The media pegged her early on as a ranter and sadly the import of her stunt with the pope’s photo got lost in the iconoclasm of the moment. It was intended as a protest against the Catholic Churches complicity in child abuse. Years later and the soporific vacuity of the Irish pop of the time (and in the shape of Boyzone, ever since) looks shamefully complacent in comparison. It was the very definition of a sane (if inflammatory) response to an insane situation, one which the world is only just catching up on. It was also the first indication that Sinead was the real voice of Ireland on the world stage; brutalized beyond toleration, haunted by old daemons, insular, yearning, spiritually bereft and desolate.

In the ‘The Year of the Horse’ concert video while singing ‘Irish Ways’ she tries to sound and look just that.  The shaved head now looks votive, like a nun or someone in deep mourning. Eyes closed and fingers flickering before her in the follow spot, she enumerates aeons of suffering to a steady, almost martial beat. It’s an enormous but subtly depressing moment that feels like a postcard from the 1980’s, a reminder of that lousy conflict and it’s horribly charmless progenitors; Adams and McGuiness and sodding Ian Paisley. All the grief, the national indignation and the chauvinism that at the time seemed a permanent condition is there, as is the implicit sense of identity crisis from which these dangerous emotions spring. It’s beautiful of course and heartfelt, but it is also nationalistic song with some of the vices of nationalism; parochialism and sentimentality, another attempt to identify herself and find the root cause of her anger.

That same anger illuminates that shows set piece, albeit in a more honest and personal form. ‘The Last Day of Our Acquaintance’ is to an O’Connor fans what ‘Nothing Compares…’ is to everyone else. Her key song.  It smoulders through its slow, resentful verses and she sings flat phrases like ‘you have taken me for granted’ with genuinely venom. And my favourite line ‘and we will meet later to finalise the detail’ is self evident; from resignation to dismay to spite to despair in nine words. She slowly gathers herself and the anger grows again, lunges forward, retreats again and finally explodes in a cathartic chord change that lights up the stadium with sheer vitality. This may technically be a musical bluff but it’s viscerally powerful and emotionally correct. It begins in utter defeat and emerges defiant.

On the surface her work appears to be defined by emotional structures rather than aesthetic forms. But it may be truer to say that the forms, or scraps of forms, through which the emotions are expressed are so shredded, mingled together and obscure that the finished product appears formless. Get up close to the music and you can start to catch the shreds and ghosts of Irish folk songs, 80’s stadium rock, Power pop, punk, reggae, touches of Sylvia Plath and Edith Piaf, 50’s radio ballads, Dublin street slang, hymns, mantras, prayers. All of these things emerge with an unpremeditated immediacy which sometimes fails to convincingly cohere and sometimes coheres with such force that it takes your breath away.

Her numerous cover albums seem to be a logical consequence of this approach, leading with the emotion and the need to externalize the trauma, personal and political that she has internalized. She grasps for whatever best expresses the psychic strain, either in writing or in singing songs that express the right emotion. On ‘Am I not your Girl’ this is demonstrated to full effect. The harum scarum track selection may seem wilfully uncommercial but considered individually the tracks are often startlingly effective. The soupy melodrama of a lot of the source material is reinvented by the raw boned insistency of her voice so that the nugatory effects of stuff like ‘Success has made a failure…’ are lent a genuine emotional intensity.

She pulls this trick again on the superficially more cogent ‘Sean-Nos Nua’ (Old Style New). Certainly some of the selections are scholarly (‘The Mourlogh Shore’ is gorgeous) but you’d have to be pretty determined to find real depth in ‘I’ll Tell Me Ma’. Because, I suspect, the governing impulse of these selections is not so much aesthetic as psychological. With each album she is mapping out an area of her psyche or her past; giving us piecemeal a psychological autobiography in song; in a deeper sense this is exactly what artists do, refract their pain through deeply adumbrated artistic forms.

And this culminates in the clever, restrained video for Molly Malone from ‘Sean-Nos Nua’ album. In it she reiterates the simple iconic image of the ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ video that made her in the first place; simply her beauty and her unflinching gaze. She makes it implicitly a song about ghosts, all the more haunting for its innocent familiarity, like wandering down a well known street to find a hidden fragment of the ancient city.

A lot of people mocked the ‘farewell tour’ aspect as of Sean-Nos tour as insincere, a ploy to get attention, and she has released albums since. But give her the benefit of the doubt and another truth emerges.  She always means what she says when she says it and as a career summation the whole thing is superb; steeped in sinewy, lyrical Sea Nos, with reggae warmth and a knowing homage to her own iconography. She is summing it all up and drawing a line.

In the 1990’s she was ordained as a Catholic priest in the break away sect the Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church. The media response was predictably derisive. It was an unambiguous statement of intent. After explaining for many years very clearly what she did not want the church to be (narrow, political, elitist, homophobe, misogynist) she is now attempting to show by example, exactly what she thinks it should be.

Cage Drops Lieutenant

Nicholas Cage (The Rock) has announced he is to step down from the starring role in the forthcoming multi-million dollar Broadway adaptation of his own hit movie Bad Lieutenant; Port of Call New Orleans.

Bad Lieutenant! which was due to open next month, will be directed by Greg Zhalick (Mapplethorpe!); chosen because of his unconventional stagings of Irreversible and The Borrowers and features a number of original songs by Marvin Hamlish (The Way We Were). Cage, who would have been singing on stage for the first time in his career, would have been belting five new numbers written expressly for him including; ‘Crack Rock’, ‘You’re a bad girl baby (but you’re good to me)’ and the titular ‘I’m a bad, bad, bad Lieutenant’:

‘I like guns, I like drugs, I like prostitutes,

I’m on the street lookin’ for old ladies to shoot,

Yeah I’m a bad, bad, bad Lieutenant

Chorus: All the way from New Orleans!

Yeah I’m a bad, bad, bad Lieutenant’

©Zube Productions 2009

The production will be rescheduled with the lead being taken by relative newcomer Zed Rippton (The Rock!). It also features Biff Hipshorn (Mamma Mia 2: The Legacy) as his imaginary sidekick Iggy the Hallucinated Iguana and Duine Bensey (Alas Smith and Jones!) as Golden-hearted Nancy, his prostitute girlfriend. Some of the songs are already generating buzz on the ‘net especially the show stopping: ‘Don’t point that gun at me young man’ and the sultry ‘I’m not resisting, officer’.

The songs were written by Hamlish for the movie under its production title; ‘Werner Herzog’s Able Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant; Port of Call – New Orleans: The Musical’ but they were dropped for the sake of coherence. Cage’s reasons for dropping the role are unclear although it’s widely rumoured that he has accepted a lucrative contract to appear in a sequence of in-house infomercials for Satan himself.

I live in Bounds Green and am writing to wish you luck in the upcoming election. I will be voting for you after having voted Lib Dem in the previous election and in spite of my general disappointment with the party.

I don’t imagine you’ll have chance to read this before the election, I hope you are out foot-slogging and winning votes door to door. But I’d like to express my sense of political disenchantment, and hope you will understand that I cannot vote for a party I believe in without expressing my disquiet at its recent behaviour.

While recognising that political parties campaign in poetry and govern in prose, I can’t help but feel that Labour has strayed from its core values in the last eighteen years. Dropping clause four felt to many like a capitulation; as though a generation of punishing political effort directed towards putting social equality on the political main-stage had simply been washed away.

I am a thirty year old student studying politics and have lived in this borough my entire life. I was a child when the Conservative government shut down the GLC, but I remember the sinking feeling which accompanied it. There was a sense that the people running our country were unaccountable and simply, fundamentally against us. When Labour took power in 1997 we felt a sense of euphoric release, but it was mixed with uncertainty.

As my generation has reached maturity many of us have simply failed to find a political expression of our ideals. We cannot find inspiration in a party with a compromising agenda which promises change while refusing to make tough, principled decisions on key issues. We are being attracted to a Liberal party which hides it’s cynicism behind cautiously selected, shop-window policies. We are naturally suspicious of a government which supported a dubious war, which rolled back banking oversight in the first place, which has committed itself to replacing Trident.

I believe that Labour is the only party which can embody the changes we need to see in this country and I will be rejoining the party, perhaps too late in the day now, and voting for you on May 6th. But I will do so in the knowledge that I am nearly alone amongst my peers.

I will support Labour, even in opposition, but my support won’t come for free.

I believe that central government is a closed shop, uncommunicative and unresponsive to the rank and file of the party. I believe this situation is as much me and my generation’s responsibility to remedy as it is the party’s. We have allowed ourselves to be excluded and failed to make our voices heard and it has backed us into a corner where we (or many of us) will be voting for a party that does not share our values, thereby allowing a party who is actively opposed to them into power.

My generation badly needs something to believe in and the Labour party will need us to survive. Please let me know how I can help in the future.

Yours truly,

J W

This is our problem; no one wants to endorse a Gordon Brown premiership, (though I submit that the reasons for that are various and a tad murky) but no one wants to let the tories in. In such an agonizing double-bind it’s easy to think that a stalemate is a preferable option. But I really want people to examine the presumptions on which their choices are based and to realise that this sense of being trapped is largely a self fulfilling prophesy.

If we feel coerced by our voting system then we need to put pressure on the commons to change that system, and that pressure should start now. But it is short sighted and dangerous to use a General Election as a referendum on electoral reform, though in reality they nearly always are.

As to the Lib Dems, if these are people who cannot even commit to the idea of socialism in principle then what hope do we have that, given power, they will make socialising decisions? What matters is what the core of the party want and I seriously doubt that the core of the Lib Dem party want social change.

They are a centre-right party in their very DNA, who are feinting left to woo voters and block Labour. But if they can do that with such alacrity I have no doubt they can feint right when the wind blows favourably in that direction. And since they have no core philosophy to be held to (and that’s probably what their core vote want anyway) it will be easy and expedient for them to do so.

I am infuriated that Socialism is not even under discussion in this election, since I see no evidence that society is becoming essentially fairer or better run. Why can’t we be ideological? Why do we have to side with some sketchy middle-of-the-road-at-best ‘Liberal Democrats’? What does that even mean anyway? We’re all liberal democrats. Even the Tories.

Money became lovingly, unashamedly obsessed with every moment and every nuance of my existence. It has clung to me ever since; every moment of every day, waiting for me when I wake up, watching me when I sleep. I have got angry with it, screamed at it to leave ’till I was blue in the face, told it I did not respect it, like it and certainly did not love it. But money is deaf.

Even when we were at our most distant it would still send me letters and ring me every day. When I pulled the phone out the wall and closed my curtains and refused to read the mail, money would be waiting for me when I returned, angry and frustrated at my absence. It was never out of my thoughts, of course, no matter how far down in whatever dark pit I hid. Money was there every second.

Like all obsessive relationships there has been no satisfaction for either party. No rest and no peace. We are locked in an endless stifling embrace me and money, someday I fear that only an act of violence will finally end it. Because I have become as obsessed by money as it has with me.

Scream and cry and stamp your feet.

If you try and fail again,

Blame an act of god. Amen.

No. 1:  Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. Possibly the worst thing about being alive in Noughties Brittan. This charmless shit-com began, like a gurgling cough, in 2001 and persists to this day. I personally appeared in it. Twice. True story.

No. 2:  Channel 4. It crawled through the gutter cackling and gibbering, clawing at its flesh and chanting nihilistic mantras about entropy and death. In my oppinion.

No. 3:  Catherine Tate. Like a howling, joyless, strangely terrifying hen night. More witless than Justin Lee Collins, more grating than Allan Carr, scarier than Jimmy Carr, louder and more repetitive than Little Brittan and dumber than a sack of house bricks. Seemingly everywhere.

No. 4:  Gordon Brown. A sad, smelly, moth-eaten teddy bear gathering dust in the corner of a particularly grim charity shop alongside half a toy train and a ceramic plate with a poorly executed painting of an otter on it.

No. 5:  Pete Doherty. The poseurs poseur, he reminded us all just how boring drug addicts are and wore a hat that just made me angrier and angrier every time I saw it. He and Winehouse stalked the fetid streets of Camden like Pestilence and Famine.

No.6:  Peaches Geldof. 792,000 results on Google. Doesn’t actually do anything.

No. 7:  Russell Brand. Like the spirit of banality itself, despite setbacks, he grew only larger as the years wore on.

No. 8:  Nick Griffin. Looking like a unctuous management consultant from Bristol who smells of scotch eggs and wee, he appeared on Question Time causing BNP membership to soar.

No. 9:  Abu Hamza al-Masri. The UK’s favourite novelty fascist. ”The person who hinders Allah’s rule, this man must be eliminated”

No. 10:  Planet of the Apes, Big Fish, Sweeny Todd, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Tim Burton, the formerly great director, smeared crap across the decade like a bewildered chimp.

No. 11:  8 out of 10 cats. It was a tv pannel show, one of the plethora which sprang up in the noughties like the tv equivalent of Barratt homes. I’ve never watched this one but apparently it’s garbage.

No. 12:  Twitter on your iphone; the cutting edge of noughties tech. Beeeep. Stephen Fry had Weetabix for breakfast. Oh.

No. 13:  The Crazy Frog. It reached No. 1 on the singles chart, due in no small part to mobile downloads or something. Ding ding ding ding ding ding, ding ding ding ding ding ding, ding ding ding ding ding ding, ding ding ding ding, ding ding ding ding ding, ding ding ding ding ding, ding ding ding ding ding, ding ding ding ding ding, ding ding ding ding ding, ding ding ding ding ding…

No. 14:  Simon Cowell. He was Simon Cowell. People talked about him. A lot. ‘Doesn’t he have high trousers’, they said ‘isn’t he mean’, they continued, ‘I wonder if he’s gay’ they bleated as your brain bubbled.

No. 15:  An Emo band. They are rubbish.

No. 16:  Avrile Lavigne. Some serious critics claimed that her music had hidden depths. It didn’t. Insidious hit ‘Skater Boy’ promised love and acceptance so long as you become famous and rich. ‘Could I make it any more obvious?’ She sang. No. Now p*** off.

No. 17:  John Prescott. A comprehensive school educated trade unionist who took his degree from Hull after serving as a merchant marine, he went on to become deputy leader of the most successful Labour administration of all time. He is best remembered for being quite fat.

No. 18:  The New Pink Pather. A typical noughties remake, it was of course utter, utter shit. They made a sequel.

No. 19:  David Cameron. Looks like a grown up Billy Bunter who’s made a pact with a rather low-rent demon. He wears the strain of the cognitive dissonance implied by ‘compassionate conservativism’ around his eyes. Watch as they grow darker and darker as his star inexorably ascends.

No. 20:  George Bush. For eight years we thought about this man every day.

Once upon a time there was a species who, due to a particular confluence of environmental forces, learned to travel over short distances on their hind legs. This allowed them to hunt different prey in a different way and necessitated they develop more complex hunting skills. They developed the first ever repertoire of skill sets; using a range of different methods to accomplish desired outcomes, unlike most species who have only a single skill set which they nuance to suit their environment.

This (technically infinite) self adaptability and their physical adaptation to fully erect bi-pedal movement allowed the species to migrate in a non cyclical manor, unlike all other species. At this point all the land masses were fused and they explored, driven by a desire to find an environment which would allow long term static occupation. Their great migration was, ironically, motivated by a desire to stay still.

The species managed to find spots all over the landmass which allowed them to satisfy all of their daily needs and they settled. During this period the landmass  separated into four major continental masses and a plethora of islands. The branches of the species, thus isolated, began to evolve along diverse lines.

Long term occupation necessitated the development of other skills. The settled peoples became aware of seasons for the first time and developed more and more sophisticated ways of making the environment continuously habitable. They began to husband crops and animals; controlling their environment rather than searching for naturally occurring sustenance. They had to produce complex solutions to complex problems in order to sustain a successful, sedentary, year round existence; they stored and preserved food, and after a long troglodytic (or cave dwelling) period they built dwellings and developed civic systems in order to allow for labour specialization.

These static communities were threatened by nomadic groups still incapable of sustained agricultural production who would take their stored resources, often in mounted raids. So they fortified their settlements, selected a group to train themselves as defenders and the strongest (or most tactically minded) became leaders, then, as the communities became more organized and militant and began to incorporate with other villages into larger city states, they became warlord-kings. For quite some time these city states rose and fell, still subject to the limits of their environment-control technology, political autonomy and geographical resources.

Individuals rose up who sought to forcefully incorporate as many city-states as possible into super-states or empires. Of particular note were the emperor Chin who created the Chinese empire, Ivan (the terrible) who consolidated Eastern Europe, The Roman Caesars, The Asian Moguls and the European kings and queens. Amongst the most significant of these was Henry the eighth of England. His enclosures of common lands act led to the corporate division of arable land and the growth of urban living. Cities rather than villages became the predominant population centers and a property based legal system emerged, as did a sense of social class.  All of these factors would lead, ultimately, to the industrial revolution when a contractually disenfranchised rural working class and a socially aware cadre of urban philosopher/scientists together revolutionized the nature of material production with the intention of freeing the world from scarcity and social injustice. This technology spread to England’s trade partners and ultimately allowed those who possessed it to explore, map, colonize and control most of the world.

And thus it stood in 1914. These large, European originated trade-based power blocks stood together, shoulder to shoulder across the world. They had signed agreements and charters and treaties with one another, buying temporary quiet at the price of long term stability. Two major, associated empire groups had developed which intersected on the political border lands of Bulgaria and Serbia. And in 1914 (when Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand a nominal representative of one power bloc was assassinated on this borderland) the system split into two warring halves. The following Great War continued, with a cold war period, until 1945 when German militarism withered under the weight of it’s own monomaniacal belligerence and America dropped a nuclear bomb on it’s Japanese opponents. The empire system had shred itself and a nation-state based system emerged, with smaller often culturally, religiously and/or ethnically homogeneous nations, each defined by its military capacity, geographical disposition (or at the behest of their former empire lords) and organized around whatever point of apparent consensus its leading caste could conjure up.

This left the two largest power centers (America and Russia) intact. Power became bi-polar with one major empire (China) seceding from world power disputes altogether and the rest cowed by the nuclear capacity of the two major states. These covertly antagonistic nation states attempted to formulate a morally-based political community but were undermined by the fatalistic war mentality of the two major powers and by their own reluctance to erode internal sovereignty. Throughout this Cold War period the two power centers defined each other (and, by proxy, everyone else) ideologically and geographically but the Russian power bloc was quietly deteriorating due to internal political contradictions and a comparative poverty of recourses.

In 1989 the Russian soviet system finally collapsed. The bipolar cold war system became a uni-polar system. All nations understood that the American system of democratic capitalism was the only state model available and proceeded to negotiate accordingly. They used whatever particular material advantages and ersatz cultural postures they could muster to bargain for their place in the settling new order. Their citizens, their religions, their materials and their military became bargaining chips in a global system of top trumps, with each nation attempting to secure as large a share as they can of the global market while striking ideological poses in order to convince their citizens and the media driven world community that they are motivated by transcendent (if often bizarre) motives rather than by greed and fear.

That’s it. Any questions?

‘Still waking up in the mornings with shaking hands,

And I’m trying to find a girl who understands me,

But except in dreams you’re never really free’

Fucked out in L.A after trashing his career and many of his personal relationships through booze and aggressively mad behaviour; fat, paranoiac, sodden, he suffered a recurring dream in which he took his magnum .44 down to the freeway and took a shot at a passing car. Waking panicked, labouring between reality and dream, he would check the revolver to make sure he hadn’t really done it. One imagines him standing, sweating at the kitchen counter, blonde hair plastered to his pale forehead, whole body shaking, mortally relieved to have made it back to reality without actually… y’know… killing anyone.

‘I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel,

I was staring at my empty coffee cup,

I was thinking that the gypsy wasn’t lying;

All the salty Margaritas in Los Angeles,

I’m gonna drink ‘em up.

And if California slides into the Ocean,

Like the mystics and statistics say it will,

I predict this motel will be standing,

Until I pay my bill’

Zevon knew Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne, worked with Bob Dylan and Neil Young and was acclaimed as one of the most important songwriter of his generation by Rolling Stone. But the chances are you’ve never heard of him or have only heard a handful of his songs. And that’s mostly Warren’s fault. He drove a truck through his own career; unable to overcome the contradictions in his own psyche long enough to gain momentum. His voice betrays the rawness of his id too clearly. The quotidian awfulness of the neurotic life emerges through the veneer of sugary L.A guitar and high harmony that helped to sell the world the thin stuff of The Eagles. His late recognition occurred after his rehabilitation and was partly occasioned by his diagnosis of inoperable cancer, proof that while the public don’t mind a bastard, they won’t forgive an under achiever.

‘You said you were an actress yes I believe you are,

I thought you’d be a star.

So I drank up all the money, yes I drank up all the money,

With these phoneys in this Hollywood bar,

These friends of mine in this Hollywood bar’

One of his friends, writer Paul Nelson, compared his songs to the works of Van Gough; queasy, vivid, hyper-real, disturbing. Excitable boy is a good example; it’s an up tempo rock number which Zevon chose as the title track of his second album. In it he pays oblique tribute to his former employers the Everly Brothers, for whom he played piano, by referencing their biggest hit ‘Wake up little Suzie’. In the song the eponymous hero, with whom Zevon implicitly identifies himself, takes little Suzie to the junior prom a la every cheesecake American rocker of the fifties and sixties, then rapes her and kills her. Then it gets worse. He sang this live while pounding the piano to a rock guitar backing and grinning like a loon. It’s a bit like someone putting their foot through a rock song and turning it into a piece of performance art.

‘Grandpa pissed his pants again

He don’t give a damn.

Brother Billy has both guns drawn

He ain’t been right since Vietnam.

Sweet home Alabama

Play that dead bands song,

Turn those speakers up full blast,

Play it all night long.

Daddy’s doing Sister sally

Grandma’s dying of cancer now,

The cattle all have Brucellosis

We’ll get through somehow’

In his final interview (a Letterman special devoted solely to him) he launches a joke about death and dry cleaning that doesn’t work. It’s an awkward moment when private make-do-and-soldier-on humour decomposes visibly under the bright lights of the public gaze. He’s embarrassed and Letterman blenches, has to take a breath. It’s a rare moment of real emotion. One of those moments when you realise that, however we dress it up, were still just a bunch of African monkeys, with teeth that clench, pores that sweat, guts that churn and blood that flows and that fouls-up.  We realise also that this death matters to us, and matters directly. We experience that moment of helplessness in the face of mortality that makes us feel like children again. Zevon wrote about that feeling a lot. His life was haunted by fear and by mortality. And he’s one of our most honest chroniclers of how it actually feels to be sick, to be confused, to be scared and alone.

‘Ain’t life strange, ain’t it funny,

Nothing matters but love and money.

Things don’t work out the way you reckoned,

The money comes first, the love comes second.

Cigarettes make the sun come up,

Whiskey makes the sun go down,

In between you do a lot of standing around’

He got out some good observations in the interview too, he was a smart guy after all, he enjoined us to ‘enjoy every sandwich’ which is a good line, put it on your facebook profile, but then he said it twice. The first time it seems off the cuff. The second time you realise he’s chosen his own epitaph.

‘A gentle rain falls on me,

And all life folds back into the sea,

We contemplate eternity,

Beneath the vast indifference of heaven’

Zevon overcame his alcoholism by learning to live with who he was and accept the boredom and frustration of the quotidian world. In listening to his work it’s worth remembering the lowly and the duff stuff too, the flip and the weird, as well as the more apparently grandiose stuff. All kinds of things go up to making a human being; eccentricities and habits, fears and frustrations, lust and cowardice, aspirations and laziness, blood, bile, sweat, snot and piss.  We should enjoy all of it.

We should enjoy every sandwich.

‘Sometimes when you’re doing simple things around the house,

Maybe you’ll think of me and smile.

You know I’m tied to you like the buttons on your blouse,

Keep me in your heart for a while’