Killer Opening Songs (Song 44 by The Gloaming)

Ireland has featured prominently in 2016 on account of the centenary of the Easter Rising, the revolt that laid the grounds for, ultimately, Irish independence from Great Britain.

For Killer Opening Songs Ireland has another meaning: that of a fascinating musical canon. Whether traditional or modern, the repertoire from the Emerald Isle is one to which our regular section always defaults. Tonight it is the turn of a band that, although with only two albums under its belt, has already made its mark.

The Gloaming is a supergroup made up of five successful musicians who first came together in 2011 with the sole purpose of revolutionising Irish music. They have done this by mixing the orthodox with the experimental. The Killer Opening Song of their self-titled debut album is an outstanding example of craftsmanship. On Song 44, singer Iarla Ó Lionáird’s voice lifts and floats as Thomas Bartlett’s piano is kept to almost a whisper. At the same time Martin Hayes’ fiddle lets out a slow, sweet and melodic wail. It sounds like a plaintive note, one that is supported by Caoimhin Ó Raghallaigh on hardanger d’amore and Dennis Cahill on guitar. The spectral-sounding track is sung in Gaelic and has an 800-year love story behind it. A man keeps seeing the woman he loves in his dreams. Midway through the song the tempo changes and becomes more upbeat with the familiar Irish jig making its first appearance only for the melody to return to its sombre tone at the end.

Those looking just for foot-tapping music, however, will be disappointed. The Gloaming is more interested in how far they can push the boundaries of Irish music, not how to conform to already-established melodic patterns. The evidence for this is in the rest of the album. Allistrum’s March is a haunting fiddle-driven instrumental. Necklace of Wrens features words by poet Michael Hartnett. Opening Set is perhaps the standout track in the album. A sixteen-minute-long piece, brooding at times, explosive at others, this is the sort of composition that becomes a classic from the word go.

It is always heartening to see musicians, especially those plying their trade in traditional forms, using their left-of-field, creative power to the maximum. The Gloaming is a good example of this and the Killer Opening Song is one again the living proof.



© 2016

Next Post: “Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On”, to be published on Saturday 30^th April at 6pm (GMT)

Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On

One thing about life (mine and everybody else’s) I know for sure is that I do not know and I will continue not to know. What I mean is that my knowledge will always be finite and limited. There will always be more things I will not know about than things I will.

This is what Bryan Magee, historian of philosophy and subject of a recent article in The New Statesman by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, calls “permanent exclusion from the understanding of total reality”. For Magee, accepting this status is the first step towards wisdom. I agree. To me, wisdom is not the mere pursuit, acquisition and retention of knowledge but also the landing that permits access from one set of stairs to the next.

I have been thinking about knowledge and its close cousin, belief, recently. The former has always felt like a process, an incomplete, messy, chaotic process. The more you know, the more you realise you do not know. Knowledge can be equally frustrating. You have understood the content, you have analysed the form and still… there is a missing piece in the puzzle.

Enter belief, not only of a religious nature, but of any type. Belief points at confidence in a certain type of truth that is not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof.

Whereas knowledge, both the acquisition and application of it, is chiefly empirical, belief needn’t be. If someone in the Middle Ages had written about a flat surface on which people swiped their fingers and hands to turn virtual pages in order to access information, I doubt people at the time would have come up with words such as: e-reader, smartphone or tablet. Yet, centuries later it is for us to make that connection. If we do that, are we not, however, marrying a contemporary concept to a loose and up-for-interpretation ancient one? From this point of view, this “marriage” is speculative as we do not know what people in the Middle Ages would have called these devices if they had had the chance.

I see knowledge like a river: running, shrinking, expanding, going up or coming down, never ecstatic. Belief, on the other hand, carries with it a level of persuasion, especially on the part of the believer.  Knowledge is risk because it never leaves us on terra firma. On the contrary, the acceptance of a proposition (let’s call it concept or theory) propels us further forward in search of the next challenge. Of course, certain arguments have been closed through the acquisitions of knowledge: the Earth is round and not flat, the moon rotates around the Earth and our planet circles the sun. But there still is a great deal of theories that challenges us.

This is where belief comes in. It offers succour amidst so much head-scratching. If climbing up the stairs of knowledge is satisfying, resting on the landings between floors is heavenly. Careful, though, a short break is advisable, but prolonging one’s respite might make us too “comfortable”, dull our senses and kill our thirst for knowledge. Which, lest we forget, is finite and limited.



As usual, I will take a month off during Easter and shall be back mid-to-late April. Wish you all the best.

© 2016

Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music

As I wrote on this blog a couple of weeks ago I was recently invited to attend an event about Hispanic bloggers. Especially those based in London who write about this great city. It was a lovely affair. There were probably between thirty and forty people in the audience and five bloggers in total: three Spaniards, one Argentinian and yours truly, the only Cuban in the house. The event was very well organised, the food gorgeous and the afternoon networking session productive.

On the way back home I kept thinking about my fellow bloggers and the circumstances that had brought them to London. There was a word that cropped up often in my thoughts: synchronicity. Despite the fact that we all had different motives to relocate to the Big Smoke, we all shared a common desire to make sense of our new surroundings through the magic of blogging.

So, there I was, pensive behind the wheel when all of a sudden the traffic slowed down almost to a halt. It happened as soon as I hit Shoreditch High Street. Sometimes when I find myself in a situation like this, completely unexpected and beyond my control, I go with the flow. Other times I lose my patience little by little. Luckily it was the former mood that got hold of me first. Since I had already written my post about hipsters in my new section, Urban Dictionary, but lacked an image to go with it, I thought to myself that here was the perfect occasion to take that picture. I pulled over and got my camera out.

I went back to the main thoroughfare, this time Kingsland Road. The scenery around me, however, owed more to a little market town in another country. Women with multi-coloured headwraps crossed the road slowly. Men wearing drainpipes waved drivers like me to stop as they manoeuvred their way through the dense, almost stationery traffic. Bandanna-ed old geezers sashayed on the pavement. A dreadlocked couple (hair length about the same in both man and woman) clad in gold, black and green carried what seemed to be heavy Tesco plastic bags, eyes set on each other. No one was in a rush. This wasn’t the London I was used to. The one with the frantic pace, horn-tooting and swearing. Maybe it was because it was Saturday, maybe because it wasn’t raining (for once!) or maybe because in the absence of rain we had been allowed a tiny bit of sunshine. The truth is that everyone was in chill-out mode.

The traffic build-up was total. It felt as if somebody had cast a spell over our engines. You could almost hear the soft purr of them, but it was all in vain, we weren’t going anywhere. I reflected more on what happened earlier on the day. So many people from different Spanish-speaking countries (Mexico, Colombia, Spain, Argentina and Cuba) sharing our experiences. Again, the same word flashed before my eyes: synchronicity. I remembered then an e-mail I had received some months ago.

If, like me, you  have been blogging for a long time you might recognise the following scenario: a message pings into your inbox telling you that the sender has been following your blog for quite a while and do you think it would be possible to plug such and such product for a modest sum? My response is usually the same: no, I’m not interested. I haven’t even got Google Ad Sense on my blog. I want people to come to read me not to buy stuff from me or a company with which I am not familiar. Unless what I am flogging is that book that I keep meaning to write but always manages to elude me (note how I always blame the inanimate object).

Over time this type of correspondence has increased. From the odd e-mail I used to get every two or three months six or seven years ago, now I receive almost two or three per week. Occasionally, though, I find a little gem amidst the unsolicited mail.

Synchronicity: unexpected but pleasant

That was what happened last September when a message from someone called Darragh (I really didn’t know whether it was a bloke or a woman. I’ve never been very good at Irish-sounding names, sorry) arrived at my virtual doorstep. Darragh was promoting an up-and-coming singer called Roisin O. There was a link to a youttube clip which I clicked and I was immediately hooked. Not only was Roisin gifted with a crisp, clear, beautiful voice, but the video of the song (Hold On is called. Click here to watch it) was highly imaginative and creative. In its simplicity lay a well-thought message.

I must admit that when it comes to acknowledging correspondence I have always been on the procrastinating side of things. It was only recently that I got back to Darragh. However, instead of telling me off – quite rightly – for being so slow to respond, Darragh sent me a link to the whole album, The Secret Life of Blue (link to album here). And as I sat on Kingsland Road I suddenly recalled that there was a song in the record named Synchronicity. As soon as I got home that night, I logged onto my e-mail and listened to the melody again (clip below). Roisin O’s mellow tones completed the picture I’d been trying to sketch in my head all day long following the Sharehoods blogging workshops. When she sings: See the zig-zag of a shoelace/The way a jigsaw fits into place/When our hands tightly knit/I think of all the ways we fit I immediately go back to that room at Google Campus where all the pieces of this gigantic Ibero-American “jigsaw fit into place”.

The Secret Life of Blue probes the depths of pop music. It is a very well-balanced record. Opener Here We Go has a lovely, foot-tapping groove with highly sophisticated multi-layered vocals that show off Roisin O’s versatility as a singer. Climb High foregrounds an expressive, otherworldly piano which matches Roisin O’s own otherworldliness note by note. Let’s Find Some People reminded me of Tori Amos but with a KT Turnstall twist.

Altogether the album is a reinterpretation of Irish music, mixing the craic with soulful ballads. Roisin O is one of those artists who bridges the gap between modernity and tradition. In her case she leans more on the former than the latter. To me that was also what the event about the Ibero-American blogosphere was: a way to bridge the gap between the culture we left behind (but which never left us) and the culture to which we are adapting now. That all this brings like-minded people together, it’s a bonus. Then, again, that’s synchronicity for you, totally unexpected but usually pleasantly surprising.

© 2014

Photo taken from Roisin O' website

Next Post: “Of Literature and Other Abstract Thoughts”, to be published on Wednesday 19^th February at 11:59pm (GMT)

Killer Opening Songs (The Bold Fenian Men by Cathy Jordan)

Some voices arrive in one’s life without any fanfare or red carpet treatment. They’re not the type to be found at presidential inaugurations, miming or not. They’re rather the kind to offer a seamless, smooth and meditative transition from past to present. On their (sometimes) puny shoulders these voices carry a country’s cultural traditions, occasionally with a modern twist. Cathy Jordan is one of those voices.

Formerly of Irish band Dervish, Jordan’s debut album, All the Way Home, turned up on Killer Opening Song’s doorstep a cold morning last November. It has since barely left its stereo. The first track, The Bold Fenian Men, is even on K.O.S.’s mp3 player for when it goes out jogging.

Haunting and beautiful, The Bold Fenian Men is an old school Irish ballad that abracadabras the way into a record brimming with disarming intimacy. The melody, originally written by Peadar Kearny, is part of the canon of songs with strong Republican sentiments that permeates the Emerald Isle’s folklore. On the clip below Cathy performs the track a capella (click here for the album version), thus, bringing an otherworldly quality to lines like 'Tis fifty long years since I saw the moon beaming/On strong manly forms, on eyes with hope gleaming/I see them again, sure, in all my sad dreaming/Glory O, Glory O, to the bold Fenian men.

Part of what makes All the Way Home a must-have album is Cathy’s sheer quality as a singer coupled with the musicianship of her collaborators. Obviously her voice takes centre stage; however, it is far from being the sole focal point. The arrangements are excellent, especially on tracks such as The Road I Go, In Curraghroe and The Jordan Jig, on which she plays the bodhrán, the Irish frame drum. Although All the Way Home is not as energetic a record as the ones she released with Dervish, the album still packs a mighty punch. Nowhere is this clearer than in the title track, a beautiful and rousing coda to a fine collection of songs.

It’s worth remembering at this point the reason why Killer Opening Songs exists. The genesis of this almost six-year-old section can be traced back to the Gospel according to Rob Gordon. Rob (played masterfully by John Cusack) is the lead in the movie High Fidelity. He is the saint patron of heart-broken, male thirty-somethings who still organise their record collection according to the date when they bought a particular record for a girlfriend or friend (And If I want to find the song "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile, but didn't give it to them for personal reasons). It was Rob’s last words in that movie that gave birth to K.O.S.: “The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention.”

Just like The Bold Fenian Men as sung by Cathy Jordan. A Killer Opening Song.

© 2012

Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 3rd February at 10am (GMT)

Living in a Bilingual World (The One About the Craic)

Craic Agus Ceol!

The caption caught my eye immediately. Never mind the fact that the tape contained songs by The Chieftains, Christy Henessy, Sinéad Lohan and Christy Moore amongst other artists; it was those three words that made my eyebrows hug each other for a fleeting instant.

The winter of '96 turned out to be a pretty good one for me. My then girlfriend, now wife, came to stay with my family and me in my flat in Havana for a fortnight and we all got on like a house on fire. I had just attended the Havana's Latin American Film Festival where I had seen a plethora of good movies and as if that wasn't enough the temperature in the Cuban capital was doing exactly what it was supposed to deliver at this time of the year: transforming the morning air into a chilly wind (that the thermometres then shot up to 25-26 Celsius by midday is information that we had better leave aside). Knowing that I was very keen on music and aware of my penchant for Luke Kelly's work, one of my wife's housemates back in the UK, an Irish woman, had made a tape for me together with her (also Irish) sister. The resulting record was riveting to say the least and I remember playing the cassette on a loop on my old battered Walkman, a gift from a French hardcore socialist fellow (nope, neither do I) who had come to visit the University Folkloric Dance Ensemble with which I used to perform in those days.

But it was the cryptic title splayed across the tape's label that puzzled me. Craic Agus Ceol? What could that possibly mean?

The answer arrived unexpectedly some time later when I began to work at a travel agency here in the UK. One of my colleagues was Irish and one day as we were about to break up for Christmas, he said: 'So, what's the craic, mate?' This time I did not let the opportunity slip away and asked D what the word meant. D smiled and exclaimed: 'The craic? The craic's the craic, mate! Sorry, too difficult to explain. It's a feeling that everything's fine, that you're having a good time. That's the craic'.

I would be stating the obvious if I said that I was left even more confused after his enthusiastic reply. Luckily I found (almost) an answer when I spoke to another Irish person.

The word 'craic' (pronounced 'crack') is of English origin (yup, so did I!) and it is used to convey a sense of fun. When utilised with 'agus ceol' it refers to Irish nightlife, so fun and music, there you have it.

Just like my post about the Portuguese word 'saudade' a couple of months ago showed, 'craic' is another of those words that carries the meaning within, rather than externally. And since this term is so warm and tender, at least to me, it is better to leave you tonight with an example of what I think it is good 'craic'. So, enjoy the clip everyone.

Copyright 2009