Archive News
Tasty rock sound of Ham Sandwich at Monroe’s Live
Date Published: {J}
The impressive indie rock quartet Ham Sandwich will play Monroe’s Live this Friday and as she prepares for the gig, lead singer Niamh Farrell reflects on a fruitful 2011.
“We were really busy; we were over in Reading and Leeds, we were in Popkomm in Berlin as well, and the Electric Picnic,” she says of the Meath band. “We’ve had the best year.”
Reading and Leeds are two of the UK’s biggest festivals, and take place over the same August weekend. Did the shows go well for the band?
“They were amazing,” Niamh says. “We were playing at the BBC Introducing Stage. Reading was fantastic; Leeds was brilliant, but the weather was horrible. At Reading, the weather was incredible and loads of people showed up to see us. A lot of people said they showed up off the back of us having a strange name!”
In 2010, Ham Sandwich released White Fox, their second CD which included the superb single Ants. But in July of that year, as they were making the album, their manager Derek Nally died of a heart attack. Not only did the band lose a friend and an ally, but on the day of Derek’s funeral the quarter had studio time booked.
“We had it all planned and booked that we would go in to the studio on a certain date,” Niamh explains. “When Derek passed away, we went to his funeral and we were in the recording studio that day. We were talking about it – ‘will we do it? Will we put it back?’ We just sat down, had a chat about it and thought Derek would’ve told us just to get on with it.”
“At times like that, you do feel like giving up, you really do,” she adds. “But you have to remember what Derek was about, and how much faith he had in us. He would’ve told us to cop on and keep going with it.”
Over a year after his death, Derek Nally’s absence is still felt.
“At different points, at different gigs, you’d miss being able to ring him,” Niamh says. “Like Reading and Leeds, and Popkomm, you’d miss ringing him and going ‘guess what we’re doing!’. Or maybe he would’ve even come with us.”
It may have been made in trying circumstances, but White Fox is an album that strikes an uplifting tone. The combination of guitar, bass, keys and drums is a tried and tested one, but Ham Sandwich still manage to make it fresh and interesting. The Naturist is a toe-tapping gem, the sound of a band having fun – particularly when Niamh repeats the line ‘I liked you better with your homemade haircut/And then she goes and cuts your favourite t-shirt’.
“The Naturist was written pretty much along with the music,” she says. “The music came first, and then myself and Podge (guitar/vocals) in rehearsal were just throwing lines at each other. Then the end of the song, we had the t-shirt line and the haircut line, and that was just repeated in the demo.
“Then when we went in to the studio to record it we were like ‘we need something more, to lift it up.’ Ollie came up with a line, then D’Arcy came up with a line, and I came up with another line – it was great ‘cos we all pitched in.”
Niamh and Podge share vocal duties in the band, and the combination of their voices means you’ll always know a Ham Sandwich song when you hear one. Has it always been part of their sound?
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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