Archive News
Life a juggling act for twins who hit jackpot with ‘Remember When’
Date Published: {J}
Every once in a while a musician composes a song so irresistibly catchy and melodic that it gets stuck in your head and feels like it won’t get out without some kind of surgical intervention.
Acoustic pop duo Heathers penned one such song that stormed the airwaves last March and has since been whistled and hummed incessantly in baths and showers up and down the country.
Unless you’ve spent the last year and a half with your head stuck in the ground like an agoraphobic ostrich you’ll have heard Remember When, which was spectacularly launched to prominence when it featured on a Fáilte Ireland commercial last year.
Launched to prominence, too, were the 21-year-old twin sisters behind Heathers, Ellie and Louise McNamara. The use of the song in a commercial promoting tourism in Ireland to a worldwide audience was obviously a seminal moment in the careers of the Dublin girls but their star was already rising before the ad gave them their big break.
Formed in 2007, Heathers recorded their first album, Here, Not There, when they were just 17 and embarked on two month-long tours of the United States the following year. The Fáilte Ireland ad was undeniably a watershed in their burgeoning careers, however, and they have since gone on to play at Oxegen and Electric Picnic, and were invited to perform with Paolo Nutini after he saw them perform last May.
“It was definitely our big break,” says Ellie. “It made our music more accessible and way more people got to hear it than otherwise would have. The fact that it’s on an ad representing our country is really great for us, too.
“Remember When was my favourite song on the album and, even though we’ve played it a million times, I still enjoy playing it. It was a huge boost for us and things pretty much started happening for us right away after it.”
A scout for an advertising agency had heard their music on MySpace and sent them a message asking if they would be interested in Remember When being considered as the theme tune for an upcoming television commercial.
“There were other songs in for it as well and we never thought that ours would be chosen,” recalls Ellie.
But it was, and it has since been played to vast audiences as part of Fáilte Ireland’s Discover Your Own Ireland advertising campaign. Album sales have rocketed. Remember When was released as a single and climbed to number 11 in the Irish charts. They were invited to perform at CMJ festival in New York and at Canadian Music Week in Toronto.
Heathers were selected by 2FM to represent Ireland at Eurosonic 2011 in Holland, leading to a plethora of festival bookings in Europe and the UK this summer. January also saw the UK and worldwide release of their debut album, and another tour of the US beckons later this summer.
The hectic schedule necessitated by their meteoric rise would be enough to exhaust even the most seasoned pop divas, but Ellie and Louise have had to tackle the trappings of their success as part of a delicate balancing act with their ongoing educational endeavours.
Louise is currently sitting her final exams in Geography and Music Technology at NUI Maynooth, while Ellie is studying for a Primary School Teaching degree and finished her second-year exams just last week.
“The exams went fine, they weren’t too bad but it’s been all go, go, go,” admits Ellie. “We’ve been really busy with exams but we’ve also been working on our new album. Hopefully we’ll have a bit more time for working on it now and be able to focus on that for the summer.”
The balance between their promising music careers and their studies must be a difficult juggling act, but it is one that the twins have been used to since they were teenagers.
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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