Month: April 2006
Devil Take My Soul: the music of Son of Dave
'Always talk about the money, always talk about the honey, baby, all my brothers say, what's your name?...Devil take my soul, if he want it, bring you back to me, for just one more night...' It’s a rare event these days that having heard a song on a radio station, I scramble through drawers and shelves looking for a pen to write down the name of that song and the artist who sang it. Rarer still that I go online the following morning and order the album. And, I assure you, it is even rarer than that the album doesn’t turn out to be a pile of over-rated, disappointing cack. 'Fallen off my stool here...' But bizarrely enough, this is exactly what happened just this week when I heard a track by ‘Son of Dave’ this Sunday last and promptly snapped the album ‘O2’ up. And it is superb. Blindingly,...
Diggin in the Dirt: Niall (sausage the second)
Continuing with the detailed exploration of Ireland's most amorous homicidal maniac, Niall of the Nine Sausages, Blather.net's graverobber in residence, Ender Wiggan, delves deeper into the sources behind the story of Niall. The fifth century A.D. in Ireland has been called ‘the Lost Century’. In archaeological, historical and linguistic terms, there’s almost nothing in existence that can be definitely placed within that century. It’s a black hole where much of the discussion is prefaced by presumption and logical guesswork based on what came after. Paddy Probably the earliest written evidence of actual historical reality is two documents attributed to the man called Patricius, who later would become St. Patrick. Though the earliest surviving forms of his ‘Confession’ and Letters to the ‘Soldiers of Coroticus’, are contained in the ‘Book of Armagh’, dedicated in 807 A.D., the use of the Latin language contained within them, are thought to be that of...