without his fucking mask. I want to shout “What do you think you’re doing you selfish prick!” But I don’t. So yeah… just come inside. I was outside the door with the missus and kids clapping into the almost dark night. The night echoes with hoots and hollers. It is touching. No it’s moving. From far off, the hallooing and yelps are as much saying “I’m still here”. “It’s me”.

It echoes in waves as each street or neighbourhood cranks up. It becomes a bit competitive.

Someone let’s off a banger and the rooks already settled for the night rise startled in a flurry of black flight. A car horn beeps. Just the once. Out of respect. There is a sense of, well... celebration. Of a great venting. Of a minutes release from the unbearable cooped-upness of being. Of an intuited and inchoate understanding that the imprisonment of the self is unrelieved by only the approximate society of the web and dull alternative amusements of the streaming platforms and their feeble terrestrial antecedent tellys.

We need the physical other of society. We need each other. And so, yes, we clap out of gratitude for the heroic doctors, nurses and staffs, but we also, standing on our doorsteps and balconies and gardens clap for ourselves and the pure, freshly realised joy that we are alive and that in this strangest of times we are at least alone together.

• The Boomtown Rats’ album Citizens of Boomtown is out now.

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David Keenan

“I feel like I should be out building walls when I hear of the altruistic acrobatics performed by the people on the ground, daily. Decent skins that are shining like fucking comets.”

When This Cloud of Confusion Lifts

D

PHOTO: MIGUEL RUIZ

ear Evanne, I hope you are well and haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be a raving homoeopath!

I have been in my room, adhering to the general consensus of lockdown for over a week now. Primarily in my room, though out of a well-worn compulsion to stay sane, I have been out every other day for a swift sweat, running to the village and back or leading solo expeditions to the back of the garden, where I can’t help but be swallowed up by vivid childhood hallucinations. I have learnt what it is to be present again and for this I am grateful. I felt sorry for myself for three quarters of a day when the timpiste in the garage resulted in the damaged right paw but clarity came on quickly in a heavy dose, and I’m actually enjoying the shift in approach.

Given the nature of things I have nothing to whinge about, aside from my inability to grow a half decent beard.

Stories are filtering through from members of my family who are employed and deployed on the front lines of the Health service. I feel like I should be out building walls when I hear of the altruistic acrobatics performed by the people on the ground, daily. Decent skins that are shining like fucking comets. Stories filter too of people passing on alone, denied and robbed of the essential hand to clutch or the horseshoe of love around the bed. Wasn’t loneliness the biggest killer in this country before the Virus came and started having its way? I heard of a Man in Donegal who sent himself a letter twice a week, so that someone would call to the door.

Things seem to be different now. Neighbours and nature and family and friends and the songs and the barriers seem to be broken in spite of the enforced distance. It seems we’ve become more social. I have hope that, when this cloud of confusion lifts, we won’t revert to subjective amnesia and that this reconfiguration of what is truly important won’t disappear into half-talk and dopamine dreams.

I do miss your company, but I know that going down into the well doesn’t mean that I’ll drown and that we’ll have enough new found realisations to keep sleep at bay for a while when we meet again.

All for now, Love from North Louth, The Beacons are lit, David x PS Through perseverance, the snail reached the Ark. • David Keenan’s A Beginner’s Guide To Bravery is out now.

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LETTE R S F R OM HOME

Danny O’Reilly The Coronas “As the days pass and the virus continues to wreak havoc on the world, it becomes clearer to me that all I really want is for my family to be ok and to give my dad a hug.”

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A Proper Send-off Delayed

T

wo weeks ago, my grandmother, Maura O’Reilly passed away peacefully at the age of 96. And while it wasn’t the coronavirus that killed her, its effect on her funeral service was both surreal and unnerving.

An amazing and strong woman, loved by anyone who ever met her, adored by her five children and countless grandchildren (and great grandchildren), she played a huge part in my grandfather’s record company, Dolphin Records, and the Dolphin Discs record shops.

I have no doubt her funeral would have been full with hundreds of people paying their respects with little anecdotes of something small and lovely they remember about Maura.

I have no doubt that there would have been a lovely celebration after the funeral, with music, laughter and many stories about how great she was.

And I have no doubt that I would have given my uncles, aunties, siblings, cousins, but especially my father, numerous hugs throughout the day.

Instead it was a short service, immediate family only, sitting apart but remembering together, and promising each other that there will be a proper send-off organised when all this madness has passed.

This pandemic has affected everyone in different ways. I feel a huge amount of guilt, admitting that I’ve spent far too many hours worrying about how it is going to affect my band. Selfishly worrying about whether an unfortunate band name will negatively affect sales or opportunities for us going forward, as well as all the other worries that I think all musicians and artists have in this uncertain time.

I suppose it’s human nature to be concerned with things that affect your livelihood. But as the days pass and the virus continues to wreak havoc on the world, it becomes clearer to me that all I really want is for my family to be ok and to give my dad a hug.

Stay safe, stay apart, this madness will be over soon.

Louize Carroll The Blizzards On Our Capacity To Love and Be Loved

T

his is a letter in light of a global re-set. It is as much a letter to myself as it is to all who have open ears, and to the hearts of those who may not.

If you have spent the last decade tending to your outer definition of success, you might feel lost in the darkness right now. This is a time of being exposed to your own, perhaps strangely unfamiliar, inner voice. A time of not hiding behind the noise of living that can obscure its message.

Don’t be afraid.

It feels uncomfortable. You might start to feel panicked. It might even feel like you’re falling apart, breaking down.

Good. You’re doing it right.

We must fall apart before we can build back up again in a way that makes sense. We must fall apart in order to address what we’ve been ignoring in the deepest, quietest parts of ourselves.

We must fall apart in order to re-set to make our lives more meaningful.

We must fall apart in order to reveal within our souls what deeply matters to us.

One day soon, we’ll meet in the place where we will sing again.

Until then, we will remain here and be silent. This being silent business, it’s not easy. There are

a lot of unpleasant things in this quiet place. Pain from a million moments ago, old deep hurts long since avoided. How many of your days up until now have been filled with other people’s worlds? You swim in other people’s moments.

It helps you to avoid looking at your own.

There can be expectant automaticity to much of life that often manifests as an unexplained melancholy. A sense of ennui as you blindly trudge uphill chasing something, anything, so you won’t feel left behind or inadequate.

The world is concerned with biological contamination now, and it is making you act immediately.

But for how long have you been contaminated emotionally? How much of what you chose to do in your life until now was because you were acting out of pain, fear or trying to unconsciously keep up with some false god that told you how to be better, look better, do better?

And the people! You exclude them because they could hurt you. You could move through your whole life in denial of your need for meaningful relationships until something wakes you from your carefully curated substitute reality.

It could be an illness, a heartbreak or it could be a global pandemic.

When you strip back the frills that dissolve within minutes when faced with this virus, you are left with the sobering realisation that one of the few values that lies fully within your internal control, a value you can grab a hold of and pull close to the core of who you are, is your capacity to love and to be loved.

I hope you keep this at the core of everything you do, and don’t do, from here on in.

Jim Sheridan I Hope The Corona Ignores Me

I

told mother a few years ago I couldn’t give blood because I had scarlet fever as a child.

“You never had it,” she said.

“But I was in the hospital,” I said. “You never had it,” she said again, with an accusatory tone.

“I remember you and Dad coming up to the hospital and looking in the high window,” I said.

“You never had it.”

“I remember thinking you and Dad had shrunk, ‘cause the window was only a few feet off the floor on my side, but you couldn’t reach up to see in the little square window, because I had thrown the porridge out and you didn’t want to stand in it.”

“You never had it,” she said with deadly deadpan.

“Then why was I in hospital?” I said. “I had the symptoms.”

“You never had scarlet fever,” she said again. This time her tone conveyed that she had NOT been remiss in keeping either me or the house clean.

“Ok,” I said, “I never had it. But I remember you and Dad standing at the end of the bed in the front room, holding hands and being really worried, and the ambulance arriving – and I remember the hospital with no wallpaper on the walls. And I remember everybody in Abercorn Road being really scared they would get it.”

A blank look from Ma… So I go, “I didn’t have it.”

My mother just looked at me. I couldn’t make out what her expression meant, other than that I had an overactive imagination.

Obviously I wanted to be like the other kids who got it.

But according to Ma I never had it. So now I try to keep my imagination in check and ignore the corona. I hope it ignores me.

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LETTE R S F R OM HOME

Laura Whitmore Postcards From The Edge

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he last time I wrote a letter – a personal one, not one addressed to the bank or my local representative – it was handwritten. The art of letterwriting has been replaced by a 280 character tweet (thanks for increasing it from 140 Twitter) or a voice memo on WhatsApp. I had a pen-pal when I was younger who lived in Italy and I still have a stash of our scribbled correspondence in a box somewhere. We lost touch when I went to secondary school and I can’t help but wonder how she is now, as Italy is one of the hardest hit countries during this Covid-19 pandemic.

Postcards are something that I’ve never given up on. I’m lucky to have travelled all over the world during my career and I’ve always sent home a postcard to my mother. I think she’s kept them all. I still do it. The last one was sent back in February, from Cape Town, South Africa, ahead of Love Island filming duties.

At the moment, the most travelling I’m doing is from the sofa to the fridge – so instead I’m writing this letter from my home in North London. I’ve gone as far as the edge of my current world – the upstairs balcony. The sun is shining, there’s blue skies above and the street below is deserted.

The UK is currently in lockdown. Apart from one brief walk a day, unless you’re a key worker, you should not leave the house. Usually postcards say ‘wish you were here’. But the truth is, I don’t wish you were here, as now more than ever we need to not do the one thing we all

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love to do to: socialise. It’s engrained in us: the backbone of Irish culture.

When I moved to London, over ten years ago, my English colleagues used to be intrigued by my incessant organising of get-togethers. I invited everyone back to mine after a night out for a sing-song, some planned, some sporadic, depending on where the night took us.

We are social beings. Drop us in any country in any part of the world and we will gravitate towards people; or maybe them to us. Which is why this is so hard. Monday rolls into Tuesday and then it’s Saturday then Sunday and a week has gone by and I’ve only seen one other person in real life.

I’ve always been someone who hates routine. My home until now has been a storage place for my stuff. But now I long for routine. My week is broken up with recording radio and podcasts from my makeshift home-studio and then trying to fill the time in between. I get up early by choice. Lie-ins are great when they are special, rare and celebrated, not because I’ve nothing else to do.

I thought the anonymity in a big city like London was wonderful – but it can also be cripplingly isolating for many. So this week, on some blank postcards I wrote to some of my neighbours (I didn’t have their numbers) and I dropped through their letter boxes a little check-in message. I’ve never sent a postcard such a short distance before, but it felt so much more important than the rest.

Check in on your neighbours. Technology is great, but there are people, generations even, who don’t have a smart phone or know how to use the latest online social platform. The written word is a powerful tool whether it’s typed or penned. Use it and stay safe.

Laura x

PHOTOS: KATRHIN BAUMBACH

“The written word is a powerful tool whether its typed or penned.

Use it and stay safe.”

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“There is nothing surreal about the images of an empty Dublin, an empty Venice, hospital doctors, nurses and patients enclosed in various forms of disposable plastics. They are all too real. Too ordinary. Too contemporary.”

Neil Jordan Director

I’d Make a Passable Hand At Garbage Collection

PHOTOS: KATRHIN BAUMBACH

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ovid-19 has in an odd way shown up the paucity of our imaginations. None of the dystopian fictions of the past fifty years – The Stand, The Andromeda Strain, Margaret Atwood’s Onyx and Crake, etc etc – have quite matched it. So ordinary, so global, so ferocious.

So I would ask for a moratorium on the word “dystopian”. And another one on the misuse of the word “surreal”. There is nothing surreal about the images of an empty Dublin, an empty Venice, hospital doctors, nurses and patients enclosed in various forms of disposable plastics. They are all too real. Too ordinary. Too contemporary.

The only image that seemed to deserve that word, was that of the Pope in an empty St Peter’s Square, sitting on a ceremonial chair, lit by a yellow light. That had a resonance that Dali could never have matched. Or Max Ernst. Or any of their later also-rans.

And the only piece of fiction that comes anything close to matching the atmosphere of what we’re going through is, oddly enough, a story that has nothing to do with viral infections. Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds. Not the Hitchcock movie. The 31-page story, of a Cornish farmland and the

gradual realisation that something in nature has turned against us. One farmer, one family and some eruption in the natural world that might have to be endured.

“The smaller birds were at the window now. He recognized the light tap-tapping of their beaks and the soft brush of their wings. The hawks ignored the windows. They concentrated their attack upon the door. Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.”

Nat Hocken couldn’t communicate with the outside world. I can. And there are certain compensating realisations. I never really liked house parties. Was never the best in crowds. Always preferred empty cinemas. But I have never felt quite so useless.

Without a medical degree, without training as a nurse. I would maybe make a passable hand at garbage collection and grocery delivery. Could have been a postman. All professions that have never seemed more heroic.

I have a sneaking suspicion – or maybe it’s a hope – that something might happen that will be as unexpected as the virus itself. Like in the ending of an earlier dystopian fiction – H. G Wells The War of The Worlds, where the alien invaders were killed by the common cold.

But, no wait.

Isn’t that a coronavirus?

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Glen Hansard

This Is a Time To Rest Deeply

O

n March 11th, the day the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic, I was in L.A. working on a film soundtrack.

The following day, I was driving up through Laurel Canyon, on one of those golden California evenings.

The light was hitting off everything in this supercinematic way.

I turned on the radio and the first thing I heard was Donald Trump’s voice saying, “So I’ve decided to cancel all travel between Europe and the United States for the next 30 days, effective midnight Friday.” I pulled over, called my manager and asked him to get me the hell out of there.

I had visions of stealing the hired car and driving across America, avoiding contact with people, headed for Chicago where I could stay with friends till this thing blew through. But how long would that be? Could be months, could be a year? Luckily I managed to get a seat on a flight. I was going home.

I got back on March 13th. I’ve never been so happy to descend through clouds into the grey skies of Dublin airport. Maire picked me up and, in the car, we discussed the precautionary idea of me going to the spare room to self-isolate. Maire was having none of it, she said we’d get through this together.

In the first few days at home I thought I had symptoms, but in the end I think it was just asthma and jet lag. But even as I settled back to home life and the unexpected joy of having time off, not knowing if I’d brought the disease with me left me anxious. I read articles on symptoms and watched videos of those who were going through the illness. Days went by and Maire was showing no symptoms. Her positivity was infectious and eventually I relaxed and moved my attention to the springtime, the garden (thank god we have a garden!), digging, planting, building raised beds and clearing the greenhouse.

I’ve never done so many odd jobs around the house, or been as present in it. Whether I’m clearing out sheds or painting furniture, or forever trying to fix the satellite dish, my new mantra is “slow, slower, slow as you can.” Even the news can wait until the evening now. This is a time to rest deeply, reflect, look around and listen, to open ourselves to what’s going on inside and allow something new to emerge, as a fresh image of our shared world coalesces.

On a personal level, this has been a time of great connection with not only the immediate surroundings and nature, but also with friends near and far.

That connection has proven true and heartening, even deeper than before.

We’ve had time not only to think, but to feel. And when things do go back to “normal”, I hope it will turn out that this time in isolation has brought us all a newfound attention and kindness to ourselves, to others and to the earth.

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“If you listen closely you can hear distant singsongs from the surrounding balconies and the general essence of unity is tangible.”

Faye O’Rourke Soda Blonde

Take Everything One Day at a Time

I

’m beginning to forget pre-pandemic life. On the 29th of February, I asked my boyfriend to marry me after a lengthy courtship of two months. As an impulsive yet self-conscious person, I was somehow shocked that our decision received a few mixed reviews and I had forgotten the major detail that I had, in fact, not met his parents. This sparked a week or so of crippling anxiety and hairloss but, hey, I’m impulsive and I’m in love.

All of the above was abruptly plunged into triviality, along with headlines of changing political sentiment and the possibility of a new wave of government leadership. I don’t think any of us will forget Varadkar taking to the national stage, quoting Churchill and triggering such a rapid 180° turn in popular opinion. My generation has never experienced a global emergency, let alone fully imagined a worldwide pandemic – as seen in films like 28 Weeks Later or Soylent Green, rather than our history books.

I’m currently isolating in the Liberties with my partner. A place that’s usually known for its vibrancy and authentic Dublin spirit, now really is like something straight out of a dystopian film. As much as a certain bleakness is attractive to me, it’s not all doom and gloom. If you listen closely, you can hear distant singsongs from the surrounding balconies and the general essence of unity is tangible. It’s also exposed me to new music. I have a proud, fresh

appreciation for what I can only guess is some kind of traditional accordion-led polkas (thanks apartment No.26!).

We’ve managed to make quite a nest for ourselves here on Bond Street. What it lacks in windows, it makes up for in a feeling of community and shared experience.

There’s also an abundance of time to improve new skills in kitchen-related activity, as evidenced by the distinct lack of flour available for purchase. I feel like I’m a ‘sim’, slowly graduating from an autumn salad to Cobbler and Eggs Machiavellian. I also have a new appreciation of social media. A person on a screen is now as valuable as if they were really there beside you. A night out in the pub has been replaced with a night on Zoom with a few dozen cans and a larger bag of crisps. (There are upsides!).

We’ve found a new way to communicate and connect as a band, minus the old barriers of balancing work schedules and attempting to manipulate time itself. It’s not all easy: on occasion, the days can seem unending, as monotony rears its tedious head. Thoughts of the front-line workers, while mixed with immense pride and admiration, can also stir worry and concern, having family members who are part of these crucial sectors. But a constant source of comfort is music. Old favourites give us stability and the nostalgia of freedom, while new contributions produced by our artists have become more vital than ever before, lifting and unifying us while also memorialising this extraordinary time with purity and authenticity. I want to deeply thank and encourage you all to continue writing, painting, singing, sowing or doing whatever you feel truly expresses you.

Things that seemed so gargantuan and important, issues that seemed to weigh twice that of the world, now pale beside that crucial and deciding component of life: love. Spread love (not germs) as much as possible during this unprecedented period, and take everything one day at a time... which is how I’ll be taking my engagement. Let’s hope it outlasts the pandemic!

Imelda May Stay 05.04.20

yoga, piano, cooking and nothing worse than a whiner so smile and post that online too.

How about not knowing

Wake eat breathe

what to do for a while

wait watch sleep away the worry

figure it out before

connect without meeting

it all goes back to a before

missing while seeing your face

we couldn’t keep up with

on a screen the size of my hand close the door Da wash the food before touching the hands that are cracking like they did when you painted school railings in the rain keep safe stay in keep going stay sane relax, read, do the things you’ve been meaning to do shed the weight

and keep the good bits the laughing at ourselves time with the kids and dog and neighbours leaving stuff on the step the bloody good excuse for not paying the bills no sweat about not getting dressed hearing birds again now the traffic has been turned down

you’ve been meaning to lose

singing songs like you did the first time

but not the plot

music to my ears

keep that!

that I get from mam’s side

Plant potatoes, dance with the telly drink the wine you were keeping for ‘good’ loosen the clothes

who I miss while I wake, eat, breathe wait, watch and sleep away the worry.

tighten the purse

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LETTE R S F R OM HOME

James McGovern The Murder Capital

The Only Certainty Is Uncertainty

D

ear lovely peruser, What the fuck is going on?

It appears spring has taken a new form, of winter dispatches from the bed to the couch, the sound of drum and bass on the canal and full spec ice-cream vans now become distant vibrations from a past year, or worse, questionings of my own presence.

I writhe at the utterance of social-distancing as being “the new normal” in this perverse unknown. Far from normal it is and far from normal it will be recalled upon.

I’d physically kill for a hug if homicide weren’t illegal and, again, with tongue most likely touching inner face, I wish for a world where hearing the word “lockdown” was more synonymous with encountering a pseudo fan of Skepta’s (see me in the magazine hi mum).

Our asymmetry has now been exposed, and the quarrels with which we attached ourselves internally been crushed callously by forward thinking microbes. Our bathrobes and CDs of old no longer extras on our set, but highly paid stars in our everyday regret of having not known how good things were.

Reheating last night’s meal you stir and stir and stir*, lost in the completely original thought that it “definitely tastes better the next day”.

Bowie’s The Next Day has a song on it called ‘You Feel So Lonely You Could Die’: there’s beautiful humour in that now.

I customarily reminisce deeply on fleeting nothings and the art of lost romance, even moments minnow as a glance. It’s easy to romanticise the idea of connecting with anyone on what is now Day 24 of remembering what it’s like to dance. (I would meticulously commit arson and get away with it for a dance in Workman’s right

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now, if arson weren’t illegal and or understandably frowned upon, of course).

“Bob Dylan’s discography chronologically!” I exclaimed to fucking no one on day 13. This was the great fourth-wall-break between James and his audience of... James. A paramount idea to fill time and become even further acquainted with the not-so-bad guy and his dry wit. Dry it was, and dry it still is. ‘All I Really Want to Do’ on ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’ from 1964 has been a personal favourite thus far on my endeavour - sharp and clever as ever. *Stir, stir, stir... “Fuck that really does taste better the next day” - Original Thought #2 on day 17, shortly preceded by Original Thought #1, “Maybe a piss in the back garden would spice things up today?”

If all we have is time to kill, but time is also a killer, then time is the enemy my friend. But worry not, time is a wilted concept now for those of us at home. ‘The great purge of the inner voice’s ability to reassure’ (2020 edition!) is in full flow, and I’ve become semi-unwillingly reliant on watching Stewart Lee clips on YouTube.

I regularly bask in his logically and creatively formed bleakness served cold through comedy gold.

Look up ‘Give it to me straight, like pear cider that’s made from 100% pears’ for a two-part-pirated masterpiece. Though be warned, there is triggering imagery of a semi-large crowd enjoying themselves in a theatre... (At this stage I would diligently forge large sums of multiple currencies across several decades for one pint outside Grogan’s, day or night. Of course only if producing counterfeit money weren’t illegal and/or looked down upon by the man, man).

Alas, The only certainty now is uncertainty, and that is not “the new normal”, because humans are resilient bastards. So fear not, you semi-detached wholly reshaped peruser in kind, the third summer of love is fast approaching. Let’s just hope it arrives this year and not the next.

Love, James.

• The Murder Capital’s debut album When I Have Fears is out now.

PHOTO: EMILEE DROST

“Bowie’s The Next Day has a song on it called ‘You Feel So Lonely You Could Die’: there’s beautiful humour in that now.”

LE TTE R S F R OM HOME

JyellowL Rage Is An Understatement Of How I Feel

PHOTO: MIGUEL RUIZ

D

ear Hot Press Readers, Your friendly neighbourhood yellowman here. I hope everything is well and everyone’s maintaining a level head, hard as it may be in the current circumstances. I thought I was doing fine – until I found myself writing this letter, addressed to an entire publication and its readers!

Anyway, some insight into where my mind is, at the moment: I’m feeling appalled by the suggestion, made by two doctors on French TV, that the Covid 19 vaccine be tested in Africa; and that they proceeded to liken African people to prostitutes during AIDS studies.

Here’s what happened, as reported by the BBC. Camille Locht, Research Director at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, was talking about a Covid-19 trial in Europe and Australia. JeanPaul Mira, who is Head of Intensive Care at Cochin Hospital in Paris, then said: “If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation? A bit like as it is done elsewhere, for some studies on Aids. In prostitutes, we try things because we know that they are highly exposed and that they do not protect themselves.”

Dr. Locht agreed with him! “You are right,” he said. “We are thinking about a study, in parallel, in Africa.”

Rage is an understatement for how I feel about it.

But of course history shows that the French authorities, like those in much of the western world, don’t hold Africans in very high regard, as their trail of colonialism through our continent confirms.

On a lighter note, I’ve been working on my album and participating in various challenges. I even started one myself. The #broketoolong freestyle challenge invites rappers – or people who’ve become rappers as a result of self-isolation – to talk about how this situation has impacted their finances.

The album I’ve been forming is formidable and I can’t wait for the world to hear it; it has healing powers! The first taste of it will be made available in May, so I’m excited.

Anyway, stay safe and feel free to write back!

Kind regards, J • JyellowL was born in Nigeria. He is one of the hottest young rappers on the Irish scene. His debut album is due shortly.

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THE A&R DEPARTMENT

Fox Jaw

Luz Corrigan

The Burma

JAW DROPPING That thing about adversity creating great art... it’s true! Irish musicians have gone into overdrive to try and cure those Covid-19 blues. Words: Stuart Clark

T

hey’d reckoned on the Lockdown curtailing their musical activities for a while but having discovered the joys of Zoom Fox Jaw pieced together a cracking five-way version of ‘Ghost Town’, which does The Specials proud.

It’s typical of the ingenuity and “Fuck you, Covid-19!” attitude that artists and music lovers alike have displayed these past few weeks. It’s fostered a sense of community, which has gladdened our hearts. The message is clear and simple - “We’re in this together!”

Fellow Limrockers We Come In Pieces – the name contains more than a hint of what they sound like - had us forming a socially distanced moshpit with their ‘Lockdown’ offering, which was written and recorded in a 24-hour orgy of cabin fever creativity.

“Stay at home you muthafuckas!” it exhorts as the forces of Valhalla are unleashed. With Leo Varadkar taking care of intro duties (well, sort of) and a nicely deranged accompanying video, it was a day very well spent.

Having built up a healthy online following with her Lewis Capaldi, JP Saxe and Maisie Peters covers, Irish-Argentinian teenager Luz Corrigan proves she’s a writer of calibre too with ‘i’m lonely’.

The beguiling slice of acoustic pop explains why heavyweight Toronto producer

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JMAK, the Apple-backed Platoon label and Paradigm, the same agency that live books alt-J, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, Jason Mraz, The Lumineers and the Dave Matthews Band, are all in Luz’s corner.

You can tell from looking at her socials that the 18-year-old has a close bond with her fans who are lapping up the new single and counting down the minutes until she starts gigging again.

The Burma buzz has crossed the Atlantic with Rolling Stone premiering their ‘Same Again’ track and comparing its “glimmering rock” to the likes of The Killers, The Smiths and The Strokes.

What distinguishes the Corkonians from those other bands is singer Tony O’Donovan’s halfway between Paul Banks and Tom Petty sneer.

It’s available as part of their Sugar Moonlight five-tracker, which is available from the Burma Bandcamp and likely to cause more media fawning, not least from us.

While currently unable to add to his list of high-profile supports - Aslan, Brian Kennedy and Damien Dempsey are among those who’ve been given a serious run for their backstage rider by him - Ciarán Moran has treated us to the cracking ‘Falling Down’.

Guided by the likes of Christy Moore, Roddy Doyle and Colm Quearney as he found his musical feet, the Dublin North Inner

City singer tells it like it is with references to substance abuse, domestic violence and homelessness. We imagine a song about the current crisis will be coming down the tracks.

He also pens a mean chorus, which has resulted in serious amounts of Spin 103.8FM airplay.

Impressively, the accompanying video trended for almost 72 hours when premiered on hotpress.com.

Moran is being looked after by Luke Rynne Cullan and the rest of the TuneRelease.Com crew whose next release is the debut single from JJ Bloom, AKA Conor McQuaid who’s majorly into his classic soul, funk and R&B. The 23-year-old had quite the adventure with his previous band, Dúlamán, who made it to the final of Germany’s Got Talent and subsequently released a well-received album there through Sony.

He’s co-written two songs, ‘I Won’t Be Leaving’ and ‘Supernatural’, with Jake Carter and ventured to France as a pen-for-hire but is now keen to establish himself as a force in his own right.

His cause will be helped no end by ‘Always You’, a supercool summer pop single which finds JJ taking to the ice at The Rink in D12 in the video.

Sound-wise, there are nods to two of his favourite acts, Hall & Oates, and the cycling shorts-era Style Council.

“The Late David Turpin has gifted us a free instrumental version of his Romances album, which is proving to be a real stressbuster in the virtual HP Towers.”

Ciarán Moran

Proving that he’s a top man as well as a wonderful songwriter, The Late David Turpin has gifted us a free instrumental version of his Romances album, which is proving to be a real stress-buster in the virtual HP Towers.

Released last October, the original 12-tracker found Turpin, who scripted gothic Irish horror The Lodgers and has a new movie, The Winter Lake on the way, ‘casting’ the likes of Elephant, Bear Worship, Gar Cox, Samyel, Martin McCann, Jaime Nanci and old pal (in terms of the duration of their friendship, not his age) Conor J. O’Brien as the singer of his songs.

The result is a cinematic tour de force ripe for overseas licensing…

Infandum, a prodigiously talented Lucan rapper, announces his arrival with ‘Blast Furnace’, a street anthem that manages to be both gritty and poppy.

If radio stations are looking for something to play next to Dermot Kennedy, this could be it. With the 16-yearold also a natural in front of the camera, we’ll be keeping a very close eye on young Dylan Donegan…

We’re also loving ‘That Girl’, the current single from Zali who’s been working with Wizkid, Tekno and Tiwa Savage producer Blaise Beatz. The Irish singer promises “a bold reminder to girls everywhere to unapologetically own who they are” and duly delivers with a song that oozes R’n’B sophistication.

Inspired by the likes of Toni Braxton, Frank Ocean and Amy Winehouse, she could have a summer hit on her hands if radio proves to be as enthusiastic as Spotify who’ve put it on their The New Éire playlist.

With previous single ‘Can’t Stop’

amassing close to 150,000 plays and pockets of fans everywhere from Mullingar to Mexico City – we love them analytics! Zali is really cooking at the moment.

An R’n’B belter if ever there was one, Amanda St. John teams up with Avro Party on ‘Made Myself A Name’, which contains such choice couplets as: “You could literally be my fairy godmother or knight in shining armour/ Myself & Karma will never forget you for it!”

Upcoming on May 8 from the Northern Irish singer is The Muscle Shoals Sessions, which finds her following in the legendary studio footsteps of Aretha Franklin and Etta James who you suspect would recognise St. John as a kindred spirit.

It’s always a good day when there’s new music from Patrick M. Barrett who also magicked ‘Hearts Off The Latch’ up in just 24 hours. Putting his Hedge Schools guise to one side, he’s operating this time round as Arrivalists. Whatever name he’s using, Mr. B is consistently one of Ireland’s best songwriters. A doff of the A&R Department headphones too to Ruth Medjber formerly of this parish who supplied the ace cover photo.

Belfast indie rockers Gnarkats undergo a massive growth spurt on their new single ‘Dreamers’. As with its ‘War Cry’ predecessor there’s a big wall of guitar noise – we suspect they listened to quite a bit of Therapy? growing up - but now with added pop guile.

• See and hear all of the A&R Department tracks and videos on hotpress.com.

ON OUR RADAR...

NEW MUSIC / PRODUCERS / BANDS

DANIEL BLUME The Dublin singer on being an early bloomer and the strange times we live in.

How long have you been playing music?

DANIEL BLUME: Since I was literally six months old. My Mum took me to these mother and child music classes, where all the moms sat in a circle with the babies on their laps, and there were shakers, and drums. It was a great, interactive way to inspire a love of music from a really young age. That led to me getting to choose what instrument I wanted to learn in school, which was classical guitar. It quickly became a lot more serious than a hobby. I went to a music school in the UK when I was nine, and now I’m singing and making pop music.

You live in the UK now, but where in Ireland are you from?

My dad’s side is from Dublin, and my Mum’s from Meath.

How many different instruments do you play?

Guitar and piano. And I sing as well, of course.

What inspired ‘Catch Feelings?’

I was going through this period where I was falling for the wrong kind of people, putting myself in situations I shouldn’t, and I wanted to write a song calling myself out and wishing I had better control of those emotions. I think a lot of people can relate to that.

What are you hoping you can accomplish once this self-isolation period is over?

I want to travel the world playing my music.

Performing is what I love the most, and I love seeing real faces in front of me, a real crowd.

Anywhere you especially want to play?

It seems the least exotic, but I haven’t actually performed yet in Ireland. And Irish crowds are famed for being the best, so I think the first thing I’m going to do when this is all over is get a show together in Ireland.

Zali

• Daniel Bloom’s ‘Catch Feelings’ single is out now TANIS SMITHER

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ON OUR RADAR...

THE A&R DEPARTMENT we took advantage of Ryanair sales, and started backpacking around Europe – busking and playing open mic nights. We created our scene. The touring we’ve done in Australia is from a busker we met in Berlin. Everything we’ve ever achieved has been from travelling around Europe with a guitar and a harmonica.

Have you seen a growing appetite for Irish music around Europe?

Brandon: Yeah, we have the golden passport, and everyone loves us everywhere. But Irish people have experienced a lot. The majority of people I knew were council house, single mammy, pub children – having blackcurrant and crisps, waiting for their mas to come out from the pub. A lot of Irish families come from a place of struggle, as well.

You can really hear that in the music.

KNEECAP

THE OCELOTS You’ve been on the scene for a while – how does it feel finally getting your debut album out into the world?

Brandon: It’s weird. It makes us more vulnerable to judgement.

With an EP out, it’s like, ‘They could go any direction, they have potential’. But releasing an album, it’s like, ‘Okay – this is them, and that’s it’. That’s really scary.

You recorded Started To Wonder in a cottage in Skibbereen. How did that come about?

Brandon: It was pretty random! There’s a Skibbereen market on Saturdays, and we bought two shirts for a fiver off this girl. She was like, ‘Oh, you should come down and meet my husband! He’s just built a studio in the house!’ This was only the second time we’d met her – but she convinced us. We spent three weeks there. You never know what goes on in Skib!

The folk scene is taking off in Ireland at the moment – but your career has really followed a trajectory of its own.

Ashley: Our career started when we were 17, through a video that went viral. That was five years ago.

Brandon: We were getting all these emails from labels at that time, and we didn’t know what to do. We had no one representing us. Then we headed over to London to work with a major label over there, when we were 18. They wanted us to co-write with producers and songwriters in the industry, but it didn’t feel right. So

You’ve spent a major chunk of 2020 touring across Australia – does that packed schedule get intense?

Brandon: On the first Australian tour we did last year, we had 35 shows and pretty much no days off. No one knew us, so we did a lot of pub gigs – where you’re just stuck in the corner of a room.

Doing that everyday was so exhausting. This time around, we have Monday and Tuesday off most weeks, and it’s mostly ticketed shows.

We’re playing really good venues, and we’ve been treated really well. It feels like we’re on holidays! (laughs) Ashley: We’re also camping along the way, so accommodation isn’t something we have to stress out about. We have a campervan, so we can pull up by the mountainside.

Brandon: We did a tour of Italy once, and that was the hardest thing ever. We had one gig where we finished the song, and all we heard from the crowd of six was someone snoring (laughs). We had just come from doing a tour with Jack Johnson, so we had such big heads. It was a hilarious contrast.

Ashley: From 5,000 people to 5 – and one of them’s asleep! But touring is always going to have a huge impact on your mental health, because you can’t really control the comforts and variables around you. We’re lucky that we’ve travelled so much – touring is our comfort. We moved to Leipzig in Germany, and trying to find a sense of home when we come back from these tours can be strenuous. Your sense of home gets shook up a bit.

Any plans to return to Ireland?

Ashley: Where we live now, I think we have a better relationship with Ireland. Now I can look forward to visiting Ireland, because I’m not spending €1.50 too much on chicken fillet rolls. And €300 too much on rent.

• The Ocelots’ new album, Started To Wonder, is out now.

LUCY O’TOOLE

TRACKS Awkward Z – ‘Directions’ One of several thrilling new talents to emerge from the Anomaly collective, Awkward Z returns with his first release of the year. With a confident flow, he delivers refreshingly expressive bars over a bright, laid-back beat – interspersed with inspiring interview snippets about his journey so far. The release marks the South East rapper as one of the most capable new voices in Irish hip-hop. Lucy O’Toole.

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Naoise Roo – ‘Sick Girlfriend’ Exuding a genuine sense of vulnerability, the title-track from the Dubliner’s upcoming EP explores the stress mental health issues place on relationships.

Redolent of Siouxsie Sioux in her prime, Naoise Roe’s impassioned vocals are accompanied by a maelstrom of synth stabs, pounding drums and toothrattling basslines. Beautiful, necessary and honest.

Ingrid Angulo.

Junk Drawer – ‘What I’ve Learned / What I’m Learning’ The NI Music Prize winners channel the best of psychedelic and garage rock on this sprawling, emotionally volatile seven-minute track. Following a slow, rhythmic first half, the three-minute mark signals an explosion into glorious chaos – with squealing guitars and hard-hitting bass blending together seamlessly. A thrilling calling card for their debut album. Ingrid Angulo.

JJ Lee – ‘sink’ A swirling lo-fi offering, ‘sink’ is an understated indie-pop track from Cork producer JJ Lee, featuring Matthew Corrigan (aka Ghostking Is Dead)’s languid vocals and Caoimhe Coleman’s mellow lyricism. 2019 was a busy year for the producer, and ‘sink’ signals the start of exciting new developments in 2020.

Tanis Smither.

SAM S MITH

SAM SMITH ON COVID-19

W

E HAVE TO MAKE THE MOST OF IT ALL

Like all of us, I’m spending my days indoors, bored – but also wracked with guilt and worry for everyone out there who is risking their lives for us. It’s a hard one for everyone, and everything’s relative I think. I have mental health issues, so I’m just trying to keep my head above water right now, like so many of us. But it’s just a weird time. I hope everyone’s okay and coping.

PHOTO: WALTER PFEIFFER

OCD AND COVID I have OCD, which I’ve had since I’ve been a kid, and since I became well-known it’s gotten way worse. Because it’s a control thing and – with what I do, the lack of control within my life became very intense. For me, I’ve been on the road and travelling around the world and touring since I was 20 years old. This is the first time that I’ve had to clean my clothes and look after myself as a human being! And obviously these are very privileged problems.

But you know, this lack of control sends my OCD absolutely wild.

It manifests as obsessive thoughts; I’ll see a picture or a film and I’ll obsess over it for days, to the point where I’m crippled by it.

As an illness, OCD is very misunderstood.

People claim to have it when they’re just cleaning their rooms and they’re tidy, but it’s actually a little more intense. It can turn into violent imagery, violent sexual imagery, so it’s a mountain to climb, constantly.

CREATIVITY IN WAVES For all of us now, the world is so busy and so

manic all the time, it’s just constant, and with technology nowadays it’s even more intense, in that you have to be constantly connected and in a hundred places at once. This stillness, I think, puts you face to face with your demons, and with your self. So I think we have to make the most out of it. But then the pressure to make the most out of it becomes very intense, too!

Creativity is coming in waves right now for me. Last week, I had this beautiful moment where I started enjoying singing again: just singing for the joy of singing myself. And then this week, I just do not want to sing at all. So I think we just have to be so easy on ourselves.

IN KEEPING WITH THE TIMES As everything started happening in the world, with everyone going on, I started to feel less and less okay with the fact that I was bringing out this pop album. It just felt very, very vibrant and loud. And I’m an empath as a person, and was starting to feel weird about that, given the heaviness everyone has been feeling.

And then having the title ‘To Die For’ and the front cover is a bunch of people touching my face: it’s absolutely not the message I want to be giving right now! So I’m changing the album title so it feels fresh to me and fitting. I write music all the time, non-stop, and I have a few songs that I’ve written that are more in keeping with everything. I’m just so aware that many of my fans would have lost people through this, and have been through hard times, and I wanted to keep it in line with everything.

• In conversation with Roe McDermott

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IS IT ROLLING,

Bob?

The Boomtown Rats then that are The Boomtown Rats now: Bob Geldof, Simon Crowe, Garry Roberts and Pete Briquette

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BOB G E LDOF Bob Geldof is back in his home town to promote a new Boomtown Rats album, Citizens Of Boomtown, a comprehensive documentary of the same name, and a book – Tales Of Boomtown Glory – that collects his complete lyrics and fleshes them out with a few stories. He’s got a few more up his sleeve for Pat Carty.

M

onday at 4pm, I get a call, can I interview Bob Geldof at 7? Now is not the time for faint hearts.

I meet Bob in the lobby of The Merrion Hotel and he suggests we do the interview in his room.

As we’re taking the lift, I explain how the change in schedule means I haven’t had time to fully prepare. There just wouldn’t have been time otherwise, he counters, and he doesn’t mind talking to Hot Press, as “it’ll be all about music and not the other fucking shite.” He offers me a glass of wine and we kick off.

It’s been thirty-six years since In The Long Grass. Who needs a new Rats album in 2020?

(Bob Geldof snorts and we’re off). I need it! It’s what bands do.

I’m not interested in nostalgia, so when we regrouped, we had to consider, what is it? Is the Rolling Stones doing ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ nostalgia or is it completely classic? It’s classic.

You’ve said that if you went to see The Stones and Jagger went ‘Here’s three songs from the new album’, you’d be the first to go: ‘Here, hold on!’

That’s what I did last night! We were playing in the North of England. We started with two new ones and then I said ‘Hey! The new album’s coming out, but the rest of the show is going to be old ones’. And the audience all went ‘wayhey!’

(He’s rolling for sure).

I’d bin a song if I couldn’t do it. If I do ‘Lookin’ After No. 1’ it’s for the same reason I wrote it on the dole queue in Dún Laoghaire. I’ve still got that dole card where I wrote “The world owes me a living.” If I sing ‘Rat Trap’, I’m not back in the abattoir in Ballsbridge, that slaughterhouse of dreams. When I do ‘Banana Republic’ it’s not about the Irish Republic which grew up, finally. It’s about the American Republic. And with ‘Someone’s Looking At You’ it’s not about what I was living through in 1975, it’s about Zuckerberg and and your device literally recording you.

Keep going, please...

It is this surveillance capitalism – they’re packaging you and selling you on to a third party. Well, fuck off. There’s no way that’s acceptable. They’re monopolistic, and they should be broken up. I can go on and on with this. If I sing ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ it’s not about Brenda Spencer, but it can be about the massacre two weeks ago. The songs have survived in me, as an expression of a sentiment and an emotion. When I heard the opening cadences of ‘Mondays’ last night, nothing turned in me and went “Oh, for fuck’s sake, this fucking thing again!”

PHOTO: ADRIAN BOOT

Hasn’t that ever happened?

No, what happens is sort of like a trigger point into a place.

When you do transcendental meditation, you’re given your own private mantra, and the minute you hit that, it does lull you into that place you’re meant to be, so I hear the “bam-ba-bam” of ‘Rat Trap’ and I go into that groove. After seven solo albums, The Boomtown Rats for me are vital again. That noise – as Bono says “that glorious noise of The Boomtown Rats” – was what I wanted to hear.

And is it happening?

You know that it works, because the crowd goes nuts at festivals even though they probably don’t know the tunes. Your mind is ticking and it begins to manufacture tunes that suit that noise but in a more contemporary sense. The songs are not about

working in an abattoir but that attitude is to the fore, and the Bobby Boomtown part of me needs that attitude.

THE FINE ART

The song on the new album, ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Yé Yé’ celebrates the music that got into you as a young lad.

That’s the only medium I know where truthfully I resonate. I know that’ll look wanky. I can write essays, I can talk my way through things, but where it just makes perfect sense is this, and in the verses I explain why this minor art form does this.

Minor art form?

I view it the same way Noël Coward viewed it. Pop is minor, you know.

Pete Townshend said it’s the most ridiculous thing in the world, and the most important thing in the world.

Well, that’s right, and total respect to Pete. If I’m following someone, his intelligence shines through. Look, I say it in the book that there are lines in rock that are as incandescent as any of the great poets, and there’s an equality of expression in a different way. But it’s cheap music, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Cheap, but potent.

That’s what Coward says in Private Lives, “Strange how potent cheap music can be”; it’s one of his deathless lines. Country music, Hank Williams, it’s corny as fuck but, as Leonard Cohen said, the peak of the tower of song. It is just soul. It’s ultimately reductionist. Just the names excited me – Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf – WHAT THE FUCK? – let me check this out. John Lee Hooker is just him stamping on the floor and going dang, dang, dang.

John Lee Hooker is the sound of the air in the room; it’s the sound of the soul of one man.

The air in the room, that’s brilliant.

Sam Phillips said about hearing Howlin’ Wolf “This is where the soul of man never dies.”

Yeah, it’s kind of why I miss that. There’s great pop music – Billie Eilish’s album is fucking wonderful – but it’s more about craft, ability and talent, of which I have little so I just go with attitude and hence, Citizens Of Boomtown.

LOOKIN’ AFTER NO.1

The Saint Bob figure that emerged in the ‘80s to change the world with Band Aid and then Live Aid didn’t spring out of nowhere. Geldof had formed a branch of CND in his native Dún Laoghaire in his teens, as well as working with the Simon Community. He even campaigned for ‘Save The Whale’ at the height of punk, an incident immortalised in ‘Someone’s Looking At You’ when he’s spotted in the square “shooting my mouth off about saving some fish.”

You were at odds with your contemporaries in the year zero of punk, who seemed not to give a shit?

They did give a shit. Obviously Steve and Paul of the Pistols didn’t give a shit, they were just great. The Pistols the most friendly towards us because, I guess, John was Irish, in effect.

His view was that it’s all shit, everything, so I guess the point was in the nihilism they created, there would be new roots, which is exactly what happened. They were the perfect avatar of the moment. Where could they go after that perfect first record?

Can you make a better record than Never Mind The Bollocks?

It’s one of the fucking pillars. On the other hand, The Clash were, to me, seriously old hat.

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Bobby Boomtown takes a leap: The Boomtown Rats on stage back in the day

Is that jealousy, a feeling that you were being somehow excluded?

I was jealous of their cool, but as I said at the time, they were the Bay City Rollers of the new wave.

first album is lame. They became the band they were with London Calling, just like U2 became what Bono said they were with The Joshua Tree. And Sandinista! is a fantastic album.

But The Rats were the ones at the top of the charts.

Yeah, but that was on purpose, that’s where the power of pop was. If you’re going to do this, you have to aim for that. Can we get on Top Of The Pops? What do we have to do?

I’ll do it. Do you know the Trotskyist trope of entryism? You pretend you’re X, you infiltrate, you get your mates in, and then you take over. The Pistols always wanted to get on, but they couldn’t after the Bill Grundy show.

In the documentary, there’s a fucking clip, where I said look, if the Daily Mirror says I’m throwing up in airports and I get the front page, I’ll agree. I don’t care.

What about The Rats’ place in history then...

Nowhere. We’re not seen in the same league and the big problem in ’76/’77 was that they thought we were Johnny-come-latelys. In 1975, New York is bankrupt. The Mayor of New York begs for help and Gerald Ford says, publicly, “Drop Dead, New York City.”

Inflation in the UK is 27%. In Ireland, we have in effect a civil war on the island where 3,600 people are murdered. We have an utterly corrupt government and an entirely corrupt State religion. We have an entirely corrupt business class, and we have a zero economy that offers its young no hope.

What’s the point?

The thing is to get out of the conditions you live in, to stop being poor, to use fame as a platform, which I said in 1976, and, you know, if girls want to sleep with you because bizarrely you’re in a band now, and not slopping around fucking Walter’s in Dún Laoghaire, then get to number one. The Clash thing was Joe trying to get rid of his hippy past: he was a transitional figure, as were we. We transitioned from Dr Feelgood into the new thing. Lucky us, we did it in the obscurity of Ireland. We had been playing a year when we pitched up, so we were match fit. We could play, and we could play fast.

Could others not play?

Our ambitions were musical so I didn’t go along with the punk gestalt that you couldn’t have choruses. We had choruses, we had saxes, we had all this shit, which is why we got mega reviews in America. Everyone bought into the fact that The Clash were cool – but I didn’t like them that much. I think the

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Meaning what?

Of course you get The Ramones, and Patti Smith, and the Talking Heads. Of course you get the Sex Pistols and The Clash, and of course you’re going to get a middle-class group of Herberts not being quiet about this, AT ALL. Fuck You. They all come together, unrecognised in New York and in London and there’s this big stew. New bands are forming in this sort of chrysalis, this petri dish of ferment, and The Clash are one. Strummer had been in this cockamamie, okay, sort of R&B lot, but so had The Rats. He forgets all that and runs from his past, cuts his hair when he sees the Pistols and fucking forms The Clash. Just like we saw The Feelgoods and went, “Thank you very much, North Star.” Mainly for me it was the lyrics – “Stand and watch the towers, burning at the break of day.” Fuck! You can make rhythm and blues like that? I’ll write about fucking Dún Laoghaire. That was beautiful to me. I never achieved “Watch the towers burning” – I mean, this is Wordsworth.

You’re being unfair to yourself...

So, we go out with The Ramones and the Talking Heads and, as you know, we played in schools. We were friendly with them because they just thought we were one of them, they couldn’t get arrested in New York. Bob Gruen, who was the house photographer, says people think that The Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, and Patti were huge: they were nothing. They never played theatres, they still don’t. There’s a myth around this.

The CBGBs myth, one of the worst holes I was ever in.

Exactly, that’s all they could play so when they came to England they couldn’t fucking believe it, it was like the black guys with the blues. We said fuck this and went North because nobody was interested. Alan McGee says in the documentary that he went with Gillespie to see The Rats and they fucking blew him away. Geldof was completely opportunistic, saying “You, in row fuck, get the fuck out of my gig!” I didn’t, but that’s McGee. He said he heard ‘Lookin’ After No. 1’ and it just woke him up. Great, that’s my bid to history there. Rock n’ roll history.

HOW TO COMPOSE POPULAR SONGS The Best Of The Boomtown Rats is, for the most part, spectacular. But there are a lot of shifts in style.

I think what’s happened is that the songwriting has come to the fore because the songs have lasted but the band hasn’t.

We shifted all of the time. I would go with a song to the band, and they’d go “Ehh…”. It’s fucking awful, have you ever been in a band?

I have.

You know, then. You go with a song and they’re going, “What is it? A? I suppose it’s D after that?” For fuck’s sake. Nobody asks about the lyrics. One time I collapsed in the Marquee with the heat. I fainted, went back stage and Garry tried to keep going, but he only knew one line, so it was ‘fuck this’ and

BOB G E LDOF the band left the stage.

just free there. It’s a terrible cliché, but I am.

You told a load of US music industry people exactly what you thought of them. Is that why The Rats didn’t break America.

It didn’t help, but Bono’s wrong in the documentary. He said that if we had just waited a minute, an hour, we would have done it. That’s not true, there’s not anyone of my generation who did it, and the reason is MTV.

Was that on your mind when Garry called around? I can go clear every night.

No, I go clear with the solo stuff too. It’s not as frantic, although it can be. Those songs go to other places that I’m not sure I want to visit to be honest with you, and sometimes it gets a bit much for me. I can play Rats songs with the solo band but it’s completely fucking different. It’s that half hour afterwards of exhaustion after a show: you’re emotionally replete, psychologically complete, and physically exhausted, and I’m just sitting there with a drink, and I’m happy. That’s the word I’m groping for that I reluctantly ever use: I know I’m happy.

It arrived too late?

MTV came of age with Live Aid, we had national rock ’n’ roll television, but when were the Pistols, The Jam, Elvis Costello, the Rats, The Ramones, the Talking Heads, Television, or Patti Smith EVER on MTV? EV-ER? Believe me, if The Ramones and The Sex Pistols had been on MTV, BANG! They look so fucking great, people would want to be like that band, like when I saw Jagger. How do we know MTV was the break out? Because immediately MTV goes national, you get Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Prince, Michael Jackson, Boy George, The Eurythmics, U2, The Police.

“The Ramones were nothing but style, totally curated.

The Clash, totally curated”

It was a different type of music.

It was, but it was the look. MTV introduced style to America and The Ramones were nothing but style, totally curated. The Clash, totally curated: Jasper Conran made their shirts, Joe lived with Jasper in Regent’s fucking Park, the son of a diplomat, but they glided through because the music was of its moment, and they looked the bollocks. Ours seemed to be pastiche, yet I’d written ‘Lookin’ After No. 1’ on a dole queue.

Simon in Smithfield, and shit like that. That’s why rock ‘n’ roll did it for me. You’re leading towards some point, and equally, you’re ending at some point. In The Long Grass is a fine album The band’s musicality is great, but no one’s interested. Wherever I was in my life, maybe The Rats were no longer the vehicle to express that, but I had no intention of breaking the band up, zero.

So songs matter too?

The damn bursting catharsis all about Ireland, which is album one, that’s gone, now where do you go? WHERE THE FUCK? We can’t be a better rock n’ roll band than The Pistols we just can’t. We can’t be cooler than The Clash, we’re not cool. What the fuck? I hear Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces: this is wonderful – I’ll never be able to write songs as great as this. Because of Mutt Lange, I’d already begun writing with structure and melody. That’s how Tonic For The Troops happened. You arrive in London, you see these girls who are mad and wild and rebel – and not 1975 Catholic Ireland. They’re opinionated, they don’t give a fuck either, and they’re in your face. The theatre of the self is exploding everywhere and you write ‘She’s So Modern’ and Mutt says, “that’s a pop song”.

That’s what happened.

When Live Aid took over your life, was there a sense that the Rats had more to do?

It stopped at Self Aid. If ‘Dave’ had been a hit single in 1984…

Well, that’s my problem, which I think about.

‘Dave’ should have been on the radio. It’s not that I’m bitter about that, it’s just, there’s your time, and it’s gone.

Because it wasn’t a hit, you were at home at 6pm to watch Michael Buerk’s report about famine in Ethiopia.

People say “that’s it.” But everything had lead to that. I don’t mean it was predetermined, but I was sensitive to those things anyway – whether it was anti-apartheid at 16, me and Mick Foley organising a march to stop the rugby team playing in Ireland, and then working with the homeless every night for a couple of years with

With Live Aid happening, did you think: ‘I can’t go back to The Rats now’?

No, I couldn’t wait to get off of this thing, but I can’t because it’s so big. The organisation of it was so immense.

Could you not have delegated that?

I did, John Kennedy, and the trustees who are still the six of us, did. But it was: we gave you the money, you swore every penny would go there and I’m trusting you, so do it. And I still do it, I’ll show you four phone calls about Africa that I have to deal with now. I still do it because it works.

This is what you’re going to be remembered for.

Would you prefer it was the music?

Yeah, I don’t care. It’ll be ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ and Live Aid. Fine. Adrian Devoy said to me last week: “A Tonic For The Troops, Sex, Age & Death and Citizens of Boomtown - not bad?”

Yeah, actually. Not bad.

THE HAPPY CLUB

How was it getting The Rats back together?

Garry came around and my immediate instinct was to say ‘NO!’ Then it was ‘I’m not going to jump around, I play guitar with the solo band’ and Garry said “You can fuck off” – because I’m a shite guitar player! But jumping around like a cunt like I used to? Forget it. Of course, the minute they started, I jumped around like a cunt, because that’s what it does.

Isn’t jumping around difficult now?

No. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but it’s not. There’s this place you hit that I’m just desperate to get to at a gig. I’m not a scientologist, but I go clear. There’s no contingencies, no equivocation no doubt. I’m

So why did you split?

When it comes to the end of the thing in ’85/’86, it’s nothing to do with Saint Bob emerging from his chrysalis. Of course Band Aid’s gonna hit me when I’m in a vulnerable state of confusion and anxiety, and it’s gonna suborn that into some other greater thing. I don’t expect it to end up with Live Aid, but it does.

You cannot leave that standing. But I could also go on and write Deep In The Heart Of Nowhere.

The Boomtown Rats could have done lots of that, but it became my first solo album, which I had to do.

Why did you have to do one?

That was the deal. They would not sign The Rats unless I did one. They would sign me because now I was Mr Fucking whatever. My thing to The Rats was: “We’ll have studio A and B. I’ll record during the day, you record during the day, I’ll come in at 6. I’ll play you all my songs. You get first dibs: the ones you don’t want, I’ll keep.”

And they were, “Nah.” We were tired and fed up and there was no money left, but we would have gotten good money for this deal. But then Simon and Johnnie said, “We’ve got our own deal, we’ve been writing songs.” That was it, they went off and did their own thing.

Was there ever a showdown?

It was one bad meeting in the basement of my place and that was it. We got together for Self Aid cause we said we would, but I remember a fucking vicious row, just poisonous, although it doesn’t look like that on the film. The best thing about that gig, which I hadn’t understood, and that’s why this documentary is so interesting – people say “but you fucking lived it?” Yeah, but I had no perspective on it. I had no idea that in the middle of ‘Joey’s on The Street Again’, I suddenly go into Woody Guthrie’s ‘Greenback Dollar’: “I don’t want your Rolls Royce, mister/ I don’t want your pleasure yacht/ all I want is the right to live, mister/ give me back the job I lost.”

You said thanks for the ten years on the stage art Self Aid. I did and it’s complete. The Boomtown Rats take their name from the great musical activist, and now I know what we’re meant to do, this band has intent and purpose, and we end up from somewhere singing a classic Woody Guthrie song about unemployment at an unemployment gig and we’re unemployed and the circle is complete. So of course I say it’s been a great ten years, rest in peace, thanks very much.

• The Boomtown Rats album, Citizens Of Boomtown, is out now. A the time of writing, the documentary is on the RTÉ Player.

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THE SHOWS MUST GO ON

LOCK DOW N S HOWS

Whether you’re a Star Wars nut, football crazy or searching for the new Breaking Bad, ED POWER brings you ten of the hottest bingeables on the planet.

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1. THE MANDALORIAN (DISNEY +)

Just arrived in Ireland, Disney’s new streaming service is aimed largely at kids and teens. One exception is Jon Favreau’s fantastic Mandalorian, the first live-action Star Wars series. Pedro Pascal stars as the eponymous interstellar bounty hunter, whose life and career are changed forever when he has a run-in with cuddly alien Baby Yoda. Brilliant stuff!

2. THE BOYS (AMAZON PRIME)

The Cult of the Superhero is taken down in the goriest fashion in this funny, sometimes profound and often violent satire of caped crusaders and their role in society. Alan Moore’s Watchmen made much the same point – but The Boys is zingier, pacier and so much more gleeful. With Dominique McElligott as Celtic-themed Wonder Woman Queen Maeve.

3. THE ENGLISH GAME (NETFLIX)

As you would expect of Julian Fellowes the class politics in this soccer original story are… a bit strange. Surly mill workers are lined up against noble Old Etonians in a war for the soul of the sport which, in the 1870s, is just getting started. Yet there is a compelling true story tacked on as Fellowes traces the rise of Scottish player Fergus Suter, one of the first professional footballers and a pioneer of the passing game that would transform the sport. For those who like that sort of thing, the frocks are fab too.

4. OZARK SEASON THREE (NETFLIX)

Season three of Netflix’s riff on Breaking Bad stars Laura Linney and Jason Bateman as a sniping husband-and-wife who are also running their own home-grown crime empire. Clichéd and derivative it may be, but the pace is cracking, the leads compelling.

LOCK DOWN S HOWS

6. GOOD OMENS (AMAZON PRIME)

Neil Gaiman’s adaptation of his 1990 novel with Terry Pratchett is at moments awfully pleased with itself.

Yet this is urban fantasy escapism of the first order, with David Tennant and Michael Sheen as devil-andangel frenemies whose cozy understanding is thrown offkilter when God decides to trigger the apocalypse.

5. ALTERED CARBON SEASON TWO (NETFLIX)

7. FLEABAG (AMAZON PRIME)

Anthony Mackie takes over from Joel Kinnaman as immortal cyberpunk antihero Takeshi Kovacs. The setting is a far future where death has been cheated and, those who can afford it, are downloaded over and over into fresh bodies or “sleeves”.

Thus Kovacs comes back as MCU-star Mackie and is immediately tasked with solving a murder on his home planet. The real mystery, however, is why he can’t get a problematic ex-lover out of his head.

We could all do with a laugh. As it turns out, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s tart observational comedy is just the tonic in these weird times. As the titular selfishbut-adrift millennial she sweeps you back to the days when our problems were bite-sized and often just in our heads. However, with Waller-Bridge’s character quietly mourning a friend who took their own life, Fleabag doubles as a powerful meditation on grief.

8. FOREVER (AMAZON PRIME)

Comedians Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen will crack you up as the middleaged married couple who are suddenly forced to spend a lot more time together than they’d ever imagined. When it was released several years ago, Forever was received as a dark relationship fantasy.

Now… it feels like a diary entry ripped from all our lives.

9. TIGER KING NETFLIX

Along with guns, it seems that most redneck Americans want the constitutional right to have bad hair, even worse teeth and an endangered big cat living in their backyard.

Populated by an increasingly unhinged cast of characters, some of whom wouldn’t have looked out of place next to David Koresh in the Waco compound, this is reality TV of the very best/worst kind.

10. NEXT IN FASHION (NETFLIX)

Part of a new trend in kinder, sweeter reality TV. Alexa Chung and Tan France are the presenters of a series in which successful designers looking to take their business to the next level vie for a deal with Neta-Porter and a $250,000 first prize. It should be a frenzy of back-stabbing.

Yet everyone is so nice it makes your heart swell.

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LOCK DOW N BOOK S

THE WRITING

IRISH

THE BUTCHER BOY Patrick McCabe

Very much the definitive novel about provincial Irish life, McCabe struck gold with this 1992 novel, which reads like of a mix of The League Of Gentlemen and Twin Peaks, with an undercurrent of Flann O’Brien. Five years later, it was also adapted into one of the greatest ever Irish films by Neil Jordan, with a memorable central performance from Eamonn Owens as Francie Brady, the homicidal youngster who terrorises ‘60s Clones.

THRESHOLD Rob Doyle

Upon Threshold’s release earlier this year, Doyle elaborated on many of its themes - sex, drugs, travel and more - in a fascinating interview Hot Press interview. A genuinely innovative mix of memoir, fiction and travelogue, Threshold also boasts the author’s trademark strand of compelling dark humour.

SOLAR BONES

Mike McCormack A very apropos work for the moment, Solar Bones focuses on engineer Marcus Conway, who - at home in his kitchen - reflects on his life to date over the course of an hour. Famously told in one long sentence, using a stream-of-consciousness style, So-

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Whether you’re in the mood for southern gothic sleuthing, impenetrable streams of consciousness or visceral tales of wanton sex, PAUL NOLAN has something that’s guaranteed to whip you into a page-turning frenzy.

lar Bones was an act of such audacious virtuosity that it was the winner of both a BGE Book of the Year award and the Goldsmiths Prize, whilst also making the Booker longlist.

NORMAL PEOPLE

edly his masterpiece. Stylistically on a par with Nabokov and Martin Amis, the novel is based on the Malcolm MacArthur case, which notoriously led to the phrase “GUBU” entering the Irish lexicon.

CONSTELLATIONS

Sally Rooney

Sinead Gleeson

It’s now known as the novel that defined a generation, and it’s due for a hotly anticipated BBC TV adaptation later in the year, overseen by the Oscar-nominated Lenny Abrahamson. Focusing on-star crossed lovers Muireann and Connell as they commence their complex relationship at school in the west of Ireland and continue it in Trinity College, Rooney’s tale has proven a definitive treatise on modern love. Meanwhile, in casting Kildare football star Paul Mescal as the male lead, the TV series has also gone hard after the “Paul Nolan demographic” lusted after by high-powered TV executives. Obviously, we heartily approve, even if his defensive nous was sorely missed during this spring’s league campaign.

Weighed down with glowing references, award nominations and literary prizes, Gleeson’s outstanding collection of essays explores the meaning of being a woman in modern Ireland, with themes on the agenda including love, pregnancy and motherhood, as well as old age, loss and death. One of the country’s foremost critics, Gleeson also turns her eye to art and the creative process in this brilliant and thought-provoking work.

THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE John Banville

A novel written with such finesse it had even Don DeLillo in raptures, Banville’s 1989 effort - about louche scientist Freddie Montgomery, who kills a maid in the process of stealing a painting - is undoubt-

EVERY DEAD THING

John Connolly

Connolly’s celebrated detective Charlie Parker is set to return in the upcoming The Dirty South, but it’s well worth revisiting his debut appearance in this 1999 thriller. Giving even Thomas Harris a run for his money in the nihilistic shlock horror stakes, Every Dead Thing takes on a southern gothic feel as Parker pursues sadistic psycho the Travelling Man, who has a nasty habit of putting his victims through unendurable horror that doesn’t involve watching the Fair City omnibus. One of the all-time

LOCK DOWN BOOK S

classic thrillers by an Irish author, Every Dead Thing is truly unputdownable even as you squirm in terror.

A GIRL IS A HALFFORMED THING Eimear McBride

“Every Dead Thing takes on a southern gothic feel as Parker pursues sadistic psycho the Travelling Man, who has a nasty habit of putting his victims through unendurable horror that doesn’t involve watching the Fair City omnibus.”

Inundated with literary gongs – including the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award and the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction – A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is a powerful exploration of an Irish girl’s relationship with her disabled brother, religious mother and her own troubled sexuality. Celebrated for its brilliantly experimental literary style, it makes for a memorable reading experience.

ULYSSES

James Joyce As evidenced by social media, there has been a notable surge in people finally getting around to reading Joyce’s classic during the Lockdown. What immediate-

ly becomes apparent is that it’s influence on literature was both profound and lasting - everything from the stream-of-consciousness style and sly humour to the structural experimentation and exploration of city life remain prominent in modern fiction. In fact, you can see its influence everywhere from London Fields to American Psycho, and needless to say, it’s shadow continues to loom large over contemporary Irish fiction.

It’s All The Page

Author Sarah Maria Griffin offers very Irish solutions to Covid-19 problems @griffski

ROOM LITTLE DARKER

June Caldwell

If you want a book reflecting the dystopian feel of the moment – as well as some laughs courtesy of charcoal black humour – check out this searing short story collection. Exploring “visceral tales of wanton sex, broken relationships and futuristic nightmares”, it’s one of the most daring and provocative Irish books of recent years.

Caoilinn Hughes treated us to a sneak preview of her new novel, The Wild Laughter, as part of the #StayHomeStayReading initiative

The Rick O'Shea Book Club has a new talk show, Shelf Analysis, on its Facebook.

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LOC KDOW N PLAY LIST

THE PLAYLIST’S

THE THING

More than ever before, the Coronavirus Lockdown has reminded us of the invaluable solace and inspiration offered by music.

Paul Nolan reflects on music’s vital role in difficult times and compiles a playlist of essential Lockdown tunes.

W

hen it came to compiling the Hot Press Lockdown playlists, I was initially a bit hesitant: would it be possible, in the midst of such unprecedented turmoil, to get the tone right? As it transpired, there was a surfeit of material that envisioned the dystopian landscape in which we now find ourselves, and revisiting it was not just important, but absolutely essential.

The fact that generations of artists had imagined a world in such a state of emergency was actually a comfort - in so many of these songs, the over-riding message is that we’re all in it together. Indeed, there has been a widespread feeling during the COVID-19 crisis that, more than ever, we need music, entertainment and art as soul food. To say the very least, we appreciate their value anew.

In compiling the two Lockdown playlists - here merged into a single collection - it was also remarkable to discover how many different styles of music chimed with the moment, whether it was the Orwellian vision of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs; the dark paranoia of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine; Public Enemy’s clarion call for social revolution on Fear Of A Black Planet; or St. Vincent’s anxiety-tinged depiction of information overload on ‘Digital Witness’.

Personally, I know I will always associate the terrifying ‘Face On Breast’ from Scott Walker’s Tilt - an album beloved of Bowie that very much anticipated the 21st century - with this period. It was among the songs I revisited as I compiled the first playlist on the Thursday afternoon the Lockdown was announced, with the storm clouds gathering outside. Quite simply, its dystopian textures scared the shit out of me - but in a cathartic way that was very much necessary.

It was a personal moment, but I know it will have wider resonance: we will eventually look back and cherish the songs that got us through the darkest of moments before the dawn finally arrived.

For more essential Lockdown playlists including selections from Faye O’Rourke, Rosie Carney, Pat Carty and more - follow Hot Press on Spotify. For your convenience, scan the codes to be brought straight there.

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LOCKDOWN

PA R T 1

LOCKDOWN

PA R T 2

S O C I A L D I STA N C I N G

LOCK DOWN PLAY LIST

playlist 3 playlist 1

Faye O’Rourke Isolationism

FAYE O’ROURKE PHOTO: MIGUEL RUIZ PRINCE PHOTO: COURTESY OF NPG RECORDS

The Hot Press Lockdown Playlist We Are The Pigs - Suede London Calling - The Clash He Thought Of Cars - Blur 1984 - David Bowie Until The End Of The World - U2 Survivalism - Nine Inch Nails Risingson - Massive Attack Welcome To The Terrordome - Public Enemy Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) Marvin Gaye Digital Witness - St. Vincent No Control - David Bowie Army Of Me - Bjork The National Anthem - Radiohead 1999 - Prince To Bring You My Love - PJ Harvey Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) - Arcade Fire Pumpkin - Tricky Face On Breast - Scott Walker Are ‘Friends’ Electric? - Tubeway Army Ghost Town - The Specials What Would You Do? - Tha Dogg Pound It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) - REM (Exchange) - Massive Attack

F AY E O ’ R O U R K E

playlist 2

Rosie Carney My Bedroom Has Four Walls Headache - Grouper Dynamite - Saint Sister Play It On My Radio - Niki & The Dove Braid - Perfume Genius Cut Me - Moses Sumney Demons - The National Coping - Junior Brother The Moon Song - Beabadoobee, Oscar Lang From Me, The Moon - Lav Noid - Yves Tumor Star Roving - Slowdive Some Place Else - MorMor She Wanted A War - Blonde Tongues Teardrop - Massive Attack Untitled (How Does It Feel) - D’Angelo

ROSIE CARNEY

PAT C A R T Y

Sky’s Grey - Destroyer Sexy Boy - Air Venus As A Boy - Björk La Ritournelle - Sébastian Tellier The Game Of Love - Daft Punk Tommib - Squarepusher FEEL. - Kendrick Lamar After Thoughts - Oddisee Girls - Death In Vegas I - Aphex Twin Dead Of NIght - Orville Peck Mean It In The Morning - Loyle Carner Wildlife Analysis - Boards Of Canada Players - Slum Village Round And Round - Ariel Pink Everything Is Embarrassing - Sky Ferreira Tinseltown In The Rain - The Blue Nile Girls On The TV - Laura Jean 11th Dimension - Julian Casablancas Millionaire - Kelis, André 3000 Hunnybee - Unknown Mortal Orchestra Lyk Dis - NxWorries, Anderson .Paak, Knxledge I’m The Man, That Will Find You - Connan Mockasin Cranekiss - Tamaryn Sugar For The Pill - Slowdive

C RYSTA L B A L L

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LO C K D OW N… B U T NOT O UT! Dylan isn’t alone in gifting us new music

A Serpent Stung Me

Michael Stipe

“There’s a party going on behind the grassy knoll,” sings Bob Dylan on ‘Murder Most Foul’, the 17-minute dissertation on JFK and the ‘60s he’s surprise released. Pat Carty believes it says as much about the present as it does the past.

O

n November 22nd, 1963, my mother went to the cinema with her pals.

She was in the Adelphi on O’Connell Street enjoying Hitchcock’s The Birds when the movie was stopped to announce the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. They went out onto the street, in shock like everyone else. “It felt like the world had been shot,” is how she puts it.

Bob Dylan was already flying by 1963. His second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, came out in May of that year, and songs like ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, ‘Masters Of War’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ saddled him with the voice of a generation tag that he fought long and hard to shake, although he never really did. I’m more of a ‘Girl Of The North Country’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ man myself, but that is a whole other story.

Despite making an eejit of himself by having too much to drink, and identifying with Lee Harvey Oswald, at a National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee awards do three weeks after Kennedy’s death, Dylan didn’t directly address the assassination on 1964’s rather dour The Times They Are a-Changin’. Devout followers The Byrds would, though, two years later. Their version of ‘He Was A Friend Of Mine’ was included on Turn!

Turn! Turn!, a song that Roger McGuinn possibly heard first from Dylan, who had recorded it for his debut album, although it failed to make the cut.

McGuinn rewrote the traditional song’s lyric to reference the killing. All this isn’t to say that Dylan was unaffected, how could he not have been?

The world had been shot. According to those who were with him on the night of November 22nd, Dylan said: “They are trying to tell you, ‘Don’t ever hope to change things’.” Not long after that, he wrote, “It is useless to recall that day once more.”

2020: we’re at another tear, another rift in history. There’s a petulant child in the White House and a global pandemic has exposed him. He is being held up to measure and he is being found wanting. This will surely be his end, although we’ve all said that before. At this moment in time, Dylan – a man who has given expectation the finger since he first got off the bus in New York – decides it is not useless to recall that day after all, and releases a seventeen minute song about Kennedy’s last hours. But is he mourning the events of 1963, or the historical turning point – be under no illusion, that is what it is – that we’re spinning around now.?

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Musically, there isn’t a whole lot going on.

There’s a possibly improvised piano, brushed drums, and a groaning cello, and the faintest hint of the vocal inflections of Randy Newman’s subject-sharing ‘Brothers’ here and there, but this is, for all intents and purposes, Dylan reading out a prose poem. But that is more than enough. After eight years of mostly insipid standards, here – at last – is fire. In a way, the music is perfect.

They – the man, the powers that be, the whoever – have come to collect Kennedy’s unpaid debts, and the actual foul act itself is the “greatest magic trick ever under the sun.” The throne has been usurped, and not for the last time. The sixties descend from here – The Beatles are there to distract and hold our hands, as we skip blissfully – and intentionally unaware – towards Woodstock, and even Altamont, where another violent act will close out the decade. The fire is sweeping, the flood is threatening. Murder, it’s just a shot away.

“Dylan is the ghost of our collective conscience that goads us on.”

There’s time for one last episode of Theme Time Radio Hour, hosted by Wolfman Jack, to soundtrack a dream’s dying. Go down to the crossroads, try to flag a ride in the black Cadillac that takes us all to our final rest. Play Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Guitar Slim. Play Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker and all that junk. We are soldiers in the army so play the ‘Blood Stained Banner’ that we must hold up until we die, play ‘Murder Most Foul’. Hamlet stands on the battlements, his father’s spirit calling for revenge, decrying the unnatural act. Dylan is the ghost of our collective conscience that goads us on: “I said the soul of a nation’s been torn away/ And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay/ It’s 36 hours since judgement day.” The ghost howls: “If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.” But we have borne it. The “day of the antichrist” that began back in 1963. We live with it now, and feel its clammy hand on our shoulder, and its foul breath on our neck, whispering “don’t ever hope to change things.”

Michael Stipe: ‘No Time For Love Like Now’ Aided and abetted online by Aaron Dessner from The National, Mr. S has written and demoed a song for the times in isolation at home. “Where did all this begin to change/ The lockdown memories can’t sustain/ This glistening, hanging free fall,” he asks, voice cracking with emotion.

Bono: ‘Let Your Love Be Known’ You could tell he’d been up all night when Bono posted his “little postcard from bubblin’ Dublin” on Instagram.

Dedicated to the doctors and nurses on the Coronavirus frontline, couplets like: “Yes, there is isolation/ You and me are still here/ Yes, when we open our eyes/ We will stare down the fear” find him shaken but defiant.

Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts V: Together & Ghosts VI: Locusts Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose put in some extremely late Lockdown nights to rush release the two albums they’d up till then been slowly assembling.

“As the news seems to turn ever more grim by the hour, we’ve found ourselves vacillating wildly between feeling like there may be hope at times to utter despair – often changing minute to minute,” the pair say. “Although each of us define ourselves as antisocialtypes who prefer being on our own, this situation has really made us appreciate the power and need for connection.”

The Crayon Set: ‘Out Of Your Mind’ The Dublin indie rockers ease their selfisolation blues by giving Donald J. both barrels on this banger of a tune that’s up now on their Bandcamp.

“I know you think you’re normal, but we need some further tests/ It’s a viral infection, you’ve become a space cadet/ Take a deep look inside, you’re out of your fucking mind,” is their assessment of the 45th President of the United States’ tenuous grip on reality.

Matthew Kiichichaos: Heafy: ‘I Saw A Tiger’ The fabulously named Trivium singer has cheered us up enormously with his heavy metal thunder take on the Joe Exotic, er, classic, which soundtracked Netflix’s Tiger King.

“Tell ’em that the tiger needs a little bit of love/ Let ’em run the jungle, let ’em roam their land,” he croons on the best animal song since ‘My Lovely Horse’.

Like most things these days you’ll find it on YouTube.

STUART CLARK

LOCK DOWN S E X

B UT CA N I ST ILL HAVE SEX? We are living through crazy times right now, in the shadow of Covid-19. But as isolation pushes us towards sitting on the sofa and watching Netflix on repeat, why not shake up your days by bringing sex into the lockdown schedule? Words: Sarah Richardson

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verything is shutting down. We are being told to stay at home. And social distancing is mandatory. But here’s the thing: even in emergency times like these, our desire for sex doesn’t just evaporate.

In truth, it might just be one of the things we can do that’ll help us to make the best of a bad situation.

Whether you are staying at home with your partner or by yourself, sex can be a great way to reduce anxiety and bring pleasure into social distancing.

Maybe there’s something you’ve always wanted to try, a new position or game. Maybe it’s something you and your partner have talked about but never got around to doing. Maybe life got too busy and sex became something that was rushed rather than reveled in. Well, now could be the perfect opportunity to connect back in with each other sexually, to explore each other’s bodies fully, and discover turn-ons that you never knew existed.

If you are separated from the current love of your life, dirty talk, phone sex and sexting can all be used to bring you closer together. The feeling of intimacy and mutual pleasure can still be created, as you talk them through what you are doing to yourself or what you would want

them to be doing to you. Also, dirty talk can be a great way of bringing up and discussing potential kinks that you want to try when normal life returns.

Taking the opportunity to role-play situations without the pressure of actually being in the same space as someone can inspire

“If you are separated from the current love of your life, dirty talk, phone sex and sexting can all be used to bring you closer together.” conversations about where you want your sex life to go. And once you get into dirty talk or phone sex, you can take it one step further, by exploring sex with yourself through masturbation and toys. Anything new that you discover can then be demonstrated to your partner.

Watching or hearing how someone pleasures themselves can be incredibly sexy – but it can also be a great way to learn more about your partner’s body and their orgasms. Spending time

apart may be hard – but that doesn’t mean you can’t have sex or be intimate with each other.

As for my fellow singletons, I feel for you. If you keep hearing about how your friends are making the most of “Netflix and chilling” with their partners, then you might wonder why you had to be the one who ended up single. Well, masturbation is our friend too.

I’m not talking about a quickie before sleep: this time-out can be used to properly pleasure yourself. From self-massage to nipple play to toys, there are so many ways we can engage with our bodies. Shops like Sex Siopa are still operating online, so if you can afford to treat yourself to a new toy or lube, then why not support a local business and get yourself a little (or even a big) present?

I know it might seem like I am making light of a very serious situation. There isn’t one person I know who isn’t worried about what we are all facing into. There is a huge risk that our mental health will take a serious hit. From loneliness to depression to anxiety, this is a really scary time.

I am not saying that sex can solve these issues, but sex and masturbation are proven to reduce anxiety and relieve stress.

So stay safe, look after yourselves. And remember: even in lockdown, sexual pleasure is still important.

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NIAMH OF HAMSANDWICH

FANGCLUB

RORY B. BELLOWS

SUNNY

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ANDREW FLOOD OF WHENYOUNG

PAUL McLOONE

SON OF THE HOUND

KATRIN SCHANZ

SICK LOVE

SIVE

TPM

LINDA COOGAN BYRNE

SHAEFRI

MUIREANN O’CONNELL

HUNTING HALL

KEVIN McGAHERN

FERGAL D’ARCY & AIDEN O’CONNOR

BUDDY WEARING AN EMMA LANGFORD HI-VIS

AE MAK

DONE TO A TEE!

W TABLOID TV

VARO

STEPH O’SULLIVAN OF GREYWIND

e asked you to demonstrate your support for Irish musicians by emblazoning them across your chest and wonderful people that you are, you’ve done so in your thousands.

From indestructible Thin Lizzy, Virgin Prunes and U2 classics that have clearly been shown the Lenor love down through the years to Sprints, Fontaines D.C. and The Murder Capital designs of a much more recent vintage, the sartorial elegance levels have been off the chart.

Available for your full online perusal, the #HotPressMyLovelyTShirt gallery also includes such celebrity merch-wearers as Alison Spittle, Fergal D’Arcy, Emma Langford, AE Mak, HamsandwicH, Fangclub, whenyoung, Junior Brother, Varo, Sive, Columbia Mills, Lemoncello, Paul McLoone, Mongoose - the list really does go on and on - who all rock a very mean tee, While those Spotify plays do add up, the majority of Irish musicians are reliant on physical vinyl and CD sales, gigs and merchandise to make ends meet. By sticking a few of their goodies into your online cart, you’ll be doing them a massive favour.

Winning a special prize for innovation is Emma Langford whose Bandcamp shop can sort you and Fido out with a Quiet Giant album hi-vis dog vest.

In the meantime, keep those #HotPressMyLovelyTShirt tweets coming!

PAUL KENNY OF COLUMBIA MILLS

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BRO AD C AST

VIEWS

As people turn to radio during the Lockdown for company and a sense of community, a selection of the country’s top DJs tell us how they’ve kept the show on the road whilst broadcasting from a variety of novel spots around their homes!

JENNIFER ZAMPARELLI 2FM

DAN HEGARTY 2FM I’ve transformed under the stairs into a very, very small studio. The room is only slightly bigger than I am, but the acoustics are pretty good. The whole DIY thing really does bring me back to those Phantom FM days, when we did our broadcasts from our ‘secret’ studio above Whelan’s – the worst kept secret I’ve ever come across.

Operating from just one screen means you have to call on your memory a bit more for things like album titles and dates. You tend to cross your fingers in the hope that nobody flushes the toilet when you’re in the middle of saying something riveting!

I’ve had the whole range of emo-

LUCY KENNEDY Radio Nova The Colm and Lucy Breakfast Show producer Clint Drieberg came to our house, looking like a cast member of CSI, to set up a mini-studio in the corner of the dining room. He had a few briefcases, laptops, mics under his arms and was wearing gloves.

It was 6am so he worked in silence so as to not waken my three young children – but it looks great!

The biggest challenge has been whispering on air but trying to sound

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tions. Sometimes they linger, and other days they can be rapid fire, so there’s a bit of variety! One thing these restrictions have done is force us to become more creative. Unshackling yourself from routine and comfort zones is a pretty healthy thing to do.

By the time my show is on, it’s the last two hours of the day. People have been hit with so much information, not to mention a multitude of emotions, so I play music, and try to give people an escape, listening to tracks like ‘Blood Flow’ by Grandbrothers, or something by Just Mustard or Rollerskate Skinny…

• Dan Hegarty is on RTÉ 2FM, 10pm12am, Sunday to Thursday.

normal, so that I don’t wake up our children. That, and avoiding the temptation to go live in my pyjamas!

One surprising moment was when our potty-training three-year-old daughter Jess announced during my traffic read that she had done some business in her potty...

Of course, I get moments of fear and concern for our futures – and then I’m calm and trusting in fate. Our main message is simple – we’re all in this together, so for a few hours, let’s park our worries and have a laugh.

Colm and I are both working parents, so we’re the same as everyone else. Except that we are particularly naughty!

• The Colm & Lucy Breakfast Show is on Radio Nova, weekdays 6am10am.

For additional contributions from Colm Hayes, Dee Woods and Marty Miller of Radio Nova, keep an eye on hotpress.com/radio

I’m broadcasting from my kids’ bedroom looking at a giant Lego Death Star, cushioning the sound with a Star Wars pillow. The biggest challenge has been disciplining myself to get up at the same time, get dressed, and treat it like a normal day. Sometimes I get distracted and start folding clothes, but the technology is amazing.

By the looks of it, we have new listeners tuning in who maybe couldn’t tune in before, so that’s lovely. My local shop, Lynam’s in Goatstown, surprised me and left coffee and scones at my front door... that was so thoughtful of them.

I go through the whole gamut of emotions, from

boredom, through anger, sadness from missing people, happiness to be spending time with kids, and frustration, back to boredom. But I’m full of admiration for our frontline people throughout every single day. They’re amazing.

We’re all in this together, I really want people to know that. Laughter is a tonic, and although the tone is very much in tune with what’s going on that particular day, the message is: the world is still turning and we will get through this.

And even though you want to divorce your husband right now, or disown the family members you’re in isolation with, remember – we are all feeling the exact same way!

• Jennifer Zamparelli is on 2FM weekdays from 9am.

IAN DEMPSEY Today FM I’m at home with my wife Ger, my youngest son Evan and my daughter Aislinn. I’m delighted to report that we’re getting on very well together and – so far anyway – there are lots of laughs, music and conversation!

And we’re all having a go at the cooking too.

I’m onto my second broadcasting from home set-up already – it just plugs into my Ethernet connection with a mic and headphones, and away we go. All of us radio people are seeing a whole new way of broadcasting, which will stand to us after the pandemic. Not having human contact is a bit of a pain, but my greatest challenge hasn’t changed at all – it’s still trying to get to the news on time!

People need a degree of normality and a place where the ‘we’re in this together’ slogan can come alive.

We’re the sort of show where people tend to share messages, so we’ve also seen some incredibly selfless acts by ordinary, everyday people.

Wash your hands, stay at home and keep listening.

• Ian Dempsey is on Today FM, weekdays from 7am-9am.

LOCK DOW N DJS

VALERIE WHEELER SPIN South West I have the home broadcasting kit on a vanity desk, beside my bedroom window looking out onto my housing estate in Limerick – a mic, laptop and all the essentials needed to get me to air.

The greatest challenge has been trying not to wake the neighbours at 7am. You forget how loud you are! It’s extremely important to

continue to broadcast. Radio is a companion for listeners, so it’s nice to be able to keep people entertained and informed and have fun, while everyone is going through such a tough time.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve had some amazing people on, who have contributed to the community during these times of need. Ed and I started a campaign to get listeners to send letters to local nursing homes, and the response from adults and kids around the South West has been incredible.

To be honest, it’s hard to put into words how I’ve been feeling. It can be scary. I’m currently living alone for the first time ever, due to COVID-19.

You almost have too much time to be thinking the worst. I usually do sports reporting on the weekends too, and feel like part of my identity has been taken away from me while there is no sport – so I’m looking forward to getting back to that.

Stay safe, stay home, wash those hands and we will all get through this together!

• Valerie Wheeler co-presents the Fully Charged Breakfast Show from 7am on SPIN South West

PA U L A M a c S W E E N E Y ’S H O M E S E T U P

PAULA MacSWEENEY Today FM Broadcasting from home isn’t too hard when the tech team in Marconi House do most of the work! They sent me home with equipment and very specific instructions on how to hook up to my laptop – and really, they do the rest. I found the smallest, quietest place in my house to broadcast: my wardrobe!

What’s surprising is how much we can do from home – we can conduct meetings via-Zoom, we have all the technology to keep in touch and to keep the show going.

I’m in my wardrobe in North

ED SMITH Today FM I’m set up at home with my ‘broadcast kit’ – which is essentially a mic, an audiobox and a laptop. Of course, I miss the energy and buzz of being in the station with the crew. There’s an electricity in the air most days which is great to vibe off for your own show. And I miss the inappropriate jokes.

Since the crisis, I’ve been genuinely moved as to how important a role radio is playing in people’s ability to deal with what’s going on. They want to be informed of developments, and then distracted with some craic agus ceol. The reaction from listeners, telling us how much this is helping them through, has been powerful. People need the radio more than ever. Tune in to tune out!

Funnily enough, I was powering on fine for the first while. I’m down in Mayo with my girlfriend and her sister, who have been remarkably tolerant of my sounds (and smells if truth be told). But I was WhatsApping a colleague today, and he was very honest and raw in telling me that he’s been struggling being out of the office. Hearing someone else admit it allowed me to do the same.

I’m also missing my daughter and sister, but we ping back and forth every day!

I want people to know that we are here, and we will be every minute of every day, playing them the songs they want to listen to. Maybe it’s our turn to listen to them for a change!

• Ed Smith is on Today FM, weekdays and Sundays from 7pm-10pm.

TRACY CLIFFORD 2FM

I’ve been doing my show live from the home studio I share with my partner Mark. We use Rodecaster Pro podcasting equipment, set up with mics, laptops, and a Tieline that links us back to base at RTÉ.

There were a fair few challenges in the beginning with how the mics sounded, but my tech-nerd fella has been an absolute hero in making sure everything works well. It’s challenging not being

Co. Dublin, broadcasting to the nation. Mad! It’s important for broadcasters to keep going – familiarity in these challenging times can be a real comfort. Nobody is immune to feeling down or upset – myself included. Every day is so monotonous – there’s very little variety between weekdays and weekends. I’m looking forward to the little things resuming like going for a cup of coffee in a nice café, meeting friends for lunch. Tiny, seemingly insignificant things, are actually the big things.

• Paula MacSweeney is on Today FM, weekdays 5am7am.

able to fully access the radio computer software from RTÉ, but I have the legend DJ Mo K back at base, monitoring all the output for us.

Strangely, I feel we’ve been even more creative. In times like these, radio really comes into its own, as a companion for everyone. People know that we can entertain them, but that we can also let them know important information about the current situation as soon as it happens – before getting back to playing great mood-elevating music. That doesn’t happen with podcasts or Spotify.

Some people on the frontline really are going above and beyond for their communities. Having folks texting in to say thanks to them is really shining a light on their great work. I want my listeners to be able to escape the news, let music lift their mood, and get their kids who are stuck at home involved by playing radio games with me.

We are a gang who are all in this together – so let’s rave around the kitchen!

• Tracy Clifford is on 2FM, weekdays from 12noon

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REASONS TO BE CHE E R F UL

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REASONS TO BE

CHEERFUL 1. Charlatan Athletic

Difficult times they may be, but Stuart Clark has found plenty online to keep his pecker (metaphorical and otherwise) up.

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We don’t know if Her Maj will be handing out ‘Services Rendered During The Covid-19 Crisis’ awards in the future, but if she does there has to be an Order Of The Rock ‘n’ Roll Fucking Empire for Tim Burgess.

The Charlatan-in-Chief has taken it upon himself to organise dozens of Twitter listening parties whereby people simultaneously press ‘play’ on a favourite album and, glass of something cheeky in hand, discuss its awesomeness with both the musicians responsible and each other.

From Spider Stacy dishing the dirt on Rum, Sodomy & The Lash to Ed Simons, Beth Orton and Tim himself telling us loads of stuff we didn’t know about the Chems’ Exit Planet Dust, they’ve all been awesome.

See twitterlisteningparty.com for details of the upcoming Libertines, Suede, Style Council, Sleaford Mods and Fontaines D.C. parties.

2. Much To Do About Muffin While taking care of Amnesty Ireland business at home, its Executive Director Colm O’Gorman has also emerged as a veritable food hero with his Twitter recipes.

If you’re up for some, ahem, “warm, sweet, luscious, sticky, salty bliss”, his Date & Ginger Muffin with Salted Caramel, Spiced Crumble & Pecan is outrageously good.

Get a daily dose of deliciousness from @colmogorman.

3. Porn Star In the same week that he was reelected to the Seanad, Senator Fintan Warfield suggested some excellent ways to virtually swap bodily fluids during The Lockdown.

“Social distancing applies to hook ups and sex, so explore other ways to satisfy your needs like phone sex, cam sex, reading erotica, watching

porn or just plain old masturbation,” he advised whilst directing people to the hivireland.ie site where safe sex tips abound. Incidentally, we’ve had great fun working through Fintan’s list… several times now!

4. Avant-Garde At It We devoured every second of Stranger Than We Thought, the Lyric FM documentary about the Aisteach.Org archive of leftfield Irish creatives.

Composer Jennifer Walshe, writer Kevin Barry and visual artist Alice Maher are among those who can be heard discussing their respective muses at rte.ie/lyricfm/ the-lyric-feature.

5. What A Complete Aisling Having caused numerous rib fractures with This Way Up - nothing ever has or will in the future make us laugh as uproariously as that ‘Zombie’ scene

REA S ONS TO BE CHE E R F UL

6.

9.

7.

- Aisling Bea returns on April 10 in Love Wedding Repeat.

The Groundhog Day of smug middle-class weddings, the Netflix one-off also benefits hugely from having Tim Key, AKA Alan Partridge’s Sidekick Simon, in it.

“Christy Moore found it a bit spooky at first, but gave me absolution and told me to keep at it!”

6. Good Golly Miss Dolly The First Lady of Country has been virtually tucking the kids in and reading them a bedtime story every night on her Dolly Parton’s Imagination Libray YouTube.

She’s catering for a different part of her demographic by agreeing to do a 75th anniversary Playboy photoshoot. Whichever bracket you fall into, you’re in for a treat.

7. Hay Girls, Hay Boys!

Described by Bill Clinton as “The Woodstock of the Mind”, the famous Hay Festival of Literature and Art is going digital in May and June. To whet appetites, there’s a shiny new Hay Festival Podcast, which kicks off with Stephen Fry yapping to Philippe

8.

Sands. Soon to be joined by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Hilary Mantel, Naomi Klein and Caitlin Moran it’s a stimulating listen.

8. A Great Time To Be Archive We’ve always been massive npr. org/series/tiny-desk-concerts fans but they’ve outdone themselves with their curated ‘Best of’ playlists, which include memorable visits to their office from Grimes, Coldplay, Chance The Rapper, Lizzo, The Cranberries, Adele, Anderson .Paak and the Sesame Street gang.

They’ve skipped nary a Covid-19 beat with the likes of Margo Price and Michael McDonald Zooming in their stripped-down performance.

9. He Who Kildares Wins Modren Moore - his guitar kills both Covid and fascists - never fails to put a smile on our faces with his Christyfied covers of whippersnappery types like Jason Mraz and Taylor Swift whose ‘Shake It Of’ sounds especially awesome sung in a

10.

Newbridge stylee.

“I contacted Christy Moore to let him know I was doing it,” the man responsible, Harry Prendergast, tells us. “He replied saying he found it a bit spooky at first, but gave me absolution and told me to keep at it!”

Keep an eye/ear on @harprendergast.

10. This Supporting Life For those suffering Premier League withdrawal symptoms, Gary Lineker has invited Alan Shearer and Ian Wright into his kitchen for Match Of The Day Top 10, a new podcast that will (as the kids say) be dropping every Wednesday on BBC Sounds until normal sporting hostilities resume.

The first thing under consideration is: “Who was the greatest captain of the Premier League era? Kompany or Keane? Adams or Vieira?” We all know the answer is “Seamus Coleman” but, hey, let the boys have their fun!

Get your footie fix at bbc.co.uk/ sounds/play/p086w1p3 • Read Stuart’s Reasons To Be Cheerful blog on hotpress.com

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THE WHOLE HOG FRONTLINES

THE RISE AND RISE OF COVID-19:

A FABLE OF OUR TIMES

As people celebrated the new year, almost no one had any sense of the horrors that were about to be unleashed on the world. There had been signs in China. But the authorities were at first slow to respond.

Then the shit hit the fan – and ever since the death toll has mounted as the SARS-like virus dubbed Covid-19 raced across the globe – stopping everything… Photography: Karen Kelleher

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iruses and humans have conducted a dance of life and death since our forebears flopped out of the primordial mud many millions of years ago. Mostly, they just wash through us but from time to time they take us with them and sometimes in very large numbers, as happened just over a century ago, when the so-called Spanish Flu decimated a world already shorn of young men by World War I. So, public health officials and epidemiologists are ever-watchful. Or they should be.

Percentage-wise, the biggest threat is that an influenza virus will mutate, so that it can hop from birds or pigs to humans. In recent years we’ve had bird flu and swine flu, which was a pandemic in 2009. But others are out there too, like Ebola, SARS and MERS, a particularly nasty coronavirus that emerged in the Middle East in 2012.

The thing is, the sly bastards keep changing.

Mostly, the really dangerous variants die off – but every now and then a virus and humans cross one another at the wrong moment for us. While we need to be lucky every time, they only need to be lucky once to cause huge devastation.

These unhappy crossovers tend to happen in places where humans and animals, wild or farmed, or both, are in very close proximity and where hygiene is poor. By a very great distance, the greatest risks are associated with Southern China, South East Asia and West Africa.

This time, the word is that something happened in a fish market in China’s tenthlargest city Wuhan late last November. The actual species jump may have been elsewhere, in a so-called wet market, where wild animals like bats or pangolins are sold as food, their fresh meat regarded as a delicacy. If so, delivery drivers, moving between the two markets, were almost certainly the vectors.

The illness that took hold in the fish market at first looked like a cluster of pneumonias –

The Hijab By Any Other Name So many shibboleths have been exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

It is a tiny, side-current to the main action of course – but isn’t it interesting to see people demanding the use of face masks in countries where so many people have been virulently opposed to hijabs? We are all hiding now.

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B O L T O N S T R E E T, D U B L I N

until it didn’t. One local described it as a SARS outbreak but he was silenced. How much time was lost at this juncture will, in the future, become a matter for serious analysis and debate. As will the extent to which the Chinese authorities made a serious error by failing to alert the World Health Organisation and giving others more time to mobilise.

Travel warnings were issued. It was early in January, about six weeks after the initial outbreak when Chinese scientists announced the discovery of a new coronavirus that could transmit between humans. BAM! It was a bombshell. But the reality is that the response across the world was leaden.

Late in January 2020, the Chair of Public Health Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, Gabriel Leung, estimated that the true number of infections was likely to be ten times more than had been officially reported. He warned that draconian measures might slow the virus’ progress but nothing could stop a pandemic.

He predicted that infections would grow exponentially, peaking in late April or May 2020 and that at its peak there could be 100,000 new infections a day.

That chilling warning notwithstanding, in hindsight the authorities elsewhere seemed bizarrely complacent…

THOS E L A ST H EADY DAYS Looking at the timeline of what we now know as the Covid-19 pandemic is chilling. The numbers

seemed small and isolated at first. Then they grew. It spread. Leung was right. Doubling and then doubling again – and again. Dozens became hundreds, then thousands and now millions. And it’s almost everywhere in the world.

Everything has been turned on its head.

Borders are closed, planes are grounded, the global economy is in freefall, basic freedoms have vanished and lockdowns are widespread.

Live music has ground completely to a halt.

Sport too. We have new concepts like social distancing and cocooning to contend with.

Totally new ways of working and playing. We are on a different planet. All changed. Changed utterly. In just three months.

Remember Ireland in February? Like, eight weeks or so ago? A handful of us might have noted the reports of this new virus. But everyone was fixated on the general election. Ah yes, that was the election that was all about change, wasn’t it? We were so comfortable with our economy, we decided that it was time to fix society, pay more taxes, build more houses and apartments, get more nurses and teachers and doctors and roads and rails and… hence the Sinn Féin surge, then the hung Dáil.

The ironies abound! People voting “for change” because young people are living with their parents into their 20s, and demanding a new era of housing for all, only to find themselves locked down at home two months later, unable to travel or shop or go to pubs or restaurants or concerts or hairdressers or

THE WHOLE HOG FRONTLINES

watch or play sports or go to the gym, furiously pounding the pavement to burn off energy and frustration…

Jesus wept. What we’d give now for the comforts enjoyed back in those last heady days before the shit hit the fan, eh?!

I T ’S B EEN O U T F O R FA R LONG ER One pharmacist in central Dublin says that he noticed an unusual pattern, from January.

He issued about 40% more prescriptions than average at that time of year, for antibiotics to treat chest infections. He is convinced that Covid-19 was circulating in Ireland even then, well before we all got worried about Italian rugby fans arriving here for a Six Nations match, potentially carrying the infection.

It is reported that there was a spike in pneumonia cases in Italy in January and early February. Retrospective analysis may reveal that this was the case elsewhere too.

Some countries succumbed to more virulent infection, earlier than others. Iran is one. Italy is another, the outbreak there concentrated in Lombardy in the north. Spain has followed. The numbers in the UK too have climbed like a cliff in reverse.

We were shocked and deeply frightened, watching the speed with which the pandemic took hold and the numbers dying. But as the days pass and the contagion spreads yet further, especially in the United States, these graphic figures now represent an appalling vista.

The virus is extremely threatening for older members of society and those with underlying conditions. But its virulence has been compounded in many countries by a lethal combination of complacency, incompetence, inefficiency and denial. By what appears like deliberate under-reporting. And by politics, of course. Why, for example, do Brazil and Russia report so few cases?

Nowhere is the impact of political failure clearer than in the United States where, after months of Trump obfuscation and denial, even the White House is now predicting that up to a quarter of a million people could die, which is vastly more than succumbed in China.

Meanwhile the CIA is trying to prove that they are now under-reporting in China.

We probably won’t know just how early Covid-19 was actually circulating until there is widespread blood-testing for antibodies. The number of actual infections, past and present, is clearly far higher than has been measured, since many countries are only testing severe cases or patients requiring hospitalisation. But there’s mounting evidence that it’s been out there far longer than we thought, and that more people have been infected. And that many have likely recovered. If so, this may change the picture. But for now, the news is relentlessly bad…

T H ER E WI L L B E G R EAT SA DNESS On February 28, we had the first report of Covid-19 in Ireland. It was a woman who travelled through Dublin airport on her way home to Northern Ireland from northern Italy.

She later tested positive for the illness on returning to her home in Belfast. The following day a secondary school “in the east of the country” – subsequently revealed to be in Dublin – was closed for a fortnight after it emerged that a male student had the virus. He too had returned from northern Italy.

BLESSINGTON STREET BASIN, DUBLIN

A day later the majority of Google’s 8,000 staff and contractors in Ireland were told to work from home after a member of staff reported flu-like symptoms…

Hard to believe: that was only six weeks ago. It feels like much more. So much has happened.

Case numbers have hugely increased in Ireland: last weekend we passed 4,000 positive tests and 120 deaths. The predicted surge is upon us. But the truth is that we have so far kept the lid on it better than many. In the UK, the death rate per million is over twice that in Ireland. It could be so much worse here. At the time of writing it looks as though we have, as they say, flattened the curve and our trajectory

our distance. Wash our hands. But the moment will come when we know that we are moving towards the close of this chapter. We will be able to think about the bigger picture then. About what we’ve learned in this crisis: about ourselves and about the world alike.

There will be great sadness between now and then. People will die. Some young. But when all the dust settles, maybe what emerges from disaster will be better than what has gone before. Perhaps even a lot better. After all, Britain’s welfare state and its fabled, if now emasculated, National Health Service arose from the debris of World War II. Why not aim for a similar transformation here?

BORIS JOH N SON GETS TH E VIRUS

“We’re still in the thick of it. We need to keep our distance. Wash our hands.” is beginning to resemble that of China which, for all that will be said and written, controlled the outbreak relatively effectively and thereby limited mortality.

If this is maintained, it is a signal achievement and is due to good management, deference to expertise and timely action. Almost certainly, the key driver from a Government and HSE perspective was that they knew that our health services would be swamped if the virus were allowed to course unchecked through the population. It hardly matters. Looking at other countries where it was allowed to run loose confirms that we chose wisely.

In this regard, it is important to acknowledge that there has been a quite remarkable mobilisation on the part of the community as a whole. A few exceptions apart, everyone has done their bit. Conor McGregor weighed in by paying for masks! Indeed, as the crisis has unfolded, those vital human qualities of neighbourliness and compassion have unexpectedly surged in parallel with the virus.

So too has our appreciation of those on the front-line.

We’re still in the thick of it. We need to keep

The response to Covid-19 of the populist buffoons who are in charge in far too many countries now has been tragically inept. It is hardly surprising. The President of the United States, Donald Trump led the way with his initial dismissal of the virus as a mild flu. Slowly, steadily, it has been showing him who’s the real boss.

Current projections for the US are genuinely scary, from a humanitarian point of view. But also from an economic, social and cultural perspective. The US is far too important to be in the hands of such a wretch but that’s how it is.

Having started out as a Covid-19 denier, he has flip-flopped. Tried to dump the blame on anyone and everyone else he can. Politicised the pandemic by calling it the Chinese virus. But so far, astonishingly, his poll ratings are up. You

The Day After April Fool’s Day On April 2, the main US disaster response agency asked the country’s Defence Department for 100,000 body bags, as the toll mounted from Covid-19.

Even the White House, so long in denial, was predicting that US deaths from the disease could reach between 100,000 and 240,000. President Donald Trump warned that the country can expect “a very, very painful two weeks.” It is being kind to say that the man’s lack of empathy beggars belief.

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THE WHOLE HOG FRONTLINES

S T. M A R Y ’ S P L A C E , D U B L I N

wonder about people’s sanity.

There is a nasty possibility now that Trump might try to use the pandemic to adulterate the US presidential election in November. He and his lapdogs in the Republican Party will use the crisis to have a very serious go at restricting voter registration and voting hours, to effectively disenfranchise Latinos and African-Americans.

In Hungary, Victor Orban has made a grab for power, pushing through a law, with the cooperation of parliament, that allows him to rule by decree.

The UK is also in a horrible mess. A few weeks ago, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson was jauntily advocating that Britain ride it out and build herd immunity, that it would be tough but the best course was to take it on the chin.

That’s all out the window now. In terms of death toll, the UK is fifth in the world, surpassing China, on a fraction of the population base.

The health service is in chaos. Business activity is at an historic low. And on March 26 it was announced that Boris Johnson had come down with the virus. At present, he is under orders to self-isolate for a second week. Others in the UK pandemic team are also ill.

If they weren’t in isolation, you might see a lot of egg on faces. If they weren’t wearing masks, that is.

TH E P E R I L S O F F L AT TENI NG THE C UR V E All across the world, the coronavirus has decimated economic activity. Whole sectors have been closed and shuttered. Some won’t recover. Others will be changed entirely. Retail Colour Me Purple Don’t be calling the Guards to report strange people in your ‘hood. Those aren’t strangers, they’re just your neighbours without make-up! Some people are now talking about the extinction of the blonde.

Dark roots are growing out, highlights are fading, grey strands emerging. Not to mention botox wearing off. A whole new era of facial expression is dawning!

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WH ATEVER H APPEN ED TO TH E MUSIC ?

“For musicians, it is a disaster. The vast majority of artists live a kind of hand-to-mouth existence.” has collapsed. Construction has stopped.

The aviation industry is in deep trouble. So is tourism.

The positive view is that this isn’t like 2008. It isn’t a structural collapse. As a result, the Irish government has been able to borrow money at very low to non-existent interest rates. They have introduced measures which offer a three-month window, during which people can be kept on the books of the company that employs them, and paid 70% of their income (up to certain limits). There are flaws in the system, but so far the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and the Minister for Finance Paschal Donohue have done more or less the right thing.

But how long can they sustain this? Will it be possible to lift current restrictions by the end of June? Pandemics have a natural cycle but by “flattening the curve” we, and the Asian countries, have extended its tenure. We don’t know for how long. We also don’t know when a vaccine will be available or, more worryingly, whether a vaccine will confer long-term immunity or might – like the flu jab – be needed annually.

Some businesses, like hairdressers, will have a major boom once restrictions lift. But others will take much more time. Our construction industry is dependent on imported skills and labour.

Many immigrant workers have gone home. Will they return? And if not, what then?

Interestingly, we have seen a lot of Irish getting the plane back home, notably in medicine. Do these returning heroes include any of those who sent sneering missives home over the past decade about how fantastic it was to work in Australia or Dubai and how they’d never return to this benighted shore?

Arguably, only the aviation industry has been worse hit than the music, entertainment, hospitality and sports industries. Because it is around these activities that crowds gather – whether it’s 100 people in a restaurant or 80,000 in an arena.

When the first restrictions on gatherings were announced in March, the hope was that everything would be back up and running by the beginning of April. Look how naïve all of that seems now. At the moment, numerous music festivals are still in the summer schedule. But how many will go ahead? There is no knowing.

But the fear has to be that the entire calendar of events will be wiped out.

For musicians, it is a disaster. The vast majority of artists live a kind of hand-to-mouth existence.

Musicians and band members need to play to earn a living. In particular, the festival circuit offers the opportunity to earn a decent crust, as well as the opportunity to win new fans in legions. As a result of the cancellation of all events, even mid-range acts will take a huge hit that they can’t afford. And, as of now, not enough has been done by the Government in Ireland to soften the blow across the creative industries.

It isn’t only musicians who have been hammered. Elsewhere in Europe, legislation has been put in place which offers promoters some sight of a way forward – even as they see huge events being cancelled across the board.

Here, however, at the time of writing, nothing has been done to assist in managing the fall-out – and it could be immense. In Ireland we have become used to seeing all of the biggest names in the world of music gigging here on a regular basis. We buy more tickets for live shows than anywhere else on the planet. We also produce a huge number of world-class acts.

All of that has been placed in mortal jeopardy

by Covid-19.

The same is true in relation to sports. The Six Nations, Euro 2020, The Olympic Games, Wimbledon, The Masters golf tournament, the Premier League – they have all bitten the dust. Even the mighty men of Hot Press

THE WHOLE HOG FRONTLINES

Munchengladbach – enjoying their best season in years – have seen all of their games cancelled for a few months.

Covid-19 may sound like an obscure Russian team in the Europa League but it’s a Premier League virus and it has, more or less, shut sport down entirely, right around the world. The economic impact of this will be immense. If the global lockdown lasts long enough, clubs will go to the wall. Governing bodies and associations may well go with them. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time for football in Ireland, which was deemed before Covid-19 exploded, to be on the verge of finding a way back from the edge of the abyss.

T H E D EAT H O F CI V I L LIB ERTIES There is another, perhaps more sinister aspect to all of this. The shutting down of society to curtail the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been achieved through a wholesale waiver of civil liberties.

Were it imposed for any other purpose, we’d not be talking of “self-isolation”, but instead about house arrest. In Ireland, An Garda Siochána now has a remarkable range of powers and sanctions. Rights we’ve long considered normal have been suspended indefinitely.

It might be amusing if it weren’t so desperately serious. Members of the commentariat, and politicians alike, who once declaimed the primacy of human and personal rights and entitlements, not to mention the importance of dissent and civil disobedience in various circumstances, have suddenly started preaching the need for draconian impositions and compliance.

The Chinese Government will be grimly amused at how quickly everyone has come to espouse the need for social controls and civil obedience. And one suspects that in many parts of the world, the legislation, which in many ways is authoritarian and paternalistic, will linger on the statute books long after the pandemic has passed. And it will, almost certainly, be used and abused into the future in many jurisdictions.

We will have to work very hard to ensure that Ireland is not among them.

It’s An Ill Wind A new mask factory began production in Beijing on January 31, within seven days of being proposed and granted all the relevant licenses. According to the Beijing Daily the new factory is “capable of producing tens of millions of masks per month.” In Ireland, while most businesses are on their knees, there’s been a boom in delivery and, in turn, a significant increase in employment for truck and van drivers.

The Burning Question: Italy is a Covid-19 disaster area, with the highest death toll of all so far. The city of Milan has been forced to shut its main crematorium for a month to deal with a surge of bodies that have accumulated in the course of the pandemic. There has been a “constant and progressive increase of the deceased awaiting cremation” and the waiting time at the Crematorio di Lambrate has reached 20 days.

M O U N TJ O Y S T R E E T , D U B L I N

“The USA is immensely rich and powerful but it is currently in the hands of a huckster, a narcissistic chancer.”

THE R IS E AN D RISE OF CH IN A This too will pass, they say. It is an ancient mantra and it probably holds good. We don’t know when. Or how far-reaching the changes imposed on us all will be. Will employment in Ireland ever return to the historic highs experienced in the final months of 2019? How many companies will successfully return from hibernation? A depression has been threatened.

Just how severe will it be?

When all this dies down and the dust settles, we may well find that a new world order has taken shape. China, now emerging from the pandemic, has been flexing its soft power. This includes gifting masks and advice and pharma knowledge.

In contrast, the USA will see a far greater death toll and looks set to suffer much greater economic damage. A couple of days ago, US State Governors challenged Donald Trump’s claim that the US was well-stocked to test and care for coronavirus patients, complaining that individual States were in competition with each other for equipment and meds. To rub it in, Russia dispatched a planeload of coronavirus gear westwards, a gesture described by Donald Trump as “a very nice gift.”

The US has for a long time been the world’s most powerful economy. It should have been better positioned than any other country to deal with Covid-19. But it may end up being the hardest hit. The reason is not hard to divine: it is Donald Trump himself.

The USA is immensely rich and powerful but it is currently in the hands of a huckster, a narcissistic chancer. How can a man who routinely derides expertise and bigs-up his own

addled hunches lead such a complex country through an almost uncontrollable crisis like this?

Answer: he can’t and as a result the US, and therefore the world, will suffer the economic consequences for years.

China, on the other hand, might just step into the breach.

REMEMBERIN G LI WEN LIAN G The countries that are faring best against Covid-19 are the ones that took the advice of health experts early and followed that advice well.

It is odd, then, that the crisis has unleashed a flood of fake news, conspiracy theories and quackery. One fourteen-year-old of our acquaintance told her aunt that Covid-19 would be cured by having constant sex. Would that it were true, but it isn’t! But it’s out there on some teen-friendly platform. And much else like it.

Every crisis generates conspiracy theories: that China developed the virus and has an antidote ready for sale at the opportune moment. But someone else says it’s all an American scam.

Brazil’s increasingly discredited Jair Messias Bolsonaro says it’s a media con.

But in China, things have come full circle.

There is no doubt that the authorities there made very serious, possibly catastrophic mistakes. When evidence emerged of a new coronavirus, through a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, reporting was suppressed.

Li Wenliang , a physician in Wuhan Central Hospital, warned his colleagues of a SARS-like illness in December 2019. When his warnings went public, he was summoned by police and reprimanded for making false comments on the internet. He subsequently contracted Covid-19 and died on February 7.

Following a public enquiry, the Supreme People’s Court exonerated Li Wenliang. The court stated that: “If society had at the time believed those ‘rumours’, and wore masks, used disinfectant and avoided going to the wildlife market as if there were a SARS outbreak, perhaps it would’ve meant we could better control the coronavirus today.”

“Rumours end when there is openness,” they added. And so say all of us…

The Hog

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TONY DUFFIN FRONTLINES

“THERE’S A DESPERATION THAT COULD BUBBLE OVER INTO VIOLENCE WITH THE WRONG WORD OR LOOK.”

O

n March 12, I picked up my daughters from their respective schools, as they were closing to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. My youngest daughter, Ruby, was disappointed as she didn’t want this to happen – she wanted to be able to finish the charcoal drawing she’d begun in class, and to see her friends as normal.

Five days later, on St. Patrick’s Day, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar addressed the nation stating that, “Never will so many ask so much of so few.” He was referring to the people on the frontline of the response to COVID-19 in Ireland. Ten days later, on March 27 at midnight a ‘Lock-in’, as it has now been dubbed by some, was enacted and further restrictions designed to reduce the spread of the virus came into place. Whilst this is fresh in our minds now, it will not be so apparent to readers later how quickly things changed over the past few weeks in Ireland.

Ana Liffey Drug Project is a ‘Low Threshold - Harm Reduction’ service, working on the streets of Dublin and Limerick, with people who have complex and multiple needs, including problematic drug use, mental health issues, physical health issues, behavioural issues and more. The majority of the people we work with are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Our ‘Low Threshold - Harm Reduction’ ethos and the skills and competencies of our team are well suited to helping with the response to the COVID-19 outbreak amongst this cohort of people.

Led by the HSE (in CHO9 and CHO3), and working alongside our colleagues in Homeless and Addiction services, we have had to quickly adapt how we deliver our services, to help to reduce the spread of the virus and to respond to the increased risks our clients have faced – particularly the increased risk of an overdose.

The group of people who use drugs that

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we work with are a particularly vulnerable group and are at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19. The sharing of syringes, crack pipes, tooters, etc. is risky and increases the chance of infection, as COVID-19 is transmitted through droplets. So, providing Harm Reduction interventions is going to continue to be essential in the fight to stop the spread of COVID-19 amongst this cohort.

Should they contract the virus, there is a likelihood that they will require hospitalisation as many have underlying health issues which put them at greater risk of complications. For

“The people we work with are at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19.” example, smoking crack or heroin can cause and/or exacerbate respiratory conditions.

Similarly, someone with HIV or Hep C may have a weakened immune system.

The ‘Lock-in’ has added a layer of complication to an already tough existence.

The best way to illustrate this is to tell you a story based upon our experiences.

Imagine a young man addicted to drugs living on the streets during the COVID-19 crisis… one way he gets his money is by sitting down on Henry Street and begging, but now there is practically nobody there to give him money: the crowds have all gone. The little money he has to buy drugs with is now harder to spend as he struggles to find a dealer.

Withdrawing from opiates and feeling really sick, he roams the streets of Dublin. He sees others in the same state as him; and there’s an

edginess in the air – a desperation that could bubble over into violence with the wrong word or look. He heads for the day service he’s been using for the past five or six years to speak to the staff he’s built up trust with. Unfortunately, they’ve had to shut down because of COVID-19 and they are providing an outreach service on the streets.

He heads off again. As he comes around a corner four people he knows approach him and demand anything he’s got – money, drugs, whatever. A fight ensues and he comes off the worst: he now has no money and his face has been slashed from lip to nose. He stumbles on through the streets, angry and bleeding. The few people that are on the street look at him with a sense of fear and/or disgust. Then he bumps into two people dressed in matching jackets. They are outreach workers – he knows one but not the other. As he refuses to go to the hospital for his facial wound, the outreach workers call a nurse and arrange for him to be seen.

They ring a GP and arrange for him to be assessed for a methadone and benzodiazepine prescription. They call the Freephone to arrange for emergency accomodation. As he hasn’t eaten, they buy him food and other supplies.

They call his friend who heads down to meet him. Most importantly they treat him with dignity and respect.

This is just one scenario – offering a brief insight – into the lived experience of the people we work with on the streets during the COVID-19 crisis.

Suffice to say their lives are made even harder

by COVID-19; but it is also true to say that the State and Civil Society are pulling together, working with great pragmatism and flexibility to try to help every single person in this vulnerable cohort.

In that, we can all take great pride.

PHOTO: MIGUEL RUIZ

Self-isolating is impossible if you’re a heroin user who needs to score every day. Ana Liffey Drug Project CEO, TONY DUFFIN, writes about the people he’s meeting on the streets during the COVID-19 crisis and the trojan effort to provide them with the services they desperately need.

McCANN FRONTLINES

WITH FRIENDS LIKE GOD... …who needs enemies? John Carson of the DUP blames the Deity for the coronavirus.

And if you look at what it says in the bible, well, it is very hard to disagree. Plus: Covid-19 and why it is a bad time to be young.

EAMONN McCANN

B

allymena councillor John Carson has taken a bit of a battering for suggesting that the coronavirus pandemic might be God’s way of giving the human race a skelp on the arse for failing to practice proper sexual distancing.

It was our reckless endorsement of homosexuality and abortion which brought the wrath of the Lord upon us, the veteran DUP man declared.

“I said when abortion was legalised that our nation would be judged by God. I was laughed at and mocked by some. But, as I said at the time, they laughed at Noah, until the rain started.”

An Alliance leader dismissed Councillor Carson’s view as “antediluvian.” An interesting choice of words, given that “antediluvian” means “before the Flood.”

God sent the Flood out of anger at the iniquity of the earth. It’s all there in Genesis 6-11. “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was evil. The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.”

“Sorry I ever thought ye up,” seems to have been His sour farewell to the multitudes as they writhed and gasped and gulped their last amid the tumult of water descending.

So why is John Carson being held up to obloquy and ignominy when, truly, he does but speak the word of the Lord?

If He was capable of inflicting such awesome agony on millions because He hadn’t been accorded the respect which He believed was due, why would God balk at flinging fistfuls of coronavirus across the more impertinent world of today?

GIVE THEM HELL But enough of Ballymena. Let us move on to Exodus, and plagues.

A succession of 10 plagues was visited on the land of Egypt by Yahweh (God in his Israelite manifestation) in retaliation for the Pharaoh refusing to let His chosen people migrate to the land He had promised them.

These plagues were: the Nile turned into an ooze of blood; the earth covered over in a slither of frogs; fly-swarms so thick as to blot out the sun; billows of locusts; eruptions of boils; a barrage of brimstone; darkness at noon; extinction of livestock; a chastisement of scorpions; slaughter of the first-born.

Reason being that the Egyptians had refused to do as they were told. “That’ll larn ye,” Yahweh might grimly have muttered as he departed the scene of his unprecedented 10-in-a-row.

Yahweh didn’t mess around.

And there’s Sodom and Gomorrah, razed to the ground until there was not a stone left upon

FRANCIS DANBY’S THE DELUGE

a stone nor a living being to suck the scorching air, and all on account of the heinous sin forever associated with Sodom.

Isn’t that more or less what Councillor Carson was saying?

If his warning was so risible that Arlene Foster had to issue a public reprimand, will she join me when, if ever, the self-isolation is over in upturning Savonarola and making a bonfire of

“A succession of 10 plagues was visited on the land of Egypt by Yahweh.”

Biblical blather? Probably not.

That will be the undoing of the DUP in the end – ideological inconsistency.

Now it is reported that many millions of Catholics have joined Pope Francis in saying a rosary to the Virgin Mary that she might intervene with God and persuade Him to call the pandemic off. He has the power to do it, apparently, but so far just hasn’t been bothered.

The theological basis for prayer in this instance appears to be that a clip on the ear from His mother might help Him behave a bit better.

And I see that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, reckons that “Prayer can work as a therapy,” which to my mind is hardly the point.

The more I think on these matters the clearer it seems that Councillor Carson is the only consistent Christian among them.

Don’t give up now, councillor. Give them hell instead.

SUSCEPTIBLE TO THE VIRUS So Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Van Morrison, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis arrive in Dublin this day to check out the TOUTS, but are rumbled en route by the Special Branch and taken off in cuffs to Mountjoy. I gather that’s the way of it now in the Republic.

Up here in the occupied Six Counties, there’s a mite more freedom for the septuagenarian community. Some of us are nervy about crossing the border.

Are there snipers on the roofs waiting to pick off any 70-plus citizen who dares poke her head out?

Are there posses on motor bikes waiting at the border, whirling lassos?

Will we see bouncers at the boozers, demanding proof we are not over-age?

Shall we skulk in a laneways pleading with young ones to bring us out a half bottle of Smirnoff?

Contemplating such age-related restrictions, I hear older people on our street lamenting that they’re no longer young and are thus, on top of everything else, more susceptible to the virus.

This is a vice-versa way to look at the world.

The over-whelming truth of the period we are traversing is that this is a very bad time to be young.

Oh, and speaking of lassos, it has been revealed that the 37th annual Festival of Cowboy Poetry at Elko, Nevada, has sadly been postponed until March 2021, when the latest Poet Lariat will now be revealed.

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LOC K DOWN ALBUMS

CHILDISH GAMBINO PAINTS

Lots of albums have been delayed as a result of Coronavirus.

But these are five glorious exceptions...

HIS MASTERPIECE

ALBUM OF THE FORTNIGHT

Childish Gambino 3.15.20 rca

‘32.22’

RAPPER-TURNED-ACTOR DELIVERS 2020’S FIRST MASTERPIECE Donald Glover’s fourth album as Childish Gambino manifests in these dog days of the coronavirus lockdown like something from a waking dream or suffocating panic attack. It’s hard to say which: often the record finds a way to be both comforting and moderately terrifying in the same heartbeat.

The LP is named for the date on which it was released and arrives after a long delay (sometime movie star Glover has been busy). Given its considerable gestation it is probably an overreach to declare it Self-Isolation: The Album. But 3.15.20, which features uncredited cameos from Ariana Grande, 21

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Savage and “psychedelic soul” singer Kadhja Bonet, makes for a surprisingly comforting listen. After spending so long inside your own head, what a relief to take a trip into Glover’s.

Oh and it’s a cracking progression too. Early in his rap career, Glover seemed to be performing an extension of the comedy he honed on shows such as Community. That had its echoes in the persona he presented on screen. There Glover has often cut a quicksilver figure, too lithe and mercurial to pin-down.

He has of course confirmed his mastery of surrealistic humour with his woozy sitcom Atlanta.

However, he made a terrible Lando Calrissian in the (admittedly deeply troubled) Han Solo movie. There his foundational error was to take the character seriously rather than, as Billy Dee Williams did in Empire Strikes Back, approach Star Wars as the best lark in the world.

The obvious touchstone, as he slips back into his Childish

Gambino alias, is ‘This Is America’, a wry howl into the void from 2018 which appeared to foreshadow the fatalistic farce in which America currently finds itself embroiled as Donald Trump squares off against Covid-19. Its themes of The Land of the Free reckoning with the most enduring of its original sins – the worship of the dollar over human life – is fleshed out and blown up to supersize on the album. It is, in places, a whirlwind of despair. The distorted tornado pop of ’32.22’ (many of the numbers are named for their time signature on the recording) is almost demonically catchy, a pummelling you can’t help but groove to.

There are moments of abandon too, such as on the topsy-turvy banger ‘Algorhythm’ which suggests a dystopian mixtape curated by Nine Inch Nails. That, in turn, is in contrast to playful penultimate track ’47.48’, where Glover’s debt to Prince floats to the surface, like a bather in a swimming pool baked by golden rays (no matter that the lyrics are incredibly bleak). It pours from your speakers like sunshine – a glimmer of grace amidst the catharsis.

OUT NOW · ED POWER

musicality that recalls The Corrs.

Songs like ‘Pushin’ And Shovin’ and ‘Mother’s Tale’ drip with drama and a similar Corrs-like richness. ‘Old Friend’ is a welcome addition to the canon of gently melodic folk lovesongs, while global self-help fads have been built on less wisdom than that contained in the lyrics of ‘Carpe Diem’, boosted by those full-blooded voices and a beguiling rhythmic feel.

The instrumental ‘The Black River’ leads off with Mark O’Donnell’s nimble fiddle, and shifts up the gears to show they know a bit about lettin’ it rip around the kitchen. Later, the Clannadlike ‘The Ox And The Birch’ pops along to show it was no fluke.

‘Should I Stay’ is a more reflective, soulful item, with Ciara O’Donnell’s faultless voice to the fore and leads to more delicious fiddling, this time with an Eastern flavour. ‘Bird Boy’ ends Walls of Caves on a throbbing playful high.

This is indeed an impressive debut, brimful of confidence in all departments and a pocketful of upful songs that’ll hopefully take Billow Wood around the world.

UT NOW · JACKIE HAYDEN

o

Dua Lipa Billow Wood

Future Nostalgia

Walls Of Caves

warner

own label

‘Physical’

‘Carpe Diem’

STRIKING DEBUT FROM BALLINA TRAD-ROCKERS Mayo band Billow Wood comprise Mark O’Donnell (fiddle, guitar), Harry Lawlor (harp, guitar), Ciara O’Donnell (bodhrán, flute, whistles), and Bríd O’Donnell (accordion) with walk-on parts for bass and drums.

They blend their instrumental melange of folk, trad and rock with vocals that will shake and stir.

A short ethereal intro sets the scene for ‘Running From Wolf’ to chastise us for our frenzied misuse of time, before it bathes in a vocal

MULTI-PLATINUM MEGASTAR TAKES BOLD DISCO TURN ON SOPHOMORE ALBUM. Few could have predicted the runaway success of ‘New Rules’ – Dua Lipa’s breakthrough single and one of the zeitgeist-defining hits of 2017. While establishing the English singer as an oceantranscending star, the track, along with her self-titled debut album, placed her in front of an almost overwhelming wave of adulation and expectations.

However, unlike some of her pop peers, there was always a wry

sense of self-awareness about Dua Lipa that marked her as a unique force – with ‘New Rules’ playfully challenging the stereotypes of the genre, through the angle of female empowerment. Three years on, her second album finds her taking the reigns of her own vision and career like never before.

Of course, even in such defiantly joyful pop, there’s no escaping the current climate of uncertainty and fear. With the Coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc on the global music industry, Future Nostalgia has arrived a week early – and, you might add, not a minute too soon. Bubbling with soaring synth grooves, punchy beats and dazzlingly confident production, Future Nostalgia is an unexpected shot of upbeat brightness during these dark times.

Making no effort to recreate previous hits, Dua Lipa has remodelled the audacious disco sound of Donna Summer for the present day – as introduced on the thrilling title-track.

On standouts ‘Physical’ and ‘Levitating’ she combines the dark but irresistible lust-pop of Starboyera The Weeknd with the best of ‘80s power pop, with plenty of nods to Blondie and Olivia NewtonJohn. ‘Good In Bed’, meanwhile, channels Lily Allen with deceivingly clever, sharp lyrics wrapped up in a sugary sweet sound.

While the closing ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ breaks less new ground, it’s an essential, if blatant, reminder that the female experience isn’t always so rosy: “It’s second nature to walk home before the sun goes down/ Now put your keys between your knuckles when there’s boys around/ Isn’t it funny how we laugh it off to hide our fear/ When there’s nothing funny here.”

With Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa has proved her star quality to dazzling effect – supplying a muchwelcome burst of unapologetic joy and confidence in the midst of uncertainty.

OUT NOW · LUCY O’TOOLE

MIGUEL RUIZ

DUA LIPA

THE SCRATCH

The Scratch Couldn’t Give A Rats right up ye

‘Pull Your Jocks Up’

DUBLIN FOLK-METALLERS DELIVER TRIUMPHANT DEBUT. Emerging as a raw, balls-tothe-wall alternative to neatly packaged and polished acts with the release of their debut EP in 2018, The Scratch have consistently thrown predictability to the wind – embracing absurdity and anarchy in equal measure, as they garner legions of devotees off the back of their famously raucous live shows.

Their latest trick has turned out to be their most brilliant move yet: releasing their aptly titled debut album, Couldn’t Give A Rats, three months early, in an effort to spread positivity during these anxietyridden times.

Blurring the boundaries between folk and heavy music in their own wildly unique way, the Dublinbased four-piece have resonated powerfully with a generation who are more than happy to pack their playlists with Lankum and Ye Vagabonds alongside Fontaines D.C. and Girl Band. With Couldn’t Give A Rats, The Scratch take this approach to bold new territories – with ‘Seanchaí’ leaning closer into trad than ever, while simultaneously abiding by metal principles.

‘Session Song’ is a slow-building ballad about “slaves to the weekend” and the inevitable comedown, with more than a few nods to Damien Dempsey; while the cello-assisted ‘Underworld’ exposes a surprisingly tender underbelly.

The poignant ‘Birdie’, meanwhile, is one of the album’s most blindsiding moments – the finest ode to an Irish granny since Thin Lizzy’s original ‘Sarah’ from Shades of a Blue Orphanage.

Of course, that’s not to say that the brazenness has gone anywhere – the album opens with the line “Take a bow, you’re a top-class

cunt”, after all. Like a conversation with an old, drunk stranger in the pub, The Scratch’s lyrics continue to sway between gems of battlewon wisdom and the ramblings of a madman. While producer Aidan Cunningham skillfully captures the raw spectacle, heavy rhythms and vicious energy of their live shows, there’s also plenty of room for their triumphant melodies and dazzling chops to shine.

With Couldn’t Give A Rats, the band have crafted one of the boldest Irish debuts of recent memory – expanding their sound and vision, while still holding onto the wild impulses that mark The Scratch as one of the country’s most spectacularly original talents.

OUT NOW · LUCY O’TOOLE The Strokes The New Abnormal rca/sony

‘Bad Desicions’

SOLID RETURN FROM THE NEW YORKERS While Julian Casablancas might have laid on the New York cool a bit at last year’s Electric Picnic, The Strokes’ performance reminded all present of what a great rock ‘n’ roll band they are. People might easily have forgotten this, given that their last record was back in 2016, and that was a mere EP. The band admitted as much themselves, with Casablancas recently saying, “The 2010s, or whatever the fuck they’re called, we took ‘em off”. When your debut album revitalised guitar music all on its own, perhaps it’s easy to feel you’ve done enough.

Has The New Abnormal been worth the wait? Well, kind of.

When the first single arrived earlier this year – ‘At The Door’, all fat analogue keyboards and minor scale riffs – it was a bit disappointing. “Not trying to build a dynasty,” sang Casablancas, “I’ve lost this game so many times before.” But things improved

immeasurably when the second release arrived a week later. Music fans of a certain age couldn’t help but hear a bit of the Billy Idol/ Gen X “classic” ‘Dancing With Myself’ in ‘Bad Decisions’ and this was a good thing, as it made for a superior song. “Making better decisions”? Indeed they were. It should also be noted that Billy Idol and Tony James receive their deserved credit. The song itself is the sort of tight, angular rock/pop that we were hoping for.

‘Eternal Summer’ – another highlight – has you reaching for the credits again as ‘Love My Way’

by Psychedelic Furs is there in the verse melody, earning the Butler brothers an unexpected payday.

When Casablancas sings “Your silence is no longer needed” you can’t help but agree with him as these two songs recall what was so great about The Strokes in the first place.

‘The Adults Are Talking’ (open hi-hat, muted guitar, inventive solo); ‘Selfless’ (nice line in falsetto from Casablancas); and the bright keyboards of ‘Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus’ are all worth hearing, as is ‘Why Are Sundays So Depressing’.

That song takes things at a slightly slower pace, with guitarists Hammond and Valensi copping some of the slovenly chords of ‘70s Keef ‘n’ Ron, albeit with Lou Reed subbing for an on-holiday Jagger.

The brightness fades. ‘Not The Same Anymore’ goes nowhere, and takes a while to get there, and ‘Ode To The Mets’ is another dirge, despite the amusing request for “drums please, Fab”. Casablancas moans, “I was just bored, playing the guitar.” Not one of his finest lines.

Still there are more hits than misses here: enough to justify their continuance as a going concern.

OUT NOW · PAT CARTY

For more album reviews go to hotpress.com/music

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LOCK DOWN F OOD

STEPPING UP TO THE PLATE Serious heroics are being performed by Ireland’s food and drink producers during the current crisis. Stuart Clark makes sure that deliciousness keeps coming your way... (clockwise from far left) Can do attitude; Corleggy Cheeses; Liath to go; and Bombay Pantry

THOSE LAZY-HAZY DAYS OF SUMMER

White Hag Brewing were 48 hours away from launching their new 4% Phantom Hazy IPA when word reached their Ballymote, Co. Sligo HQ that the licensed trade was shutting down.

Faced with potentially having to pour thousands of litres of beer down the drain, they quickly came up with an online strategy, which included a live stream of their new creation being canned and master brewer Joe Kearns hosting a virtual tasting session.

“We’re using a combination of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Eventbrite to bring the beer to our fanbase,” explains their Commercial Director, Bob Coggins. “These are extraordinary times and we have to adapt and change to ensure we keep our business and brand alive. We believe this to be the first time any brewery has had to resort to these measures to launch a beer.”

Boxes of 24 x 330ml Phantom Hazy IPA cans are available from thewhitehag.com priced €60 with free postage and packaging.

GRILLING IN THE NAME OF

With BBQ season upon us, one of our favourite neighbourhod burger joints, BuJo in Sandymount Village, has come up with the excellent idea of grill ‘em yourself meal kits.

Twelve burger patties, eight brioche buns, slices of cheese, dill pickles and their special burger sauce delivered anywhere in Dublin costs just €40 and will put smiles on even the gloomiest of faces. Get the full lowdown at bujo.ie.

DELIVERING THE GOODS

Ballymakenny Farm, DK Connemara Oyster, The Irish Goat Meat Farm, Carlow Farmhouse Cheese, Lough Gill Brewery, Crossogue Preserves, The Mindful Farmer, Wild Irish Chocolates, Paddy O Granola, Corleggy Cheeses, Connacht Whiskey, Kelly’s of Newport and Roscarberry Recipes are just a handful - we’ve very large hands! - of the fine Irish producers who’ve either started or stepped up their home delivery operations to ensure that our stomachs don’t grumble too loudly

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during the current crisis.

A source of immense deliciousness, the excellent slowfoodireland.com/special-deliveries list is updated daily.

A STAR IS REBORN

Liath in Blackrock, Co. Dublin is just one of the Irish restaurants that has adapted ingeniously to the times.

Instead of welcoming customers into their small but perfectly formed Michelin starred dining-room, Damien Grey and the team are dispatching exquisite twocourse meals to customers who are also supplied with reheating and plating instructions.

Place your order at liathrestaurant.com.

CURRYING FAVOUR

Bombay Pantry is dealing in more than just delectable Indian takeaway at the moment. Their various locations around Dublin are participating in #FeedTheHeroes, a brilliant initiative organised by Cian O’Flaherty. #FeedTheHeroes partners with different restaurants to get food to healthcare staff and others working around the clock to mitigate the coronavirus crisis.

Bombay Pantry director Emma Sheehan says: “Our Glenageary store delivered a range of our delicious curries into the COVID-19 testers and the A+E staff in St. Michael’s hospital. Clonskeagh delivered to St. Vincent’s last night and tonight we are delivering to the Radiographers in Loughlinstown.”

Treat yourself to a top-notch curry at bombaypantry. com.

FOOD HEROES

Finally, let us raise our knives and forks in salute to the fabulous Just-Eat and Deliveroo staff who’ve made sure that our pizza/burger/burrito/kebab/curry/ ramen/kung po/peri peri chicken/pancake/fish & chips cravings have been satisfied these past few weeks.

We doubt we’re the only ones whose sanity has been preserved by being able to dial-up food from our favourite restaurants and takeaways.

If you could see your way to leaving them a tip in an envelope that would be lovely...

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