Archive News
Windings celebrate colourful new album with free city show
Date Published: 28-Nov-2012
Limerick band, Windings, who make music for the sheer joy of it, play Róisín Dubh on Thursday, December 5. The Limerick-based band have just released their third album I Am Not The Crow and Steve Ryan, chief songwriter of the five-piece group, explains how Windings came to be.
“The first album I released in 2005,” he says. “It was like a solo thing I was doing on the side of my other band [the hard-rocking two piece Giveamanakick]. Then that band finished and we put out the second album as Windings – there were two other lads involved at that stage.
“Then, come this year, there were five of us altogether. Since finishing the album and releasing it, we’ve lost one member and gained another. It’s kind of constantly changing! But the line-up that recorded the line-up is pretty spot on; we’re very happy.”
I Am Not The Crow was recorded in two sessions, one in Montreal and the other in Donegal (“All the –als!” laughs Steve).
The album has been released as a vinyl picture disc, and the nature of a record informs the mood of the album – Side A was recorded in Montreal, while side B was laid down in Tommy McLaughlin’s studio in Donegal.
“We happened to be over in Canada because we’d been invited to play Music Week in Toronto,” says Steve. “Then we went up to Montreal by train. Before we had even left for Canada, the four songs were rehearsed to within an inch of their lives. When it got to the studio, we just set up and did every song 19 or 20 times until we got the one we wanted.”
From the outset, Windings wanted to make an album that would be one cohesive piece, and not just a random collection of songs.
“We had the album envisioned as eight songs, we knew how we wanted the songs to be ordered,” says Steve. “I had been DJ-ing with a friend of mine called Tim, from a band called Hidden Highways. We had this night where we’d only DJ stuff from before the eighties.
“Basically, it got me rooting through my record collection. All the stuff my dad owned – Neil Young stuff, Funkadelic and David Bowie, who used to make albums that only had seven or eight songs, but it’d be a whole piece. It’d build up from the start of side A, and down from the start of side B – and that’s what we were looking to do.”
The album cover and picture disc features a vividly coloured bird, and was designed by Mattie Bolger and Emily Lidstrom, who go under the moniker M & E. Bolger is a member of Redneck Manifesto, and the couple have also designed sleeves for that band as well as for Si Schroeder and Choice Prize winner Jape. Anyone who buys I Am Not the Crow on vinyl has a work of art in their hands, something the Windings’ front man is proud of.
“We had a choice doing this album – print up 1500 CDs or we could get 500 vinyl for the same price,” says Steve. “And our vinyl is a picture disc, so it has a piece of art on it that we commissioned people to do. Now, it’s a much more limited run than CDs, but for the same price I think it’s more worthwhile, to look at, to appreciate, than a CD box would be.”
To celebrate the picture disc, Windings played a show in Limerick, but it would be fair to say, the event sounds more like the opening of an exhibition than a record launch.
“Kind of!” says Steve. “It was everybody’s first time seeing the record. Maybe we wouldn’t have made such a big deal of it if it hadn’t been a picture disc. We played a gig and played our record about two hundred times!”
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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