May 1st

Hello and welcome to the new website. Please have a look around, listen using the mp3 player above and feel free to post comments on my myspace page. (link)

My debut album 'In The Blood' is released on Friday 27th June and will be available from record stores across Ireland, on iTunes in the UK, and from the shop here. There will be a launch party upstairs in Whelans prior to this on the night of Saturday 14th June. I'm pulling out the stops to make this a special night so don't miss this one!

If you can't wait for the release the album will be available on my up-coming support tour with Tom Baxter.

I will be touring Ireland with my band following the launch in June, which I’m really looking forward to. Dates will appear on the gigs page as they are confirmed.

The artwork on the website is based on drawings i did for the fold-out digipack album. The drawings relate to each song and come reproduced in a booklet with the lyrics inside the CD package.

Below is the beginnings of a blog / diary...

 

 

In The Blood - part 1.

May 13th 2008

I love trains, always have. Just stopped by the side of the motorway and saw the splendor of a snaking passanger train soar across the open landscape. Beautiful. Planes, on the other hand, or more specifically, airports, i struggle with. I wrote the following while waiting for my plane to Aberdeen from Dublin to start the Tom B support tour, which is going very well by the way, on the third day today on the way to Sheffield.
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Hot, bothered, tired, wired. In the airport. Writing this is relieving a claustraphobic fog brought on by the wool being pulled over my eyes in one of the modern ages' most glorious, horrible, important and perverse components of any transportation network, of any 'bloodstream' - Airports. The nodes, the fertile gateways that connect the mass populace of one city to another. Factored into the business plan of every expanding enterprise. Spread the seed. Growth. Growth is good ya?

"..on a plane late last night, i saw the bloodstream feeding.."

Flying. It casts a spell. The promise of freedom, getting away. Getting away from what? maybe thats another blog...

I remember a rant about airports in the opening paragraph of one of Douglas Adam's books. He was a master at seeing the absurdity of modern life and he was funny. I don't know if i can aspire to be comic, but another airport experience this morning has prompted me to write this.

Airports. And those that harbour them, the airlines. I don't know of anything anywhere any place in the consumer driven front end of the economy that exploits our different, often opposing human desires in such a glorious and audatious way. It is often commented upon, often with disgust, that airlines and airports fleece money from you. You are advertised 'free' or very cheap flights, but by the time you've pored through the website making sure you've de-selected options like travel insurance and priority boarding which are assigned to you by default, booked your baggage, eaten some food in the airport and spent an hour and a half waiting on a plane for it to leave while engineers fix some vague technical fault, the cost begins to outweigh the benefits.

The freedom that air-travel promises juxtaposes starkly against consumer driven market forces in overdrive. Consumer driven business is so succesful in airports precisely because of the promise of freedom, a holiday, something different, a break from normality. Any way an airline or any company working within an airport can find to fleece your average customer is capitalised on to an astonishing degree. Of course this is well known and accepted as some form of necessary evil. But I'm going to rant anyway. My coffee and flapjack €5.20. My baggage handling fees. Today they wanted to charge me €360 to take my musical gear. €15 per Kg for every Kg you are over your 15Kg personal allowance. I got some through as hand luggage but the charge was still stupid compared to the €87 cost of the flight. (The only thing that made it possible for me to fly today was the girl at the check-in desk couldn't bring herself to charge what she was supposed to for it and cut the price in half. She was foreign, smart, and rolled her eyes in a knowing way: 'Ryanair - its all about ze money'.) They have it down to a tee, Ryanair, The fleecing business. The wool over your eyes. I wouldn't be surprised if your man from Ryanair has spent a few past lifetimes down under in the close company of sheep.
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Air travel is becoming more expensive. It is perhaps just a readjustment after years of cheap flying, or is a necessary response to the rising cost of fuel. But now we're so used to flying so often, we'll stump up the extra costs and keep the aviation industry alive. The cynical voice says "they hooked us in, now we'll pay'.

"..up the country, round the world, nothing beats the way it flows.."