Barbed ire

The looks so unlike the smouldering goddess of the publicity pics that when she peeked her head into view before tip-toeing slimly on-stage, I assumed she was going to announce her own imminence, and thought, “That’s cool, a woman emcee.”

“It’s so new,” she whispers, folding herself into position at the gleaming grand piano which, alongside an acoustic guitar, is the only prop in sight. This is the second-ever gig at the Letterkenny Cultural Centre. “I think the only person who’s touched these keys was the piano-tuner,” flexing her fingers and making distracted, demure eye-contact with a packed, devoted hall, a hint of fluttery eye-lids. Who’d have thought there’d be a theatre-full of Joan As Policewoman fans in Donegal?
She looks like Cillian Murphy, then she’s Lauren Bacall, sings like she’s in hushed conspiracy with the audience, then cackles with laughter and belts out the next number, has a droll line in chatter. You are on the edge of cringe... “Thank you for bringing me somewhere so green”... then cracked up with relief... “where the donkeys are so hairy, like Beyonce.”
She has been around the block with names too numerous to mention, but sounds like she has no musical forebears at all. An operatic jazz singer of punk-inflected ballads, maybe. Love to hear her take on Bessie Smith numbers, if she does that sort of thing, which she should.
She seems utterly at peace with herself, able to shrug at slings and arrows which you sense once made her suffer. Her songs are of struggle and personal survival, serene, reflective, gently triumphant, hiding behind nothing, open about her neediness as evidence of strength.
“We’ll cut the whip and lose the anchor
As long as you jump the ride...”
“I don’t want to live for tomorrow
I don’t want to live for the dying chance
If you’re already good as gone.”
“All you know is the way
That he made you feel
He made you feel safe enough
To feel at all.”
She’s terrifically funny. “Anybody like South Park?... ’Phoned my boyfriend, told him I was playing Letterkenny... He said, ‘Kilkenny?’...I like it so much I have to think of new ways to talk about it.”

I’d rather pay in to catch up with The Q than touch for a press pass to Barbra Streisand, so I’m not inclined to distress over MCD’s treatment of folk who paid a fortune to trudge through the most impressive expanse of mud seen on the planet since the Somme to find they had no seat to perch on as the posturing screecher savaged their ears from a poorly-positioned video screen.
And another reason is that, from the impassioned accounts on the radio whinge-ins, the Streisand dupes were handled no worse than rock fans are routinely treated by the same moolah-mad moguls who have established a monopoly over the live music industry. How did they think they’d be treated? With respect? What makes them think they’re so special? That they not only can but actually have paid five hundred squids for an evening of meaningless mush-mash melodramatics? That doesn’t make them special; that makes them stupid.
I realised that the game was up for honest music when once I complained at a festival about cops in a concealed vantage point at the side of the stage with long-range cameras trained on the innocent audience. What the fuck are they doing, and who allowed them, and I demand they be given the bum’s rush right now, I reasonably appealed to the representative of the promoters, who was standing beside me.
Only to be told that, “They are here at our request” – note even the phraseology – and that if I didn’t stop creating a ruckus, “We may have to ask you to leave.”
Hope I die before I get that sort of old.
I remember the good days at Punchestown when the Beep warned the audience from the stage about drug-squad scoundrels in particular T-shirts prowling the field with malevolent intent. “Fuck you, coppers,” he charismatically concluded.
But when business-suits rule, decency fades, and there’s as little respect for nerds as for true heads of our time.

The Mail On Sunday has suggested the reintroduction of capital punishment for suicide bombers.

It’s a month since Gordon Brown moved into Downing Street.
Only a fortnight until cross-channel football resumes.
Time to put the question: for how much longer are we going to have to put up with this appalling government?
In matters of sport we are given to giddiness. I allowed my heart a little skip when I heard that Brown had appointed chubby-faced James Purnell as culture secretary: he’d been among the small, gallant band who’d greeted London getting the Olympics with a proper splutter of scepticism.
The vast sums necessary for staging the celebration of gouging, cheating and nationalistic hype would be better spent re-opening the hundreds of school playing-fields flogged off under Thatcher and Blair, Mr. Purnell suggested. What justification could there be for “spending billions making London’s overcrowding worse?”
Now that Mr. Purnell had become minister in charge, maybe this overblown bonanza for steroid manufacturers, lycra magnates and choreographers of formation flag-waggery might be cut down to size.
But no such luck. Mr. Purnell has announced to the Commons that he now reckons he was wrong. The Olympics present “a glorious opportunity to promote all that is best in Britain.”
What had brought about this change of mind?
The success of the Manchester Commonwealth Games, that’s what. If that modest event could spread such joy, how much more uplifting would be the impact of the Olympics?
The Manchester Games were in 2002. Readers may recall that Norris from Coronation Street was a volunteer marshal at the new stadium built for the Games which is now home to Manchester’s football team. Whereas Mr. Purnell’s speech about the wastefulness of the Olympics came in 2003...
Or take new sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe. In 1999, he tabled a bill to take the governance of football away from the Football Association and establish an independent regulator.
“The FA has failed miserably to protect and act in the best interests of all who support the game,” Mr. Sutcliffe told MPs. "It should be stripped of any role relating to the finances of football."
Recent developments have confirmed that this view is now even more relevant: the transfer shenanigans at West Ham, the takeover of Man City by a Thai politician on the run, the farce surrounding Ken Bates’ re-re-possession of Leeds United, the financing of Chelsea, the financing of Fulham, the dawn raids by posses of Plods, etc., etc.
But Sutcliffe, too, has now changed his tune: “While many of the issues I raised then are still relevant now, things have changed a great deal. I now firmly believe the solution lies with sport regulating itself.”
It’s like the Green-but-not-cabbage-looking Party in the South agreeing, as I understand it, to a coal-fired smelter in the Newgrange burial chamber, the concreting-over of the Burren and the re-designation of the Lakes of Killarney as storage sites for Euro-sludge.
When the attainment of office becomes the point of your politics, you end up believing in nothing very
much.b