Rock

Kathy Burke meets Joe Strummer in Little Crackers’ Better Than Christmas

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By Johnny Foreigner

I knew actress Kathy Burke mainly for her brilliant performance in the 1997 film Nil By Mouth, when she played a battered woman terrorized by her brutish husband (played with equal brilliance by actor Ray Winstone.) As comedienne, Bates also played “Magda” on  AbFab, and delivered a hilarious line in Sid and Nancy – “John got beaten up by fascists.” (wonderful!)

When I came across this great short biopic from 2010 about a young London schoolgirl (Ami Metcalf portraying a teenaged Kathy Burke) meeting her rock n’ roll hero Joe Strummer – it left me wanting to see the rest of the series. IMDB describes Little Crackers as “a series of short comedy-dramas with a Christmas theme, written by British artists recalling moments from their childhoods.”

Here’s how Kathy Burke the Writer sums up her Little Crackers “Better Than Christmas” mini biopic:

Kathy Burke turns 16 in two days and is about to leave school after sitting one final exam. Kathy’s passion is music and she dreams of being a writer for the NME where she’ll interview the likes of Paul Weller and Johnny Rotten. As Kath and her friend Mary celebrate their freedom, they’re stopped in their tracks by an almost unbelievable vision. There, in front of them, are The Clash. While an awestruck Kathy clutches her now-autographed NME, her hero, Joe Strummer, offers her some life-changing advice.

The original, pre-crash, pre-Sandy lineup of Fairport Convention was brilliant

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Fairport Convention 1967

Fairport Convention are an English folk rock band, formed in 1967 by guitarists Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol, bassist Ashley Hutchings and drummer Shaun Frater (with Frater replaced by Martin Lamble after their first gig). They started out influenced by American folk rock, with a set list dominated by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell songs and a sound that earned them the nickname “the British Jefferson Airplane”.

Vocalists Judy Dyble and Iain Matthews joined them before the recording of their self-titled debut in 1968; afterwards, Dyble was replaced by Sandy Denny, with Matthews later leaving during the recording of their third album.

Denny began steering the group towards traditional British music for their next two albums, What We Did on Our Holidays and Unhalfbricking (both 1969); the latter featured fiddler Dave “Swarb” Swarbrick, most notably on the song “A Sailor’s Life”, which laid the groundwork for British folk rock by being the first time a traditional British song was combined with a rock beat.

Shortly before the album’s release, a crash on the M1 motorway killed Lamble and Jeannie Franklyn, Thompson’s girlfriend; this resulted in the group retiring most of their prior material and turning entirely towards British folk music for their seminal album Liege & Lief, released the same year. This style has been the band’s focus ever since. For this album Swarbrick joined full-time, alongside drummer Dave Mattacks. Both Denny and Hutchings left before the year’s end; the latter replaced by Dave Pegg, who has remained the group’s sole consistent member to this day; Thompson left after the recording of 1970’s Full House.

Record Review: Fontaines D.C. “A Hero’s Death”

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Heady, funny, and fearless, the Dublin band’s second album is a maudlin and manic triumph, a horror movie shot as comedy, equal parts future-shocked and handcuffed to history.

The Horsemen of the Apocalypse do not thunder and gallop. They lurch and stagger, weighed down by the grim burden of their brief. Slowly, they stalk humanity with an Amazon Prime package of grief, war, and pestilence, their approach suggested only by the mechanized drone of social media and cable news. When the end finally comes, it’s all so quotidian and tedious; a whimper, not a bang. All around us, the party is ending, and Fontaines D.C. are the final house band. The setlist is A Hero’s Death.

Slinking seeming fully-formed from Dublin’s working-class neighborhood The Liberties, the five-piece established themselves as bona fide inheritors of a centuries-long socialist-bohemian tradition on 2019’s post-post-punk document Dogrel, an album that weaved together the enduring groove of Gang of Four and the psychically dislocating poetry of Allen Ginsberg with unnervingly precocious aplomb. Dogrel was a shouty revelation—part early Mekons, part cider-addled James Brown & the JB’s—all of it suggestive of a crucial talent abuzz with live-wire intensity.

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