MY LITTLE BREAK

My little break from blogging is over and I would like to report that I had a nice break.

I would like to report that but it really isn’t true.

Just not had a minute.

Anyway, I will give you something from Eamonn McCann here, taking another shot at U2. I saw him speaking at a conference in Scotland and he was great.

Josef Locke was always so much more rock ‘n’ roll than U2

Eamonn McCann

Shuffling out from U2’s Popmart tour — the one with the McDonalds-style Golden Arch — at Lansdowne Road 10 years ago, I chanced on Philip King, singer, songwriter, television producer and music adviser to the Irish Arts Council.

“Whaddya think?”

“Whatever it is,” pronounced the elfin Kerry sage, “it’s an effin’ big one of them.”

Which has always been the way with the emperors of bombast. Now they, or at least their stage sets, are bigger than ever. Biggest ever seen, the PR propaganda assures me. As if that were a measure of musical stature …

The tour kicked off in Barcelona on June 30 to gasps of ecstatic approval, most breathlessly from Irish commentators flown out for the occasion, many of whom apparently believe that saying a bad word about Bono might render them liable for prosecution under the Republic’s new Blasphemy Law.

The Belfast Telegraph reported on Tuesday that, according to the environmental monitoring group carbonfootprint.com, the 18-month, 100 gig tour will involve the band travelling 70,000 miles in their private jet, the 390-tonne set following on cargo planes.

The volume of CO2 spewed out will be enough to transport U2 34.125 million miles to Mars and back. (Of course, the damage could be cut by half if they were just flown to Mars and left there.)

This odyssey of environmental obliteration — how many endangered species will have been rendered extinct by the time Bono croons a final chorus?

I despair for the panda — follows Bono’s dreamy pronouncement last year that: “My prayer is that we become better in looking after our planet.”

We should be used by now to the clanging contradictions of U2. It’s been noted here before that Bono’s castigation of the Irish Government for directing too small a proportion of its tax receipts to aid for the developing world was swiftly followed by the band transferring its business operation to the Netherlands to avoid paying tax to the Irish Government.

Now, Larry Mullen has noticed “a new resentment of rich people in this country … We have experienced [a situation] where coming in and out of the country at certain times is made more difficult than it should be — not only for us, but for a lot of wealthy people … The better-off (are) being sort of humiliated.”

There you were believing that it’s people writhing on trolleys in hospital corridors because wards have been closed on account of the economy or children learning arithmetic by calculating the speed of the rats scuttling across the classroom as a result of the education budget being slashed to bail out the bankers who are being humiliated in the New Ireland.

Wrong. The little drummer boy has now explained that it’s the rich who are being reduced to tears by hard-faced officialdom.

Larry’s distress was aroused by seeing tax-exiled property developer Dermot Desmond being dissed at Dublin airport. “If this is what (the rich) experience, how can I fly the Irish flag and tell people ‘come to Ireland because it’s great? ’… All those rich guys with all those balls [?], all those women that you see organising this and organising that, without them we’d be in a very, very different state.”

Larry has been particularly saddened by the plight of his pal Ronan Ryan, whose Dublin nosherie, the Town Bar and Grill, has hit hard times on account of fewer people being able to afford the prices. “He got eaten alive,” mourned Larry. By ravenous hordes of enraged proletarians, possibly. U2? Josef Locke (ask your granny) was more rock and roll.

But ethical and cultural succour is at hand. Even as the carbon-moguls pose and prance at their second gig in Croker two weeks from Saturday, Glasgowbury will be under way in the gorgeous setting of Eagle’s Rock in the Sperrins. (Head for Draperstown and follow the signs and alluring sounds.)

It’s here you will feel the uplift only poetry can provide. The poetical performers will include global guru and rock and roll philosopher Henry McCullough, the non-pareil And So I Watch You From Afar, the Jane Bradfords, whose eponymous album (always wanted to use that word) was among the glittering jewels of 2008, good-time deep-down and dirty Here Comes the Landed Gentry, dark, dangerous Mighty Stef (listen to him growl “You Have Been Selected as a Woman of the King”, and tremble), brain-crush three-piece Fighting With Wire, full-on and fearless The Q, Skruff (managed by a SDLP councillor, but the new album has almost forced me to forgive them), Derry retro rockers Furlo, Junior Johnson (from Randalstown!), the Beat Poets, Dutch Schultz, Little Hooks, LeFaro, the Inishowen Gospel Choir, Paul Casey, Paddy Nash and the Happy Enchiladas (worth the journey just to hear Diane Greer exulting, “I’ll be dancing barefoot in Verona, Throwing shapes in Timbuktoo, Singing out in Barcelona, Not worried about you.”) and a rake of others abuzz with cred, all from Ireland, almost all from Northern Ireland, half of them genuine teenagers.

Pay no attention to Edwin Poots. Or to his diddly-di detractors.

This is our authentic culture, available to all, threatening nobody except those with vested interests in the throwback drek of the ‘two cultures’ society.

Glasgowbury will be a finer, truer, more cultured place to be than the vast arena in Dublin where ego-warriors will warble as they squirt cider in Ireland’s eye.

Come to Glasgowbury, where even the burgers are brilliant.