The Thrills, a Dublin 4 rock band with surf rock influences, has seen their profile explode in the last few months and the date in Dolans Warehouse this week had sold out within one hour. I’d been half converted to them through their singles in the meantime and tried to weasel a ticket out my brother (who works there) but to no avail.

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Last Friday saw New York’s Ed Hammell hit Cork. We loaded up on a little buckfast and headed down in time to catch the support act, one Jinx Lennon. As we came into the ‘Half Moon’ our senses were assaulted by this Cork madman lepping and yelping and roaring at a hundred miles an hour and playing his guitar really badly, really loudly, I said to no one in particular

“In a couple of minutes I’m going to have to murder that crazy bastard”

For the bit of peace, like. However, Jinx had a funny way of growing on you, like a fungus or the abscess on Zumbar’s neck, so that in a couple of minutes I was saying

“Crazy bastards of the world unite.”

Purpose yet to be determined. So we’re getting some drinks in and ol’ Jinx is “singing” about someone son being nothing but a cunt and we’re chatting to this lovely young one and her annoyingly sound boyfriend when Hammell comes on and rattles the shit of his guitar and says he’s going to tone down the bestiality jokes cos he’s just had a kid. Fucking kids, ruin everything.

And so Hammell flaked into a few songs about, surprisingly, how God would rather we didn’t kill each other and nice stuff like that. That and songs about crack whores and the like. The songs though seem incidental. What Hammell is selling is his Noo York schikt, his charisma, his story telling ability. At the back they are selling a music album and a spoken word album and I’d say the latter’s the better bet. Still, it’s amazing the amount of noise he gets out of his seventy year old acoustic guitar, his wit is excellent and he gives the crowd a good hour and a half’s worth of the Hammell experience.

As promised:

A gallery of photos from santacon yesterday

Everything is crap! I hate to point the blindingly obvious but there you go. Music is crap, films are crap, books are crap. In mitigation there is a few good tv programs around but tv is still, on the whole, crap. Maybe we should start making our own crap. I’ll start off with this article, which is, of course, crap. (It’s hard to write well about crap).

I know culture tends to follow a boom/bust cycle which could suggest an imminent breakthrough of good stuff but I’ve been expecting that to happen for years now. Years! How much longer must we suffer through this culture lethargy? I know we see the odd good film and hear the odd good tune but when the last time something came along that was so fucking outrageously brilliant it grabbed the whole of society by the ears and shook it till it’s eyes watered? This is the sort of shit I’m looking for people! That’s the shit we need! Good enough is just not good enough anymore. We need voltage, I want to be electrified, fried rice with enough chilli sauce to melt a mountain, d’yaknowwhatimean? Please let 2004 not be another bore, what do we want? WE WANT MORE.