<-- Back to Part 1
Midges of Rock 2003 - 20 Years Later But No Fleekin Better - Continued...
...Time for a toilet break next, as Sandwick AGOFR legends The Guireans
came on for a long haul through their 24-year back catalogue.
Unfortunately the toilet was already full, so I had to go back and
listen to them. Guireans regulars Roddy Huggan (guitar/vocals) and Iain "Dead Olac" Livingstone (bass/keyboards/vocals) were joined by long lost member Neil “The Hippy” Shaw (guitar/vocals and fleekin’ white settler folkie bodhran thing), last heard on 1985’s “Bogie Goes To Bennadrobh”.
The
agony of waiting for the Guireans to start was prolonged by a “live
satellite” appearance from Guireans manager and Plook Records CEO Ken “Mr 102%” Livingstone,
purporting to be in his pool in Beverly Hills. Confident that he would
be awarded some sort of big lifetime achievement thing, rock ’n’ roll
accountant Livingstone had recorded his live satellite appearance some
months earlier and posted the video (surface mail) to save money.
Naturally Ken’s appearance triggered a chorus of boos and hisses from
the assembled Avante-Gaelic elite, and no award was forthcoming. Ken’s
poolside speech was followed by a “digitally” remastered version of the
1981 Guireans Video. Obh, obh!
The Guireans started their downhill slide by offending Travelling People everywhere with the unpleasant Beastie Boys cover “(You Gotta) Fight For the Right to Ceard-y”. The descent accelerated with “Coldpray Mucus for Petrie People”. This was evidently a protest at the loss of the harbour view from founding Guirean Jimmy Petrie’s
house, due to the construction of Sandwick’s new Continuity Free
Church. Why this should be set to some approximation of the tune of Coldplay’s “Yellow”
is beyond me. The Guireans’ efforts to fit the word “Yellow” into the
revised lyric ( ‘Look at the cars/Look how they spoil my view/500 in a
queue/Yeah one or two of them were yellow)’ , or to find alternative
rhymes (‘…well see when they’re all dead/I bet they’ll go to Hell (o)’
) are almost as laughable as Coldplay’s own.
Haww.
You Gotta Get on Up. See Somethin Ya Like Mac? Work That Body. The
Guireans sum up the entire genre of dance music from James Brown
to Jungle Garage Trance Hop (via Tommy Darkie) in 5
minutes
More reductionism and caricature followed, as the Guireans presumed to distil the entire canon of urban dance music into “Wisco Remix Hi NRG Stylee 2003”,
a Stars-on-45 type retread through some of their disco and dance
influenced material, ranging from the proto-house of 1982’s “Jazz Mucus for Funk People” to the Divinesque HiNRG of “Village Mucus for People People”, to the techno industrial onslaught of 1984’s “Industry (Gut Factory)” and back to HiNRG with this year’s paean to home slaughtering and sheep’s head broth “Danger - High Moltage”.
Evidently this apparent fixation with gay disco and unpalatable ethnic
recipes is the idea of Guireans manager Ken Livingstone. Livingstone
thinks he’s identified a particular market niche where the pink pound
meets the Atkins diet backlash, resulting in an exorbitant projected
demand over the next two years for records that sound like Sylvester’s
“Mighty Real” but have lyrics about duff, ceann cropaig and sheep’s
brains.
Masters of mood that they are, the Guireans chilled out the post-rave audience with “H*bba Nice Pray”, a slightly adjusted semi acoustic rendition of a well known Stereophonics
number. The Guireans’ version addresses the topic of a certain
righteous elder and woodwork teacher in the Nicolson, who received
extensive Gazette coverage in the late 70s/early 80s after he’d
allegedly applied a right hook to an unfortunate pupil who didn’t wear
a tie.
Time to speed things up again, so the Guireans went for punk/new wave lite. When thon Avril Lavigne blone came out it reminded the elderly Guireans of Kim Wilde,
who inhabited exactly the same niche back around 1980. Kim and Avril’s
marketing was designed to cater to the wee boys and girls who like a
bit of punk pose and attitude but actually prefer listening to pop. So,
the Guireans thought, why not have an Avril Lavigne/Kim Wilde mix and
chuck in a bit of Tiffany chust because the chords fit? “Sk8 Boi”
is the tale of an unassuming smelly welder who likes to eat sornan
gort (ie “matured” skate) … and so is rejected by the snooty
sgadan-eating object of his affections. Imagine her surprise some years
later when she turns on the Gaelic sermon and discovers that he’s
become an elder and is going to be a minister. By which time, of
course, it’s too late for her because some other blone has snapped him
up. There’s an obvious moral to this, which appears to be that nice
young girls should always go out with smelly ugly guys, just in case
they turn into someone respectable. And Kim Wilde’s “Ceards in Amarybank” had to be done just for the chorus.
New
Wave Lite pop punk princesses Avril and Kim are "ecstatic" on hearing
that the Guireans were covering their material. Evidently Toyah
was not very pleased to have been left out.
Now
that the crowd were all punked up and slamming, it was time to calm
them down again before they went through Wattie’s floor. “S*ndy M*thes*n” ensued, an adaptation of REM’s cover of The Clique’s “Superman”. To sedate the crowd even more before making their escape, the Guireans hit them with their closing “Velvets Mix”, another “Tight-Fit-Back-to-the-60s” type trawl through a selection of the Velvet Underground/Lou Reed downers in the Guireans’ back catalogue. “Sunday Morning”, a
tale of self loathing and sexual paranoia brought on by having to get
up for church after a hard day at the peats, was followed by “Herring”, a searingly frank and personal account of the devastating effects of this dangerous fish on the addict. “Waiting for the Bus”
reveals another side of addiction, whereby degraded maws queue up to
spend their last pennies on public transport so that they can get to
Cailean Neilly’s fish shop, and “Walk on the West Side”
examines the underbelly of life among the transspeciessals(?), stray
livestock and tractor jockeys inhabiting the seedy strip of the Long
Island between Shawbost and Fivepenny Borve.
After some prompting, the audience demanded an encore. A surprised and delighted Guireans returned to the stage with Jason Dun Ringle on guitar, and launched into “Crowdie Mucus for House People”, a sensitive ballad on the subject of sheep cloning. The remaining Dun Ringles came up to guest on “Pairclife”,
a Britpopesque number describing a day in the life of a bodach from
South Lochs. An extra verse was bolted at the last minute as a rant
about white settlers objecting to wind farms.
The set closed with an extended “measgachadh da-chananach” or, for the monoglots, “bi-lingual mix” of the 1984 anthem “Todhar”. “Todhar” extols the agricultural and cosmetic virtues of well composted cattle manure to the tune (approximately) of Edwin Starr’s “War”: “Todhar – Huh! What is it good for? Spreadin’ on the feannag – say it again” etc..
So extended was “Todhar”, in fact, that the audience had mostly fled by the time it was finished, leaving the Dun Ringles with a concert hall even emptier than the one the Guireans had entered….
Luckily the appearance of the specialist rock star catering crew (Mrs Wattie)
with the backstage rider drew the stray liggers back into the
auditorium, no doubt expecting the usual high class drugs and fine
champagne. However, the shop in Bayble had run out of kilos of cocaine,
pristine $100 bills and solid silver platters due to a police crackdown
in Garrabost, so Mrs Wattie got an excellent big pile of Safeway pakora and samosa
instead. The feeding frenzy that ensued was an even less pleasant
spectacle than the Guireans’ set, with a ravenous Jason Dun Ringle
elbowing men and women and throwing children aside in a dash to get all
the pakora and none of the samosa. You’d think he’d have plenty food at
home, with all that salmon and venison about the place...