Month: April 2025

Sweden meets Ireland: Andy Irvine on the road with Quilty

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By Andrew Curry

Andy Irvine is one of the most consequential Irish folk musicians of the last 60 years. His influence stretches through his membership of bands such as Planxty and Sweeney’s Men, his exploring and popularising of a huge repertoire of traditional songs, and his experiments with other folk traditions, on recordings such as East Wind and with bands such as Mozaik.

So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise to discover that in his early 80s he is on a short tour of Britain and Ireland with the Swedish group Quilty. They’ve made a 30-something year career playing Irish and Swedish folk music to audiences across Europe and elsewhere.

The tour had stopped off at the Irish Cultural Centre in London en route from Sheffield to Cilgerran before playing a series of dates in Ireland from Wednesday 30th April.

The show kicked off with Irvine on stage alone for a few songs, switching between bouzouki and guitar. These included Houdini, Brackagh Hill, and Here’s A Health To Every Mining Lad. This last one came with a slightly tricky singalong chorus, but given Salut! Live’s north-eastern roots, we’re always willing to join in with a song about the 150 year struggle by miners everywhere for better wages and conditions.

Quilty is a four piece folk band that consists of Esbjorn Hazelius on fiddle, mostly, Staffan Lindfors on bass (playing bass lines on guitar here rather than standup bass), with Gideon Andersson on bouzouki and guitar and Dag Westling on guitar, banjo, and whistle. This is the same line-up they started out with 32 years ago.

And almost immediately they had arrived on stage we got another of the songs that Andy Irvine is indelibly associated with—The Plains of Kildare, in which the rich people bet on the thoroughbred mare, and the poor on Stewball the stallion.

As he went into the song, Irvine said that he didn’t want to give the ending away, but that if the poor didn’t come out ahead, they wouldn’t be playing it. Irvine learned it from Eddie Butcher.

From their repertoire Quilty contributed the murder ballad The Two Sisters, which starts with jealousy and ends up with everyone dead, but has the jolliest of tunes. Irvine followed up with an Antrim song, Come With Me Over The Mountain, apparently one of the few Antrim love songs that end well.

Esbjorn Hazelius and Staffan Lindfors closed out the half with a Swedish polska (“every Swedish musician learns to count to three”) with some gentle fills from the other musicians.

How does a group of Swedish folk musicians end up playing Irish music?

Hazelius hitchhiked to Ireland as a teenager to spend three months trying to learn as many jigs and reels as he could, and Andersson recalled that Andy Irvine had been something of a musical hero to their younger selves. As he said, had someone told them then that they’d be touring with him one day, they would have been disbelieving.

Their own repertoire has a bit of a nautical flavour to it. There are shanties and hornpipes in there, and other songs of the sea. We got some of that in the second half, with The Bonny Ship the Diamond, The Press Gang, sung a capella, and a couple of hornpipes (apparently known as fottis in Swedish, if I have the spelling right), one of which had been written with John Doyle when they were touring together.

When Hazelius finished his teenaged tour in Ireland, he went into a record shop in Galway to buy some CDs of jigs and reels to take home to Sweden with him. One of the records he bought was East Wind, which Irvine recorded with Davy Spillane in 1988.

When he got it home, he was disappointed. There is not an Irish tune on it, although most of the musicians are Irish.

Instead, it’s an exploration of Macedonian and Bulgarian music, and includes some fearsome time signatures—7/16ths, 9/16ths, 11/16ths. It’s a step away from 3/4ths time.

But he came to appreciate it, and in the show they played Dance of Suleiman.

There were more conventional songs from the Andy Irvine repertoire as well, sung in his distinctive tenor voice. These songs included Bonny Light Horseman, A Close Shave, written by Bob Bickerton, about cross-dressing gold thieves, and another Antrim love song, Kellswater, that also ended well (“you’ve had both of them now”, said Irvine.) One thing I also learned, by the way, was that it’s Irvine, rhyming with ‘wine’ with the emphasis on the second syllable.

They closed the set out with an energetic a capella version of Roll The Woodpile Down, associated with Bellowhead, which was a lot easier to sing along with than A Health to Every Mining Lad. The encore included Blackbirds and Thrushes, from Quilty’s repertoire, and the Dubliners’ Farewell to Old Ireland.

As they closed, Staffan Lindfors thanked us for turning up, as artists do, deadpanning:

Without you coming it would have been a real fiasco.

Visiting the merch stand after the show, I asked how they came to collaborate together. It happens that Quilty and Irvine share a booking agent in Oslo, and through them they were able to invite him to play at their 30th anniversary concert a couple of years ago. That led to a tour of Sweden together. For his part, Irvine seems to be enjoying the experience of playing with them. They make a good sound together.

Source: Sweden meets Ireland: Andy Irvine on the road with Quilty – Salut! Live

Illinois governor: “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.”

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 29, 2025

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt popularized the idea that the first 100 days of a presidency established an administration’s direction. As soon as he took office on March 4, 1933, he called Congress into special session to meet on March 9 to address the emergency of the Great Depression. Congress responded to the crisis by quickly passing 15 major bills and 77 other measures first to stabilize the economy and then to rebuild it. On July 24, 1933, FDR looked back at “the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”

In a Fireside Chat broadcast over the radio, FDR explained that his administration had stabilized the nation’s banks and raised taxes to pay for millions in borrowing. That federal money was feeding starving people, as well as employing 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps planting trees to prevent soil erosion, building levees and dams for flood control, and maintaining forest roads and trails. It was also funding a public works program for highways and inland navigation, as well as state-based municipal improvements. The government had also raised farm income and wages by regulating agriculture and abolishing child labor.

FDR was speaking on July 24 to urge Americans to get behind a program of shorter hours and higher wages to create purchasing power that would restart the economy. “It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the Nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about,” he said. “If I am asked whether the American people will pull themselves out of this depression, I answer, ‘They will if they want to.’”

Today is the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. He marked it by delivering what amounted to a rally outside Detroit, Michigan, in which he claimed his had been “the most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country, and that’s according to many, many people…. This is the best, they say, 100-day start of any president in history, and everyone is saying it. We’ve just gotten started. You haven’t even seen anything yet.”

In fact, Trump has signed just five measures into law: the Laken Riley Act, which Congress passed before he took office; a stopgap funding measure; and three resolutions overturning rules set by the Biden administration.

But Trump’s administration does parallel FDR’s in an odd way. Trump set out in his first hundred days to undo the government FDR established in HIS first hundred days. Trump has turned the nation away from 92 years of a government that sought to serve ordinary Americans by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, protecting civil rights, and stabilizing global security and trade. Instead, he is trying to recreate the nation of more than 100 years ago, in which the role of government was to protect the wealthy and enable them to make money from the country’s resources and its people.

Trump set out to destroy the modern American state, gutting the civil service and illegally shuttering federal agencies, as well as slashing through government programs. His team has withdrawn the U.S. from its global leadership and rejected democratic allies in favor of autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. At home he has imitated those autocrats, ignoring the rule of law and rendering migrants to prison in El Salvador without due process, and using the power of the state to threaten those he perceives as his enemies.

As is typical with autocratic governments, corruption appears to be running deep in this White House. The president and his family are openly profiting from his office. And it would be hard to find a better example of a government letting cronies profit off public resources than Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s relinquishing of control over the department to a DOGE operative, or of a government permitting businesses to profit from ordinary Americans than billionaire Elon Musk’s apparent creation of a master database of Americans’ information.

Trump’s dismantling of the modern American state has been a disaster. Trump spoke tonight in Michigan to tout his hope that his new tariffs will center auto manufacturing back in the U.S., but the economic chaos his tariff policies have unleashed has turned what was a booming economy 100 days ago sharply downward. That economic slump, along with Trump’s illegal renditions of men to El Salvador and the gutting of services Americans depend on, has given Trump the lowest job approval rating after 100 days of any president in 80 years.

And that suggests another way to look at the first 100 days of a presidential term. For all that the 100-days trope focuses on presidents, the first 100 days of Trump’s second term have shown Americans, sometimes encouraged by their allies abroad, pushing back against Trump to restore American democracy.

Democratic attorneys general began to plan for a possible Trump second term in February 2024, preparing for cases they might have to file if Trump followed through with his campaign promises or implemented Project 2025. California, with 5,600 staffers in its department of justice, and New York, with 2,400, carried much of the weight. They were able to file their first challenges to Trump’s January 20 executive orders on January 21. Their lawsuits, and those of others, have been so successful that they have sparked both Trump and MAGA Republicans to attack judges and even the judiciary.

Early observers of the movement to stop Trump’s destruction of the modern state argued that the opposition was too burned out to mount any meaningful pushback against a newly emboldened Trump. But, in fact, people were not in the streets because they were organizing over computer apps and at the local level, a reality that burst into the open at Republican town halls in late February as angry voters protested government cuts at the hands of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”

On March 4, Representative Richard Hudson (R-NC), the head of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, told Republicans to stop holding town halls to stop the protests from gaining attention. So Democrats began holding their own packed town halls in the absent Republicans’ districts.

On March 20, 2025, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) launched their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in Las Vegas. Unexpectedly huge crowds flocked to their rallies across the West, revealing a deep well of unhappiness at the current government even in areas that had voted for Trump.

At 7:00 on the evening of March 31, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) launched a marathon speech attacking the Trump administration and imploring Republicans to defend democracy because, he said, he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.” Before he finished twenty-five hours later on April 1, his speech—the longest in congressional history—had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.

The quiet organizing of the early months of the administration showed when the first call for a public “Hands Off!” protest on April 5 produced more than 1,400 rallies in all 50 states and turned out millions of people. Organizers called for “an end to the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration; an end to slashing federal funds for Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on; and an end to the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and other communities.”

On April 11, Harvard University rejected the administration’s demand to regulate the “intellectual and civil rights conditions” at Harvard, including its governance, admissions, programs, and extracurricular activities, in exchange for the continuation of $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and a $60 million contract.

Harvard’s lawyers wrote: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle…. Harvard is not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”

Last Sunday, April 27, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gave a barn-burning speech to Democrats in New Hampshire, telling them to “fight—EVERYWHERE AND ALL AT ONCE.” “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now,” he said.

“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact— because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”’

And so, even as Trump tries to erase the government FDR pioneered, Americans are demonstrating their support for a government that defends ordinary people, and proving the truth of FDR’s words from 1933, that when people act together they “can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about.”

‘British Pulp Fiction’ is country’s ‘best film of last 90 years’

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The 1996 film is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, YouTube and Apple TV – it became an instant classic from the moment it was released despite fears around whether it would live up to the hype.

It was supposed to be “unfilmable” and a “foolhardy” choice for a second film from a team who had exploded on to the scene two years earlier. But the result could not have been better as the film became an instant classic which regularly features in lists of the best films of all time and was even voted the best British film of the last 90 years.

Trainspotting was released in 1996, “supercharged with sulphurous humour and brutal recklessness”, according to a Guardian review 20 years later which also said it was “maybe the only successful 90s British attempt at answering films like Goodfellas or Pulp Fiction” which “has a version of their spirit and power and matches them for hardcore violence, horror and drugs”.

The film was directed by Danny Boyle and based on a book by Irvine Welsh, which was adapted for the big screen by John Hodge’s screenplay. Its cast became household names whose careers became spectacularly successful — think Ewan McGregor (Renton), Robert Carlyle (Begbie), Jonny Lee Miller (Sick Boy), Ewen Bremner (Spud) and Kelly McDonald (Diane).

The film follows a group of heroin addicts in Edinburgh and especially Renton’s attempt to escape addiction while also plotting to steal a large amount of money to set him up with the new life he has planned for himself. The film’s now-legendary opening scene sees Renton and the kind-hearted Spud racing down Edinburgh’s main route, Princes Street, while Renton’s “choose life” monologue runs over Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life hit.

The film came two years after Boyle, Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald had released Shallow Grave, which was described as “a breath of fresh air through a beleaguered British film industry” and was a lot to live up to. But a BBC review after Trainspotting’s release said the film “had that rare quality of exceeding all expectations”.

Listing it at number 74 in their list of the best films ever made, Empire says: “For their follow up to the superb Shallow Grave, Danny Boyle, Andrew Macdonald and John Hodge foolhardily elected to film the supposedly unfilmable: Irvine Welsh’s scrappy, episodic, multi-perspective novel about Edinburgh low-lives.

“The result couldn’t have been more triumphant: the cinematic incarnation of ‘Cool Britannia’ came with a kick-ass soundtrack, and despite some dark subject matter, a punch-the-air uplifting pay-off.”

In 2024, it was voted the best British film of the last 90 years in a poll to mark the 90th anniversary of the British Council. In 1999 it placed 10th on the top 100 British films of the 20th century and in 2004 it was voted the best Scottish film of all time.

Author Irvine Welsh had heroin addiction issues

The book, Trainspotting, was released in 1993 and has been voted the 10th best book of the 20th century. There have, in fact, been five instalments in the “Trainspotting series”, though only one reached the stratospheric levels of fame the first, which is reportedly the “most-shoplifted” novel ever.

Author Irvine Welsh became addicted to heroin in his early 20s and was addicted for around 18 months before going cold turkey (as Renton does in the film) and beating the addiction. He has described it as “awful” but also explained the appeal of the drug to so many people, saying it gives a “tremendous sense of wellbeing” and a “feeling of invincibility”.

He added: “The good thing about heroin, and the worst thing, is not having to deal with other people. Of course, it’s a complete delusion.”

Why is it called Trainspotting?

A question that is often asked is why the film, which is about drug addiction in Edinburgh and doesn’t feature any trains, was called Trainspotting in the first place. It is reported to be a reference to an episode from the novel where Begbie and Renton meet “an auld drunkard” in a disused railway station who asks them if they are “trainspotting”.

According to IMDB, author Welsh has explained that when he was growing up in Edinburgh there was an abandoned train station that had become a place frequented by the homeless and drug-addicted, who, when going to the station to take drugs, would often say that they were going “trainspotting”.

Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh in 2010 (Image: Daily Record)

A film that’s ‘impossible to quit’

Trainspotting has a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.1 out of 10 on IMDB. Kevin Maher, writing in The Times, says it is “easy to start, all-consuming, impossible to quit”. Jay Carr in the Boston Globe says it as “unsinkable vigour coursing through [its] veins”, while Chris Cabin in Slant Magazine says “the film finds pitch-black humor, horror, tragedy and violence in a series of asides and digressions”.

However, David Goodman, writing for Associated Press, said: “Trainspotting is too morally bland for the ugliness it depicts. It’s yet one more movie with the subtle, destructive message that it’s not so terrible to do bad things, as long as they’re carried off in a stylish, amusing way.”

Trainspotting is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube and Sky Store

Source: ‘British Pulp Fiction’ is country’s ‘best film of last 90 years’ | Films | Entertainment | Express.co.uk