Despite forming 40 years ago, Sligo music legends Those Nervous Animals didn't actually release a studio album - The Mission Sessions - until early 2021.
In the early '80s, the band (with producer Bill Whelan behind the desk) released two singles, Just What the Sucker Wanted and The Business Enterprise (My Friend John) and a mini-album, won a formidable live following and played a number of major festivals.
Fast-forward several decades, and lockdown spurred Those Nervous Animals into making music again, this time remotely.
Ahead of the band's appearance at It Takes A Village festival, which takes place at Trabolgan Holiday Village in Cork from 17th – 19th September 2021, we asked TNA guitarist Pádraig Meehan for his choice cultural picks...
FILM
The Coen Brothers' Ballad of Buster Scruggs is unforgettable cinema. Imprinted images persistent as chewing gum. The film positions the viewer somehow at the edge of things, looking in. Seeing things you ought never see, death-dreams. One real keeper is the story of the gold prospector stealing eggs from an owl. Can the owl count? Another great little short story has Liam Neeson as a travelling showman/impressario, choosing between his pale disabled actor or a mathematically adept chicken. Another western travelling show gets the Tom Hanks treatment in Paul Greengrass’ News of the World. It’s the Internet, western style. Hanks rolls from town to town, not with a freak show, but reading newspapers to avid audiences. Lots of interesting themes here, and enough Hollywood romance in its soul not to break our hearts.
MUSIC
Back in 2017 I was recording an album called The Fourth Wall with a band called Bedlam Suitcase, with Tara Mooney and Tom Jamieson. It was all home recording or Zoom-calling producers in distant lands. At the same time, just down the road, Amy O’Hara was busy writing and recording A Blue I Can’t Describe. Amy’s album is just out now. It has one of my favourite songs on it, Slow Moving River, about the atmospheric Bonet River in Dromahair that flows into Lough Gill. The Bonet is pronounced "Bow-nett", or in Irish An Buanaid, ‘the Little Constant One’. Other tracks on the album showcase Amy’s wicked sense of irony and satire, including one song which cheerfully prescribes her funeral ceremony. But this song, the fourth on the album, is played straight; you get emotional warmth and Amy’s delicate vocals at their wavery best.
BOOKS
In Hoffa's Shadow - A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth by Jack Goldsmith is the latest in a recent rabbit hole of unsolved murder mysteries I seem to have fallen into. This is another no doubt biased account. But for some reason this work of non-fiction gets you intimate with the events and the families in a way The Irishman didn’t, for instance. Hoffa was a complicated character, the Hoffa dynamic with Robert Kennedy is explored, with all its moral quagmires and righteous wrongness, an account that gave me pause for thought.
THEATRE
It has been a while! A few things over the last years: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (at the Gielgud Theatre, London), I found moving, funny and educational. It had an almost overwhelming and amazingly staged sequence paralleling the experience of travelling, alone and lost, on a busy train for a boy with Aspergers Syndrome.
I always look forward to new original work from Blue Raincoat theatre group in Sligo. Hunting Darwin, which is on in late August and September, is based on a particular incident in 1911 during Captain Scott’s famously doomed attempt to reach the geographic South Pole. A bit like the sixties Moon shots, the expedition had scientific objectives, as well as being an international race involving flags and male egos. On the way, a trio of team members made a detour on sleds to Cape Crozier on Ross Island in brutal conditions. The objective was an unhatched emperor penguin egg, seeking evidence of the evolutionary link between all birds and their reptile predecessors. Niall Henry and his team seem to be on their own journey of exploration in recent shows, delving into emotional and climatic extremes.
TV
The Sopranos. Now that was a proper binge. Amazing how some of the episodes I had seen before were completely surprising and fresh again. In places it reached sublime heights of storytelling. I know we all know it, but watch again. Okay it’s not all jaw-dropping, but it got us through Covid. What a dynamic between Tony and the therapist. Then there was that Russian guy that Paulie and Chris tried to murder in the snow, only to see him miraculously escape in the woods, leaving the made men shivering and lost in the snow like Scott of the Antarctic. Or the scene where Janice whacks Tony Aprile. Seems so sad and unfair that James Gandolfini died so young. He was a truly amazing presence on screen. Apparently they are making a Sopranos film now with his son as a young Tony, will be interesting to see how that goes.
GIG
Last one was Holy Holy, the Tony Visconti/Woody Woodmansey Bowie tribute band, at the 2020 Dublin Bowie Festival. They played the entire The Man Who Sold the World album, and some other tracks. An upcoming gig I think I would find interesting would be Sigrid at The Academy next March. She was only born in 1996! Decent songwriter and singer, and has that delicate half-off telling-a-secret Scandinavian vocal style down to a tee.
ART
These days I find it hard to get past cave art, or other Paleolithic stuff, like the work of the Chauvet Cave painter(s) in the Alps, as seen in Werner Hertzog movie, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. But here in the North West, we have a dynamic art scene. An imaginative body of work has been created by Bettina Seitz and her collaborators. The outcomes multiply, as public art, as atmospheric film, as performance. Ancestors is a site-responsive exhibition of sculptures on an uninhabited island off the coast of Sligo.
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RADIO/PODCAST
I watched both film documentaries, the rather silly one by Jim Sheridan and the Netflix one, Sophie: A Murder in West Cork about that brutal killing. It is a topic both horrifying and fascinating, and just refuses to go away. Sophie, as a trace, a shadow, in video and photographic image, seems so gorgeous, so petite, so trusting, so poetic. We all need resolution, somehow, and feel for her family. As someone who remembers the case at the time, it seems thoroughly weird how amateur detectives, and pretend journalists (please, Sinead!) have filled the void, and true crime-type pitches (which we are so used to from American TV) have taken over from RTÉ-type journalistic accounts. I discovered books by a guy who is leaving messages for someone he believes is responsible for the murder. One of the best pieces of work around this investigation was the West Cork podcast, across no less than 14 episodes. It was not without some flaws and wobbles, but well put together, I thought.
TECH
Adobe Capture. Only I don’t think I am using it right. It’s amazing; you point at things, and little coloured circles start wandering about the screen. Trippy. You can derive colour schemes and codes, acronyms for every imaginable tint; RAL colour for paint, CYMK, RGB, Pantone etc, to your hearts content. Great for driving people in a paint shop quite mad. Oh… I have a better idea. I can take some landscape shots, cheesy enough for middle class tastes. Dermot Bannon fans. They can buy my pictures as a centrepiece, and I can supply the colour codes for doing up the room. In fact, all I have to do is convince my friend and colleague Eddie Lee (bass player, arranger, composer) who is a much better photographer than me, and already has a thriving business selling prints, to go a bit more into the realm of cheese. He of course has to be pay me a substantial commission for the idea.
THE NEXT BIG THING...
The above. Or…. Tokamaks. Fusion. Only fusion scaled down to the size of a matchbox. Climate change sorted, with the help of solar sails and matchboxes. Or... Quantum bus stops, in which you catch the bus and go to the office, and miss the bus and stay at home, simultaneously. A lot of people will be taking those post-Covid, I suspect.
Those Nervous Animals play It Takes A Village festival, which takes place at Trabolgan Holiday Village in Cork from 17th – 19th September 2021. Tickets are available from www.ittakesavillage.fm
