Jayhaitch in Review 2010- Music(The personal stuff)

Reviewing a year gone by has been done countless times. I don’t really have anything overly original to add to it. Not that that has stopped me posting three separate review pieces with more to come. It has been a great year in music which made it really hard to come up with a blog piece that wasn’t thirty thousand words.

I’ve done a list of albums and songs I’d recommend here, but I want to just talk about a couple things music related that, on a personal level, were a big part of 2010.

Kormacs Big Band @ Electric Picnic. Over the years I have gone to see a lot of friends in various bands in pubs and clubs around the country in front of crowds ranging from seven to about seventy. All extremely talented musicians with enormous passion for making music and being on stage. I enjoyed supporting them because I love being around talented, enthusiastic people but a little part of me always wanted more for them. A big break, a huge crowd, a record deal. Something.

This year I got to see my good friend Sean Kennedy play euphonium on stage at the Electric Picnic in front of thousands of people. As the last band performing on one of the main stages at the first night of the three day festival there was a lot of interest in seeing them in the Little Big Tent. So much so that the security guards decided to stop letting people in and pulled over the barriers to keep a lot of people, me included, out.

The excluded masses were not happy about this in the slightest. One of our number reckoned if he all pushed the barrier and bouncer standing behind it would soon give way. I don’t approve of that kind of thing at all. I did, however, take advantage of it, stepping over the prone guard and into the tent to see my friend perform with Kormac’s Big Band.

I don’t know if he enjoyed it as much as I did, but it was definitely a thrill for me to see a butty o mine playing on what is, in my mind anyway, a huge stage that I had to riot to get into. And from the sounds of things he could be involved in even bigger things next year.

The reformation of Pulp. I’ve already spoken about how happy this news made me here. It is very exciting and hopefully a chance for me to see a band who have always been one of favourites. To see my friends get excited by this news transported me back ten years to when we were young and cool without mortgages, credit cards, kids or hassles.

Seriously, I will steal and sell a child on the black market for ticket to one of their gigs. Or at least work a couple of extra shifts to pay for it.

Stevie Wonder in the O2. When my good friend Martin rang me to tell me of this gig, I was hanging out with another friend and his kids. That was when I first considered kidnapping of minors as a viable way to obtain concert tickets.

Again, I have already blogged about my Stevie love. His music is joyous and uplifting and nothing can ever be too bad when you listen to it. This was the first time he had played in Ireland in something like twenty five years and I was damned if I wasn’t going to be there to enjoy it.



The anxiety I felt as I sat on the ticketmaster website at two minutes to nine the morning they went on sale palpable. One hand on the mouse ready to click refresh, the other clutching my credit card, even though I already had the card details stored under profile. I wasn’t taking any chances. When I successfully acquired I could have danced around the room.

The gig itself was fantastic. He played all the classics and while he was never going to be dancing around the stage he manage to put on an amazing show. He had two drummers and a bongo player for crying out loud. Some people later complained that the sound wasn’t great at the gig. The fact that each song was flowing through my mind and soul meant that I never noticed it.

The Arcade Fire. Before this year, I had seen the Arcade Fire live twice and owned both their albums. That makes it sound like I was a big fan, but to be honest, I wasn’t really sure. I liked some of their stuff, Funeral is a great album but Neon Bible was only ok. When I saw them in the Olympia in 2007 I was decidedly under whelmed.

When there new album, The Suburbs, came out some friends were raving about it, but I was in no real rush to hear it. On top of that, when I saw the price for tickets for the gigs they announced in the O2 my mind was definitely leaning towards writing them off.

Eventually I got around to listening to their latest opus. It was fantastic. Sixteen fantastic songs of boredom, disillusionment and just growing up in American suburbs (The band are ostensibly Canadian but Win and William Butler were born and raised in Middle America.)

Stand out tracks like Ready To Start and Rococo lead the way but the recording never lets up and the even on the back end songs like We Used To Wait and Sprawl(Flatland) make it easily one of the most consistently good albums of recent times. There is no filler here. Without question, Album of the Year

They are probably going to become the biggest band on the planet in the next couple of years and I’ll have to hate and begrudge them, in the same way I do U2 or REM. Not the same way I loathe bands like Kings of Leon and Coldplay. No I do that because they are shite.

The album was so good, it made me want to go to one of the concerts, but ticket prices these days are something that a struggling writer can easily justify spending, what with having to eat and live under a roof. So I would just have content myself with listening to them on my earphones.

That was until I was on the receiving end of one of the most thoughtful, sweet gesture. A very good friend of mine, whose fanaticism about her music is matched only by her kind heart and generous nature, had gotten herself a ticket for the Sunday night gig. Tragically, she lost a close member of her family and could not go for obvious reasons.

At a time when she could be forgiven for ignoring the outside world and forgetting about such trivial things as a rock band, she thought of me. She got her housemate to bring in the ticket to me in work, hours before the gig was due to start, because she wanted me to enjoy it.

It was one of the most touching things I’ve experienced. I struggled not to shed a tear, standing there in Muji. A little later at the gig, I did. They were fantastic live and I knew that it was something my friend would have loved to experienced. I was emotional because she couldn’t and so grateful because I was. I really need to find a way to thank her. I think I’ll start my dedicating my music review of 2010 to her.

Music has a beautiful way of connecting with people. It helps form memories, it comforts, it encourages. It speaks to you when you’re lonely. It makes you happy. Sex, driving, exercising, drinking. Its all better with music. Everyone should have music in their life.

Its like that scene in the end of The Commitments when Jimmy Rabbite is being interviewed by an imaginary talk show host. When asked if he has any final words on the story of the band he answers in his Dublin Accent;

“We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels cross the floor, I was feeling kinda seasick, til the crowd called out for more.”

“That’s very profound Jimmy. What does it mean?”

“I’m fucked if I know Terry.”