Progress -

Just discovered an unofficial fan's blog for Van Morrison, available at www.vanmorrisonnews.com. Interesting angle there on Van and the literary tradition in Ireland - a point worth making. In additional news, it might be time to make a wee trip to Beal Feirste to have a look around. The main thing I want to see is a newspaper archive and a photographic archive. Could spin up before Christmas as I have a few days to do things this side of the holiday. Van playing soon at the Albert Hall - £200 per ticket. The letters I sent up to Ballyshannon didn't turn up anything of significance about RG's early life there. Some reports say he moved away at eight, others at three. One thing I do remember someone saying to me is that Ballyshannon had a lot of foreigners in it, due to the electricity plant that was built there. Just listening to 'Johnny The Fox' there again today. Very impressive songwriting for a man who was in the throes of jaundice, and in some ways more pointed than 'Jailbreak'...as though Lynott had a story to tell. I have written the first draft of the contextual chapter, focusing on the industry in Ireland. I am starting into hybridity now, which will be the third chapter. I was accepted to give a paper at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Conference over in San Diego in May of this year, which is a big boost. Will be a lot of work getting it together. Have set myself the target of finishing by Christmas this year, which means a chapter every two months. That's achieveable, if challenging. Working away on other musical projects, various collaborations with Limerick Creative Music, Sticky Fingers and Lost and Found on the go at the minute. Got great help from a few good heads in Limerick regarding the PHD - more about that later.

King's Call

Cold breeze blowing around Limerick this weekend. Have been working away on two fronts: tracked down Essays on Music by Adorno, ed. Leppert. It's a BIG BOOK, so garnering perspectives will take a lot of reading. I will start with the essay 'On Popular Music' and go from there. Still working through the Iain Chambers. Read Negus' chapter on geographies, which didn't go into geographies per se, but looked at the idea of imperialism transmitted through music. Learned 'King's Call' last night on piano and guitar. Excellent video.

November 23, 2008: Theoretical Prespectives

Bringing things up to date here, November 25th. Theory-related issues: I am continuing with reading Keith Negus, and hope to get started properly into Iain Chambers. Wrote a bit more on Vulliamy (1977) and added this to existing corpus. In addition, I have been reading on other PhDs in areas such as documentary film in Ireland. So far so good, but I have been surprised by the emphasis on theory in the ones I've looked at. Admittedly, I have not read right through all 2-300 pages of any particular thesis. I am very impressed with Keith Negus' discussion of theoretical approaches to popular music. He makes a very difficult subject very approachable. His first chapter considers audiences, and articulates the mass culture vs active audience debate that began with Adorno and runs throughout the latter decades of the 20th century, culminating, in Negus' analysis, with the work of Iain Chambers. I have borrowed Chambers' book and am looking forward to reading it as it seems well laid out and theoretically engaging, while simultaneously addressing actual musical texts. This is important to me, because I surmise that theories of music as culture often theorise the aesthetics of music. No, they don't: in fact, what they do is aestheticise the practice of theory as opposed to using theory as a basis for examining text or objects from the real world. A good example here is Adorno, and I have had an initial look at Leppert's discussion of the mechanics of wAdorno's writing. I've ordered the book 'Essays on Music'. I started reading a couple of critiques of Adorno, on which focuses directly on his writings on jazz by Witkin. Witkin argues that Adorno's problem with jazz stems from his view of the nature of music. From what Witkin says, Adorno considered music which developed through performance - and which involved a dialectic between the individual notes and the entire piece - as progressive, and music in which the structure didn't develop as regressive. In addition, he wasn't convinced by what we might call 'the characteristics of embellishment' employed by jazz musicians - trills, gracenotes, repetitions, improvisations. Not exactly sure where Irish rock music fits into this at the minute, except to say that in my view key rock musicians were as sceptical of commerciality as Adorno himself. Their music should be read in this way, in the way Witkin and Leppert wish us to read Adorno - as the embodiment of a musical politics which, while realising that perfect articulation of idealised dialectic between notes and the whole is impossible, nonetheless strives to achieve that. Another idea worth teasing out is that of Adorn's utopianism, and how this related to the utopias (or spaces) in Irish rock songs. Listening to 'Hard Nose The Highway' - Van Morrison. High-end, with some distinctive songs. Certainly aspects of Irishness are key here. Am thinking about what an 80-year old chap who bought a keyboard in Savin's (where I work) said the other day: the reason Irish traditional music became unpopular is because it was (a) specialised - only people with a knowledge of the tradition could play it and (b) after a while it all sounds the same, despite the fact that there are stylistic and regional variations, and different categories of music: reels, jigs, hornpipes, slides. Amazing. One other point is that between Rory Gallagher's, Phil Lynott's and Van Morrison's families, there were no sisters. Might be relevant. I attended a challenging talk on the history of theories of evolution this evening, and based on that I want to think about how we could view first wave Irish rock as an evolution - a response or adaptation to a transformation of the Irish socio-economic-political environment, or the overcoming of a certain problem, lack or need.

Contextual Reading

A key issue is establishing the relevant literature for the topic. I've identified the following as relevant, though additions and quite possibly subtractions need to be made.

Theoretical Areas and Approaches to Popular and Rock Music
Key theorists: Hebdige (music as culture), Frith (music as culture), Moore (musicology), Maultsby (music and the body), McRobbie (sexuality), Middleton, Adorno (mass culture, passive listeners), Iain Chambers (active subculture)
Are there broad divides in the approaches?
1. Frankfurt School, Mass Culture. Limited in that it does not deal with rock specifically, or music from after 1950 in general.
2. Subcultural approaches - more applicable to rock
3. Musicology
4. Sociomusicology
5. Irish rock and Ireland? Kearney, Kiberd, Gibbons
Key issues: Identity, History, Space, Mass Culture


That's a rather diverse bunch, and included in there as well are the anthropological perspectives (?) of Pierre Bourdieu and the critical issues/areas outlined by Keith Negus....why am I doing this again? ;)

Listened to Gallagher's album 'Deuce' again today. Interesting, I think, in that only one track from here appears on the subsequent 1972 'Live in Europe'. Some interesting musical textures and some excellent musical ideas. Plenty of rock riffs and tight musicianship from the band. I found the acoustic guitar soloing on 'I'm not awake' to be below par, almost as if Gallagher didn't know the scales to put over the minor chords. Thematically, love and loss is prevalent again ('Used to Be'). Use of the 6/8 rhythm is interesting in 'I'm not Awake Yet', song, and lends credence to the idea that 'traditional' Irish musical tropes keep appearing in the work of 1970s Irish rock artists. I also listened to 'Shades of a Blue Orphanage', and although I am waiting for it to sink in, I thought the album was a lot more impressive than biographies suggested. Also received Morrison's 'His Band and the Street Choir' today, with 'Domino' (haven't heard it yet) and the original of 'I've been Working', which I know both from 'Too Late to Stop Now' and 'Friday Night in San Francisco' on there. I wonder if it would be useful to look at each artist in terms of key themes when composing biographical sketch.

Welcome, failte romhaimh!

This is the blog of Matteo Cullen, PhD researcher, musician and teacher. The blog is a new space where the PhD research topic - Irish rock music of the 1970s - will be debated, argued, streched out and banged about. In addition, other college issues and initiatives will be tracked to some extent - academic training, grant applications, day to day issues. Let's not overlook the key focus, however: 1970s IRISH ROCK MUSIC. I should say at this point that this page will deal with key figures from Ireland's rock history and culture - Van Morrison, Phil Lynott and Rory Gallagher. Unfortunately, the debates engaged in here will probably be of no great interest to the general reader, since they are highly academic. I won't be going into major detail in areas such as autobiography, and people looking for an accessible read on their favourite Irish rock artists should probably start by visiting fan sites, or buying a good biography. I would personally recommend the following biographies for the focused, interested individual:

Van Morrison: Rogan, Kevin (2004) No Surrender: Van Morrison. A critical account of Van Morrison's career by a man who isn't afraid to, well, critique. Engaging book, well researched, significantly more in-depth than previous Rogan book on Morrison. No rationale given for continuous comparison of Van Morrison with Ian Paisley.

Rory Gallagher: McAvoy Gerry and Pete Chrisp (2006) Riding Shotgun. Twenty years on the road with Gallagher means that McAvoy is in a privileged position to discuss Gallagher's professional life. Only Tom O'Driscoll could rival that! There's a bit of mythbusting, as McAvoy reveals the regimental approach to professional affairs adopted by Gallagher in the post Taste era - no doubt coloured by his experiences in the Taste set-up. The strengths of McAvoy's work lie not only in the first-hand account it provides of life on the road with an icon of Irish rock, but also in the provision of a constructive account it gives of the development of rock culture in Ireland, and the life of professional musicians in the 1960s and 1970s. Jean-Noel Coghe's biography is also worth a mention, though I suggest it merits 'for collectors only' status. Interesting photographs in it, however.

Philip Lynott: If I'm not mistaken there are more biographies of Lynott and Thin Lizzy than Gallagher and Morrison. (I could be mistaken...) A key biography is Putterford(2002) Phil Lynott: The Rocker, Omnibus Press. Detailed and written from a rocker's perspective - employs the classic 'rise and fall' narrative, but not in an essentialising way - it has plenty of facts and figures, interviews and quotations from key actors in the Thin Lizzy story. Well complemented by 'My Boy' the book co-written by Mrs Philomena Lynott and Jackie Hayden which details Mrs Lynott's life in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and her experiences, both positive and negative, as life of a rock icon.

A drawback of the rock-personality biography (genre) in general is that they rarely meaningfully consider the music itself (consider Allan Moore, John Covach, Alan Walser). None of the above contain dedicated musicological analysis, consider issues of sociomusicological context (Derek B. Scott) or adopt exploratory methodological paradigms (Portia Maultsby, Deryck Cooke)...oh well.

Feel free to post a comment here on these biographies, if you have read them, or please suggest others which are key. I plan to attach a forum to this page where issues can be debated in full.