Ukeristic Farewell!

Well I suppose I really should invite you all to the Ukulele Christmas Party on Saturday week in town, but if ye don't play yerself, well, ye might find it all a bit strange. Apart from the festival in Dun Laoghaire in August though this really is the biggest night of the year for ukers in Ireland who, despite coming in all shapes and guises and sizes, all share the common trait of being game ball to pipe up an ole toon or two at the drop of a hat.

I intend to knock out one or two myself but the largest part of my night I suppose will be when my ukulele group of five years standing, Ukeristic Congress, takes the stage to play for the last time. It will be a modest swansong, just a few tunes, kind of a low key farewell that will mark the end of what really was a roller coaster of a ride. Indeed, as I've explained in previous posts, being a Ukeristic was the most exciting thing to happen to me musically - certainly in the hectic half decade that's just past if not in my entire 'musical' life! But I suppose everything has a use-by date and our wee group of tunestrels are no different.

Still, even if the band is over now, the memories will always remain and there are many, many to savour - like writing the songs and recording the CD, playing the near two-year residency in Whelans which turned us into a band, getting on the bill at the biggest uke Festival in the UK, brilliant in itself but where I also had the privilege of playing George Formby's very own banjolele. There were great gigs all over town too - a good few of the Whelan's shows and another in the Working Man's Club particularly stand out.

There were exciting times on the radio as well, us mixing it with bigger and bolder musicians on the Big Train is a fond memory as is the one of the time we had an RTE camera crew following us around town for the entire day - swelling our heads - though the less said about that scene with us feeding sliced pan to the swans on the canal the better! Even that testing time when we arrived to do a gig and forgot to bring the PA might one day conjure a smile!

But all things must pass, as uber uker George Harrison would have it, and it certainly will be with a wrench of the heart and a tear in the eye that I'll be singing the note that marks the end of the Ukeristic road that night. After it I suppose we'll have a pint and toast the future, then snap our cases closed, doff our hats and head our separate ways - onwards, upwards, ukewards and beyond. Fine folk, fine times, sadly missed.



Click the pic to see the Xmas vid!

Beat the Intro!

Yeah, I think it's high time we took a bit of a breather from all the heavy lifting that is bag blog banter just for one post and instead have some organised fun in the form of a ... quiz!!! Seeing as we've recently been talking about why great songs are so great, I've taken the liberty of making a little reel of fine tunes which features the opening notes or beats of 20 well known pop songs from the latter part of the last century. All you have to do is have a listen and see can you get as near to the twenty as I reckon you can and, to make it interesting, well why don't I just plop a cool, crisp pint of eh, Tuborg up on the counter of the bar in The Beggars and tap me fingers as I await the first of you to arrive in with yer awful throat and your list of answers! The accompanying pictures will give you the clues you need and I'll post up the answers in a couple of days.

Answers and more soon ...

Name that tune!

Answers below ...


Answers: 1. The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night; 2. The Rolling Stones - Start Me Up; 3. The Ramones - Baby I Love You!; 4. The Specials - Too Much Too Young; 5. Paul Simon - Graceland; 6. David Bowie - Fashion; 7. The Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive; 8. Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run; 9. Prince - Little Red Corvette; 10. Madness - Michael Caine; 11. The Jam - Eton Rifles; 12. The Beach Boys - Good Vibrations; 13. David Bowie - Life on Mars; 14. Guns 'n' Roses - Sweet Child o' Mine; 15. The Stone Roses - I am the Resurrection; 16. The Beatles - Something; 17. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Enola Gay; 18. Dexy's Midnight Runners - Come On Eileen; 19. ABBA - S.O.S.; 20. Donna Summer - Hot Stuff.

Thirty right answers! Nicely Done, folks.

Songs ... of Praise!

I was going to talk today about all those songs that have connected with me down through the years and about all those life-defining moments and memories they've conjured up along the way. And to begin, I'd like to talk about the classic song, Ben, because it reminds me of the time when we had ... mmmm ... nah, maybe some other time!

But I do do love the songs, it's true - as I'm sure y'all do too - and I particularly love the great ones! Pound for pound, I even think great songs are better than all other entertainment forms put together although that's probably just me being me today. Still, the reason I say it is because great songs do it for me like nuffink else can. A fine tune can pack more, shall we say, emotional triggers, into its core than anything else around and these can be re-played and re-lived again and again for as long as you want and for as long as you live without causing too much disruption to your daily life. Few other art forms are as flexible. No matter how brilliant, say, the best books I've ever read were, I had to consciously find the time and the space to read them - and even if they were a pleasure to behold, I definitely never read any of them more than three times in my life. Yet, I can think of a thousand songs I've listened to a thousand times - and many, many, many of them sound as good on the thousandth listen as they did on the first.

Another great thing about a great song is that you have the sole right to deem it great - every awesome feature, every chord change or solo or lyric or vocal or whatever, is great because you deem it to be so. Hard to argue with that either. Admittedly, it wasn't always like that. When we were all a bit younger we kind of had to go with what the crowd thought was cool in order to preserve some degree of street cred, so in many cases if a genius band in your mind were a bunch of t*ssers in the opinion of others whose opinions carried more weight, then you had to be careful how you batted. Still, I was lucky I suppose, because I happened to love the new wave and the ska music that was all the rage when I were a lad but I had to keep a lot of other stuff quiet - stuff I really loved but which, if it got out, meant I was finished - like Sheila B. Devotion and eh ... The Goombay Dance Band! No matter how odd or naff or uncool these things were, I just couldn't resist spinning them because they were, to my mind, great songs and that was what mattered most! But being older now, (it has some benefits after all!) I am completely free to listen to what I want regardless of the received wisdom and for that I am privileged and thankful. Yahooo. Free at last.

Now, where is that Tavares album o' mine!

More soon ...


Se-ven tears have flown into dee ree-vurr!

Takin' the biscuit!

I suppose you could view this entry as a kind of a post-script to the one below or whatever but since writing it, I read a jaw-dropping article on Artificial Intelligence in the FT Weekend Magazine and was gobsmacked by how some of our smarter brethren, namely yon technology brain-boxes, see our not-too-distant future panning out ... and by how completely far-out their ideas really are. Par exemple:

• " ... when computers match humans in intelligence, humans would cede leadership in technological development, since the machines would be capable of improving their own designs by themselves ... and with the accelerating pace of technological change, it wouldn't be long before the capabilities - and goals - of the computers would far surpass human understanding."

und dann ...

• " ... aided by their brilliant machines, humans could quickly colonise space, cure ageing and upload their minds onto computers. It's just a case of getting past the dangerous moment of the intelligence explosion. If we can make it to the next century and achieve technological maturity, we could have another billion years!"

God knows, any assessment of your own IQ is always a depressing pursuit when there are eggheads nearby but surely this is taking the biscuit. There're people out there talking seriously about uploading their minds onto computers so as to conquer space and live forever while I'm sat at the controls here in dumb-ass central still trying to figure out how they put the figs into the fig rolls.

Sweet divine lord!

More soon ...

Gid orrfff me ... I'm only artifishlee intellimigent!