• Getting Re-acquainted: ‘Breaking The Law’

    May 31, 2013 - By 

    Part of metal’s appeal is its terminal uncoolness. It can’t be co-opted, it isn’t ‘hip’, and it doesn’t easily translate to a mass audience. Sure, sometimes it has a dalliance with the mainstream, but there are always the hardcore contingent who take it to extremes, and they’re the ones who are still there when it slinks back to the darkness. Metal is, and always will be, outsider music. And if being uncool is what makes metal cool, then Judas Priest must be the coolest band on the planet. Their 1980 single ‘Breaking the Law’ remains their signature tune, and also…

  • The Story Behind: Hüsker Dü (Part II of II)

    May 25, 2013 - By 

    With Husker Du’s drive and aspiration was going to come into conflict with the orthodoxy of hardcore,  for the world at large, their meteoric development was continuing to deliver the goods, and their second album of 1985 would somehow manage to raise the bar even further. Flip Your Wig boasted improved production values, giving the band a sparkling and clean sound for the first time, as well as highlighting the intensely creative and rewarding songwriting rivalry that existed between Bob Mould and Grant Hart. The two men had been peppering the albums with gem after gem, but Flip You Wig…

  • The First Time: Alana Henderson

    May 24, 2013 - By 

    In the very first installment of The First Time, we ask fast-rising, cello-wielding, Dungannon-derived songstress Alana Henderson to cast her minds eye back to pivotal ‘firsts’ in her music-listening, discovering and making life. Next week: Mojo Fury’s Mike Mormecha. First album you bought? Lets be honest shall we? It was a Shania Twain album. Come On Over. I was off school sick and I remember gathering the money together and sending my mum to go and buy me it in Woolworths in Dungannon. I’m pretty sure I loved it. The first album I remember buying myself was Anthony & The…

  • “Social Consciousness and Bono”: Nomeansno interviewed

    May 24, 2013 - By 

    In 1979, two brothers got together in a basement in Canada, and began making noise. In 2013, that noise shows no sign of dissipating. Nomeansno have blazed a trail through punk rock, tackling the subjects that few others would dare to, and experiencing more reinventions than a gaggle of scientists at a reinventing convention.  Currently somewhere out there in the world, preaching the gospel, Steven Rainey caught up with guitarist Tom Holliston to get the low-down on the career that never should have been. Nomeansno are an enigma. Wrapped in a conundrum, if you like. Whatever suits you. A lot…

  • Will Self

    May 3, 2013 - By 

    As much renown for his towering intellect and vocabulary as he is for his increasingly ambitious literary work, 51-year-old writer and journalist Will Self is, equally, widely recognised as “that clever guy from Question Time and/or Shooting Stars“. Ahead of his talk at this year’s Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, Brian Coney happily risks becoming fully aware of his own intellectual impotency in discussing Self’s beloved London, the oft-misunderstood approach ‘psychogeography’ and the author’s latest, arguably most accomplished novel, the Man Booker Prize-nominated Umbrella. You have, of course, recently published Umbrella. At the risk if being too general, what type of…

  • Label Lessons: SST Records

    May 3, 2013 - By 

    The wonderful thing about a deplorable culture like that of the 1980s is that the counterculture is sure to be interesting; this brings us to SST Records, one of the landmark independent record labels filed away in the lower, yet equally storied recesses of popular music. Originally purposed as Solid State Transmitters – a small electronics business formed by a 12 year old soon-to-be founding member & guitarist of pioneering hardcore act Greg Ginn – SST Records opened for business in 1978 as a way for Ginn to release and distribute his own material with Black Flag, and shortly thereafter…

  • The Story Behind: Hüsker Dü (Part I)

    May 3, 2013 - By 

    The sky is the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel. The ground is muddy and wet, and the detritus from wrecked automobiles are all around. Three figures stand, apart, but somehow together, and the air has the static charge of electricity. This is the Zen Arcade, and anything can happen here. When it was released in 1984, Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade immediately stood out as being something new. Previously, the band had been one of the initial glut of American bands inspired by the thrilling rush of punk, taking the form and making it harder, faster, more aggressive, becoming…