Archive News
‘Stop The Lights’ as Walls play gig to launch new album
Date Published: {J}
The Walls, led by brothers Steve and Joe Wall (formerly of The Stunning), will play Monroe’s Live on Saturday, March 31.
The gig is part of a series to celebrate the launch of their third album, Stop The Lights. Their previous released was 2006’s New Dawn Breaking – what took them so long?
“We’ve been asking ourselves that question!” laughs Steve. “I suppose a lot of things happened in between – kids arrived, DIY, putting up shelves, building an extension, building a studio. A few Stunning reunions. And we spent a lot of time working on songs for this new Walls album,” says Steve.
He and Joe are the chief songwriters in The Walls and normally bring finished songs to the studio, but they went for a different approach this time around. They spent over a year recording jams with fellow band members, which the brothers would then sift through to try and find pieces that they could shape into songs.
While it was far from a fruitless process, the brothers eventually realised that ‘maybe we’re the kind of songwriters that write in a certain way’.
“Of all the stuff we did, we managed to get maybe two or three things,” Steve says. “Then we kind of went back to the drawing board a bit, and myself and Joe started writing apart, and together. What we felt about a lot of the stuff that we jammed was that it didn’t have that emotional attachment.”
Some recent reunion show with The Stunning re-affirmed the power of their songs to Steve, and made him think about how he writes.
“We were amazed every time we went out and did Stunning gigs at how many people still found those songs relevant to them,” he says. “Songs like Everything That Rises, Heads Are Gonna Roll, Brewing Up A Storm, Romeo’s On Fire. The one thing you thought was ‘why try and fix it if it’s not broken?’.”
Steve and Joe may have returned to their roots as songwriters, but those of hours of jams that The Walls made have not been abandoned just yet. In fact, Steve is thinking of turning to one of Ireland’s funkiest bands for assistance.
“Now that the album’s out we might revisit some of that to see if there’s anything in it, now that the pressure’s off a bit,” he says. “Some of it was very good. There was one track – what did we call it again? We used to put whatever name came into your head, king of working titles-so there was a song called Broccoli!
“There was one piece we were trying to turn into a song. It was something you could imagine the Republic of Loose doing, it had that kind of vibe to it. So I might give [ROL’s frontman] Mick Pyro a shout and ask him to help us finish it.”
When Steve was writing songs for the previous Walls album, Ireland was in the grips of the economic boom. Romantic Ireland’s Dead and Gone was inspired by the Yeats’ poem, September 1913, a weary look at those in thrall to money.
“The song would have been written around 2004, right in the middle of all that greed and buying and borrowing,” says Steve. “The Celtic Tiger didn’t affect a lot of artists really. Maybe the gig money was better, but at the same time we were watching all of this going ‘this can’t last’.
“Since then – because we’ve been so slow in getting our bloody albums out! – there have been so many changes,” he adds. “It’s like a different country. There’s a song on the new album called It Goes Without Saying. We’re getting great feedback on it, even though the subject matter is. . . I hate using the word depressing. And it’s not even a comment, because I don’t like commenting on things. I hate songs that are political in any kind of preachy 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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