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Irish Examiner
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Culture That Made Me: Music legend Brush Shiels picks his touchstones
Brendan 'Brush' Shiels, 79, grew up in Phibsboro, Dublin. In 1967, he formed Skid Row, Ireland's seminal rock group, which briefly included Phil Lynott on vocals, and Gary Moore on guitar. The band released two acclaimed records, Skid and 34 Hours, before disbanding. He fronted a show, Off Yer Brush, on RTÉ television for two seasons, 1986-87, and he has released several solo albums. He will perform at Connolly's of Leap, Co Cork, 6pm, Saturday, June 14. See: Save the Last Dance for Me We lived in one room on the Phibsboro Road. Beside us was a pub, across the road was another pub. We had no radio. Seven nights a week, people came out of the pub and would sing for another two hours. Some fella used to sing, 'If I can help somebody as I pass along … Then my living shall not be in vain' again and again. Right at the railings, about a yard away. That's how I learned Save the Last Dance for Me and all these songs – from people singing them outside. After that, we got a radio. I started listening to Saturday Club with Brian Matthew on BBC. I remember hearing the very first Beatles live programme, Too Much Monkey Business. It must have been '63. The Beatles had harmonies and a sound I'd never heard before. I loved them for that. Bob Dylan I couldn't believe Bob Dylan when I first heard him. To this day when I hear Like a Rolling Stone, it has the same effect on me. I've learned hundreds of Bob Dylan songs. I love Desolation Row, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall and Mr. Tambourine Man. I still have the same fascination for his use of lyrics and symbolism. Until he arrived, it was Elvis, Cliff Richard, songs like Take These Chains from My Heart, and The Beatles were all kiss me quick numbers and meeting girls. When Dylan came along, it was a different way with words. I never looked back from that. He was my biggest inspiration. We Gotta Get Out of This Place Funny enough, I started off on the guitar because of The Shadows and that sort of stuff. Then around 1965, I started to hear other things. There was a baseline in The Animals' We Gotta Get Out of This Place, something about it influenced me. It spiked my interest – what you could do with the bass. Chuck Berry There was a bookshop up the road. It had a box of music magazines, all the same, called DownBeat. I got them for next to nothing. They were about jazz in America, like Duke Ellington, Count Basie. My mind went back then to this film I saw when I was about 12 called Jazz on a Summer's Day. It was about the Newport Jazz Festival. This film had a big effect on me. It had all the greatest jazz musicians in America at that time in it. In the middle of it all, this guy Chuck Berry came on, and he does Sweet Little Sixteen. When I saw Chuck Berry I realised that's the only way to do it. Brush Shiels. Night Train The jazz thing was always in the back of my head. I was interested in why the jazz scene was so big in America. A lot of it was hard to follow. I could follow them singing the melody, but once the solo came in and went off on a tangent, I didn't really understand it. Then I read in one of these magazines – I became an expert after reading 72 DownBeat magazines [laughs] – that Ray Brown, the bass player with the Oscar Peterson Trio, was the man to listen to, and the album to listen to was Night Train. That Night Train record changed my life. That's where I went next. Unison Blues DownBeat magazines also said, 'There's a great bass player called Vinnie Burke. Have a listen to him.' He had a track called Unison Blues which is the origin of the Skid Row way of doing things. A lot of the ideas about playing, I got from Vinnie Burke, his bass lines stood out. The sax, the bass and the piano playing the same line in unison gave it a particular sound, which, ultimately, I could hear in Cream and Jimi Hendrix. Lucky enough I came across Gary Moore when he was only 15 and he knew exactly what I was talking about. Phil Lynott Phil Lynott performing with Thin Lizzy at Cork City Hall in 1982. Picture: Irish Examiner Archive The first time I got in touch with Phillo, I got the bus out to his house. I knocked on his door. I went in to say hello to him. He told me he was listening to The Velvet Underground. I said, 'Forget about that.' Then he said, 'Paul Simon's I Am a Rock'. I said, 'No, if you want to come along, we'll try this Jimi Hendrix thing, which is going to be the next big thing.' A couple of days later, he sang Hey, Joe, and that was the start of it. Phillo had film-star appeal. Back in the 1960s, he lacked a bit of confidence, but the potential was unbelievable because he had everything else you needed. But life being the way it is, now he's gone. Somebody said to me once, 'How well did you know him?' I said, 'Well, he came on my honeymoon with me.' That's how close we were. Led Zeppelin Skid Row loved Led Zeppelin. We were playing in the Whisky A Go-Go in Los Angeles in 1970. Who turns up only John Bonham, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood. We're playing away and John Bonham wants to get up to sing, and Robert Plant says, 'I'll play drums.' So, the two boys got up. These lads from a band called Slammer – I knew them – took photographs and bootlegged the gig. You can still get it on YouTube. You can't buy it. The sound was just noise, but it's up there. John Bonham Led Zeppelin in 1973: From left to right, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham (1947 - 1980), John Paul Jones. (Photo by) John Bonham had a particular way of drumming that we hadn't heard before. It was thunderous. It sounded like an elephant stampede, like a wildebeest with an outboard motor on its back. Carmine Appice from Vanilla Fudge had a similar style. It was the start of all these great drummers like Ginger Baker, the way of doing it with the two bass drums, even though it had been done years before in jazz. It got lost along the way, but very fast playing made a comeback. Charlie Parker Charlie Parker – one of the great saxophonists, one of my biggest influences solo-wise – was in this café once, and Hank Williams' I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, was playing. Somebody asked Charlie Parker, 'Why do you keep putting that on?' He says, 'It's the words, man.' Like he's soloing all night. He's no problem soloing. So, when somebody is singing something like that, and he has felt that bad himself, and put it into words, he wants to listen. A lot of sad songs are about when somebody puts into words what we're all feeling. There's beauty in it.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Honey Don't!' Review: Margaret Qualley Stars As A Gutsy Private Eye In Ethan Coen's Messy Comic Noir
Even after his death in 2004, there's still only one Russ Meyer, and this, the second solo outing from the Coen brothers' Ethan, is a sad reminder of the talent he took with him to the grave. Meyer gave big parts to big women in films that shouted about SEX! in great big capital letters, bringing an artistry to the drive-in but never patronizing the sizable blue-collar audience that dug his bawdy humor. Honey Don't! would benefit from even just a fraction of Meyer's genius; as it is, there's a reason why Coen's film was tucked away in a graveyard slot on the last weekend of the Cannes Film Festival, much like you keep self-raising flour on a shelf that's near impossible to reach because you don't really ever use it. The opening is certainly striking; a car is being chased, and it crashes somewhere in the desert, instantly killing the female driver. Out of nowhere comes a beautiful, bob-haired brunette, a Mia Wallace lookalike (Lera Abova) who wears leopard print on top of leopard print and rides a cute mod scooter. She inspects the body and rips a distinctive ring off its finger: a cross with a red dot. Cue the music (The Animals' 'We Gotta Get Out of This Place') and a hectic Mondo Topless-style montage of the story's setting, a very rundown Bakersfield. (You might be expecting to hear Carl Perkins' song 'Honey Don't', but Coen saves that for the end and uses Wanda Jackson's version instead.) More from Deadline 'Imago' Director Déni Oumar Pitsaev On Winning Two Prizes In Cannes: "I Didn't Expect It At All" Palm Dog: 'The Love That Remains', 'Sirât', 'Pillion' And 'Amores Perros' Honored - Cannes Film Festival Ethan Coen's 'Honey Don't!' Gets 6.5-Minute Ovation In Cannes This dead-end town is where we meet Honey O'Donahue (Margaret Qualley), a hella lesbian and gutsy private eye who likes to drink ('Heavily. It's a point of pride'). Working with the local feds, Honey begins to investigate the crash, even though it has already been written up as an accident. What Honey isn't telling them, though, is the fact the dead woman, a local bartender, had asked for her services in the days before her death. The case takes her to the local church, where pastor Drew Devlin (Chris Evans, in the kind of role Charles Napier would usually play) has a very hands-on way of communing with his congregation, and also the local police station, where she hooks up with cop M.G. Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), and the two embark on a passionate affair. It promises to be a kitsch laugh-riot, but, like the last film, Drive-Away Dolls (2024), Honey Don't! doesn't tick any of the necessary boxes to become the cult film it obviously would like to be. The idea of a lesbian private eye isn't even that new either, since Jess Franco had two in a pair of his most enjoyable exploitation movies (Sadisterotika and Kiss Me, Monster, both 1969). Qualley, who handles the role with a sass it doesn't really deserve, carries the film to the finish line, which is no easy task given the proliferation of messy subplots, from the reappearance of Honey's abusive father to the provenance of the mysterious brunette, who turns out to be French and in the pay of the pastor, whom she warns that 'ze purple' — whoever they are — are nut vary 'appy wiz 'im. Mercifully, it's all over in under 90 minutes, but the ending — as well as being, well, just silly — raises more questions than it satisfactorily answers. Does this mean there's going to be a third movie, effectively making this the second part of a loosely linked trilogy? Honey, don't even think about it. Title: Honey Don't!Festival: Cannes (Competition)Director: Ethan CoenScreenwriter: Ethan Coen, Tricia CookeCast: Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Lera AbovaDistributor: Focus FeaturesRunning time: 1 hr 30 mins Best of Deadline Broadway's 2024-2025 Season: All Of Deadline's Reviews Sundance Film Festival U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize Winners Through The Years Deadline Studio At Sundance Film Festival Photo Gallery: Dylan O'Brien, Ayo Edebiri, Jennifer Lopez, Lily Gladstone, Benedict Cumberbatch & More
