One Man's Electric Picnic is Another Man's Electric Chair

An Spailpín Fánach is a left hand thread in a right hand world.

All across Ireland tonight, An Spailpín Fánach’s generation will be getting themselves ready for the Electric Picnic, a boutique pop music event that is taking place outside Stradbally, County Laois, this weekend. In a field outside Stradbally, County Laois.

Tonight, ladies will hang up their kitten heels and root under the stairs for their Wellingtons. Wellingtons that cost sixty lids and are painted in tropes more psychedelic than is common back at the mart, but wellies nonetheless. Gentlemen, knights gallant of the practical sex, will take the tent out of its bag and count pegs, check groundsheets and make sure the mallet is packed and ready for violence against the pegs and the earth.

And on the northside of Dublin, in the House of Books and Spiders that is his lair and refuge, An Spailpín Fánach will reflect, once again, that these people are shelling out serious wedge in a recession to spend two or three nights outdoors, in a field. In the rain. What in damnation is the matter with them?

Some people say it’s the music. Music that makes staying in a field in Ireland in September worthwhile hasn’t been written, baby. And if it has, it hasn’t been written by the bagels who will strum a moody Rickenbacker at the Electric Picnic.

An Spailpín Fánach rather liked the Fleet Foxes album but, being both old and musically literate enough to be familiar with all four of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, it was hard indeed to listen to the Fleet Foxes album and not get an overpowering sense of Déjà Vu. And that was while domiciled in one’s own property. As opposed to sleeping in a field. In September. In Ireland.

An Spailpín Fánach can understand the appeal of the Electric Picnic, or Oxegen before it, for young people. It’s worth sleeping in a field if you’re a young person because Mammy and Daddy won’t be there, which means everything else is gravy after that fine start.

The problem for An Spailpin’s Fánach’s generation is that An Spailpín Fánach’s generation are Mammy and Daddy. They have no damn business sleeping in fields. There is nothing left to prove. You can afford gigs where you can retire to a bed at night, and enjoy hot water and flush toilets in the morning.

But An Spailpín Fánach is out of step. The culture now views grown adults cavorting in fields in the rain as some sort of – God, I don’t know, Green Party voters' sabbat I suppose. Have you seen that ad for tea on the television, where Grandmamma remarks to a young lady that one’s clothes didn’t get dirty at the rock concert in Grandmamma’s day because, darling, one simply didn’t wear any.

Are An Spailpín Fánach’s judgemental lips the only ones that cry “you dirty old slapper!” at Granny when that ad is on the telly?

Sigh.

There used to be a notion of the march of progress. Man evolves from the apes, makes tools, use the tools to make shelter, lives in shelter, learns how to eat sushi, pretends to like the absurdist theatre of Samuel Beckett, and so on. There are very few things that make reversing that evolutionary stream worthwhile, and sleeping outside of shelter, in a field, in Ireland, in September, in the rain is not one of those few things. And, God love him, neither is Damien Dempsey.







Technorati Tags: Ireland, culture, music, Electric Picnic

An Spailpín Fánach's Farewell to Music

I don’t listen to music very much anymore. I certainly don’t buy it. I’ve been moving house lately, and as I pack up the CDs and go through them I look at the odd one and think “why in God’s name did I buy this crap?” And then the invariable answer comes – because I read in a magazine that it was cool.

I name and shame: Trout Mask Replica, by Captain Beefheart. Forget everything you read – it’s garbage. There is no other word.

I used to buy a lot of music, and then, slowly, I began to find that there was less and less stuff I wanted to listen to. Once you’ve caught up on the classics – Stones, Who, Beatles, you know yourself – you find that the current crop doesn’t really measure up. Is there any record that sounds quite as revolutionary as Astral Weeks or Forever Changes still does? And it’s been forty years since those records were made. No progress in forty years - two generations, at least - is not a great sign.

It’s doubly disappointing when you realise that the so-called classics don’t stand the test of time that well either. There will always be revolutionary artistic endeavour, like the two I’ve mentioned already, but there’s nothing to revolutionary about something that was influential forty years ago. After forty years, the revolution becomes the establishment. In his marvellous series on Twenty Century Greats, Howard Goodall pointed out just how revolutionary the Beatles were, but I remember when the DEC VAX computers were the cat’s pyjamas but I don’t get the vapours today at my amazing home wireless internet access. It’s just part of the wallpaper now. Ozimandias, King of Kings…

Some of An Spailpín’s friends are fluttering with anticipation at the prospect of attending the Electric Picnic (or Siamsa Cois Laoi 3.0, if you like) this weekend. It must be a lifestyle thing. I looked at the list of bands playing and was able to file them all under two species; who the hell are they, and I thought they were dead. If most of that bunch were playing in the back garden not only would I draw the curtains, but I’d seal up the windows as well, just in case, nasty old humbug that I am.

A friend of the blog was shocked last week when I told him I don’t listen to music anymore. It’s not so much that I don’t listen to it, as that I don’t look to it for the same meaning I once did. Music is still vital to him (although he’d a be longshot to be seen at the Picnic as well, I might add), but for me the magic is broken. I liked the Kaiser Chiefs last year, but when I see that their songs are being performed better currently by bubblegum pop acts like Lily Allen and Girls Aloud, well, a man tends to see them for what they are.

“Cabaret music” used to be the rock and rollers’ great sneer to the squares – Paul A. Rothschild refused to produce The Doors’ LA Woman because it was “cocktail music.” Now, the insult has no frisson anymore; in fact, if you are entertaining this weekend, I’m quite sure a spin of LA Woman while the digestifs are being served will go down terribly well. We are all into cocktail music now – has anybody seen Snorah Jones’ record sales lately?

Besides, rock and roll is past its sell by date. Sinatra sang saloon songs for grown-ups; it’s hard to take Mick Jagger seriously when he sings “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” for an audience who are thinking “I Can’t Get No (Nursing Home) Subvention.” The Sinatra era is dead as well, as people have lost the art of both writing and appreciating that sort of urbane, sophisticated lyric and melody. Wicked was the big Broadway hit musical last year, but the songs are, uniformly, very middling indeed. Send in the Clowns? Don’t bother, they’re here.

Bono likes to tell us that rock and roll can save the world. Well Paul, it’s had half a century now since Bill Haley first rocked around the clock – how do you think it’s doing so far? Any stir?

Freddie Mercury had it figured from the start. Freddie knew that this crack about rock and roll saving the world was all blather. “My songs are like Bic razors,” he said. “For fun, for modern consumption. You listen to it, like it, discard it, then on to the next. Disposable pop.”

Good old Freddie. He knew that life is a cabaret. He put on a show, but he never claimed them to be any different to the ones George Formby used to do at Blackpool pier in the 1930s. Nothing wrong with George, and enough right with him not to pretend to be anything he’s not. As for the rest of the shapers, well, we’ll have to wait and see. Enjoy the picnic if you’re going, but try not to join any movements or cults. And to end on a happy note, here’s Freddie singing one of those disposable pop songs, one of An Spailpín’s own favourites (the hopeless old softy), Love of My Life. And isn’t it interesting to note that, as Freddie’s voice soars and he leads the singalong, there’s no emotion there at all? Freddie knew what he was doing alright. God have mercy on him.





Technorati Tags: culture, music, Electric Picnic, Freddie Mercury