It’s the charity record that keeps on giving. Now comes news that The Cake Sale album is to be released in Britain and the US.
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Verve regain their nerve

“You’re more likely to get all four Beatles on stage” was how Richard Ashcroft once responded to a question about a Verve reunion.

Last week, though, Ashcroft rejoined Nick McCabe, Simon Jones and Pete Salisbury and announced a number of British shows for the reformed Verve later this year. The band’s last show together was at Slane Castle in 1998.

Might this second reunion have something to do with the lack of successful solo careers? After all, Ashcroft’s three underwhelming solo albums never quite scaled the same critical or commercial heights as Bitter Sweet Symphony.

The Phoenix Park deer will have company this autumn. MCD Concerts are planning to hold eight outdoor concerts in the largest enclosed city park in Europe - or Dublin anyway. On the Record assumes a large tent will be involved or your ticket will have to come with gloves and scarf attached.

While there has been much chatter about who might be playing (with Arcade Fire garnering the most online punts), the park in winter is not the only exotic venue choice this year.

Take veteran British heavy metallers Diamond Head’s forthcoming Irish tour. While there are a few coventional venues on the schedule, the band, who influenced Metallica and Megadeth, will also play in the Round Room in Dublin’s Mansion House, headline a show at the natural ampitheatre at Ballykeeffe Wood and Nature Reserve in Co Kilkenny and perform at St John’s Castle in Limerick.

Let’s hope that some music festival organisers in Austin, Texas don’t have a hankering to call their attorneys about the name used by the newest Irish summer festival on the block.

Cork X Southwest is a one-day festival which takes over Skibbereen on Sunday, August 5th and will feature such bands and DJs with Cork accents as The Frank & Walters, Fred, Stanley Super 800, John Spillane and Fish Go Deep.

There will also be a couple of blow-ins on the bill, but CorkXSW organisers plan to keep these to a minimum.

Interesting piece from today’s Times about the slump in concert attendances for such hoary old dinasours as Elton John, George Michael, the Rolling Stones and Barbra Streisand. It seems Irish concert-goers aren’t the only ones up in arms about high ticket prices. However, unlike Irish fans who simply shell out for the shows and then moan about it, fans elsewhere are actually going elsewhere with their cash.

Have you ever tasted grilled puffin? It’s a little bit like chicken.
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Forget catalogue pimping or signing the next big thing, the future for the record industry is to get old hit-makers to make new music. Interesting piece from Forbes about how Sony BMG’s Burgundy Records and Universal’s New Door label are putting their faith in such heritage acts as Chaka Khan, Gloria Estefan, Styx and Smokey Robinson.

The New York Times likes the look of the new iPhone.

Jan Moir is not a fan of girl power.

$3,121 would have got you dinner for two and an intimate gig with Prince at Los Angeles’s Roosevelt Hotel.

But 300 euros will get you a VIP ticket, a free programme and drink and meal vouchers at the Midlands Music Festival in Co Westmeath.

Rolling Stone does the big picture thing on how it all went wrong for the record industry. Advertising revenue must be down.

Sassy Sue continues to round up the local heroes of yesteryear. This time, it’s former Specials and Fun Boy 3 grump Terry Hall who’s stepping up to the DJ box. He’s at the Sugar Club on July 27.

Hey, it could be as good as Die Hard 4.0. Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter have decided to go into the film-directing business with Electroma.

Two robots drive through the Southwestern American landscape in a 1987 Ferrari 412. They arrive at a small town in Inyo County, California where the townspeople are robots living a suburban existence. They drive up to a high-tech facility where liquid latex is poured over their heads and meticulously shaped into human faces. Pleased with their new human appearance, they walk down the road to the astonishment of everyone else around. When the duo’s faces start to melt in the sun, the locals realise that they aren’t real humans after all, and begin to chase after them. They take cover in a room and reluctantly peel off the ruined masks. Leaving the town and their dream of becoming human behind, they begin a lengthy and ultimately perilous hike across the desert salt flats.

Holy concepts Batman! The dialogue-free flick opens in cinemas in August and is released on DVD in September.

The world has gone mad. Or else this is a dastardly plan by MCD Concerts to cash in on climate change and global warming.

Per yesterday’s Sunday Business Post:

MCD, the country’s largest music promoter, has landed a major deal with the Office of Public Works (OPW)to hold eight outdoor concerts in the Phoenix Park, Dublin later this year.

The concerts will take place at the park between October 16 and November 5 and the anticipated attendance at each concert will not exceed 10,000 people.

The company intends to apply for a concert licence from Dublin City Council in the next two weeks seeking permission to host the concerts, which will take place on the land adjoining the visitor centre at the Phoenix Park.

I’m assuming there will be a tent of some shape involved.

Blame Ronan Fitzgerald for this. His post ends with what sounds like a challenge.

After listening to this man self-eulogising about the good old days on Irish radio this week I thought: where’s good old Jim Carroll when you need someone to burst the bubble of a bloated Irish institution? That is, on the pages of a considerably less bloated one. (Them’s fightin words!)

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Following the recent post about the New York composer looking for guitarists for his forthcoming Dublin show at the Analog festival, Glenn Branca has got in touch with an update. And no, he doesn’t want On The Record to do some plucking.

Everyone who’s signed on so far is a reader. We’ve got near 60 now and I think in the next week or two we’ll have the 100. Although it is true that there have been 100’s of responses and most can’t or don’t want to do it. It does require some effort but I think worthwhile and satisfying in the end. At least that’s the way it’s gone in past. And thanks for the plug.

When the Earl of Iveagh had the builders round to Farmleigh House in 1881 and back again in 1896, he could never have envisaged how his 78-acre estate would be used in the future.
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Three more fests will be striving to attract Irish festival-goers in the coming weeks.

The Undiscovered Festival will feature unsigned acts and new bands in Roscrea, Co Tipperary on June 29th and 30th, while the Irish Green Gathering is an eco-friendly weekend featuring the likes of Dry County, Ten Past Seven, Somadrone and dozens more in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford from August 17th to 19th.

For those seeking to combine music and surfing, the Cois Fharraige fest may be just the ticket. Taking place in a 4,500-capacity tent overlooking the Atlantic at Kilkee, Co Clare from September 7th to 9th, the festival’s line-up includes such surfer-friendly acts as Fun Lovin’ Criminals, Ocean Colour Scene, The Blizzards, Róisín Murphy, The Enemy, Tom Baxter and the ubiquitous Delorentos.

The budget obviously didn’t stretch to The Beach Boys.

Ireland may not have a new band festival of the size or stature of Austin’s colossal South By Southwest or Groningen’s excellent Eurosonic, but it does have Hard Working Class Heroes.

The festival is now in its fifth year and will run from September 28th to 30th at Dublin’s Pod complex.

Bands who wish to play the festival should apply online before July 19th. More than 700 bands applied in 2006 so competition for the 100 slots is tough. At least, they won’t have to contend with Simon Cowell or Louis Walsh as judges.

Classic singles, seminal albums and an unique approach to style and fashion have punctuated Kevin Rowland’s three- decade-long stand at the pop barricades with Dexy’s Midnight Runners.

The notion of Rowland as DJ, then, should ensure a full house at Sassy Sue’s Go-Go Inevitable at Dublin’s Sugar Club when he spins there on August 10th.

Those seeking an insight into Rowland’s possible playlist should note that his three-night stint on BBC 6 Music earlier this year took in everything from the Blow Monkeys and Bruce Springsteen to ELO and Marvin Gaye.

Steady on, steady on. I mean free concert to dowload.

It’s the band’s show from ealier this year at New York’s Judson Memorial Church. Listen and download here (there’s also an interview with the band).

They don’t make grooves like this any more.
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Le Catch writes

Random comment. I found a link to a great Irish printing company who were selling these fantastic concert posters recently but I now can’t find the link…and my recent web pages have since been deleted. I know they are based in Wicklow if that helps….does anyone know where online they are?

Any ideas, people?

And those interested in cool concert posters should check out the various Flatstock designers and contributers as well.

I think I’d prefer a bit of war, famine, pestilence and disease to this.

When all else fails, send in the lawyers. Last in the very entertaining LA Times series featuring publisher Kurt Hanson and legal eagle Jay Rosenthal debating the economics of online music. This time round, they go head to head about copyright court cases.

This man killed hip-hop.

Everyone can be a VIP at some music fests. Expect to see this excercise repeated next year at Oxegen, the Picnic, Castle Palooza and Mantua. Especially Mantua.

Talking of festivals…there are more on the way. Someone had better be keeping count. Newbies include the Undiscovered Festival (two days of unsigned and new music in Roscrea on June 29 and 30), the Irish Green Gathering (an eco-friendly weekend with Dry County, Ten Past Seven, Somadrone and dozens more from August 17 to 19 in Enniscorthy) and Cois Fharraige (surf and music fest with Fun Lovin’ Criminals, Ocean Colour Scene - are OCS really surf-friendly? - and many more in Kilkee, Co Clare from September 7 to 9).

You don’t need a MySpace page, baby. Just ask Prinzhorn Dance School. Or listen to “Up! Up! Up!”.

Would you pay £44.5million for Dolores O’Riordan and Morrissey?

Hillary Clinton tries to get hip, bless her.

Quote of the day: “The music industry is full of sharks, charlatans and impostors. Because there’s a lot of money involved, there’s a bunch of schmucks in there. It’s the entertainment world, full of thieves and crooks.” Go on, guess who said that? Wrong. That’s wrong too. Yes, he really said it. We might let him write this blog next week.

Props to Killian Doyle for unearthing the latest pair of Manc runners.

Following in the footsteps of Joy Division and Johnny Marr, the FAC51-Y3s are limited-edition trainers released to celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Haçienda.

The runners, limited to 250 pairs, are a design collaboration between Peter Saville (the original Factory Records graphic designer), Ben Kelly (the Haçienda’s interiors architect) and Peter Hook (off-the-ankle bassist with New Order, Joy Division, Revenge, Monaco and Satellite Party).

Here, then, are a pair of FAC51-Y3s on a metal plate from the Haçienda with some wood from the original dancefloor. Today’s question: would you pay £345 for these?

Per Music Week, the “Icky Thump” single is the biggest selling seven-inch single since Wet Wet Wet’s “Love Is All Around”.

Icky Thump needed just two days last week to break through the 10,000 sales barrier across two seven-inch formats, as it battled to replace Def Jam/Mercury-signed Rihanna featuring Jay-Z’s Umbrella at number one.

That vinyl sales tally – comfortably more than what it was selling on CD and download combined at the start of last week – is unmatched by any other release on seven-inch since the late eighties. Wet Wet Wet’s Love Is All Around, which spent 15 weeks at number one in 1994, was the last number one to sell more than 50,000 seven-inches in total, but its best tally in any one week was only 4,770 units.

This continues a trend that fully kicked in a couple of years ago, when annual sales of seven-inches rose from more than 630,000 units in 2004 to 1.073m in 2005, an increase of 70.1%. Sales steadied at 1.046m last year.

For HMV, vinyl – written off two decades ago as a spent force – is becoming an ever-bigger deal is it looks to continue to stake a claim in a singles market becoming dominated by downloads. “If you go into our store in Oxford Street, you’ll see an enormous racking area in the back of the shop with 20 feet of seven-inches; not just chart, but smaller indie releases, too. There is hardly room for CD singles, just the Top 40″, says Hirst.

You watch, the cassette single will be back next.

There are more gigs happening in Ireland in the next few months than have ever happened at any time in this nation’s history. Fact. You can blame the Greens for this (they’re fair game for everything this weather) or you could blame the Celtic Tiger (while it’s still around to blame). It really is a case of one nation under a gigging groove. Or a gigging nation once again. Or something like that.

Here’s the skinny on some of the more interesting acts who will be soundchecking at an indoor venue near you real soon.

Talib Kweli (Tripod, Dublin, June 27)

Nina Nastasia & Jim White (Crawdaddy, Dublin, June 29)

White Rabbits (Crawdaddy, Dublin, June 30) - major yahoo for this one, we’re big fans of the Rabbits and their ace debut album “Fort Nightly”

Annuals (Whelan’s, Dublin, July 2)

George Clinton with Amp Fiddler (Tripod, Dublin, July 4 & 5)

Joan As Policewoman (Vicar Street, Dublin, July 5)

Daniel Johnson (Vicar Street, Dublin, July 11)

India Arie (Tripod, Dublin, July 11)

Pharoahe Monch (Tripod, Dublin, July 19) - his new album is BANGING.

Buck 65 (The Hub, Dublin, July 24)

Os Mutantes (Vicar Street, Dublin, July 26)

Of Montreal (Crawdaddy, Dublin, August 1)

Bill “Smog” Callahan (The Village, Dublin, August 10)

Fridge (The Village, Dublin, August 16)

Slint (Tripod, Dublin, August 18)

Duke Special (Empire Music Hall, Belfast, August 19-23)

Albert Hammond Jr (The Village, Dublin August 20; Roisin Dubh, Galway, August 21)

Mark Ronson (Olympia, Dublin, August 23)

Battles (Tripod, Dublin, August 24)

Caribou (Crawdaddy, Dublin, September 7)

David Sylvian (Vicar Street, Dublin, September 12)

Richard Hawley (Vicar Street, Dublin, September 23)

Los Campesinos (Whelan’s, Dublin, October 2; Limelight, Belfast, October 3) - Rocks is digging the video for “You! Me! Dancing!” at the mo’

The National (Olympia, Dublin, November 1)

New York composer Glenn Branca nees 100 guitarists for his forthcoming show in Dublin’s Docklands. Well, 80 guitarists and 20 bass guitarists to be exact. The bass guitar is the one with four strings, in case you’re wondering.

Anyway

This performance will take place in Grand Canal Square in Dublin’s Docklands on Sunday 15th July as part of the Analog music festival.

Selected guitarists and bass players will be asked to attend two rehearsals on 13th and 14th July, from 11am to 9pm, as well as a soundcheck on the day of the concert. Food and drinks will be supplied at all rehearsals and the performance. All musicians will be required to read standard staff notation.

I have a feeling that this “standard staff notation” may be the Achilles Heel for many would-be mini-Brancas.

Those wishing to participate should email glenn@glennbranca.com or go to the Analog site.

Andrew Dubber is a lecturer at the University of Central England in Birmingham specialising in online music, media and radio technology. He also does a very good blog called New Music Strategies.

Paul Birch runs an indie label called Revolver Records and is a board member of music industry trade bodies the BPI and the IFPI.

Paul didn’t like a blog post which Andrew ran. Now read on.

The digital switch-on has begun in earnest at RTÉ with plans announced this week for six trial digital radio stations.
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Less than 18 months after the release of Josh Ritter’s well-received Animal Years album comes news of a new record from the Moscow, Idaho native.

The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter will be released in Ireland on September 7th.

Recorded last winter in Maine and produced by Ritter’s keyboard player Sam Kassirer, Historical Conquests is, at first listen, far more immediate, diverse and adventurous than Animal Years.

Ritter’s admiration for Bruce Springsteen comes to the fore on several occasions, but there’s also a melodic sensibility and confidence here which is far ahead of any of his previous releases.

Radio stations are likely to be playing tracks such as Mind’s Eye, Empty Hearts, Rumors and Real Long Distance quite a lot from September.

The album will be on the Independent Records label here, on Sony/Victor in the US and V2 will take care of the rest of the world.

Gary Lightbody and friends have provided further proof that the future of the music business may well be tickets and T-shirts.

Fans who buy tickets for Snow Patrol’s Australian shows in September will receive a free copy of the band’s Final Straw album with every ticket purchased.

“Buy four tickets and you get four albums to listen to, hang from your Xmas tree or use as frisbees - but we’d prefer you listened and sang along at the shows,” said Lightbody.

However, the band’s current album, Eyes Open, continues to sell and sell. It has just broken the million mark in the US.

As marketing gimmicks go, you have to admit that these Icky Thump USB drives from the White Stripes are kind of cute. There’s a Jack one and there’s a Meg one and each 512MB drive contains the band’s new album.

Some may regard these limited edition $99 drives as a little rich given Jack White’s previous propensity for favouring analog studios and recordings.

Then again, as their last album Get Behind Me Satan sold only half as much as the previous Elephant album, it really is a case of any (data) port in a storm

Slint are on their way to Dublin. It’s a Don’t Look Back jobbie where key acts are invited to play seminal albums in their entirity which means Slint will be playing “Spiderland” at Tripod on August 18. Tickets now on sale. Here’s a video of them in action at the recent Primavera Festival in Barcelona.

I heard the new single from The Thrills during the week. This, you will be glad to hear, is not it.
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(1) You know those really painful My Weekend features you see in newspaper supplements? Do you ever think they really should read like this?

(2) The Cool Kids. We love the Cool Kids. “Mikey Rocks”. “One, Two”. Mongrel talks to the Chi-Town old-school throwbacks.

(3) An interview with Jeff Chang, the author of classic hip-hop tome Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.

(4) The feature on gravediggers. You wouldn’t get that in The Dubliner.

(4.5) Perfect pithy music reviews.

More of this kind of thing, please.

We like the look of the “I wish Arcade Fire were playing” tee.

We also like the look of these White Stripes USB drives, but would you pay $99 for them?

End those pub arguments about the best cover versions ever with help from Twenty Major. His post asking for people to list their fave cover versions is the be all and end all of the matter for now.

Who needs Ticketmaster when you have Damien Mulley? He’s giving away two free tickets to the forthcoming Beirut show in Dublin.

Still, Ticketmaster are great at telling you about gigs before the promoters get around to spellchecking an aul’ press release. Of Montreal, whose album “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?” is both bizarre and bewitching, play Dublin’s Crawdaddy on August 1.

Rule number one, look at the big picture. OK, sorry, look for the big picture.
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Big thanks to Conor Pope for keeping a eye on the shop last week while I was unblogged on holidays. Conor is the Pricewatch fella so check him out if you have a burning consumer issue or a rip-off to report.

You go away for a week and all hell breaks loose. But enough about Paris Hilton, here’s the all-singing, all-dancing On The Record re-up.

The fabulous Os Mutantes are coming to town. Hurrah! They were supposed to play last year’s Electric Picnic but must have got a better offer. Now, they’re set to play Dublin’s Vicar Street on July 26. Hurrah again! Here they are performing “Panis Et Circenses” on a Brazilian TV show in 1969. Are we allowed a third hurrah on a Monday morning?

The latest twist in the Irish Recorded Music Assocation’s anti-piracy drive sees them getting the nod from the High Court to round-up 23 individuals who’ve uploaded 180,000 music files. That’s a lot of Richie Kavanagh

George Michael cancelled his second Dublin show last week and used the best ever excuse for a gig cancellation in the process. This one involved a truck crash on the road from Bucharest to Prague (no, really, sure everyone knows that road is as bad as the M50), vital missing components and a stage rebuild. Now riddle me this: how come all this didn’t prevent the first sold-out show going ahead? Why was it that the second show, the one for which there were still tickets on sale, which got canned? Surely the logical thing to do would be to pull the first show and use the extra time to get the necessary “components” in place?

Mark Ronson plays Dublin in August. Look, some of you haters just don’t like him, but On the Record digs him. We also really dig his Authentic Shit radio shows on East Village Radio, all available to be podcasted at your convenience. Ronson and band are at the Olympia on August 23.

Did anyone go to see Malajube in Dublin last week? Have people not yet clicked that their “Trompe-l’œil” album is rather fantastic? Are we just late to this party? Or is the French language thing really a turn-off?

Consider this a public service announcement for the day. The last episode in the current series of The Wire airs tonight. TG4, 11.25pm. Forget The Sopranos, this is real bad-ass TV. Who needs Tony Soprano when you have a complex bad-ass like Omar Little?

Not content with following his Four Tet star and collaborating with legendary US jazz drummer Terry Reid, Kieran Hebden has now reconvened his first band Fridge for their first tour in six years.

The reason for this burst of activity is a new album called The Sun released this week. Previous albums from the band, who formed at the same south London school as Hot Chip, such as Ceefax, Eph and Happiness, saw the band gathering much acclaim from critics for their post-rock adventures.

They even moonlighted for a spell as Badly Drawn Boy’s backing band.

Fridge play the Village, Dublin on August 16th.

It’s the summer of the guitar. Glenn Branca’s forthcoming visit to Dublin for the Analog festival on July 15th will see the New York composer instructing 100 local guitar slingers for a performance of Hallucination City.

Meanwhile, some of the most prestigious guitar maestros in Europe will be plucking strings at the Walton’s Guitar Festival of Ireland later this month in the capital.

Those taking part in this year’s festival from June 27th to July 1st include Anniello Desiderio, John Feeley and Berta Rojas.

The centrepiece of the festival will be a performance by the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet at the National Concert Hall. More information from guitarfestivalofireland.com

While many Irish clubbers will be packing their bags and brushing up on their Catalan ahead of next week’s Sonar festival in Barcelona, others will be relishing the return of the Celtronic festival to Derry later this month.

Celtronic has slowly grown in size and stature over the last six years. This year, it will run in various venues throughout the city from June 27th to July 1st, with headliners including Erol Alkan (right), Radioactive Man, Jerry Dammers (the Specials man will be returning to the north-east with the most rocking reggae collection around) and new house hero Jimpster from The Bays.

There’s also a wealth of local northern talent including The Japanese Popstars, Alloy Mental’s Phil Kieran and the Sirocco Allstars. Best of all, a festival pass costs just £25. More information from myspace.com/celtronic2007

If you’re one of the 15 million people who have been using the Last.fm online music service to discover new bands and tunes since 2002, it may be interesting to know that you’re worth just under $20 (€15) to the company.
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Profiles of 50 Cent have always noted the rapper’s sideline venture hawking bottles of Formula 50 grape-flavoured vitamin water. Last week, that sideline turned into a very lucrative business deal as Coca-Cola acquired Glaceau, the company which manufactures the water, for $4.1 billion. Fiddy has a 10 per cent stake in the company, which means a very good pay-day for him. Maybe this explains the rapper’s delay in getting new album Curtis into the shops. The extra cash should also hopefully mean he will tell his agent to stop accepting film scripts.

If drinking, carousing, debates and fights in a place where “men had women, men had men and women had women” is your idea of a good night out, you’d probably have loved the Catacombs.

Back in 1940s Dublin, Dickie Wyman’s basement flat off Fitzwilliam Square became a nightclub where such bohemian ravers as Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and JP Donleavy went for gargle and a good time.

Wyman, an Englishman who moved to Dublin following the death of his boyfriend during the Second World War, made money from his venture by returning empty beer bottles the following day.

Now comes an RTÉ Radio One documentary on the club. Four former patrons of the Catacombs go back to the original site and tell presenter Ciaran Cassidy about what the club was like during its wildest times. The documentary will be aired on June 13th at 8pm.

Bands seeking a record deal should prepare to send their CDs forthwith to Justin Timberlake. He has become the latest pop star to take on the mantle of record executive, as he becomes chairman and chief executive officer of Tennman, a new Interscope-funded imprint.

“We are all excited about the talent we have to offer already on our roster and I cannot wait to introduce the world to my new discoveries,” gushed Timberlake.

Only the very cynical (and On the Record) would wonder if this has anything to with enticing Timberlake to swap his Sony-BMG contract for an Interscope one.

The man who makes those snazzy “the end is nigh” sandwich-boards must be working overtime at the moment, as the major-label record industry wonders where its next tax-deductible meal is going to come from.
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