Twelfth-mas decorations

Taken last night on my Lady’s Road

11th, 12th…13th!

Squeezing past shopping trolleys in Connswater on Friday you’d think there was an impending nuclear disaster, so keen were people to get everything in before the 12th holidays. Yet given the decisions by many Belfast traders to remain open this holiday, Tesco’s will only be shut for one day (Monday)!

The 11th July bonfires and 12 July parades have each been bumped forward a day for religious(!) reasons and as I write this some palettes are being transported along our road as final preparations are made for Sunday night. (Xetera – your photos of Belfast life will be sorely missed)

Since moving back over to East Belfast  five years ago I’ve looked forward to attending the big bonfire on the N’ards Road and the expectation that goes with it. I’m no apologist for the anti-social behaviour (I hate that term) and naked sectarianism that too often accompanies the 11th night, but despite its flaws this must surely be one of the few remaining examples of grass-roots community expression in Western Europe.

Last week during the 1 July parade an English friend was amazed at the turn-out along the road, saying that there was nothing like this back in her home town. To me it feels at times like a sad, self-loathing celebration, of a culture and system for which these communities have been despised for following, and yet have failed to benefit from themselves.

It’s a very different atmosphere to the celebrations in Newtownards, where the bonfires were isolated in each of the housing estates so comings and goings were more noticeable, although there have been major strides there with Council-sponsored bonfire management programmes. Community activists deserve huge credit for their attempts to make these celebrations more family-orientated and less damaging to the environment.

I guess there’s a fair bit of cultural tourism to the East Belfast bonfire too, as I always hear a few unusual accents there, and the traffic suggests that some still make an annual trip in from the leafier suburbs. Anyway, here’s hoping that Sunday night is a safe one for all involved as critical eyes will again be focussed on Protestant working-class areas.

Bill Mallonee/Victory Garden – Permafrost

I’ve recently been listening to a lot of Bill Mallonee and Vigilantes of Love again, this album in particular.

Much has been written about Bill’s genius as a singer/songwriter but this has never been fully recognised in terms of sales. Recent years have seen him fall below or near the poverty line while he continues to eke out a living as a travelling artist across America. All the more amazing then that he still manages to produce quality full-band albums  like “Permafrost,” released in 2007.

Only 500 copies of this album were pressed (proud to say I own one of them), and it really is like a Greatest hits in terms of encompassing all that’s good about Bill’s work. I love the pedal steel and Beatles-esque guitar breaks throughout, and its great to hear a female backing vocal again. Sometimes his lyrics are so brutally honest they can be difficult to listen to, but they are wrapped up in fantastic arrangements here. The song, “Threadbare” in particular contains some of his most painful lines:

“if i had more faith if i’d given more love
read better books maybe done the right drugs
the scrape of the blister across the ragged landscape of despair
leaves you all threadbare.”

But then there are shafts of light like the chorus of “Flowers”

“we all need new beginnings
the first steps make you better
maybe you’re just a prayer away
from getting your shit together.”

All of Bill’s solo and Vigilantes of Love albums are available to download from www.volsounds.com. You can download his 1995 album “Blister Soul” free for a taste. If you’re into Dylan,  Neil Young or even The Replacements you’ll be hooked. I hope he’s able to make a visit over here again soon.

Bad! Invincible! Dangerous! off the Wall!

When I was 11 years old I won two tickets for Michael Jackson’s Dangerous tour in Dublin. My dad couldn’t get off work to take me down to the concert so I sold the tickets and bought Sonic the hedgehog for the Sega Master System instead.

Looking back it was kind of a like-for-like swap – I’m sure for many of my peers as well the cult of Michael Jackson was as much a part of childhood as Sega, Pepsi, and Saturday morning cartoons.

He visualised music and galvanised music television through his groundbreaking videos, and his cartoonish persona meant that for many of us our first tapes or LPs were Michael Jackson albums. One of the first times I heard a Beatles song was when Jackson did a cover of”Come Together.”

My mate Stu could do a pretty decent moonwalk back then. Hearing the guitar riff from “Black or White” still makes me smile, as it reminds me of countless summer holiday afternoons spent in his front room practicing.

His musical legacy? He definitely has created one, regardless of what music critics say. The Jackson Five’s “I Want you Back” has got to be one of the most uplifting pieces of pop music ever created. The era most familiar to me was the clatter and bang of the “Bad” album and the less successful “Dangerous.” The quality of his songs, and the man’s vocals, matched with Quincy Jones’ flawless production, made his music addictive. I think he may well have been the greatest entertainer of his age. The impact of his music on breaking down racial barriers in popular culture can’t be underestimated.

It’s sad that a generation has grown up that now only knows Jackson for the allegations that have dogged him since 1993. Apparently google nearly crashed due to the online buzz around his death – how much does the celebrity gossip industry owe its current media domination to figures like him?

When I sold those tickets I thought I’d maybe get to see Michael Jackson when I was older, yet soon after the allegations started his life really went downhill sharper and he was basically finished. Guess I stopped listening to his music regularly when britpop and all that hit the scene too, yet I still find myself looking for Michael Jackson stories two days after he died. Maybe its the need for some twisted nostalgia-comfort fix now that life as an adult is more complex in general, or just another sign that I’m getting older and don’t want to.

NI hatred addicts anonymous

There’s been a lot of sanctimonious guff spoken this week about the racist attacks in Belfast.

The most sensible commentary I’ve read so far has come from the Alliance Party’s Ian Parsley, on his blog.

Here are his concluding comments, which I spotted on slugger:

The fact is that too many communities in Northern Ireland are totally ignored – by the media, by our political leaders, by our “influential” classes – until they do something which impacts upon those who do not have to live in them. It is no surprise, therefore, that sectarianism and racism continue to be so poisonous – and it is those shouting loudest about them who need to remember they have the toughest choices to make to stop the contamination.

Weekend in Glasgow

Many previous trips to Glasgow have been work-related, involving visits to housing developments and community projects across the city, so it was a pleasure to spend a few days as a tourist. Lisa wanted to visit some friends and family so I was happy to tag along for the ride.

We stayed with the Lenny Henry-owned Premier Inn chain at Charing Cross and spent most of Saturday and Sunday on foot round the city centre. Stumbled across an excellent vegan restaurant called Mono, also a music venue and record store. Its range of CDs and vinyl was unbelievable, and in a previous life I would have cleared that place out! As the husband of a most-of-the-time vegan, have to say the food was good too.

Record shops aside (and Fopp is as good as ever), its a sign of how for Belfast has come that almost all the big name stores in Glasgow now also reside over here. Although Glasgow city centre is also pound shop heaven and I hope that particular retail phenomenon doesn’t  catch on here as rapidly. On Saturday night we saw Terminator: Salvation, which was much better than I was expecting. Fully expect Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen to blow it out of the water later this week though.

On Sunday morning we took a walk through Glasgow Green to visit the People’s Palace, a refreshingly honest social history of Glasgow, considering it’s council-funded. Sadly our local politics is still too divided to make a similar museum a reality for Belfast. Fernhill House, the museum of the Shankill, was probably the closest we’ve got. The People’s Palace wasn’t high-tech or ultra-interactive but full of accessible information.

We celebrated our glorious fourth wedding anniversary on Sunday evening with a meal at the Ubiquitous Chip restaurant. Hey if it’s good enough for Kylie, Jay-Z and Orlando Bloom…

Monday was a train journey up the west coast to Helensburgh to visit Lisa’s aunt. We went for lunch at the Drovers Inn, by Loch Lomond. It’s Rob Roy territory and the Inn is said to be haunted. The place has a real olde worlde thing going on, but could do with a bit of Mr Sheen. We flew back to Belfast on Tuesday afternoon via Prestwick Airport. The airport’s slogan is the old slang ”pure dead brilliant.” Given these statistics, I thought it was unusual for an airport to advertise itself to foreign tourists using the word “dead.”

Though having said that, the whole weekend was actually pure dead brilliant.

The best album I’ve heard this year

The new album from Bob Dylan is also very, very good but I think this is better. Full of witty, warm, soul-searching lyrics, and catchy clangy folk-rock melodies – this is a class debut record. Delta Spirit played Auntie Annie’s one Saturday night in March, but I was too immediately concerned with getting out of Windsor Park safely after the NI-Poland match that I just went home rather than venture back into town for the gig. Wish I’d gone – hope they come back sometime.

Lock up your parents!

I flick across the Christian channels on Sky regularly and the past weekend God TV has been broadcasting live coverage of a Christian music festival in Ballymena called Fuel. I didn’t know any of the bands or speakers, but was amazed at how, in such a short space of time, events like this with exclusively American acts can now be staged in Northern Ireland. Even more significant is how this style of music and event has mainstreamed into Evangelical church culture here.

Anyone remember this?

It took place way back in August 1998, and as a Baptist teenager I was risking my YF good standing by going to it. Tony Campolo was the speaker, and there was a mix of American and local musical talent. At the time it seemed like a really huge event, but compared to 2009’s Fuel  - pretty small scale.

To me the biggest contrast between the two events was that Awake felt like a genuinely subversive happening – from having Campolo as a speaker, bringing over All Star United (a new and then unknown American band) as the headline act, holding it in a prominent public space (Laganside), and the preceding public parade starting out from City Hall. Fuel 09 in contrast, tucked away in Ballymena, looked like something you could go to with your parents!

Biking it in Belfast

We’ve been living in East Belfast for almost four years now. It’s been fantastic to be walking (and cycling) distance from so many sights and sounds round the city. Even commuting to work is a real pleasure, especially in weather like today’s (as I sit out the front of the house typing this on a balmy Saturday night). Yet there are still places on the doorstep that I hadn’t got round to visiting until this week.

What we do well in this part of the city is cycle lanes, so on Thursday evening I pedalled over to the Titanic quarter. I had no idea how massive the site is, and given the design of the monstrosities that have sprung up there already I hope it’s not going to be filled with similar buildings.

The glass-fronted Northern Ireland Science Park and a bank headquarters somehow look more dated than the old Titanic dry dock and pump house they surround. I witnessed a short flag-removing ceremony being performed by crew on HMS Caroline, and it was strange seeing such a dignified act on this little boat dwarfed by the giant new buildings squeezed round it on all sides. The main road is dotted with information boards and new traffic lights, anticipating future crowds, but there was a quiet eerieness about the place. I’ll be starting a new job back in East Belfast next month, and it will be interesting to monitor the development of Titanic Quarter and its impact on the area.

Last evening I cycled to Lisburn to meet Lisa at work. The cycle path is about ten miles and is a real beauty. This has got to be one of Belfast’s best-kept secrets. Cutting through Lagan Meadows, the river gently twists and turns through gorgeous woodland and fields as it leaves the city and passes through the villages of Hilden, Drumbeg, and Lambeg before arriving at Lisburn Civic Centre. Due to the train to Belfast being cancelled we also got to experience the return journey – tiring but still as enjoyable!

Catalan v Matalan