Archive News
John Hughes’s show to mark new album on theme of murder
Date Published: {J}
Making an album about murder and how it’s portrayed in the media is not something you expect from your average songwriter. But Jon Hughes is far from average. The Galway-based American singer launches his third album Dead Weight in Busker Browne’s, on Wednesday, July 13.
Dead Weight is informed by Jon’s taste in literature, as much as his taste in music. He explains why he went for a more narrative approach, as opposed to a personal one, on this album.
“There are probably a few characters – it’s not so much myself on this one,” he says. “I wanted to do something where I’m putting my ideas into it but I’m not actually experiencing it directly.
“It’s an album about murder looked through different kinds of media,” he adds. “I wanted to compare and contrast narratives from books to media we get nowadays, like 30 second blasts on YouTube. I find it troubling sometimes, in a way that I want to write about it.”
Does Jon feel that the 24-hour reporting of an often violent world has desensitised people?
“I think that’d be a fair thing to say,” he says. “Desensitised and I guess we’re becoming accustomed to not really using our imaginations. We expect things to get fed to us.”
One of the standout moments on the album is the stark but arresting Gretta’s Body. A combination of fiction and real life brought the song about.
“I was reading a book and it started with an image of a character standing on a bridge,” says Jon. “He looks across and he sees a window with a light that is sort of red. In the book, he doesn’t follow this image but I decided to see what would happen if he actually did.
“Part of it as a little bit personal as well because the character that [the man in the song] meets is a guy that I used to work with, years ago, in a kitchen. I remember meeting him and he had this look in his eyes – I don’t know exactly what was wrong with him – it was like he was pleased to meet me but he wanted to kill me as well. It stuck with me.
“I sort of like to write songs that are journeys through hell!” Jon laughs. “It keeps coming up.”
Yet it’s not all heavy-going. The music on Dead Weight adds some light to the dark tones of the lyrics. Bizarrely enough, it’s often a pleasant listen.
“These are things that I think about but I don’t think the music should reflect that,” says Jon. “The music has sort of a positive feel. It sounds funny, I don’t know why that happens. I guess I don’t feel any anger, so I can see why that would be reflected in the music.
“It’s a common thing when I write songs. The content might be a bit dark but the music is not. I’m not sure why that is really.”
Jon arrived in Galway in 2005, taking some time out of American city life. Like many people who come to Galway, he didn’t intend to stay but became enamoured with the place.
“It sounds so clichéd, but I was just travelling through Ireland,” he recalls. “I’d been working at a job for a long time, in a kitchen, and living in Madison city in Wisconsin. I just wanted to go somewhere different; it just came up by chance really.
“I decided to come to Ireland and I ended up in Galway. I wanted to relax for a while and plant myself somewhere. I found a job and a place to live immediately and I’ve been here for five or six years.”
Tackling the kind of ideas that run through Dead Weight sounds fairly demanding. Did Jon have to set aside a block of time for the writing of the album?
“I just write all the time – I feel like I have to,” he says. “I sometimes feel like I do a little more than I should, and I should be actually putting my stuff out there. But the whole music industry is changing, so sometimes I wonder if staying in my room writing albums and not worrying so much about the other stuff is a maybe a better way.”
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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