Design Issue. The Vacuum

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DESIGN

SPECIAL SPECTACLES

NORTHERN IRELAND COUNCIL LOGOS

COFFINS

REVIEWS

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SQUEAL LITTLE ELEPHANT: FILM SOUND DESIGN

MR. WATSON’S FAVOURITE ALBUM COVERS

COMPUTER GAME DESIGN

HOW THEY DESIGN GLENN PATTERSON’S BOOKS

BRICKS OF BELFAST

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MR. BLOOMER’S HISTORY OF BICYCLE DESIGN

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the he vacuum SOME ALBUM COVERS A PERSONAL SELECTION BY STUART WATSON

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ecord covers: they’re mostly rubbish. The same tired images are trotted out over and over again: a boring photograph of some barely human pod product airbrushed to ubermensch standards of unattainable perfection; the four ugly dullards badly photographed against a graffiti’d wall or some other reliable signifier of edgy urban decay; the sub-4AD tasteful, vaguely abstract design which doesn’t quite get the typeface right. A bad record cover is like noticing a pubic hair lingering in the garlic sauce of a badly packed kebab: it can put you right off investigating the contents. With a small amount of attention to design and content, however, a good cover can amuse, shock, please the eye or at least give some indication of the music and artistic intentions contained within.

Take 80s American post-hardcore outfit Big Black. Big Black’s vignettes concerning incest/murder/ sleeping sickness/powertools are delivered in a relentlessly pounding drum-machine-led style with guitars resembling malfunctioning farm machinery; from the Savage Pencil illustration of the unfortunate individual having his forehead punched out from the inside on the aptly-titled Headache EP to the stump-fingered malcontent striking the matches a bit too close again on Pigpile, the covers of their records sum up their explosive aesthetic nicely while remaining classic pieces of illustration and design reminiscent of American and Japanese underground comics of the era. Perhaps my favourite is the cover to their final LP Songs About Fucking: its bold font, stark green space and sweating manga heroine remain a fine example of minimal design. Not in any way politically correct but then neither were the band or the subjects they dealt with (although the initial release did have a sticker covering the offending word, naturally the first thing I did was remove it). Though it has to be said the cover is misleading as only roughly half the songs are actually about fucking.

While the record sleeves of Texan acid sludge merchants the Butthole Surfers could often be pleasingly odd (Locust Abortion Technician – painting of horribly laughing clowns holding tiny upset looking dog in a hat; Double Live – photograph of the audience being greeted by translucent, simply wrong looking mutant), their greatest remains the cover to their 1988 LP Hairway To Steven. By simply overlaying the band members’ faces upon one another they create an effect that, in sympathy with their music, manages to be stupid, disturbing and deeply psychedelic. Said LP is also notable for tracks being represented by crude, often scatalogical drawings rather than actual titles – my favourite may be the first track (subsequently revealed to be called ‘Jimi’), represented by a naked man defecating as a naked woman urinates while playing baseball.

The cover of Love’s Secret Domain

by Coil also serves as an indicator of the band’s musical and extra-musical concerns, which were always largely indivisible: the painting (by Nurse With Wound’s Stephen Stapleton under the name Babs Santini) of a tumescent male member spurting multicoloured sperm and a variety of pills, surrounded by occult symbolism reflects John Balance and Peter Christopherson’s exploration of their homosexuality and lifelong interest in the transformative powers of hallucinogenics and magick. The album title itself references these concerns – both ‘love’s secret domain’ and L.S.D. A friend of mine bought this album in Germany – while carrying it back on the plane, the record in a clear plastic bag, the gentleman in the seat beside him took great interest in the cover. He declined, however, to engage him in conversation.

Peter Christopherson’s previous group, 70s industrialists Throbbing Gristle, were (still are) a band extremely conscious of controlling every possible aspect of their media presentation, from interviews to live performances and record sleeves. The cover to

their 20 Jazz Funk Greats album presents the group standing on a pastoral cliff top, smiling and dressed in shiny polyester leisurewear – exactly the scene expected from an album of that era with that title. The sly subversion of this scene works on several levels – the dissonance between album title and group name, and between the scene and public knowledge of a group already described by Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn as ‘wreckers of civilisation’. This subversion continues in light of the knowledge that the cliff top the band poses upon is Beachy Head, one of the album tracks and a famous English suicide spot; this is reflected in the original back cover shot of an abandoned Land Rover with the group nowhere to be seen, presumably plunged to their deaths in a mess of blood, bones and nylon.

Electronic artists Autechre are another group whose record sleeves display a rare synergy with their contents – from the grainy bitstream images of their debut Incunabula through to the abstract mechanistic and architectural imagery of later releases the artwork appears

as their music sounds, a combination of algorhythms and alien textures with only a tenuous relationship to the dance culture they originated in. Indeed some might argue that the record covers and the music are uncomfortably reminiscent of the 70s prog excesses of Yes and their ilk; certainly the music can initially appear impenetrable, a showy display of chops, though thankfully without the hideous ululations of Yes vocalist Jon Anderson.

While on the subject of the 70s, one of the finest updates of that decades’ excesses is the album Sweet Sixteen by New York scuzz trash turned cleaned-up media manipulators Royal Trux. Notoriously rising from the toxic waste products of noiseniks Pussy Galore the duo quickly made a name for themselves as purveyors of a barely coherent ur-rock sprawl. In an unlikely coup, the pair managed to sign a lucrative contract with Virgin Records; while the first LP released under this contract was an oddly straightforward rock album, the follow up Sweet Sixteen managed to free them from said contract under a heady melange of every excessive 70s rock move imaginable. The cover sums this up perfectly while simultaneously telling the record company, as if they hadn’t actually listened to the LP, to kiss any commercial prospects goodbye – a stained, tubercular toilet bowl full to the brim with what may be the (thankfully indistinct) after-effects of a drug binge, or just the residue of the 70s as a decade, the mound of ordure crowned with the band’s RTX logo. Take that Peter Saville, Vaughan Oliver and Designers Republic – this is the perfect marriage of form and content.

the vacuum ME AND MY GLASSES Daniel Jewesbury

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owhere is good design more important than when it sits on your face. Good design sits on my face every day, and I’m very happy that it’s there. My current pair of glasses are the most expensive spectacles I’ve ever owned: last year, thrust unwillingly into buying a new pair, I decided that I had to stop scrimping and buy a well-designed, well-made pair of frames that might last a little longer than the flimsy things I’d made do with before, and might also look a little better.

It’s fairly easy for me to spend a large amount of money on my glasses, since I have a very strong prescription, being more or less blind to anything that’s further than about three inches from my eyes. This means that, unless I want the cheapest, thickest milk bottles strapped to my face, I have to pay a fortune for lenses that are thin enough to be aesthetically pleasing. My lenses alone typically cost about £300.

This has led me in the past to become an optical tourist, trying to save money by buying glasses in India. The optician I went to in Khan Market in Delhi was certainly much cheaper than any I’d used at home and was miraculously able to make my rather complex lenses in only one day (as opposed to the usual two or three weeks here).

It worked out well enough for me but I’m aware that others have had problems, mainly with lenses they find they can’t see through and which they don’t have the opportunity to take back to the shop (because they have to go home again). If you’re already travelling to India, wear glasses and have a copy of your prescription, and have enough time in hand to make sure that the completed specs are correctly made, then I would certainly recommend this route

for getting a second pair. If it goes wrong, at least you haven’t rejected a liver, or had a rusty scalpel left inside you.

I have known many people who thought of their glasses merely as instruments to allow them to see, for whom the idea of design is utterly extraneous to their considerations. A man I knew had broken both arms on his glasses and, being unable to afford a new pair, simply attached them to himself with an Aer Lingus baggage label that he affixed across the bridge, to his nose and forehead. This is perhaps taking things a little too far.

Then again, many people with imperfect eyesight stick their fingers in their eyes morning and night rather than proudly parade their beautiful imperfection. As John Hegley said, wearing contact lenses is lying about your eyesight, and the wilful denial of human imperfection is surely a type of repressive body fascism. Apart from that, the first time I tried wearing them, they slipped around the back of my eye and I found myself cycling up the New Kent Road in the middle of four lanes of traffic, completely blind. This would never happen with a nice pair of glasses.

My Indian glasses met their end when I walked into the edge of a window-frame in Zagreb and one of the glass lenses smashed into pieces. After cursing the peculiarities of Croatian fenestration, I quickly realised that I would have to spend the remainder of the trip with my specs held together with sellotape.

It was then that I decided that I had to bite the bullet, and stop trying to save money on this most important single item that I own, without which I am utterly unable to live independently. I returned half-blind to Belfast and was led by the hand to an optician’s where I was assured that not only did

they have the most advanced and sophisticated optical instruments in Northern Ireland (lots of big machines that go ‘ping’) but that I would find there a range of frames that would allow me, at last, truly to reflect my self in my glasses.

My optician is extremely proud of his treatment rooms. In fact he sends out a magazine twice a year to tell us that he’s redesigned the interior and had very expensive flock wallpaper and velvet drapes fitted, and that we should therefore feel even more comfortable in its surroundings, being very discerning types who deserve this sort of thing. My God, even his curtains are remote-controlled.

It’s a long way from the children’s hospital in south-east London where I had my eyes tested between the ages of four and 16, and even from the (rather comfortable, I thought) Beckenham branch of Dollond & Aitchison where I would, without fail, get my new pair of Woody Allen / Buddy Holly NHS frames fitted. Then, the only choice offered was whether I wanted black or tortoiseshell. Now, I get to choose frames that tell the world who I am, what I value, whether I shop in Lidl or Sawer’s, and what I think about the latest theories on the origins of the Thirty Years War. You can see that this is a fairly tricky business and that you need an expert to guide you through it with a range of responses like “Very nice, very nice” and “Absolutely, they’re great, but I wonder have you thought about these?” This man, I need hardly say, is always right.

My glasses have the names of not just one but two designers written on the inside of the arms. I understand from looking on the internet that one of these designers concerns himself with the frame, while the other has innovated the novel

hinge that means that it’s almost impossible for me to snap the arms off accidentally (I can bend the arms up and out and down and they just keep on trucking). In fact the website tells me a great deal of very interesting information about each of the designers of my glasses: Devotee of freedom and non-conformity, he ‘sculpted’ matter in space and invented a new philosophy for optics… This subtle and detailed complicity with the wearer makes each model a unique creation… Today’s successor to the conventional screw hinge is a biomechanical articulation designed like a human microclavicle. Inspired by the arm’s natural intelligence, it shares the same multi-directional freedom of movement… Convinced that things have a soul of their own, he has focused on defining a new relationship between man and matter. As the object surrenders its material substance, [he] restores its original purpose: human fulfillment…

Personally, I feel humbled that I am the ultimate benefactor of this much love and philosophy. The only pair of frames I’d been really happy with before were snapped in half by a ham-fisted optician at Boots when she was trying to replace a lens, but even these were just a pale suggestion of what I could truly aspire to. From now on, it’s beauty and truth all the way for me, along with freshlyroasted coffee and Chesterfields in the waiting room, and, of course, the knowledge that I have finally, after 30 years, joined the inner circle of the myopic. Never again will inferior forms sit on my face.

It’s the only one I’ve got, and it deserves more.

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A safety ordinary with treadle drive.

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An ordinary rider tries out the new expression ‘to come a cropper’.

! , Baron Von Drais’ Draisine c. 1820

, A Boneshaker c. 1850

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An ordinary with drop handlebars.

, An ordinary, High-Wheeler or Penny Farthing c. 1880.

An American Star

, A safety ordinary with a chain and smaller front wheel.

John Starley’s 1885 Rover Safety bicycle with most of the features of a conventional bicycle except a seat tube.

PADDY BLOOMER’S HISTORY OF

BICYCLE DESIGN T

he uneducated pedestrian may say that a bicycle is nothing more than than two triangles and couple of circles, but it wasn’t always so. There were many scutched knuckles, bruised shins, broken necks and prolapsed colons before J.K. Starley presented the Safety bicycle to the cycling public in 1885. For the next 99 years the design of the diamond frame remained largely unchanged until Raleigh gave us the Vektar which had an onboard computer, 2 stone of plastic trim and made dalek sounds.

But never mind that, let’s talk about the olden days.

In 1817 Baron Von Drais, quite by accident when attempting to cross-breed a jaunting car with a chaise longue made a peculiar twowheeled apparatus. The travelling machine had a steering front wheel and was propelled by pushing with the feet in a manner developed some

years previously by Fred Flintstone.

Von Drais had started a disturbing and dangerous craze throughout the world, Draisines and Hobby Horses were constructed by cartwrights and gentlemen inventors.

In Scotland, a rod-driven rear wheel contrivance was conceived.

In Paris, pedals were attached to the front wheel of a hobby horse to make the first Velocipede. While the boneshaker – and it was called that for good reason – was the first true bicycle it could not really be considered as a viable form of transport; the wooden wheels and iron tyres would have been quite at home on a farm cart. Pressure on the pedals had to be counteracted through the handlebars, this coupled with flex in the wood and iron forks gave the machine a very unsatisfactory ride. The first time I rode a boneshaker I was surprised

to find it more work than walking and no faster. I was left perplexed as to how the development of the bicycle had continued beyond this point and not been dismissed as a waste of time, energy and cart wheels.

Most boneshakers were equiped with a brake operated by twisting the handlebars to press a wooden brake block against the iron tyre.

This had little effect on the boneshaker’s speed but it made a loud scraping sound which would warn people to get out of the way.

Gradually front wheels were becoming larger with the arrival of the spoked tension wheel, at last the penny farthing was here. The large spoked front wheel gave a higher gear ratio and a rider’s maximum speed was now limited only by their inside leg measurement, the ordinaries (as they were known), were real transport. It was now pos-

sible to cover 100 miles in a day.

Ordinaries with lighter, stiffer wheels and frame and solid rubber tyres are great bikes to ride, if a little dangerous due to the centre of gravity being high and nearly over the front axle. The phrases, ‘to take a header’ and ‘to come a cropper’ refer to going over the handlebars and landing on your head, a kind of Victorian face plant. Such incidents were sometimes fatal. It became common practice to descend hills with one’s legs over the handlebars: while this left the rider with no chance of braking and little control the feet-first riding position made for a safer crash. In the late 1870s swept down handlebars called moustache handlebars became popular, inspired no doubt by the handlebar moustache which was already fashionable and is believed to have been in use since the iron

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A crossframe bicycle of the late 1880s.

A Moulton folding bicycle.

The bicycle on which Graem Obree broke the hour record in 1993 by riding 51.596km. The bicycle was later outlawed by the UCI.

The Lotus bicycle designed by Mike Burrows on which Chris Boardman won the 4km pursuit in the 1992 Olympics.

The 1984 Raleigh Vektar ffeaturing on-board computer, AM radio and sound synthesizer.

The configuration of a diamond frame bicycle exclusively favoured by the Union Cycliste Internationale.

The Windcheetah tricycle designed by Mike Burrows in 1985.

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A Kingcycle designed by Miles Kingsbury

The current hour record was set in 2008 by Slovenian Damjan Zabovnik at 87.123km in this recumbent bicycle Evie II.

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A Velocar by Charles Mochet. In 1933 cyclist Francis Faure rode a Velocar 45.055 km to break the hour record. This led to recumbents being banned from competitive cycling by the UCI.

A 1930s Velocar.

One of a number of contemporary varieties of Velocar (now called Velomobiles), the Ped-3 designed by Marko A. Kovacic in 2007.

Greg Kolodziejzyk secured the 24 hour record, riding 1046.1 km in this bicycle, Critical Power.

A plastic toy.

The Varna Diablo II, designed by Georgi Georgiev and ridden by Sam Whittingham, holds the current world speed record of 132.47 km/h.

, The Sinclair C5, a battery assisted tricycle designed by Sir Clive Sinclair, was launched in 1985.

age. Other developments aimed at trying to improve rider safety without reducing top speed led to dwarf ordinaries, geared pedals and elaborate treadle propulsion systems. One such innovation, The American Star, put a small steerable wheel in front of a large rear wheel. The Star was well suited for riding down steps but was heavy, unstable on steep ascents and, like the other high wheelers, about to be consigned to the history books by the development of reliable chain drives combined with John Boyd Dunlop’s pneumatic tyre.

John Kemp Starley, nephew of James Starley (manufacturer of ordinaries and inventor of tangential spoking), invented the Safety bicycle. The Starley Rover was an odd beast and had no seat tube. Luckily one was soon added for several reasons: • The diamond frame is the most

efficient layout in terms of rigidity, economy of materials and ease of construction.

• By the 1890s pneumatic tyres were common and cyclists would need somewhere to mount their newfangled bike pumps.

• By 1900 Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) had formed and would later deem any bike frame not consisting of two triangles illegal in road races and speed records.

While step-through and cross frames were produced in smaller numbers the diamond frame remained dominant. Recumbents had been around since the turn of the century but it was only in the 30s that they started to create a stir, Francis Faure rode a Velocar 27.9 miles in one hour smashing a 20-year-old record. Manufacturers of upright bicycles put pressure on the UCI

and the recumbent was banned. Recumbent bikes and trikes, now classified as Human Powered Vehicles for competition purposes, come in many flavours. It’s not unusual to find front wheel drive, central or rear wheel steering or other exotic configurations. The fastest machines are fully-faired, low level, short-wheel-base recumbents. Longwheel-base high-level recumbents are the most comfortable tourers.

Shorter wheelbases are have tighter turning circles and are more suited to towns and cites. For me the best thing about recumbents is the comfy seat and a riding position that doesn’t tire the back and arms and ‘cut the hole aff yee.’ The seated riding position also offers an ergonomic pedalling advantage in that the rider is braced against the seat and an aerodynamic advantage of being feet first and low down. Unfortunately the ergonomic

benefits don’t work on steep hills where upright cyclists often stand out of the seat.The low riding position also compromises visual awareness and visibility which can leave the rider feeling a bit vulnerable in city traffic.

Other innovative bicycle designs of the twentieth century include: • the Sturmey Archer geared hub which arrived in 1902 and was soon followed by Derailleur gears.

• Moulton, carbon fibre and monocoque designs such as Mike Burrows and Chris Boardman’s Lotus bike and Graeme Obree’s Hotpoint bike, both of which set new mile records before being baned by the UCI. • The Sinclar C5 which may be variously decribed as: an electric car, a recumbent trike with electronic power assist, a cheap plastic toy.

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BRICKS

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DAVID BRETT GOES ON A TOUR OF BELFAST’S FABRIC

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he Vacuum got in touch with me and asked if I would do a piece on decoration and Belfast; or was it decoration in Belfast? The idea was that I should do a dérive around the town and comment on the things I saw. This struck me as a dumb notion. I mean, who, seriously, wants to wander round the city in this weather, gawking at dripping stonework, when he or she could be at home with feet up and a bottle of bisongrass vodka at hand. The idea came to write about BISON. I don’t mean the creature with a doormat for hair. I mean concrete. ‘Bison’ used to be a firm of concreteers; great trucks labelled BISON trundled round country lanes, but you don’t see so much of them these days.

When I was a lad, BISON concrete was BIG. MASSIVE. BISONIC. Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Concrete is a natural material, much like brick. It does not get the credit it deserves. Like ceramic, it has to be moulded.

Like a jelly or a junket, it sets in moulds. It grows warm, like bread. Like bread, it exhales a rich smell as it rises. It swells within wooden shutters or steel plates. It seems to ferment. Like icing you can pump it into bags and squeeze it out. Concrete is a branch of cookery. (Just in passing, Ruth Morrow at the Ulster University has been really doing this, moulding concrete within sacks and tubes to produce wall surfaces that look like bolsters and futons or even, dare we say it, big girls’ bottoms.) And from concrete to clay. that is, brick.

Like most nineteenth-century cities, Belfast is a brick city. It is made out of its own foundations. The principle was, that if you lived on clay, as you dug the foundations of a house you would save up the clay, build a small kiln, and fire the clay on the spot, and from the bricks make the house that was to stand there.

Some of the older builder’s manuals tell you how to do this. You have to imagine a city like a continuous

brick field, smoking and flaming as it rose. There are parts of this town in which a bright red clay lies no more than 18 inches below the surface, and this bright red clay is so solid that it scarcely needs a proper firing. You didn’t need much in the way of a kiln to prepare the materials for your own house.

Of course, in these conditions, quality control is not very good; high quality brickwork had to be imported, and the cheaper, softer

There are parts of this town in which a bright red clay lies no more than 18 inches below the surface, and this bright red clay is so solid that it scarcely needs a proper firing. brick made on the spot was used for the inner walls and the back walls; hence the rears of Belfast houses tend to have a variegated colouring, to crumble and to sag.

The brick is often porous so that when you drill into it, moisture rises to the surface. There is a real deterioration in quality beween the street and the entry.

Hence comes the famous description, ‘Queen Anne front, Mary Anne back.’

In the nature of things, such a quotidien practice was rarely remarked on or written about, so there is a lot we don’t know about it; but it has a strong bearing on the character of this town and the way it looks, in both the general and the detail.

First of all, the colour.

Belfasters don’t seem to notice how brightly coloured is the city they live in, how, on a summer’s evening with the sun setting over Moira, the whole of the Lagan conurbation starts to glow, and how the orange-red collides with the bright green of Irish fields and trees. The colour, too, of the

individual bricks matures through every stage of red with a kind of pointillist verve. Though in so many respects the common brick is the perfect industrial product, in actuality every brick is different from its fellows. A stack of bricks is a wonderful thing – semper idem, semper alius. A whole wall of bricks changes its hues and tones imperceptibly both every day and decade by decade.

Modern bricks, being made in a fully mechanised fashion, are a great deal more regular in form and colour and strength than those of a hundred or even fify years ago, and they seem to be uniform across the whole country. But the actually existing historic brick changes colour according to the clay it is made of. Myself, I was brought up in York, where the local home-made brickwork

One suspects that the idea of a united Ireland and the actual material and economic unity that came about in the early nineteenth century are cemented in bricks and mortar. presents a colour field that is Ryvita coloured, interspersed with blotches of damson. This colouring of brick in fact extends in a band southward as far as London, which was largely supplied out of its own foundations, and now from Bedfordshire. It is co-terminous with strata of manganese limestone that follow the M1. Bricks from the British midlands are altogether more red and regular, and a lot of these were imported into Ireland in the form of ship’s ballast.

One of the main functions of the canals of Ireland was to transport building material; the main trade of the Royal and Grand Union Canals was to turn Dublin into a inland port – exporting horse-shit (a big problem in those days!)

and importing bricks and stone.

The canals and the later railways carried their own bricks in with them, so that the locks and the railway stations of obscure village halts are built to similar patterns with similar bricks; and with them the cottages and terraces of the railway workers. One suspects that the idea of a united Ireland and the actual material and economic unity that came about in the early nineteenth century are cemented in bricks and mortar. (The role that railways played in the invention of nations is a great and largely unexplored theme in the history of nationalism).

And while the rain is siling down and threatening sleet I am consulting my Mitchell’s Advanced Course in Building Construction (1936 ed.). This venerable book is still, I understand, in use; but my copy was given me by erstwhile climbing companion, Little Joe Farrand, the meanest man in Calderdale, before he left for Canada. Little Joe was a carpenter who specialised in shutter-work for a concrete gang; and his ultimate specialism was spiral staircases done in a single pouring. Anyway, it was from him and his book that this enthusiasm of mine descends.

From them I learnt the couth and gritty language of the brick, of those that are hand moulded and clamp-burnt, of the relation of barrows to hacks, of plain and fancy stocks. Now stocks, you should know, are classified according to the quality as malms, malmed and common; and among them exist such divisions and battallions as cutters, facers, paviors shippers, bright stocks and grizzles and bright fronts, to which we can add such outriders as White Suffolks, Gaults and Dutch Clinklers. (They sound like breeds of cows!) And, readers, you should know of English Bond, Flemish Bond, and the Stretching Bonds and the Heading Bonds. These are to be likened to the basic weavepatterns, and they impart the particular rhythms to the walls we

the vacuum live in. And the entrances, that depend upon voussoirs, springers, extrados, the haunch and the spandril and the squint quoin. And then we descend into the primal ooze of our language with the frog, the bull nose, the queen closer and the king closer, the headers, bats and laps.

But I was not supposed to be writing about this, but decoration: and brick lends itself to decoration for two very significant reasons.

First, being uniform, bricks lend themselves to interestiing combinations. No one brick is, in principal, any more important than another, and second, brick decoration needs nothing other than itself; the motifs emerge out of the wall. This makes them very well suited to ordinary buildings.

Readers of the Vacuum are invited to while away their hours

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1. St.Matthew’s Upper Shankill Road

3. Moulded brick and terracotta details, South Belfast

A really unusual and characterful church near the top of Shankill Road. Probably unique? Who designed it? No idea. Haven’t time to research it, nor have I been inside, but the brickwork (that is, the whole structure) is conceived decoratively/geometrically.

I would not be surprised to find that it is based all through on the proportions of the common brick. In this, the white/fawn is set off by the red very prettily, and the interior forms of the building are embodied on its outer skin ingeniously, Look at the way the inner stairwell is reproduced as a decorative motif on the exterior of the tower.

High quality work, I think, whose main function is to dignify the front of the house; the back is much more worka-day in design, workmanship, and quality of material. The ‘aesthetic movement’ details were, in their time, key selling points for houses of this size at this date (1900?).

We are, in effect, looking at Belfast at the height of its wealth and splendour. The City Hall is being built, the shipyards are working night and day; and the added value is being pumped into architectural detail.

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And then we descend into the primal ooze of our language with the frog, the bull nose, the queen closer and the king closer, the headers, bats and laps. looking for some good examples of what I mean. I think it is useful to imagine brickwork in the same class of activities as weaving; based upon patient addition, building up in layers, A brick wall, like knitted jersey, can be exactly presecribed in terms of the operations required to make it – knit one, purl one etc., and adding nothing that is not there already in some form. It would also be legitimate, in the Vacuum Brick Spotters’ Manual to include a few items which are not, strictly speaking, brick; but are certainly fired clay. Thus we can admit to tile-spotting, and terracotta fancying. There is, in point of fact, some very good terracotta to be seen – just about world class stuff. I am thinking of the plaques on such buildings as the Old Gas Works on Ormeau Road. But it is quite common on the better class of residencies, because it was favoured by the Arts-and-Craft builders of Malone Road and Stranmillis, and building developments of the same approximate dates (18901910) there is also lots of good tilework; and there are some occasions where glazed and coloured bricks are used to effect. We ought to keep our eyes open for these.

With that in mind, I have set off with a camera in my hand to give some idea of what I mean. The preferred mode of travel has to be bicycle. And now we have some fine bright weather.

2. Terrace off Shankill Road This is so typical of Belfast that we hardly notice it, but we should if we love the town and don’t walk about with our eyes shut.

The effect is to make much more delicate something otherwise very ordinary, with a fretwork effect. Look too at the unemphasised course of brickwork below the guttering, very typical and ordinary, but an effective way of framing the wall.

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4. The priest’s house St. Malachy’s Church This Church is, of course, well known for its oddity.

It always looks to me like a Victorian gaol rather than a house of god. But the associated buildings are very fine. There is an old school building which is, alas, getting decrepit, and the formidable priest’s lodging.

Good enough for a bishop I would have thought. Not great architecture, but a good example of what intelligent use of ordinary motifs and tilework can bring to a building. The alternation of black with red

is done with subtlety and a fine sense of proportion, and the horizontal lines of the differing brick, which alternate with the stone of the string courses, stretches the building, visually, in a horizontal direction so that its overall shape is far from monotonously cubic. The really charming features, however, is the long band of lacy tilework, that goes right round the house. I like too, the use of the alternating red and fawn sandstone.

We can go on like this for ever: but the really interesting question for me, as an amateur of the bricklayer’s art is, why can we not do it well any more? There has been a fashion in the past twenty of more years, to re-introduce decorative brickwork into Belfast’s new building. No one has done it well. (Witness, the vile additions to the old gasworks buildings at the foot of Ormeau Road, whose miserable qualities are shown up by their close proximity to the real thing.) I have no answer to this problem other than a further series of questions.

L

the vacuum Squeal for me Little Elephant Allan Hughes describes the role of sound design in film.

Illustration by David Haughey.

the vacuum I

n mainstream Hollywood cinema a supervising sound editor used to be responsible for overseeing all stages of a film’s soundtrack. The sound designer is a modern role that takes up the part of these responsibilities to do with maintaining a coherent aesthetic in the soundtrack of a film.

The sound designer is responsible for the conceptual outline of all audio-related aspects of a film’s production and will work on all stages of the sound production: recording, editing and mixing.

They will determine how dialogue should be recorded, how Foley effects should sound (see below), their placement in the edit and dynamic presence in the mix, and even include suggestions for the composition and editing of the film score and its relation to the rest of the soundtrack.

The sound designer sits at the apex of the entire sound production crew. However, although sound cinema came about in the 1920s (and sound designers existed in theatre and radio) the position in cinema production was not acknowledged until the early 1970s. This was no doubt a hangover from cinema’s initial resistance to the inclusion of sound in the film, especially synchronised sound (where sound tallies to images), which was derided as lazy naturalism and the harbinger of a creative cul-de-sac of scripted dramas. Today, unlike directors or film editors, sound designers are not affiliated to any practitioner’s guild. The role has established itself as the technology has improved, paving the way for surround sound and noise reduction and significantly renegotiating the importance of sound in pictures.

Much sound design owes its existence to the pioneering work of one Jack Donovan Foley, probably one of the first people to develop synchronised sound effects in film and the origin of the term ‘Foley artist’. The Foley artist is responsible for recreating sound effects for film where none were recorded, none exist in reality or those that have been recorded are of such poor quality that new recordings are necessary. Footfalls, the rustling of clothes, breaking bones, a television set heard through a wall; all this and nearly everything else is simulated or reproduced then recorded and added in post-production. The methods in this area of sound design can be completely incongruous and faintly ridiculous (apparently, breaking a stem of Chinese bok-choi makes a very convincing bone snap) while at the same time investing their production with a touch of the genuinely strange.

Gonzalo Gavira’s work on 1973’s The Exorcist produced many good examples of Foley work that helped the production earn its Oscar for Best Sound in 1974. Described by

director, William Friedkin as a ‘barefoot Mexican peasant’, Gavira’s work came to the attention of Friedkin via a midnight screening of Jodorowsky’s El Topo. His practice of using his own body and any small piece of material to hand imbue his recordings with an evocative quality. For the famous scene in which Linda Blair’s head rotates, fellow effects specialist Ron Nagle supplied Gavira a background of sounds that included vari-speeded recordings of fighting dogs, angry bees and squealing pigs. Against this background he strangled a leather wallet filled with credit cards to create the convincingly gristly sounds of the exorcism scene.

Gavira is not the only sound designer to indulge a little hermeticism and dark art in his working practices. Frank Warner, the supervising sound effects editor on Scorsese’s Raging Bull, treated his tape recorder as if it were a medium to communicate between the sound on his library of tapes and the sound that he would summon to match the images in the film. He compiled a secondary library of sound recordings by sitting in the dark, manipulating the reels on his tape recorder by hand, pulling the tape back and forth across the

He strangled a leather wallet filled with credit cards to create the gristly sounds of the exorcism scene. playback head while simultaneously capturing the results on another tape recorder. Sleight of hand and accident aided in his design of new and previously undiscovered sounds and, as if to consign them back to the darkness from which they came, he ritually burned the secondary reels of tape sounds that he produced so that nothing could ever be replicated by him or anyone else.

One of the first practitioners to be officially credited with the role of sound design in a film was Walter Murch for his extensive work on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Murch developed the process of ‘worldizing’, a technique whereby post-production audio recordings would be taken out into real world acoustic environments, played back, and re-recorded in a range of configurations to achieve acoustically accurate auditory representations for a film sequence.

This process was used extensively throughout Apocalypse Now where much of the production sound was unusable due to the excessive background noise of helicopters, boat engines, water and gunfire; a sound recordists nightmare. Murch had previously been credited with ‘sound montage’ on Coppola’s surveillance thriller, The Conversation where amongst many other effects he designed a study in the

minutiae of inflection and understanding. The axis around which the entire narrative point-of-view, or more precisely a point-of-audition, revolves and culminates is a short phrase of dialogue; ‘He’d kill us if he got the chance.’ Murch recorded many takes of this phrase, having the actors subtly adjust the intonation of their delivery in each reading and used a different version of these recordings each time the dialogue appeared in the film. Without wanting to spoil a film that everyone should see (or should have seen by now), the effect is designed to disorientate the listener and produces a fatal twist that switches the perspective in Harry Caul’s understanding of his surveillance subjects.

Murch’s influence is extensive and his subtle, nuanced sound design has forged a distinctive working practice that is often referenced by current practitioners in the field. David Fincher’s sound designer, Ren Klyce, made similar use of Murch’s techniques of auditory deception in the 2007, truecrime thriller Zodiac. To create a sonic analogy for the unsolved status of the Zodiac killings, Klyce had two different voice actors read transcripts of the telephone calls that the killer made in the 1970s and then, in the edit, cut the two voices together word by word to create a third, slightly stilted, ‘unknown’ voice.

A kind of technical culmination in sound design can be found in science fiction films and animations, where nearly everything needs to be designed from the ground up because the real world counterpart sounds do not exist.

Ben Burtt is an acknowledged authority of this, having designed nearly all the sounds for the original Star Wars trilogy and many more besides. The range of designed sounds is extensive, and the layering even more so, with everything from wailing baby elephants used for the sound of the Imperial Tie Fighters, microphone interference picked up from a broken television monitor for the lightsaber and the design of ‘alien’ languages from little heard third world dialects (post-colonial theorists take note, you have a paper in there somewhere!).

While digital synthesis and sampling allow faster and more complex editing, the basis for all quality sound design has not changed: put simply, the re-contextualisation of natural sounds we know and can hear but cannot recognise. As movie goers are increasingly aware of digital post-production and the manipulation of visual imagery – thanks in large part to the many bonus features that appear on current DVD releases – it is an indication of the nearly subliminal influence of good sound design that simple contrasts in sound can still provide such effective results.

the vacuum issue 41 december ber 08

Published by Factotum the supreme show hound 9-11 Lombard Street Belfast BT1 1RB 028 9033 0893 info@factotum.org.uk www.thevacuum.org.uk www.sorryday.com EDITORS & DESIGN Stephen Hackett Richard West REVIEWS EDITOR Fionola Meredith ILLUSTRATIONS Duncan Ross David Haughey COVER Duncan Ross WEB EDITOR Stephen Hull DISTRIBUTION Jason Mills distribution@factotum.org.uk ADVERTISING To advertise in the Vacuum or receive information about our advertising rates call 028 9033 0893 or email info@factotum.org.uk print run 15,000 Distribution: Northern Ireland and Dublin All copyright remains with the authors.

Printer: Bangor Spectator

This project is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

the vacuum

The Newtownabbey Borough Council logo in the form of a ‘unique self-watering floral sculpture’ designed ‘in-house’ by the Council and now adorning the Manse/Carnmoney Road North roundabout.

THE MUNICIPA P LITY RAMPANT PA COLIN GRAHAM ON THE NORTHERN IRELAND COUNCIL LOGO

B

elfast City Council’s new ‘B’ is an unusually existentialist statement for a local authority. Just ‘B’. ‘B’ good. Its design veers away from the standards of local authority logos in Northern Ireland, not just in its accidental philosophising but in its pseudosmart rejection of any attempt to make a connection between the local authority’s image and the place it represents. And as we know, the price for this is that the ‘B’ in Belfast is the ‘B’ in Blackburn and

Barrow, and so Belfast is no place at all.

This ‘B’ sign of our post-historical, post-geographic times hasn’t yet been entirely replicated by other local authorities across Northern Ireland, and probably shouldn’t be. Using a logo to create brand identification and loyalty is tricky enough for a private company but when you’re a local authority, with more or less nothing to sell and a captive audience, it’s not even very clear what you

want your logo to do, other than pick out your own bin lorries from any private operator who might come

along. Many local authorities exist in twilight spatial zones which are mere administrative units rather

than identifiable areas or locales, so there is no reason to brand the locality too heavily. Good examples of this are the old Education and Library Boards, which cover relatively arbitrary (if slightly gerrymandered) areas. So the South Eastern Education and Library Board (which covers North Down and Castlereagh) has as its logo a squareshouldered Pacman who is reading a book and swallowing an orange, or a tennis ball, at the same time. This figure haunted my own childhood,

the vacuum ARDS

COOKSTOWN

though having spent a bit of time in my early years in their library in Dundonald I know there is some truth in all aspects of the logo – the aliens, the physique, and a general sense of the library as a place to eat rather than read.

Outside Belfast, local authority logos fall into several categories.

The most pretentious are those that use their crest as their logo. Heraldically-speaking, these crests show a universally immodest preponderance of animals ‘rampant’. Typical would be Ards Borough council which has a relatively unremarkable crest flanked by a lion and a unicorn rampant. Cookstown and Lisburn (it’s a city, you know) also show their crests to the crowd. Larne has rampant swans, which was a new one on me, and much more frightening than the Ards lion. Then again the chances of being attacked by a rampant lion in Ards are relatively small, while there may be rampant swans in Larne. If I were a swan in Larne I know I’d be rampant. Castlereagh has stags (yes, they are rampant too) either side of its crest, while the crest itself has a red hand on it – ingenious. Castlereagh also uses a small white castle, designed rather like a rook from a primitive electronic chess game. The castle in chess can only move in straight lines and is used primarily to defend the king. There used to be a move in chess, an expression of defensive loyalty, so that when your king was under attack you performed a move called

LISBURN

a ‘castlereagh’. This was later shortened to the verb to ‘castle’.

Hence the castle logo for Castlereagh.

Not all crests are equal. Armagh’s is classy, as befits a genuinely ancient city, while Ards’ is over-elaborate, as befits a kind of Victorian makey-up history. Coleraine Borough Council offer welcome relief to the somber attempts to make a Borough Council look like it descended directly from a medieval township – their rampant dragons are block-coloured and slightly distended, and so there is a hint of abstraction, even modernity in their appearance. When councils dispense with the crest and go for a more ‘modern’ look, a weirdly uniform appearance seems to occur.

Even stranger is the recurrence

I know that the Northern Ireland football team use green and blue (and white) in their kits but when did the green/blue combination come to be semi-official colours in Northern Ireland. of the same colours across Borough Council logos. I know that the Northern Ireland football team use green and blue (and white) in their kits but when did the green/blue combination come to be semi-of-

LARNE

CASTLEREAGH

ficial colours in Northern Ireland (maybe all other colour combinations were already taken)? Where abstract designs are used, they are rarely purely abstract – in some way or other they tend to attempt to represent the local area. Magh-

Moyle has a faded blue squiggle, a faded green squiggle, and between them a yellow line. erafelt’s logo is an identifiable landscape of water (blue), hills (green) and trees. The trees are acute blue (not green) triangles, and a finely-tuned rural eye will note that these are resonant of an area recently planted with pine (probably Sitka spruce) trees, a non-indigenous cash crop which is not good for local soil. So there’s a reason to love Magherafelt.

Other councils have logos which are defeated by the need to be relevant to their domains. North Down has a crest and a blue wave (probably Strangford Lough), Banbridge has a wavey bridge. Newtownabbey is symbolised by an orange and blue tulip (why?). Moyle has a faded blue squiggle, a faded green squiggle, and between them a yellow line. This dominance of dual colours is pragmatically, no doubt, about the cost of reproducting the logo. But maybe also it’s a subconscious recognition of a ‘divided’ society, a repeated fascination

ARMAGH

with binarism signified through colour. Antrim Borough Council’s logo has two blue-and-green stick people who share one very long arm, making their’s an unusual, Siamesetwins approach to the dichotomies of Northern Irish life. This fatefully-conjoined couple dance, or prance, and their arm holds out a disproportionately large leaf. Maybe it’s an olive branch? Or a palm welcoming the Saviour to Antrim, though it looks like a leaf from a beech tree.

There is little enough invention, then, in local council logos. Derry is able to fall back on the skeleton on its crest as an old reliable. Second prize goes to Newry and Mourne District Council which advertises itself as ‘Gateway to the North’ – which may work for tourism, though it does suggest that its function as a district is to be passed through. It might be worth stopping for their logo though. Its inner circle is Newry and Mourne as rendered through the landscape art of the Mr Men. Adding to the note of utopian surrealism, the sky over this version of Newry and Mourne is dominated by a large, floating bishop’s hat. And first prize goes to Strabane. Despite their reliance on blue and green, with brown added, their logo seems to involve actual photographs of real places in Strabane – a bridge, a house and a living person. That’s local.

the vacuum GAME DESIGN STUART FALLIS T

here is no such thing as a video game designer. In fact, video games are no longer called games; they are ‘transmedia franchises’, where the markets of games, movies, toys, comics and more entwine to wring every last penny out of intellectual property (IP).

Serious amounts of money have to be committed to these franchises just to get the process of game development off the ground, and given the sheer complexity of the development platforms the days of the programmer-auteur are long over.

In 1983, Manic Miner was written for the ZX Spectrum by Matthew Smith in 6 weeks; Grand Theft Auto IV was four years in the making and has well over 500 people listed in the credits, of which 34 are credited as designers of one type or another.

While the title of ‘designer’ (and the many variations thereof) are still listed in the back of computer game manuals, it’s the lead designer who’s generally responsible for generating the IP. These creatives, however, are not locked away in some kind of thought factory; instead, they prefer to see themselves as ‘multidisciplinary facilitators’, who have to convince developers to apportion resources, motivate their teams to do the donkey work, manage their project to schedule and budget, all while trying to attract a major publisher who’ll get the game into shops.

In a software market that’s worth £2.2 billion in the UK alone, you will be expected to do more than sit in your lab and dream up ideas, especially if the IP of the transmedia franchise you’re working on belongs to someone else; someone who has final approval of the game’s content.

Fortunately for these chaps (and they tend to be chaps; 95% of those who work in game development are male), designing a game today has been made a lot easier, for two

reasons in particular. Firstly, as your smug English teacher was fond of reminding you, there are only seven original plots in literature; similarly, video games only have about eight specific genres defined by the ways the obstacles presented within the game are overcome. Video games are universal in the way they interact with the player: a screen will display the the results of input from a human/computer interface (a fancy industry term for a joypad or mouse). Some input reactions are intuitive and rewarding, and the games that use them become successful and are imitated. Thirty years worth of game evolution over successive generations of computers and consoles mean a designer has only to pick a genre then work on superficial visual and narrative differences. Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe (which, by the way, ticks more or less every transmedia franchise box imaginable) is the latest fighting game that has nerds everywhere wetting their pants with excitement, but it’s basically Konami’s 1985 game Yie Ar KunFu with some next-gen bells and whistles. Likewise, Gran Turismo 5 is just Pole Position with photorealistic graphics. Gears of War 2? Indistinguishable from Pong...

Secondly, when a video game tiein of an already established media franchise is being developed, a lot of the design work will have already been done. All the artwork, the character design and most importantly the story will have been produced outside of the game developer’s studio, so all that’s left to do is to stitch your IPowner approved game design onto an off-the-shelf genre in time for a coordinated release. This is why, for example, the game of the movie of the book of The Golden Compass ended up as a lacklustre

In 1983 Manic Miner was written for the ZX Spectrum by in 6 weeks.

Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe ...

Gran Turismo 5

Grand Theft Auto IV took four years to make with over 500 people invovled in its production.

is basically the same as

Konami’s 1985 game Yie Ar Kun-Fu

is basically the same as

Pole Position

the Valve Hammer Editor interface.

Portal

Spore

the vacuum mishmash, reliant on one of the laziest of game mechanics: the timed button press. Generally, video game adaptations of films are as critically acclaimed as film adaptations of video games (ever seen Bob Hoskins in Super Mario Bros? The Resident Evil series? Max Payne? Don’t bother...)

On the rare occasions when a lead designer is unfettered by external accountability and is backed with enough financial clout, the opportunity arises to create a classic: games like Halo, GTA, Metal Gear Solid or Bioshock. So how does an idea in a designer’s head get transformed into a flashing 1080p image on a fancy TV? The game’s key features are ‘blue-skyed’ into a vision document which then goes through a treatment process (similar to how screenplays are produced) until a detailed creative design document is drafted, which guides the scheduling of the project. The creative design document is revised, separated into sections which are further detailed, then farmed out to other designers to flesh out, then finally it’s up to the teams of programmers, engineers, artists, animators, musicians and level builders to actualise. Whilst the lead designer can be thought of as the architect, occupied with the lofty burdens of plot, motivation and narrative (exemplified, perhaps, by inclusion of themes from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment

in the design of Silent Hill 2), the level designers can be seen as the contractors, dealing with the bricks and mortar that hold the virtual world together. You can have a great idea for a game, but if you don’t have great level design your game is going to suck.

Level designers often learn their trade with level editing tools that come packaged with games or are available online (such as Valve Hammer Editor) and can earn

The game was dressed up with a humorous backstory, a psychotic computer alternatively plots to kill you then promises cake, and ends with the best final credits song in gaming. acclaim by submitting their work for critique by other players.

Well designed games don’t need the latest physics engine and shiny graphics to deliver the player a rewarding experience. The 2007 game Portal took a simple concept and made a fantastic game: the player can position portals on surfaces to create a visual and physical connection between two different locations in three-dimensional space. Objects retain their speed as they pass through the portals

but their direction will be altered depending on the orientation of the exit portal; teleportation of the protagonist and other objects solve the puzzles. The nature of the gameplay meant the levels had to be minimalist and spartan in look, although clever level design meant many approaches were possible to defeat the problems presented to the player. The game was dressed up with a humorous backstory, where a psychotic computer alternatively plots to kill you then promises cake, and ends with the best final credits song in gaming history; all details which indicate a thoroughly thoughtful and well led design process.

So what happens if the amount of people, time and money allocated to your project isn’t enough to create the magnum opus you dreamt of? Well, you could always exploit the ‘coolest’ development in new media and create your game from user generated content. These games employ level editing software, but actually make the design process partly the objective of the game.

Games like Spore, Second Life and LittleBigPlanet allow the design and customisation of characters and levels, the results of which can be used by other players. The release of LittleBigPlanet was met with almost universal critical acclaim, but gamers on Metacritic have been judging it much more harshly. Aside from a dodgy control system and a

Queen Street Studios Gallery IAIN ANDREWS & GENIEVE FIGGIS Opening Thursday 15th January 2009 6pm Exhibition Dates 16th January 2009 until 21st February 2009 Gallery Opening Times Mon – Wed 10am -5pm Alternatively you can arrange for an appointment outside gallery opening hours. For more details contact the QSS Administrator. t: 00 44 (0)28 90 24 31 45 e: qsstudios@btconnect.com w: www.queenstreetstudios.net Queen Street Studios, 37 - 39 Queen Street, Belfast BT1 6EA Iain Andrews Jacob’s Ladder

reliance on luck to get through the game, some user generated levels submitted online are being deleted without warning by the game’s moderators, frustrating the creators who would perhaps have spent days making them. Even if the player has been given the creative freedom to design their own levels, they still might not conform to the IP-owner’s approval process.

Despite this depressing development, the future for gamers is looking bright (but perhaps not HD clear). The release of the incredibly popular Nintendo Wii console and games with novel peripherals such as Rock Band has opened up gaming to an audience normally put off by its geekish inaccessibility. Nintendo’s Wiimote controllers have blown apart the hegemony of the joypad; new genres will begin to emerge with the imaginative application of new human/computer interfaces. Games playing has also ceased to be a singular male bedroom activity: the ideas of community and games as a socialising tool are well established, particularly now an online dimension has to be shoehorned into every design. Hideo Kojima, the designer of the Metal Gear series of games has discussed his vision of the future, where games will be more like soap operas, with people of all ages interacting with each other every day. So... just like real life, then?

the vacuum T

here’s nothing like a primary school trip to the graveyard to ram home at an early age the essential futility and nothingness of all that lies ahead of you. As if being raised in Lurgan wasn’t evidence enough of this, my class were taken by minibus to a local cemetery and herded towards one particular grave where the groundskeeper tried to frighten us with some macabre mythology. In the early 1700s a woman named Margorie McCall lived nearby. She became ill with fever and died, whereupon her family and friends attended a wake in her house. There was some consternation over a valuable ring on her finger, which several people tried to remove without success, fearing it would attract graverobbers. After her burial, thieves did indeed show up in the night to relieve her of any precious items still on her person. They too were unable to remove her ring so a knife was produced and one of them began to sever her finger. At this point Margorie woke up with a jolt, for she had not been dead at all (quelle surprise!) but in a catatonic trance. The robbers fled and she arose from her grave Thriller-style and walked (or possibly danced) the short way back to her house. Her husband was surprised, and maybe even a little disappointed, when he opened the door to find her standing there in her burial gown. And so she lived on for several more years before dying (properly this time) and being returned to the plot at which we children then stood before Co. Armagh’s self-styled Edgar Allan Poe. As he recounted her second demise he beckoned us forward for a closer look at the gravestone, on which was inscribed ‘Margorie McCall – lived once, buried twice’.

I refer to this story because the fear of being buried alive during this period, and right up to the late nineteenth century was very real, particularly in the minds of Europeans. While it is probable that rare cases of premature burial did occur, medical literature, sensationalist pamphlets and fictional stories greatly exaggerated the risk. This led to a series of ‘security coffins’ being designed, the idea being that if you were unfortunate

CURIOUS COFFINS JASON MILLS enough to wake up underground in a wooden box you would be able to alert someone to your predicament.

The first of these with any real claim to practicality was designed by a German physician, Dr Gutsmuth, in 1822. It had a long tube which would open onto the outside world if a mechanism inside the coffin was triggered. Through this air and light would pass, and another tube allowed food and drink to be administered while the person was being resurrected. Dr. Gutsmuth demonstrated the merits of his coffin by having himself buried in one for several hours whilst he ate a meal

A security coffin with an airhole and a bell for attracting attention patented by August Lindquist of Iowa in 1893.

of soup, sausages and beer before delivering a philanthropic speech through a speaking trumpet fitted to the coffin lid. Many increasingly advanced designs were patented throughout the century which included mechanisms (usually string and rope tied around the corpse’s head, hands or feet) for ringing bells, waving flags, sounding sirens and even firing pyrotechnical rockets above ground. One such coffin included technical details such as mesh surrounding the bell

to prevent it being set off by wind or birds, and a drainage system to prevent the added insult of being subjected to water torture whilst suffering the inconvenience of being buried alive. However, all these designs had their drawbacks, a common flaw being that they did not allow for the slightest movement of the corpse during decomposition, and due to the expense involved very few were ever sold.

The most advanced and luxurious safety coffin was one of the last to appear on the market during the 1970s. It was designed by a man named Angelo Hays who was reputedly killed in a motorcycle accident in 1937 but exhumed shortly after his burial due to insurance technicalities and found to be still alive.

He made a full recovery and obviously decided years later to cash in on his experience. His coffin design was complete with thick upholstering, soft pillows, a library of books, a food supply, an oxygen tank, a chemical toilet, a ventilation fan, an electrical alarm, and a radio transmitter which had an aerial sticking up out of the ground. At £4,500 it was hardly one for the common funeral but if you could afford it and happened to awaken inside you might not even want to be rescued, at least until you had worked your way through all the snacks and books.

Another interesting phenomenon is the ‘fantasy coffins’ produced by the Ga tribe of Ghana. It is considered that a person’s funeral should reflect and commemorate their life, and so coffins are handcrafted and painted into shapes which represent their trade, pas-

sions, achievements or aspirations.

The trend began in the 1950s when a carpenter named Kane Kwei wanted to make something special for his recently deceased grandmother – as she had never travelled outside of the country he decided on an aeroplane coffin to take her on her journey to the grave. News of his elaborate creation soon spread and as demand grew Kwei set up his own coffin workshop in a small coastal village. Today, his apprentice and successor, Paa Joe, designs most of these coffins in the same area – typical examples include a 7ft pink fish coffin for a fisherman, a cigarette-shaped coffin to honour a dead man’s love of smoking, a giant sports shoe for an athlete, and so on. They are constructed from pieces of soft, light wood then decorated with enamel paint and the interiors lavishly upholstered. The attention to detail is very impressive; a Mercedes Benz (for a taxi driver) includes windscreen wipers, real glass wing-mirrors, an antenna from a radio and an emblem on the bonnet. A lion (for someone of high social stature) has a sculpted spiky mane and teeth, and a carefully buffed and rounded pair of testicles. The process often takes weeks, during which time the dead awaits the completion of their custom-made receptacle at the morgue.

When ready, the coffin forms the centrepiece of the carnival-like funeral procession, which often in-

the vacuum replaced by a desire to give the person the best possible send-off in order to provide a smooth transition to the afterlife and ensure that the dead person’s living relatives are not besieged by angry spirits. The ritual was once a preserve of the rich but has become important amongst ordinary people – even though the cost of a fantasy coffin is akin to one year’s wages for an average Ghanaian, the money will be recouped by donations from villagers or wealthier relatives.

Intrigued by the possibilities offered by death, I decided to phone a Belfast funeral director to find out if such needs could be met locally;

volves hundreds of people ‘dancing’ it through the streets and throwing palm wine on it as an offering to the gods. This marks a significantly different attitude to death than we are used to in Western culture – the sombreness of the occasion is

- Hello, I’m thinking of getting my coffin made a bit early and wondered if you can do any elaborate designs or something out of the ordinary?

- There aren’t any manufacturers here who do anything like that but we work with a company called Colourful Coffins in England who can put on decorative designs in the style of racing cars and so

on. We can get them shipped over but it’s very uncommon.

- So Northern Irish funerals are quite traditional?

- Yes, very much so. It’s not really something that’s marketed or offered as a service.

- So presumably you don’t get many orders for coffins made into the shape of animals or pieces of fruit and things like that?

- No, we’ve never been asked to provide anything like that. It could be awkward because graves have to be a specific size.

- What if I stipulated in my will that I wanted to be buried inside a wooden giraffe – could you sort it out?

- Not really.

- I’m also a bit worried about being buried alive. Would you be able to fit any kind of alarm system just in case?

- That wouldn’t happen – even if you didn’t want to be embalmed for religious reasons or whatever the tests to ensure you’re dead are very thorough. I’ve been in the business 14 years and I could count the number of people who’ve

been worried about being buried alive on one hand.

- So it has come up a few times?

- Yes, there was one person in particular who wanted to be buried with a fully charged mobile phone in case they woke up.

- Pretty doubtful that they’d get any reception down there.

- Ha, yes, it was more of a comfort thing. We carried out their wishes though.

It appears that there is a gap in the market for something of this nature. Maybe a funerary service with a local flavour which deposits people in 7ft replicas of the Titanic, complete with a turbine engine, and sends them up the Lagan to be wrecked on Rita Duffy’s (as yet unrealised) iceberg. The whole thing would be functional and a good spectacle for tourists and mourners – perhaps I should write to Invest NI.

the vacuum Glenn Patterson

HOW THEY DESIGN MY BOOKS I

have only ever loved one of my book jackets at first sight: a novel called That Which Was. About six months before the envelope with the artwork arrived – about two days before the publishers had asked me, in that perfunctory way that publishers do, had I ‘any ideas’ – I had sat up in bed with a very clear image: blue, blue sky (heavens: the central character was a Presbyterian minister… I have been like that with my career, astute), a few wisps of cloud, the words That and Which and Was positioned dead centre, one above the other, and my name in orange at the bottom.

Simple. Striking. And for once when I opened the envelope the design looked exactly as I had imagined it. (It looked, I later realised, a lot like the cover of Live Peace in Toronto by the Plastic Ono Band.) The book sold abysmally.

The publishers didn’t tell me as much, they never do (a Saturday worker in Waterstone’s with access to electronic point of sale knows more about your book than you do) any more than they told me outright that they blamed the jacket, although one or two people did wonder idly (and volubly) in my presence whether blue sky and wisps of clouds let the average bookshop browser know what to expect. (This reminds me of an interview I once did for BBC2 for which I was asked to stand in front of a large UVF mural ‘so that people watching would know it was Belfast. Across the road was a piece of graffiti: ‘Big Norman is Gilbert the German.’

‘If you filmed me in front of that,’ I said, ‘people would know that was Belfast too.’ So they did, then whipped the camera round on to the UVF mural, just to be sure.)

The publishers didn’t ask me until they had done it what I thought of the paperback jacket. I thought it looked like the kind of thing a designer might do without bothering to sit up in bed, without waking up even: leeched-out colours, a

vaguely Victorian streetscape, a suggestion of ripped wallpaper.

Their argument was that they were ‘building my identity’, bringing the design for this book into line with the paperback of the previous one, Number 5 (where the ripped wallpaper at least made some sense, it being the story of the families moving in and out of – and redecorating – a Belfast house over a forty-five year period).

I thought it looked like the kind of thing a designer might do without bothering to sit up in bed, without waking up even...

The paperback That Which Was sold just as badly as the hardback.

This time instead of the cover the publishers blamed the contents.

They let me know they would not be designing any more jackets for me.

My identity stopped there.

That Which Was (they call this bit the back story) was my sixth novel, Number 5 (guess what?) my fifth. I have precious little memory of my first, Burning Your Own, published in 1988. At least I have precious little memory before the package arrived at my flat in Manchester with my eight complimentary copies. I arranged seven of them in a pile and stood one on top and took a photograph, which I still have. It shows a sensitive-looking boy, one side of his face in shadow, staring out from a pale yellow backdrop. The publishers, Chatto & Windus had earlier that year done very well with Edmund White’s This Boy’s Life, which had a similar jacket; I think – in the spirit of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ – they may have used the same designer.

For the paperback I went to another publishing house (in those days paperback rights were sold at auction) and was offered a lurid

jacket, made up of rats and flames.

I was affronted for my sensitive boy. I complained, vehemently. The publishers relented, but put the publication back by four months, from spring to the much more difficult summer market.

I decided that in future I would get my complaint, or at least my design, in early. For the next book, Fat Lad, I told the publishers what I wanted at more or less the same time as I handed them the manuscript: a painting by a Manchester artist entitled ‘Two fish follow one fish’. They told me, more or less the same time as they finished reading the manuscript, what I could have: one fish follows its own tail, which was admittedly literal (a central image in the book was a goldfish that had grown too big for its bowl), but which was, more to the point, I was sure, also cheaper.

Mind you, I thought they were being cheap keeping the same jacket for the paperback, which considering my earlier comment relating jacket changes to poor sales tells you how paranoid writers are. Paranoid

The publishers charged me £1,000 to have a libel lawyer read it then slapped an artist’s impression of Big Thunder Mountain on the jacket. and ultimately, when it comes to publishing, clueless.

Book number three, Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain (Number 5 was Number 5 in homage to a friend who referred to his novels by the order in which they had been published, including, in all seriousness, Number 2) was set in Disneyland Paris, or EuroDisney, as it then was. The publishers charged me £1,000 to have a libel lawyer read it then slapped an artist’s impression of Big Thunder Mountain on the jacket. For the paperback a

stick of dynamite was added, the fuse lit. That was possibly my second favourite jacket and – there could be a pattern here – the great reading public’s second least favourite book. Which was the end of me with that publisher too.

My next novel, The International, set mainly in a hotel bar had a jacket of a man in a jacket holding a pint of Guinness. Once I’d got over the fact that I was to have a pint of Guinness on the front of my book – at least there were no shamrocks, or balaclavas – I sort of warmed to my man, or at least to his jacket (checked, sports), under the arm of which he was holding a brown paper parcel, which, so enigmatic was his smile, I thought might have contained pork chops or body parts.

Earlier this year Blackstaff reissued The International along with Fat Lad (another take on the goldfish) and Burning Your Own (the boy restored, but less po-faced and all the better for it). The new International jacket showed an almost full ashtray on a formica table top, a beer mat with the hotel’s name just visible beneath.

Do you know what I said at the start about only loving one of my jackets at first sight? I lied.

(It’s my job.) There’s not a thing about this one I would change, unless you count wishing that one of the butts in the ashtray was mine, that bars still had ashtrays and a pint was the equivalent of three and a half pee. And we still had half pees, obviously.

Meantime another book, Once Upon a Hill has come out, with another publisher. It’s about my grandparents and their photograph appears on the cover against a backdrop of – oh, God help me – ripped wallpaper.

I might be clueless, but I recognise another pattern when I see one. Pass me the gin. Pass me The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook.

the vacuum GALLOWS LANE Brian McGilloway

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Reviews Gallows Lane Brian McGilloway Pan Books ISBN: 978-0230707696 304 pages £6.99

IN!: Northern Ireland’s Social Monthly Issue 1

Your Line or Mine Black Box every month, next show: Sunday, February 2nd

Proposition 1: Reanimation Old Museum Arts Centre Performer: Miet Warlop 18th October 2008

King Om God Star

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t’s hard to imagine summer in Strabane. Anytime that I’ve been there it’s been bitterly cold, even on my last visit in late April, and the town itself gives off the chill of one of those places left behind by the end of the troubles, unsure of its place in the, often misleading and contradictory, version of the new Northern Ireland being constructed around us. Driving past the Millennium Sculpture, which casts a shadow almost on the border itself, it’s easy to glance across at the Donegal hills and to Lifford, only a bridge away in another country, and naively create a different atmosphere, an entirely different air.

Gallows Lane both confirms and confounds these preconceptions about place. Brian McGilloway’s second book is, like the first, set in the hinterland of West Tyrone and East Donegal. The novel opens as a career criminal, jailed in the North, walks over the bridge to Lifford, but this is no tale in which the hangover of Northern violence infects Donegal’s pastoral idyll. McGilloway’s county is indeed beautiful, a watercolour wash of green hills and thunderhead clouds, but it’s also a place of menace, hucksters, tawdry clubs, and a host of characters for whom the border is not a political imposition, but an opportunity to slip between the lines of justice.

The ‘other’ Donegal is perfectly captured in the opening outrage.

When a young woman’s body is discovered, bloody and half-naked, on the cold concrete floor of a gaudy ‘Executive’ new-build, the local property developer can only remark, ‘Jesus, we’ll never sell them now.’

The garda charged with investigating Karen Doherty’s murder, which then gives rise to a series of subsequent deaths, is Inspector Benedict Devlin. His voice dominates the narrative.

Although not quite dark enough to be described as an antihero, Devlin is nevertheless a recognizable crime fiction archetype in that he is a study in the way good intentions often lead to a series of small betrayals – of family, friends and colleagues – some of which have potentially devastating consequences. He’s a finely drawn character, in many ways a mundane one, in the best sense – as concerned with his application for a promotion and distracted by intra-station rivalry, by turns, as finding the thread, and thereby the perpetrators, of the series of murders and assaults which structure the book. Many of Devlin’s acquaintances are similarly rendered and flawed, from Costello, his boss, to his PSNI counterpart in Strabane, and

the Reverend Charles Bardwell, a Northern minister who enjoys the company of ex-prisoners just a little too much.

The novel lapses into jarring melodrama in a few places – the convict whose border crossing opens the story meets an operatic end at odds with the quotidian genesis of his crime – while the writer also underestimates just how much media attention such a series of murders in a small locale would bring.

Given the enduring interest in violent death, the events described would mean satellite trucks descending on Lifford in their droves, yet there’s barely a radio microphone in the book.

These are, however, minor faults.

McGilloway is a fine writer with an eye for proletarian and believable detail. He manages the uneasy balance between event and place very well, creates an empathetic narrative voice, and Gallows Lane is impressively far removed from some of the rootin’ tootin’, laughing and shooting romps which have passed for local crime fiction in recent years. McGilloway convinces in creating a Donegal badlands; the real challenge, one imagines, will come when he ventures farther from home.

Robbie Meredith

IN!: Northern Ireland’s Social Monthly Issue 1

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OXIC PORK ALERT! No, not the crisis over dioxins in animal feed threatening Ireland’s pig industry with collapse. More of a warning, really, about the new ‘lifestyle’ publication to launch itself – all breathless self-congratulation and gushing exclamation marks!!!!!! – on the provincial populace. It was only a matter of time, after all, before we got our own celebrity magazine, eulogising the home-grown ‘successful people’. I expect it’s all part of the conspiracy to airbrush our statelet, hoovering off the detritus of a grubby war and painting on a new, bright, shiny, shopper-friendly face. As the stench and rumble of the Troubles recedes, we’re being forcibly Botoxed by the braying PR people.

Soon, we’ll have to turn towards Victoria Square (shopping mecca) five times a day. And remember, it’s not the Lisburn Road, it’s ‘Little Knightsbridge’. We’re living the dream now, ok?

So anyway, here we are, voluptuously primed for our own wee version of Hello! – lying all Danaë to the Stars, so to speak – and we have been amply rewarded.

IN! is a small-scale, local homage to the global celebrity ass-kissing behemoth. So instead of Angelina Jolie cooing over her multi-ethnic

offspring, we have chunky Eamonn Holmes smugly dandling his missus on his knee. We have Rangers footballer Kyle Lafferty and his fiancée Tori Smith, ‘loved up … talking about their feelings for each other … sharing details of their £1.2 million home’. While madam minxily bares her small sharp teeth, young Kyle squints fearfully at the camera, trying hard to concentrate. Fake snow falls thickly like dandruff as the couple model winter-wear from House of Fraser.

Yes, they have truly arrived now.

It goes without saying that former Miss Northern Ireland and ex-Blue Peter presenter Zoe Salmon is cover-girl. Good old Salmonflaps (definitively named by sometime Vacuum reviewer Stephen Mullan), resplendent in shocking pink, pouts provocatively and tells avid readers of her plans to conquer America. She also responds to an irksome little gaffe she made earlier. When presenting Blue Peter, Bangor-born Salmon-flaps chose the red hand of Ulster as her favourite symbol for a ‘best of British’ logo to be used by British Airways to decorate a Boeing 757.

(You know, I can see that Upper Newtownards Road chic carried right through to the cabin crew’s uniforms, yeah? A black balaclava, yeah, and a red hand badge on the blazer, with the wee drips of blood at the bottom picked out in scarlet diamante? Classy.) Now Zoe says, ‘throughout the controversy it was brilliant to see Northern Ireland unite and support me through it’.

Yup, we were all behind you babes.

A nation once again. Or something.

Of course, IN! also contains loads of interchangeable women with ironed blonde hair at charity nights, getting a bit tweedy at the races and whooping it up in electric blue lace at the James Bond premiere at the Odyssey. There are sweet, clean, rich little lads from the Gold Coast, simpering girlishly at their first formal.

There are leathery matrons in animal-print fake fur. You know the bland, fawning, obsequious score.

These are the ‘successful people’, laid out on the glossy page for our envious delectation. Eat up now.

But I’m full, stuffed, can’t take any more. Salmon-flaps, forgive me.

I’m all porked out.

Jabes Branderham

YOUR LINE OR MINE Black Box

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ver the bastard child of the week’s social calendar, Sunday evenings have never been so doggedly inhospitable. With Top Gear lamentably but a few weeks run away from the end of its current season and the rest of Sunday night television a smorgasbord of donkey balls, there has never been a

the vacuum better time to pour scorn upon the hangover, to put down the Chinese takeaway menu and get the bloody hell out of the house. And so, with Match of the Day 2 offering ambivalent solace in the form of extended highlights of mid-table mediocrity, I hopped on a bus and made my way to The Black Box for an evening of improvised comedy.

I hoped it would instigate an endorphin discharge gushing enough to set me up for another week chained behind a counter, serving the increasingly brutal ChristmasBug-infected general public.

Your Line or Mine, is the monthly ‘fast-paced, laugh-aminute, rapturous improvised comedy show’ from the London-based Abandon theatre company. As I entered I noticed a poster which carried the warning, ‘Caution: May contain nuts’. Taking to the stage with a gusto akin to that of amphetamine-juiced Saturday morning TV presenters, the quintet of performers (two of whom were locals) punched the air, jumped about, whooped and pretty much insisted from the get-go that everyone in the building was to have a really quite wonderful evening of side-splitting humour and laugh-a-minute thrills and spills. And quicker than you could holler ‘Are you all having a good time!?’ the first of the ‘improvs’ began.

Highbrow this was not. ‘This is not our show ladies and gentlemen.

This is your show!’ came the bellowed introduction, a statement so profoundly loaded with the possibilities of ensuing carnage that I felt my bowels loosen a little. ‘Tonight, you choose the subject matter. We perform the scenes’. This is pretty standard fare, as anyone who has seen Channel 4’s Whose Line Is It Anyway can testify, and in the capable hands of top drawer comedians, it really can produce some fantastic comedy. However, once you open the floor to a room full of people, who by all accounts are out on the piss, as a performer you’re going to be very lucky if you manage to stay clear of anything not relating to sex, farts or mild/abrasive homophobia. So commenced a series of sketches on subject matters such as, ‘Cowboy Strippers’, ‘Boy George’s Radiator’ and ‘Olympic Masturbating’.

This type of thing works very well in student unions and late at night in the bowels of fringe festivals, I’m sure; give an eighteen year old man-boy two hours of farting and he will grant you his undivided discipleship, but there is only so much of this stuff I can stomach. In truth, the performers were very capable and it would be wrong of me to say they weren’t quick on their feet, but I can’t imagine their shows vary an awful lot. ‘So what’s Simon’s special super power going to be

then?’: 9 times out of 10 someone’s going to shout, ‘Having a big aul wank!’, and you can be damn sure they’ll be the one shouting louder than anybody else. Maybe fill the audience with bookish Will Self readers and the people on stage may be forced to extend their repertoire (on second thoughts, that’s a terrible idea).

The oddest thing about the whole occasion, however, was the peculiar scoring system, a type of self-congratulatory, selfregulating scoreboard: at the end of each sketch the audience was asked to score the performance as either ‘Bronze’, ‘Silver’, ‘Gold’, or – one would assume rarely attainable – ‘Legendary’.

Not so. ‘Boy George’s Radiator’ (the first sketch of the evening) went straight in at the top spot.

Apparently we all thought it was worthy of remembrance, though I can’t quite recall anyone save for the people on stage having too much of a say in the matter. (Not that an audience does when the voting system is that of the Butlins’ holiday camp rep ‘shout loud if you like this thing more’ variety.)

It all came and went, and with the performers on stage noticeably exhausted (they had been jumping around for two hours like children on an unsupervised trip to the Angel Delight factory), the show wrapped up. Yes indeed, it may well have contained nuts, but it was mostly balls and had way too many dick jokes. Thank God for BBC iPlayer.

Peter McCloskey

PROPOSITION 1: REANIMATION Old Museum Arts Centre

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lace in front of a child a disparate collection of toy figurines, and within moments each one will have been assigned voices, actions, relationships, and stories: the natural reaction is to bring these static figures to life, to animate the inanimate.

Indeed, as children, this animation and creation through play is our primary form of enjoyment and entertainment. As children, we prefer to entertain ourselves, but as we get older, entertainment sadly becomes something we expect to be done to us, hence the frighteningly popular statement, ‘I go to the theatre/go to the cinema/ read books to be entertained.’

Those who attended Miet Warlop’s Proposition 1: Reanimation at the OMAC with this expectation, will most likely have been left cold and confused. The piece unfolds without words, and without actors, the only real human beings in the space being Warlop and the audience. Instead, the narrative is presented only through the inanimate figures that Warlop

constructs by putting clothes on to chairs, wire frames and balloons.

Once or twice, she physically moves the figures, throwing a body across a table or putting a child’s hand to its mouth in shock at witnessing a couple having sex.

For the most part, though, the images she creates are static and deliberately ambiguous – in leaving them free of her own impositions, she leaves her audience free to make their own. For example, in draping a long skirt over a chair so that it sits on the ground with two shoes underneath, soles facing upwards, we are presented with the unmistakeable pose of a woman kneeling; but, as soon as an upright pair of black trousers are placed directly in front of her, we begin to make assumptions – is this woman kneeling in submission, in prayer, or in a sexual act?

The creation of images that need completion invites us to bring them to life ourselves, gives our imaginations the space to animate, to play.

The silence, unhurried pace and precision with which Warlop constructs each scene creates a meditative atmosphere, and once each new image has been constructed, she steps aside to give it the time and space to breathe. Her movements are free of any style or affectation, and there is little sense of her being a performer of any kind, rather an architect of scenes whose doors are left open for us to meander into and explore – something which, at the end of the piece, we were able to do quite literally, with the stage left resembling an art installation and the artist having disappeared from sight.

Her presence throughout could in fact be compared to the presence, or non-presence, of an architect in a completed building – the frameworks having been constructed, the audience is free to move inside them and make them live.

Warlop’s ‘proposition’, then, may be interpreted to be that the audience, rather than being thought of as ‘spectators’, are more accurately conceived of as ‘animators’, or ‘reanimators’. Her aim seems to be to bring us to that awareness, presenting us with a series of ‘stills’ which inevitably mean little until they are interpreted and given action by us, the animators. The notion of the consumer as passive entertainment beneficiary is challenged – in Reanimation, the artist throws the figures on the floor, into the space, and the audience is allowed to give them whatever life they can imagine. Understandably, due to the widespread expectation that theatre must provide spectacle through memorable characters, narratives, as well as visual, aural and verbal brilliance, Warlop’s proposition may leave some audience members unimpressed. For others, though,

her suggestion that we – as audience members – are capable of something more than incapacitated spectatorship will feel refreshing and empowering, and her invitation to us to create our own characters, stories and voices through imaginative play, is both exciting and relieving, particularly in a city which is in such desperate need of stimulating and progressive theatre.

Cormac Brown

GOD STA T R TA King Om

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t is not clear when King Om’s album God Star was released. It contains some of the same tracks featured on his first album, Om, released in 1968, including a reworking of ‘Hey Alethia I want you’. I think it has been in circulation since the 1970s and has been reworked and rereleased since.

I’m sure it has been reviewed many times before, but only recently have I had the opportunity of listening to it. A major work, it is a sizable album containing, in its most recent form, with bonus track, fourteen songs referred to on the cover as ‘super chill out rock folk country blues’. Included are the tracks Hey Alethia honest Ulster Girl, May Freud and Ulster give you everything, Hot Dog Hound Dog Zero cholesterol homage to Elvis. The songs fluctuate in quality, both in content and production. This means as a whole album, it is difficult to review so I have focused on three songs, starting with the anti suicide song ‘Chill out anti suicide song’, which contains positive lines such as ‘You’re alive don’t do it, deep inside love your life, come join the scene, deep inside don’t go hide, the world needs your honest face.’ I believe this song is genuine and feel that during its many years of circulation if it even slightly swayed somebody’s choice on the matter then it is a force for good and to be commended.

The second song that appeals to me is ‘To Diana in Heaven’ a song about Princess Diana, with lyrics such as ‘You’re so cool I’m so bold, sweet Diana I’ve been told, I want to kiss your lips and pray, I don’t care what the papers say. I love the star dust in your genes, bright and beautiful like the Queen’s’. The song reminds me of one of my favourite murals in Belfast, in the Shankill estate, of a heart shaped union jack, nearly full gable size, featuring a wonkyeyed Lady Di, Queen of our Hearts, painted in sausage-meat-coloured paint. King Om shares a close bond with the princess, and this affectionate and intimate song does capture the beautiful union and forbidden love between two great

the vacuum humanitarians of our time. The sheer honesty of the song is very moving indeed.

Even all these years after its release the song that remains current and is most significant and personal to me is ‘Nurse Nightingale Righteous Royal Reggae.’ Featuring lyrics such as ‘She works in nursing homes with hospital doctors, Kiss me full on the mouth on the full moon in my mango dream, my Bangor princess I know my love has touched you’ … ‘how’s about you and me having a candle lit dinner at the Crawfordsburn Inn at sun set’ … ‘I want you to share four mangos with me on top of Slieve Donard’. He talks about places I can relate to: I have often enjoyed eating things on top of Slieve Donard, especially mini Mars Bars, and the best chilli sauce I have ever tasted was mango based, so I think he might be on to something and a man after my own heart is definitely someone who appreciates the finer things in life.

In fact, the reason the album came to my attention is mango related. The album was first played to me by my girlfriend Catherine.

It was presented to her while she was at work in a local gallery by no less than the esteemed King Om himself. With consideration grace and unparalleled compassion

he informed her that she was to eat mangos with him, but before fertilizing her with his virile seed she was to prepare herself for his superior genes by eating fresh fruit and vegetables with a strong mango theme. Anyone allowed to bear his son had to be in perfect health. He went to Tesco’s and bought her a bounty of purifying health and vitamins. (To be the chosen one was not to be taken lightly. One of his previous chosen hosts to be bestowed with this honour was Julia Roberts. He met her when she was a fresh faced waitress, barely nineteen, working in the pizzeria, Mystic Pizza.

After serving him a slice of heaven he painted her portrait which was magnificent, and naturally she was bowled over with infatuation and ready to bear his child. So this was an honour of great magnitude.)

Preparations needed to be made, but just what is a girl to do with so many mango and soya products?

There just are not enough days in the week. And this horticultural treasure was not without conditions, as highlighted on the back of his album cover: ‘It is taboo for a neo-girl on our scene to wear perfume which contains musk or civet extract, cruelly extracted by beating the gentle animal until death, it is taboo to eat white bread, white sugar, artificially

coloured foods, all flesh, fish, fowl.’

His love that knows no bounds was even extended to myself and whether or not I deserved it. I was granted the privilege of waiting down stairs while King Om, The Messiah, Jesus Christ the second, Parousia, His Majesty William St. Patrick Cecil McCartney, Cecil B. De Millennium, of the Supreme Galactic Government, president, prophet, priest and King of our sweet planet earth, shared the privilege of his God seed with Catherine the chosen one.

Touched and humbled by such compassion and kindness from a man of his standing I was of course eternally grateful, but I admit that I am only human and have weaknesses, like any man. Nobody is perfect and I won’t lie to you, a wave of jealousy swept over me, for if only I was ten years younger and female it would be me, soon to be lying up there, on His Majesty’s bed, like Jane Austen, short of breath, filled with butterflies, in anticipation of the messiah’s varicose-veined semi, prematurely retching its curdled pensioner man muck over my milky white torso, as I gazed longingly up to his red gurning face slobbering down upon my bright eyes.

And finally...

THE APPLE SHOP When I recently went into the new Apple shop in Belfast to buy a charger for an iPod I began to feel like I was in a villain’s command room on the set of a James Bond film. Amidst all the gleaming surfaces and expensive gadgetry I was looking around for a till & couldn’t see one. I asked one of the wandering androids where it was and he smirked in a ‘welcome to the future’ kind of way, pointing at the swipe machine hung around his neck. I informed him that I didn’t have a card and wanted to pay cash and he looked at me as if I was an alien infiltrator, trying to undermine his precious hi-tech society with my antiquated concepts like actual physical money. I was then dispatched to a special area upstairs where it took them about 10 minutes to sort it out. Idiots.

Jason Mills

Nicholas Keogh

JULIAN ARGÜELLES TRIO Julian Argüelles (Eng): saxophones Michael Formanek (US): double bass Tom Rainey (US): drums

BELFAST: BLACK BOX, HILL STREET Saturday 31st January 2009, 8.00pm Tickets: £12/£8 available from Belfast Welcome Centre 028 9024 6609 or online at www.movingonmusic.co.uk ‘Argüelles has emerged as one of the most consistently absorbing players to come from the new British jazz surge’ Kenny Mathieson, The List

RACHEL UNTHANK & THE WINTERSET

Rachel Unthank: voice, feet and cello Becky Unthank: voice and feet Niopha Keegan: violin, accordion and voice Stef Conner: piano and voice BELFAST: BLACK BOX, HILL STREET Sunday 8th February 2009, 8.00pm Tickets: £12/£8 available from Belfast Welcome Centre 028 9024 6609 or online from www.movingonmusic.co.uk ‘The “too folking good” award for transcending genre: Rachel Unthank & the Winterset.’

Kitty Empire The Observer, December 2008

NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION!

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, QFT will screen both parts of Steven Soderbergh’s new Che Guevara epic back to back – for one night only – from 6.30pm on Thursday 1st January 2009.

Tickets priced £14/£12.50 QFT Members and concessions from www.queensfilmtheatre.com New Year’s Revolution!

Thurs 1st Jan 2009 Che Part One at QFT Fri 2nd – Thurs 15th Jan Che Part Two at QFT Fri 20th Feb – Thurs 5th March

‘The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.’

Che Guevara

Queen’s Film Theatre, 20 University Square, Belfast BT7 1PA.

Out to Lunch Arts Festival Cathedral Quarter 2 -25 January 2009 Linton Kwesi Johnson Billy Childish Owen O’Neill Duke Special Cara Dillon Shappi Khorsandi

www.cqaf.com

Maeve Higgins Craig Hill Broken Family Band Dick Gaughan Sandy Denny Night Joe Boyd

Simon Hoggart Ivan Brackenbury Christine Tobin Zöe Conway and more