Archive News
Magic voice of Katie Kim for free city show
Date Published: {J}
Katie Kim will perform a free show in the Róisín Dubh on Thursday, January 26 as part of a triple bill that includes Puzzle Muteson and The Lost Brothers. Katie made waves with her debut, Twelve and will soon release its follow up, Cover and Flood.
“It’s a collection of songs from the last two years,” says the Waterford singer, also known as Katie Sullivan. “When I released Twelve, I had all these bits and bobs. I didn’t really know whether to release them as two albums or one. When I decided to make it as one album – about a year ago – it just felt right to put them all together. They all seemed like they were recorded in the same mind frame.”
Cover and Flood is a 20-track collection of home and studio recordings that showcases Katie’s ethereal voice.
“John Haggis, who used to be our drummer, got a grant from the Arts Council to convert a house into a studio, which he ended up calling Granny’s Studio. I recorded a good bit of it there, and then the rest of it was in my bedroom, really.”
Cover and Flood will be released as a double vinyl package. Why did Katie go for this unusual approach?
“I love vinyl!” she says. “And it sounds better than CD. I’ve just become so tired of CDs and how flimsy they are. I just think that people either listen to their iPod or they use turntables. I’m going to also release it on digital download.”
Katie believes that listening to an album on vinyl leads to a more in-depth experience, as the music fan doesn’t have the option of a ‘skip button.’
“When I’m holding the vinyl in my hand and I take it out and I put it on the deck, and I have to get up to change to side B – you sit down with it more,” she says. “Whereas I find when I do listen to music on my iPod – 80% of the time I don’t listen to the whole album from start to finish – I tend to flick.”
Some of the pieces on Cover and Flood are instrumental tracks that introduce longer songs. The way the whole work is presented demonstrates that Katie Kim is not about to unleash her ego at this early stage of her career.
“Even though it’s a double-vinyl and there are 20 songs, it’s only about 52 minutes long. So it’s not a huge self-indulgent release. I don’t expect people to listen to 20 full length songs for my second release!”
The Feast is one the most immediately arresting songs on Cover and Flood. Did Katie make a deliberate effort to write an accessible tune, or was she following the muse?
“They really just come out the way they come out,” Katie says. “That one in particular, I think I was reading And the Ass Saw the Angel – it’s one of the first Nick Cave books. It’s a really gothic, really visual book. And that’s where The Feast came out of – that’s how the book felt to me.”
Katie is keen to credit her long-time collaborator John Haggis with adding a drum sound that really lifts The Feast.
“I recorded it and I went out; I came back the next day and there were drums over it!” she recalls. “And he said ‘look, if you like them, you like them. If you don’t, you don’t’. I loved them, so he really was a big part of that song as well.”
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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