Great news for music fans this summer! The Spiegeltent is returning to Cork as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival 2006!
Fred The Band are playing there on June 20th. Tickets are 15 Euro.
The Nail Drivers will play in the Angler’s Rest on June 17th in a charity event so get along and support them! See you there!
Here are a few pictures of the Nail Drivers from a while back. They played a blinder at my wedding and I definitely recommend them!
Category Archives: Music
The Joker by kittens
This music video for the Fat Boy Slim cover of “The Joker” is brilliant! Featuring kittens, kittens and more kittens! So, so cute! (via Cute Overload!)
The Roaring Forties on the Late Late Show
Donal wants to see Cork Jazz band, The Roaring Forties on the Late Late Show. As he says himself, email Pat and tell him how great they are!
Queen's Death on Two Legs .. who is it dedicated to?
Over the years there has been much speculation over the years as to who this song is dedicated to. A post on songmeanings.net states that it is about Norman Sheffield, their manager in the early days who “locked Queen into a slave like contract where they saw almost nothing in terms of royalties and artistic freedom.” Nasty!
I searched about a year ago for the answer to this question but couldn’t find anything as “concrete” as the answers above. It is still hear-say but I believe it could be true..
Last night while channel-flipping I came across “Classic Albums” on BBC1. The show was about Queen’s, “A Night At The Opera”, the album which really set the ball rolling for them and included the huge hit Bohemian Rhapsody.
I missed the start of the show but came in when they were talking about “Death on Two Legs”. Brian May spoke for up to a minute about the early days, saying they had a manager then who handled everything. He named the manager but I can’t recall what the name was. It was most likely Norman Sheffield.
They showed a grainy black and white group photo, and the camera zoomed in on the smiling young face of a man in a suit and lingered there for a few seconds. The scene changed back to May who looked into the camera for a few seconds saying nothing.
If you want to know what others think about this album, here are some critical and not so critical reviews.
The JCB Song
The JCB Song has been linked to by many sites, including Donal and Mel.
Nizlopi have a really nice song. It made it to number 2 in the Irish charts, only pipped to the top by Gift Grub’s Roy Keane.
The JCB site is really entertaining and well done too!
You should also check out this great animation of Radiohead’s Creep. Really good! (Thanks Donal!)
The Lobby Bar lives on … elsewhere
Donal posted that the The Lobby Bar will host a series of music events at the Half Moon Theatre. Looks like a couple of good gigs too!
I took an amazing photo of their front door 2 weeks ago. No it’s not amazing, it’s only a front door. *shrug*
Fun Lovin' Pictures
The Fun Lovin’ Criminals played last night in The Savoy in Cork. This is the second time I’ve seen them play. The last time was in the Show Grounds in Blackrock when I got down there early and into the enclosure in front of the stage. At the time I thought the performance was great but the sound quality was terrible!
Part of FLC’s attraction for me is the great lyrics. On their studio albums Huey’s voice can clearly be heard, but their live performances leave a lot to be desired. It was difficult to make out what song they were playing from time to time as the sound was so fuzzy and loud!
The concert was disappointing for me. They played several encores but I felt like leaving before they were finished. I still love their studio work but I don’t think I’ll be going to see them play live again.
Mel was there too and thinks the same about their sound quality.
Photos taken with my Panasonic FZ5, usually at 12x zoom. Sorry about the bad quality!
Fun Lovin' Criminals Tonight
FLC play the Savoy tonight at 8.30!
Fun Lovin' Criminals Play Cork
Fun Lovin’ Criminals will play in the Savoy, Patrick St. Cork on the 7th September.
How to convert from WMA to MP3
Converting Windows Media Audio files into MP3 format is rather easy with mplayer and lame. My car stereo plays MP3s, so WMA is of no use to me!
This code is based on this script but I have to wonder why they overwrote the wma file?
Piping the output of mplayer into lame is left as an easy lesson for the reader!
for i in *.wma ; do mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm -waveheader "$i" && lame -m j -h --vbr-new -b 160 audiodump.wav -o "`basename "$i" .wma`.mp3"; done; rm -f audiodump.wav