Archive News
Le Galaxie end great year with Galway show
Date Published: 28-Dec-2012
LE GALAXIE play Róisín Dubh on New Year’s as part of a bill that also includes Enemies, Daithí and Elaine Mai.
The Dublin based quartet who formed back in 2007, play dance music that also features live bass, drum and guitar. So, was this a good year for the band?
“2012 was, without a doubt, and I’m sure all the lads would agree with me, our best year ever,” says happy front man Michael Pope.
“Everything was raised up – we had an EP, that was our best work yet, we had the Electric Picnic. For the first time ever, we sold out shows. It’s nice to do that because you feel like you’ve worked for it and you’ve earned it.”
The Le Galaxie show at the Electric Picnic was at the festival-friendly hour of 2am. playing to a packed Little Big Tent, the band had a ball.
“It was unbelievable, really,” says Michael. “The tent was full and they had to stop letting people in. That was fantastic, especially as we were going up against (dance superstars) Orbital. And we got our first celebrity fan out of it! It was Des Bishop, and he became one of our patrons after that. Oh, and Aoibhinn Ní Shuilleabháin, she was there. Two proper Irish celebrities!”
Although guitars are part of their sound, Le Galaxie generate most of their ideas from tinkering with synthesisers. “It’s kind of what excites us all,” Michael says. “Once there’s an idea, we’ll run with it. We never sit down in the studio with drums and guitars, it just doesn’t work. But if we all sit around with synths and start coming up with ideas, it can be quite exhilarating.”
“Some of our most recent songs we put together with a lot of Red Bull and a lot of messing around, just working intensively for a short period of time,” he adds.
“The one featuring Elaine Mai, Love System; that was very much ‘guess what we’re doing tonight? We’re going to write the fifth song on our EP’. There was a lot of high energy, and ideas being spouted out.”
Speaking of Elaine Mai, the Galway based electro wizard will be joining Le Galaxie on the New Year’s Eve bill. The song on which she features, Love System is on the EP that Le Galaxie released this year, fade 2 forever.
Michael is full of praise for the young artist, “She’s great,” he says. “Elaine was plugged in and ready to record her vocal, and myself and Dave from the band were upstairs in the control room. As soon as she sang, we paused and Dave looked at me, and we had this strange moment.
“As much as we have high-octane shows, there’s something about seeing Elaine – you just stand there and watch her do all her stuff and listen to her voice. I think she’s entirely unique in this country.”
Playing the Róisín on December 31st has become something of a ritual for Le Galaxie. They’ll be ringing in 2013 on stage, and plan to make it a memorable occasion.
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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