Bluenose Fisherman's Blues

Queenie’s got the blues. And when Queenie gets the blues, she makes a mix. So she’s making a mix tonight. It’s called Bluenose Fisherman’s Blues. It’s very sad, but uplifting, because just sad is boring, isn’t it. Pointless. There has to be a light at the end of the tunnel, otherwise you bang into the sides of the tunnel and get bruises on your arms. At least I think that’s where they come from. I can never remember how I get my bruises. And I bruise easily. But you all know that.

Here we go anyways:

Saor/ Free/ News from Nowhere – AfroCelt Sound System: Sound Magic Vol. I

News from nowhere – that’s what this is tonight. I feel like I live nowhere. I’m operating across four time zones at the moment. I have clocks set to different times all over the place. There’s Tracy time, which is three hours behind me. There’s Irish time, or Mom-time as he calls it, four hours ahead of me. And there’s Jersey Girl time, which is just one hour ahead, which is not so bad. We’re a thousand miles apart, which is a fifteen hour drive. But just one hour in time.

These things confuse me terribly.

So I guess I’m in the middle of it all. Nowhere.

Plus it has uileann piping in it that makes the hair stand up on the back of our necks when we listen to it.

Nos de Cariad – David Gray: Life in Slow Motion

New David Gray album at last. Hooray. There’s something wrong with the disk though. I’ve imported it a few times and it always comes out wobbly. I transferred this from the disk into the mix and it seems to be working.

I’m Not Tech© too, I think. But in a lower division.

This is uber-Gray: lots of hysterical piano and swooping vocals. And totally over the top lyrics. I love it though – it’s great for when I’m feeling blue, but uplifted. And I love the way he always uses water imagery when he’s miserable.

The sun above the cotton grass
Is sinking down like lead
The seagulls know the truth of it
And scream it overhead
Hold on to St. Christopher
The sky is murderous red
Go to sleep my one true love
Our glory lies ahead

The rest of the album is not grabbing me so much. Maybe when I iron out the wobbles.

© Trish Byrne

A Stroke of Luck – Garbage: Garbage

I found this album in Walmart last weekend for eleven bucks. I had it on tape and loved it, but never replaced it when I Went Tech. It is a stonking album. It has Stupid Girl on it, which is on my High Fidelity-type list of Top five songs with which to flagellate yourself when you’ve made a mess of things again. The other four being Garbage’s Crush, Blonde Redhead BiPolar, Mission of Burma That’s when I reach for my Revolver (or should that be a .357 magnum? Or is that just for cattle, dear!), and PJ Harvey’s Shame.

When we played it in the car coming back from New Minas, I pointed out that it reminded me of a girl we knew. So we cranked it up and listened to it a few times.

But it didn’t make the list tonight, because I’m not a stupid girl at the moment. I’m doing very nicely in the self-esteem stakes at present. And I don’t want to think about that other person. So I picked this one for the lyrics.

Here comes the cold again
I feel it closing in
It’s falling down and all around me
Falling

The leaves are starting to turn. Today when we woke, the sky was leaden, the wind was whishing around, pulling the leaves off the trees and swirling them to the ground. The light sparkles on the bay have morphed into angry little white caps of foam. After a glorious weekend of blue skies and weather too hot to even sweep up the leaves, it was a bit of reality check.

And we’re all sick. Nova Scotia has the flu. Thankfully, taking the day off seems to be allowed. I struggled into work to meet a bloke who thinks that gambling is caused by the CIA mind control programme. And who has self-published on it. Who of course didn’t turn up. Presumably they waylaid him before the truth got to me.

He’s the second nutter I had to meet in four days. I had a stand up row with a Buddhist environmentalist on Saturday morning who, when I shouted at him for accusing me of ‘being part of the problem’ apologised and said ‘all I want is to find another planet to go to and start a new biology’.

Whatever, dude. Why don’t you go ask the Yankees to bring you to Mars when they start raping it in 2028 or whatever their target date is. The rest of us are going to blow up Cape C. so they can’t come back, and try to fix things here.

Like Eating Glass - Bloc Party: Silent Alarm

I did recently. Eat glass I mean. I was making a salad nicoise, and when I took the green beans off the stove the reinforced glass saucepan I was using exploded and covered the kitchen and the salad in hot water, green beans and shards of glass. And I was broke, so I had to pick the glass out of the salad and eat it because I had nothing else in the food cupboard. I didn’t sleep so good that night, I can tell you.

I have put this in mixes before, but I’m including it again for a couple of reasons.

It has an incredible bass line. And we like a good bass line, so we do. Don’t we, dear! This one goes all the way down to my toes.

Bloc Party are pretty pissed with the state of the world. As am I. When I was coming back from the airport today I put this on full blast and sat in the back of the bus and wept hot little tears of rage at the unfairness of it all.

Someone whose opinion I value enormously put it to me very simply the other day. If you have an aquarium with fish in it, and you dangle a hook and line into the aquarium, maybe a dumb fish will bite, and maybe not. And you can probably outwit a fish with a lure if you’re smart enough. But it will take forever to catch all the fish.

If you put in a little net, you’ll probably catch some fish. But not all of them.

If you put in a huge net that drags everything from the bottom of the aquarium up, you’ll empty the aquarium.

The ocean is just a big aquarium.

The next person that tells me “we thought there’d be no end to the fish” is getting an aquarium toy – a little dragger boat maybe – pointy end first up the you-know-what.

And now they’re doing it with the trees. Except of course, they engage in sustainable forestry. What’s that you ask? Well, you clear cut a two hundred year old mixed forest, (clear cutting being the forestry equivalent of fish dragging) and when all the trees, and all the undergrowth, and all the insects, and birds, and pine martens, and other animals that only live in old growth forestry are gone, you replace it with a plantation of single species spruce, which you then spray with pesticides for four years to stop other plants from ‘competing for nutrients’. So you can rape it, I mean log it, again in forty years instead of two hundred. That’s sustainable forestry.

SUSTAINING WHO???????

And then you wave money at people to get them to move thousands of miles from their home and their family and their girlfriend to transport these logs from one place to another. And they do it because they have to, because there aren’t any fish left to catch.

What are they going to do with us when they run out of trees?

Oh that’s right, that’s not going to happen.

Queenie’s very annoyed. But apparently, she’s part of the problem. Her giving enough of a shit about these things to actually engage with the systems currently in place to offer solutions through, admittedly hugely flawed, representative democracy is PREACHING. She’s not like a REAL environmentalist, who’s had thirty years to put this kind of thing on the table in words that normal people can understand – like using the example of an aquarium, for example – but who has WASTED this time on middle class antics like designing little cards, made out of humanely chopped trees naturally, to hand to chefs in high end restaurants to prompt them to consider whether the fish they cook has been humanely caught.

When they could have been out doing something useful. Like scuttling draggers!

I suppose it would be counter-productive to engage in internecine warfare with the environmentalists just because their time has come and they are lording it over the rest of us because they KNOW.

But man, I really, really want to after the weekend I had.

I am so getting it in the neck from Jersey Girl when she reads this!

B + A – Beta Band: The Three Eps

I included this song, because it always catches me out. It starts off a little slow; it hides itself from me; I can’t put my finger on why it’s in the mix. Then, when I’m about to move on to the next song, it throws a little curved ball at me and stops me in my tracks. So I start paying attention. Then it backs off again, just to make sure I’m really interested. But when it’s sure it has my attention, it throws everything it has at me, and it’s all stuff I like – strong rhythm, quirky melody, clever structure, long build up, great crescendo - and it hits me like a tonne of bricks that I love the energy of the song, and the warm glow I get whenever I listen to it.

That’s the answer to your question, Jersey Girl, by the way…

Lift Me Up – Moby: Hotel

I’m really trying to find a song I like on this album. It’d make you weep, wouldn’t it - the absolute disappointment of it all. But I think this is it. Everyone put their hands in the air and do the Keith Brady.

Plain talking
Making us so cold
So strung out and cold
And feeling so old
Lift me up Lift me up Oh la la la la (10)

Cosmic Tree – 4Hero: Two Pages (1)

Environmental drum n bass. That’s where I’m at musically at present. With thanks to the good doctor.

Stop – look around
Can’t you see
The galaxy of life will shed you from its tree

Can I go a gorgeous shade of reddish gold first?

Of course, that’s what I’m trying to do with my hair. The Gorgeous Gabe made a stab at it a couple of weeks ago. He put too much blonde in it though.

I - don’t - want - blonde - hair. There are only five syllables in that sentence. And yet, so many hairdressers just do not compute. They are Not (Hair) Tech.

Normally, I’d stick in a bit of Jamiroquoi after this, but I don’t want to mention Keith twice in the one post. Having said that, I have mentioned other people more than once, so I guess I could.

Cosmic Girl – Jamiroquoi: Travelling without Moving

Sorry, dude. Keith hates the cat in the hat. But I love this song. I’ll stick on some Rev next, to cheer you up. Remember the gig?

Black Forest – Mercury Rev: The Secret Migration

Another great bass line in this song. From the greatest band on the face of the planet. Bar none!…What did you say dear?…Apart from April Wine?…No!…You’re wrong!…I don’t care what you think!…Because they’re shit, that’s why!…I don’t care if everyone on your island thinks they’re great…They’re still shit…Why?…Because they could have written songs like this…

If I was a white horse
And offered you a ride
Through a black forest

If we took a strange course
Promised you a danger
For a while
Lorelei

There’s no way round the forest
The only way is through
And there’s no way I’ll ever make it on my own
Without you

If you are persuaded
By all those dragonflies
Offering you a ride
I’m the white horse
Lorelei

…and they didn’t…They wrote songs with their peckers….No, I won’t take that back….

Boys and girls, I think you just witnessed the first row.

I think I won that one.

Break Me Gently – Doves: Lost Souls

I just love the Doves. I have all their albums now, and I didn’t hear tell of them till January 2003. My cousin Damian introduced me to them the day I flew home from India and went to his house to collect the car. He burned me the disc and I played it all the way home.

I used to listen to this song when I was pissed off about work.

Back in the old country!

Heroes – David Bowie: Changes

My other cousin Mervyn used to have a sheep dog that had David Bowie eyes – one blue and one brown.

My eyes are brown with green bits in them.

Himself in Alberta has blue eyes. I thought they were brown for a while. But they’re definitely blue. Apart from when they’re green. Or grey.

When my love and I parted – Solas: The Hour before Dawn

Whisht now, while the little lady is singing…

Stupid Girl – Garbage: Garbage

Ah, to hell with it, it’s a great song.

Don’t believe in fear
Don’t believe in faith
Don’t believe in anything
You can’t taste
You stupid girl
All you had you wasted

Block Rockin’ Beats – The Prodigy: Dig your Own Hole

I was out having a smoke when this was on so I can’t think of anything to say about it. And I’m not playing it again.

We who are not as others – 4Hero: Two Pages (Disc Two)

This is a ten minute filler so as I can go to bed at some point tonight. But it is a fantastic piece of music in its own right, which is why I am putting it in rather than something by Orbital, which is what I usually do.

69MB – nearly on the nose. I’m getting good at this.

It’s late. Or is it only nine pm? No, no, it’s five in the morning. Or maybe it’s one o’clock in the morning. What the hell time is it anyways? It’s late. It’s midnight, and I have a three hour statistics briefing in eight hours.

G’night all, where ever you are. Keep a hold o’ the St. Christopher.