North Kerry’s finest Messyng FC talk us through Lisselton John Street Football 2K12™, their new EP-fictitious football themed tactical RPG video game funded by the Arts Council of Ireland in a parallel timeline to our own.
The EP Lisselton John Street Football 2K12 is our reworkings and reimaginings of found music from the beta of the never completed PS1 game of the same name. The soundtrack was in varying levels of completeness when the project was abandoned, and only part of the soundtrack was recovered from the USB stick where it was rediscovered – so we decided to collaborate with some of our dearest friends to bring them into a degree of presentability and what we believe to be the best representation of what the soundtrack would have sounded like if completed.
This My Town (This My Chip Van)
This song chronicles the misadventure of Kerry County Councillor Jackie Healy-Rae Junior, and his brother, who in December 2017 were charged with assault causing harm. The victim (a tourist) told the court that, following an evening socialising in Kenmare, County Kerry, he and his companions went to a nearby chip van to buy food before going home. After ordering, the court heard that Kevin Healy-Rae, brother of Jackie had barged to the front of the queue, “slammed” money on the counter and ordered food. The victim told the court that when he “politely” told the chip van server that Mr Healy-Rae had jumped the queue, he said “this is my chip van” and “this is my town”.
The two Healy-Raes and a friend subsequently followed the victim and companions up the Main Street of the town and head locked and repeatedly punched the victim. Jackie Healy-Rae Junior was ruled by a judge to have lied to a Garda while, ironically, serving on a Garda oversight committee at the time. The pair of Healy-Raes were found guilty and given a suspended sentence so now time was served but they were charged We are completely embarrassed that this man has been re-elected following and is still serving as a councillor for our beloved county, and also embarrassed by his father and uncle who will no doubt also be seeking re-election soon.
This song cannot be considered slander as it is true. If the Healy-Rae family want writing credits for the refrain of this song, we will happily oblige.
Eircode (feat Aponym and Girlfriend.)
Contractually, we promised to not divulge too much in the way of details or speculation as to what Lisellton John Street Football 2k12 could have looked like, but the original wav to this titled “LavaLevelMusic-ver2.wav” so we will leave that there and let readers infer what they will. For the reworking, we took a different approach. As a group (largely) from rural Ireland it is very commonplace that an address to simply be:
Name
Village
County Kerry
This was never an issue when the majority of postage and delivery work was done by An Post, and the local postman knew everyone. However mass privatisation of our postal systems have had a number of negative consequences. The postman is no longer seen as much of an essential function within the community, leading to the anonymity of courier services who are not based locally, or are not incentivised to provide a high quality service. Many local post offices have closed, leaving communities without access to services like social welfare, post banking services and even a place to just go for a chat within their communities.
As a result, we live in an ever declining rural society where we do not have a postman who knows every house in a community, leading to the need for Eircodes as an identifier, where homes, businesses, farms etc who never before needed this, have become literally a combination of letters and numbers so that DPD can drop your package at your front door or leave it in your bin and just walk off. So we made a big rap metal song about it to encourage people to use it and it’s class.
Bertie Bowl (feat Dr Roger Breeze)
You know the song Rainman by Eminem where he basically just talks nonsense for three verses and then at the end says “I just did a whole song and I didn’t say shit”
This song is our version of that, a collection of throwaway words and phrases that don’t necessarily have a fixed meaning, that can fill space or functions within our vernacular. I think we use this type of thing loads and it’s really endearing. I could have a conversation with my father, without saying a word and this song is a representation of that. Dr Roger Breeze just rips on talkbox for the song. The song is named Bertie Bowl after the proposed national football and rugby stadium which never came to fruition as part of Ireland and Scotlands failed bid for Euro 2028, so this song took on a secondary meaning to us of all the nothing doublespeak and promises made to us on public investment plans. Bertie Ahern remarked in April 2020 that the “Bertie Bowl” could still be built if someone had the “political guts”. Some could argue the same about the Lisselton John Street Football franchise.
Messyng Is The Kerry Captain
This song is effectively a tutorial on the unique intricacies of how the Kerry senior football panel choose their captain for the following season (SPOILER WARNING: the captain of the club that wins the county championship becomes the captain of the inter-county team). Dr Crokes won the championship Sunday just gone beating Dingle and David Naughten is their captain, but he isn’t on the Kerry panel so I think it defaults to the next choice that is a Crokes player on the squad – probably Gavin White because of his tenure. Great player, well deserved.
We chose this theme once we realised what function this song was going to serve in the game. because of our contractual obligations to mask what the original intent of this song is, I can’t completely divulge, but I can advise that this was titled “TutorialMotif-ver6.wav” on the USB we received, I can draw attention to the fact that “boss fights” was an advertised feature of the game (how a game about Gaelic Football could have boss fights, we don’t know), and that this song had a secondary version titled “FinalStage-ver3.wav”. We combined the two iterations and used TutorialMotif for the first chorus and FinalStage for the final chorus.
Robot Wars (feat Nude Cleaning Service)
This song from the soundtrack posed an interesting case study by comparison to the others as it existed in a folder as a series of stems in the fileform .OGG, which we have only ever encountered in rhythm game situations – again, we are not speculating, just drawing attention to the fact that stems from Guitar Hero or Rock Band tend to be .OGG for whatever reason. Some of these stems were left unused and we decided to retrofit them with the Robot Wars theme song, the middle 8 breakbeats from the Powerpuff Girls theme song, Kirby’s theme from Super Smash Bros, and the bass wobs from Make It Bun Dem by Skrillex. We’re pretty ardent believers in plunderphonics and reference and transformation, John Oswald’s essay on sampling as “Compositional Prerogative” is extremely important to our craft. We can, and do, write / perform / produce music, but sometimes having a Linkin Park sample in a context that it truly doesn’t make sense in is the only thing that will make our friends laugh and if that’s our end goal then needs must.
All the words in this are by Nude Cleaning Service, I don’t even remember giving much prompt beyond “this song’s working title is Robot Wars”. I have a vague recollection of writing this song to be a top 10 list of our favourite robots and reasonings why. Fwiw Razer was gonna be #1, defy all odds to win its championship because it was very light and only really had one attack mechanic and is also as far as I remember the only robot to beat Chaos 2. Also, fwiw, Hypnodisc was going to be #2 just for cool design and how much fun it was to watch two pretty simple mechanics make complete shit of its competitors. Also also, fwiw Chaos 2 was going to be #3 because flip robots are kind of shit craic to watch and the design is pretty boring, but Chaos 2 is an undeniable GOAT for having b2b championship wins and being undefeated other than that one time against Razer? Although I might have to eat my words on that, my Robot Wars knowledge is spotty.
This song eventually became about our frayed relationship with technology in one audio play – an older man who sees technology as a frustration that is forced upon him by societal forces is met by a younger man who falls for the rhetoric presented to him about technology potentially offering an economic escape to a better life. In either case, I think they have both been lied to. Stocks & crypto & NFTS and all that shite are just a fiver on a fishing hook that some rich feen is going to use to entrap you, like in Looney Tunes. And aul lads and ladies who reckon they can’t learn new skills because “old dogs can’t learn new tricks” are undermining their own intelligence so that they can later be sold a service to work around their laziness. Learning this skill can and will enrich your life, and smartphones and apps and stuff are pure easy.
