Archive News
Free Galway concert from award-winning rockers Royseven
Date Published: 25-Apr-2012
The Coors Light Live Festival returns to Galway’s Latin Quarter for the May Bank Holiday weekend. Kicking off on Friday, May 4, it runs for three nights in a host of venues and features Kíla, Felix Martin from Hot Chip and Ham Sandwich.
Royseven will play in The Quays Bar on the opening night. The six-piece indie-rock band were up early on the morning of this interview, filming a slot a for a breakfast TV show. As bassist Bernard O’Neill explains, 6.30am is not an hour rockers are used to – at least not from a getting-up point of view!
“There should be a law!” he laughs. “It’s grand, you just have to get up and do it but I do feel sorry for the singer [Paul Walsh] because even your speaking voice is never properly awake at that time.”
Last month, Royseven were awarded the Meteor Song of the Year at the Choice Music Prize show in the Olympia, for We Should Be Lovers. There was some confusion as to whether they were actually in the venue, but a couple of their members got on stage to accept the award.
“We tried to get up on stage, and we managed to push two of the lads up,” says Bernard. “At which point the poor stage manager came over going ‘why are ye climbing up on my stage?’. Obviously a health and safety issue! To be honest, it didn’t take away from the effect of winning.”
It’s a rare occasion that you get to speak to a bassist – interviews are normally taken by lead singers. So, in Bernard’s opinion, what’s needed to make an excellent rhythm section?
“A really, really good drummer,” he says, praising the Royseven sticks-man Darragh Oglesby. “I always reckoned that – and I mean no disrespect to guitarists – if you have a good singer and you have a good drummer, then you have a good band.”
For their second and most recent album, You Say, We Say, Royseven fused the band’s rock sound with more electronic elements.
“One of the things that we really experimented with for the second album was linking the synthetic bass lines from the keyboard player with lines from the bass guitar,” says Bernard. “Double-tracking them sometimes, and playing counter melodies to one another. It became one of the styles we employed on a lot of the songs.
“We just wanted to accentuate the electronic vibe of the music,” he adds. “Not lean as heavily on guitars, to give it more of a modern sound really. If you look at some of the great indie bands like Depeche Mode, or more modern bands like Editors, a lot of the stuff is heavily leaning on keyboards.”
You Say, We Say was released five years after Royseven’s debut, The Art of Insincerity. One factor in the the delay was that the band were keen to work with German producer Andreas Herbig, who has had over 80 top ten hits across the world.
“We ended up waiting over a year for him – that’s one of the reasons that there was such a long delay between the two albums,” says Bernard. “What often happens is producers have studios that they’re comfortable working in. Andy lives in Hamburg, and he as a studio called Boogie Park that he uses a lot.”
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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