you know what live and direct means?

It's been all over the shop these last few days to be honest. We went en famille to the St Patricks Day Parade on Monday and it was one of the best I've seen yet. It's a far cry from my own childhood when most of the parade was made up of floats by a company called 'Abel Alarms' who later changed their name to ATA Security. The rest of the floats were made up by various semi-state organisations such as An Post and Aer Finglas. These days the parade has toned down the corporate sponsorship and the whole deal is more akin to carnival. The kids loved it. I thought it was great too. I also managed to check out the Skyfest from Cashel the other night and I was suitably impressed by that too. We had tickets to go and see 'Plasticiens Volant' perform The Pearl the other night but the weather was far too shitty to bring the kids out. Big up to the Paddys Day crew and a special word of mention goes to a mate of mine who is the Logistics Manager for the St Patricks Festival. Big up Mairtín.

Last week I was browsing through some second-hand albums in Road Records when I stumbled upon the all time live reggae classic 'Live & Direct' by Aswad. When most people think of Aswad they remember the saccharine pop-reggae tune 'Don't Turn Around'. Well don't be fooled. Before they started churning out pop shite like that they actually used to be really good. 'Live & Direct' was recorded live at the 1983 Notting Hill Carnival and in my humble opinion its the best live reggae album ever to have been cut to vinyl. Fortunately I already own a copy but i picked up another because I'm always recommending it to people. I've already found a home for the latest copy. It'll be winging its way over to Cork St, Dublin 8 to rest on the platter on Galafari's turntable. here they are about one year after the Notting Hill recording performing 'Roots Rockin'


Speaking of doubles of particular tunes, i also picked up 'What time is love?' by The KLF on seven inch. I'm almost certain that I have it already so it brings to two the number of seven inch tunes by The KLF that I've bought doubles of in the last few days. Still, all said, you can never have enough KLF.

In terms of new musical output, I picked up a few new seven inches last week that you might be interested in. The first is called 'Enfant Terrible' and its by UK based Sonny J. It sounds a bit like The Stooges meet a drum machine with some french vocals thrown in for good measure. Shit now that I think of it there's more than a touch of the 'Rockafellar Skank' to it. That makes it sound worse than it is, it's not bad actually. Here it is:


Next up is the latest release by Supergrass. I've never really liked this lot but I saw them play on Jools Holland the other week and I thought they were rather good. They've brought a bit of a rockier edge to their latest stuff that I'm digging. It's a far cry from the earlier stuff they used to do. Here it is:


Last but not least is the latest offering from Does it Offend You Yeah? and it's called 'We are Rock Stars'. It's a grimy techno style tune with some vocoder treated lyrics that I can't make out. It also features a remix by Bloc Party on the flip side but i haven't bothered listening to that yet. Here it is: