FURTHERMORE
By Gerry Moran
If music be the food of love there’ll be fair feasting this May Bank Holiday in the Marble City thanks to The Roots Festival one of our most popular and successful events. And so, it’s music, music all the way in harmony with the rhythm of the weekend!
* Donovan on groupies: “Generally I got thinking girls with books in their handbags whereas the other boys probably got girls with dyed hair and leather pants. There was a different party going on in my suite.”
* Christy Moore: “It’s not the intensity of singing that gets us down; it’s the intensity of what happens when the gig is over. It’s all the madness that goes on.”
* Noel Coward: “People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what’s wrong with it.”
* Noel Gallagher of Oasis when asked what he wanted for his 4oth birthday: “The head of James Blunt.”
*Liam Gallagher: “I know how to behave but sometimes I can’t be bothered.”
* Tom Paxton on folk music: “Music with the bark still on it.”
* Rev. Rick Stanley, step-brother of Elvis: “When I hear people say the colonel, Tom Parker, made Elvis, my response is – tell him to make another one.”
* Rev. Rick Stanley, step-brother of Elvis: “Graceland is the second most visited house in America after the White House.”
* The Corrs, when TV presenter asked where the all meet. “To make it in this business, along with the talent, you’ve got to have tenacity because the world is full of talented losers. And the other is timing. You can have talent and tenacity but you can just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. “
* Phil Coulter is the only non-American song-writer to have penned a hit, My Boy, for Elvis Presley who never gave an encore.
* Madonna has an IQ. of 140. When she was twelve she wanted to be a nun.
* A Joe Dolan fan when asked what does late Mullingar superstar do for her: “More than a husband would do.”
*Good Looking Woman’ was the song that made Joe Dolan the first Irish entertainer to have a hit in all five of the earth’s continents.
* A critic described Tom Wait’s voice as “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the sunshine for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car.”
* Oliver Wendell Holmes: “How silent the woods would be if only the best birds sang.
* Oliver Wendell Holmes said never ate cornflakes or rice-crispies because he said that they were too loud or the noise was unbearable in his head. I suppose that’s because he has such a sense of sound and music.”
* Jimmy Durante: “I hate music – especially when it’s played.
*Jim Morrison (1943-1971) of The Doors was the first rock star to be arrested on stage.
* The artist Andy Warhol created the Rolling Stones’ emblem depicting a big tongue. It first appeared on the cover of the Sticky Fingers album.
* Abbey Road was the last album recorded by the Beatles.
* George Cory who wrote the lyrics of I Left My Heart in San Francisco died there in 1978. Cory wrote the song with tunesmith Douglas Cross during a bout of home-sickness while in New York in 1946. The song lay unrecorded for 15 years until Tony Bennett used it in his act at the city’s Fairmont Hall in 1961.
* Tony Bennet: “Singing is like no other job. I like to make people feel good. And they make me feel good. It’s a virtuous circle. You don’t get that working in a bank.”
* Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, The Big Bopper, Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline, Jim Croce, John Denver, Glen Miller all died in plane crashes
* Amazing Grace was written by British slave-trader turned Church of England minister John Newton (1725 – 1807)
* Finally: Fred has a musical nature/He can yodel, whistle and hum/ He goes out fit as a fiddle/And comes home tight as a drum.
