But Lately There Ain't Been Much Work, On Account of the Economy...

It was hard not to think of Bruce Springsteen while watching Prime Time’s rather devastating program on the current parlous state of the Irish economy last night. The initial please-please-please don’t let it happen to us hopes of a soft landing have no given way to the grim reality that it isn’t so much a soft landing as stepping off a cliff, and we still don’t know just how much further we have to fall.

RTÉ have the show online, and you can see it at the Prime Time site here. There’s a nice opening montage of images to the tune of (unless I’m very much mistaken) Ella singing Just One of those Things, and then Donagh Diamond gives us the facts. Miriam O’Callaghan interviews five guests in total between the VT, only one of whom is predicting any sort of growth in her industry in the coming year at all. Sadly, she’s in the St Vincent de Paul. It’s all very frightening.

An Spailpín Fánach was in the new shopping centre in Longford last week, on his way back to Dublin after a sad visit to the county Mayo. Longford shopping centre doesn’t get the same ink as Dundrum or Liffey Valley, but it’s as indicative of the Celtic Tiger as any other, because there was never, never, business done in Longford bar horse trading and slashing. And during the boom the population of Longford grew for what must be the first time ever, and they were able to build a shopping centre with lots of chi-chi little outlets selling shoes and accessories and other, likewise, items.

I was there at half-five on Wednesday, and all I saw were the shopgirls leaning on their counters, staring out the door where the shoppers used to enter, but don’t anymore. Things will be worse before they’re better I’m afraid. The cold wind of reality is sweeping through the country now, and it has some devastation left to wreak yet.

And a very happy bank holiday weekend to you all.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, politics, celtic tiger, Prime Time, Longford

Live in Dublin: Bruce Springsteen with the Sessions Band

As this miserable summer drizzles on, the nation could do a lot worse than to give itself a quick taste of last winter, and invest twenty yo-yos or so in Bruce Springsteen with Sessions Band: Live in Dublin. It’s well worth the money.

Springsteen has had to carry the mantle of being the future of rock and roll for over thirty years. The remarkable thing is that not only has Springsteen successfully carried that mantle, he’s lived up to and surpassed it long ago. Springsteen has hewn his own place in the history of American popular music, and his Live in Dublin double CD is as significant a record as any he’s released in his career.

Springsteen has never been afraid to follow his own lights rather than commercial imperatives. He’s always been aware of where his music has come from, as evidenced by the regular presence of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land in his live set in the seventies and eighties. Early last year, after returning to form with the release of The Rising in 2002, Springsteen decided to fully address his folk roots with the release of We Shall Overcome last year, which featured a specially assembled band to showcase Springsteen’s tribute to the folk and gospel records to which he grew up in the sixties.

Marvellous and all as We Shall Overcome is, the band hadn’t been that long assembled. They had six months of hard practice under the Boss by the time they took the stage in the Point Depot in November of last year and were all set to rock the night, which is exactly what they proceeded to do.

The press reaction here was muted, which was a pity; sometimes one wonders if they Irish cultural media are capable of discovering anything that they haven’t been directly spoonfed by Mr Walsh or his ilk. But now Springsteen himself has released a live record of those two shows in the Point, and what a remarkable achievement that release is. For the Springsteen back catalogue, it’s like another face was carved into Mount Rushmore and nobody noticed. No matter; they soon will, and won’t quickly forget.

The single most remarkable thing about Live in Dublin is just how many disparate stands of American music Springsteen gathers and unifies. We Shall Overcome was very much a child of the Pete Seeger folk boom of the sixties; listening to it one could almost smell the coffee, cheap wine and weed. But Live in Dublin gives Springsteen a bigger canvas, and it’s one he has the big band – fifteen musicians – fill to the last square inch with hillbilly, folk, rock and roll, jazz, bebop and that single strand that is uniquely Springsteen himself.

This is a man that clearly thinks a lot about his music, and it shows. He is able to combine musical genres on Live in Dublin that, in their own environments, were mortal enemies. Springsteen looks to his back catalogue – especially Nebraska, interestingly enough – and reinvents such canonical Springsteen classics as Atlantic City and Blinded by the Light. What with Bob Dylan in latter years has been strictly self-indulgence here becomes a complete new lease of life, showing just from how many wells Springsteen has fed his muse.

Open All Night is the record’s tour de force. On Nebraska, it’s another Springsteen-on-the-Highway track. On Live in Dublin, it’s eight minutes of swinging bebop, boogie woogie piano, stellar scat singing from the Sessionettes and an all-around stompin’ and swingin’ good time. Bruce Springsteen is American music. Treat yourself.





Technorati Tags: Culture, Music, Bruce Springsteen, Live in Dublin