Cait joins the Tetras , April 2023

Pretty self-explanatory
Post Reply
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.hotpress.com/2893481.html

The new issue of Hot Press has a 'At Home with Cait O'Riordan' feature. Photos include Cait wearing boxing gloves and her cleaning her pink cowboy boots etc. The text is the usual safe stuff, except for a mention of how she has been teetotal for 'a year'.

My scanner isn't working at the moment . I'll get it working, hopefully, over the weekend and share some of the images etc.

There is absolutely no reference to Elvis. In the ongoing campaign to publicise Prenup an interview with her is due to appear in the high circulation Sunday Independent this weekend and, I'm told, there will be something of interest for us all in it.

http://www.independent.ie/
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

Image

When Cáit O’Riordan explains that she likes living where she does because the woman next door keeps chickens in her back garden, you might be forgiven for assuming that her pad is situated in Ireland’s rural heartland. Not so. She lives in the Dublin suburb she describes as “Rocking Rathmines”. “I just love the idea of waking up with the hens all clucking around,’ she admits. ‘It was the only place I looked at that had that farmyardy vibe going on, although I’m a completely city person!”

Her present abode, where she’s lived for four years, has another key advantage. “It takes me exactly 30 minutes to walk from here to the Millennium Bridge and Temple Bar,” she says. “My favourite bit of New York is 9th Avenue from 42nd Street up to the back of the Lincoln Centre, and there’s something about the walk into town, down Camden Street and Aungier Street, that reminds me of that. I like the quirky little shops, and the low-rise architecture and the fact that every time I take that walk I meet at least a couple of people I know. That doesn’t happen in London. I like that about Dublin, which is where I’ve lived since 1989. Also, people, especially Pogues fans, often stop me to tell me what a great poet Shane Maccowan is. There’s always somebody to wave at.” Cáit regards her three-bedroom semi-d as a “cave” in an extremely quiet neighbourhood, to which she retreats from the rest of the world. “I don’t encourage visitors, and everybody accepts that,” she says. Of course she plays music, both on record and on her guitars, but never too loud. “I have very good neighbours and I want to be a good neighbour too,” she says, ‘and I certainly don’t want to upset the chickens. I can make as much noise as I want in the rehearsal rooms and on stage.” Since she stopped drinking over a year ago, local pubs are no longer places she frequents, but “I love the famous Bald Barista on Aungier Street. I always stop off there to see Buzz!”


Neither home cooking nor DIY have much appeal for her. “Why would I want to cook when I live close to Jo Burger, Bombay Pantry, lots of great places to eat, and Ranelagh is only 10 minutes away? As for DIY if anybody wants to volunteer, let me know, especially if there’s a nice plumber out there?”

She took up boxing a while back, but gave up because she became concerned when it seemed to be damaging her knuckles. She actually laughs out loud when I mention the subject of gardening, so we move swiftly along to her record collection, which ranges from The Clangers to Leonard Cohen and Charlie Mingus, and her book collection which tends to focus on biographies and true-life stories rather than fiction. “I don’t read fiction at all. I’m an adventure junkie, and what happens in the real world is amazing, so I tend to read about people like Sir Edmund Hillary and his great achievement in climbing Mount Everest. There was something about Sir Ed, and I get it off Bono as well, people who find themselves with this extraordinary fame that wasn’t really the point of what they did. Bono didn’t set out to be the world’s most famous man, he just wanted to be in the best rock band in the world. Sir Ed just wanted to conquer the highest mountain. I find books about such people completely inspirational.” Not one to collect antiques, or works or art, or ornaments as such, she has a big teddy bear called Big Teds, one of several, but her most prized possessions are her musical instruments. “This year I figured out the Audacity programme on my PC. When I come up with musical ideas, I can record them and I’ve even learned to send them as mp3s. I’m getting a handle on the techy side.”

She has a pair of impressive cowboy boots. “I bought them about two years ago in a shop called Lara’s just round the corner from your Hot Press office. But my favourite personal possession is my P Bass. I’ve had it for about 22 years. She’s old and battered like me but she still does the job. I call her Chrissie, A friend has loaned me a double bass on strict instructions that I learn a Henry Grimes solo. I have a bodhrán that Christy Moore gave me in 1988, when I was hanging out at Windmill Lane.”

Image

Image

Image
martinfoyle
Posts: 2502
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 5:24 pm
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Contact:

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by martinfoyle »

I've seen Cáit around a lot in recent years (indeed we were both at the rather forgettable Chrome Hoofs show tonight at Whelans, she wasn't wearing the pink boots unfortunately) but I didn't we realise we're nearly neighbours, she almost lives in the same parish, God bless us! Yes, it is a very nice part of town, if you can track down a copy of the 1958 film Rooney you can see footage of her neighbourhood which has changed little since the film was made. Good to see she appreciates that friendly aspect of Dublin living, I often take the same route into town and it's always wonderful. I'm more inclined to stop at the Coffee Society on Camden St, though I have noticed the Bald Barista, which is across from the great jazz pub JJ Smyths, must check it out.
MOJO
Posts: 1021
Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2006 3:05 pm

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by MOJO »

Rooney 1958 review from the NYT - http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review? ... 8383649EDE (reg. may be required).. It sounds like there are some wild ladies in your neighborhood, Martin. Watch out for the rolling pins!
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/lif ... 32373.html

The Sunday Independent , March 30 2008

Life magazine
( scanned from Sat. evening edition)

Image

Image

Identity is conflict, Jean Paul Sartre once said. For most of her adult life, Cait O’Riordan was in conflict with herself. At times, it must have seemed like open war. Yet, there was a phrase she would regularly repeat to herself over and over for years: “Everyone’s really fucked up. Thank goodness, I’m all right.” Of course, Cait was, by her own admission, looking at things back to front. She had no idea that she had depression or that she was an alcoholic. It was only when the professionals started poking around her head in the Priory that she realised her true identity. They told her she had been dealing with debilitating depression practically all her adult life. “Except,” Cait adds, “I hadn’t been dealing with it.”

Do you ever truly deal with it?

“It is ongoing, for ever,” she says straight away. “There have been enough AA meetings where people say scary stuff like they didn’t have a drink for 15 years and then they started again. So you can’t ever really say:
‘This is guaranteed. I’m all right now, even if I live to be 80.’ It frightened me so badly, being told I was addicted to something.” The absolute focus of her life now is, she says, staying sober and not hurting anyone.

The 43-year-old is currently studying at UCD, doing an Access to Arts course. After this interview, in a cafe on Grafton Street, she is walking home to Rathmines to write an essay on Irish politics before packing to fly to the US on Friday to play in New York with her band, Prenup — basically, Cait on bass plus Fiachna 0 Braonain of the Hothouse Flowers on vocals and guitar and Dave Clarke on drums. Their debut album, Hell to Pay, is out on April 4.

“I love playing with Prenup,” she says. talking of their “middle-aged, rock ‘n’ roll, Rolling Stones-y, grown-up, pissed-off” feel. The idea for the group emerged when former Golden Horde singer and boulevardier Simon Carmody was asked to do a gig at a private party at Johnny Ronan’s house in November 2005.

“Simon wanted to do a punk set so he got Dave on drums and me on bass. I guess Fiachna was invited to the party because I then got a call, saying ‘I’ve got these songs...”

Given various commitments (Fiachna lives in Paris, Dave Clarke was in Chicago and Cait has her studies), the band has only recently been able to get to work. “You’ll have to ask Fiachna about the songs because he wrote them:’ she says. “The songs are all about traumatic relationships.” Traumatic relationships being something Cait possibly knows more about than most.

Caitlin O’Riordan was born in Lagos, Nigeria, on January 4, 1965. Her father, Martin O’Riordan, originally from Lahinch in Co Clare, worked for an oil company that took him all over the world. The family fled Nigeria in 1967, in fear of their lives, when the Biafran War broke out on July 6, 1967. “People were getting shot dead:’ Cait says. “The giant multinational oil corporations were being super cautious. So, my dad went to England and that’s where I grew up. He was redeployed to other countries.”

Cait has absolutely no memories of Nigeria. “I thought I did, but I don’t think they can be real” She has never been back. She was in Niger in 2006 for the total solar eclipse over the Sahara, and she thought she was so close to her birthplace that she should go into Nigeria but, she says, with characteristic self-negativity, “as a middle-aged white woman on her own”. she decided it was a “stupid idea’.

Throughout Cait’s youth in London, her dad was in places such as Mauritania in northwest Africa and the Gulf and, as such, was rarely at home: for as long as she can remember, he was always off somewhere else. Cait’s Scottish mother stayed home tomind the four children. Ask her if it was difficult to grow up effectively without a father, and she pauses to reflect before answering. You can soon see why: the answer is revelatory. “My mother, I think, is still alive I haven’t seen her in 20 years,” she says. “So it is not really fair for me to start saying things about her that I don’t know”

But I am asking you. It was you who grew up without a father.

“But what can you compare it to? A kid’s not sitting there going, ‘Well. . ? It was just what my dad did and what would I compare it to? It wasn’t an issue’ In truth, her mother and father’s relationship was a very real issue for Cait. The effects of it have been, and possibly will be, felt all of Cait’s life.

Her relationship with her siblings — older brother Martin, younger sister Claire and younger brother Murray — was a complex one by any definition of the word family. I get the impression from her tone that Martin is no longer with us. “He died:’ she says.

Can I ask you what happened to him?

“He had a problem ... he had a heart attack. He was 39.”

When I press further and enquire if she had a good relationship with Martin, Cait shakes her head and says that the “only person I kept in touch with from my family is my little brother’.

When I ask why that is, she says she didn’t believe her family was “a loving family’.
“It wasn’t anyone you’d want to hang out with. But I did feel protective of my little brother. So we stayed in touch. He was in love with music, like I was. So we were very similar like that, and I wanted to stay in touch.”

You say you think your family wasn’t loving. Looking back, why do you think it was like that?
She is reluctant to answer this question, given that other family members are not there to tell their side of the story.

This is your story, Cait, your life.

“I think it must be very hard to be left alone to raise four children,’ Cait says haltingly. “So it was great for me to be old enough to leave.”

After school, when she was in her mid teens, Cait would get the bus from Whitton to Richmond Tube Station and then get the tube to central London and hang out in record shops. There was one particular shop, called Rocks Off, where one Shane MacGowan worked.

She went for a drink in the local pub with the owners of the shop and there she met and struck up a friendship with MacGowan, who was then in a band called the Nipple Erectors. Cait was living in a Centrepoint hostel under St Ann’s Church in Soho at the time, having left home as soon as she was legally able to do so, at 16. Living in various hostels around London was, she recalls, “stressful’.

Living at home wasn’t exactly a job, either. “That’s it. What do you compare it with?” she laughs. “At least I felt like I was free. In some hostels, you had to be in at a certain time. When I was in Queens Park hostel near Kilburn — that’s when I joined the Pogues —you came and went. You were kind of on trust’.

When she joined The Pogues at 17 , she would either go back to the hostel every night or sleep “on a lot of floors’. At that age, naturally Cait thought she knew everything about life that she needed to know.

“I thought everyone else was wrong and I was completely right about everything.”

She says her mother never tried to get her back. “Never, no. It must have been a relief, you know,” she says. There is a certain amount of sadness in hearing a daughter say these words. The last time she saw her mother was in 1990.

When Cait settled in Dublin, she says she had this romantic idea that her father would come over and fix her house and want to live here. “I think that’s part of growing up without a dad: you have these fairytale notions;’ she smiles, wistfully (when you talk to Cait O’Riordan, you can’t help but keep thinking that her smiles are somehow a regretful yearning for the things she lost — her childhood, her family, her father, Elvis Costello, a chance at a happy life).

“And he did come over and looked at the house, and said: ‘I can’t do this. You need professionals.’ I drove him around, but he wasn’t impressed with Ireland. The only thing that impressed him was that Grafton Street had been pedestrianised. And that was it. I just never saw him again.”

Her father died in 1998.

How did you feel when he died?

'Nothing. Nothing, no. God, now I’m hugely sad that I missed out on all these relationships, but at the time I thought: ‘So what?’ It’s awful. It sounds so cold now, but...
“I have this weird Pollyanna thing about all the negative stuff;’ she says, “It all feels very necessary and useful. I would never have learned anything. It works for me. It is helpful. It is a way of dealing with horrible things.”
“There is no big drama,” she says. “It’s just corrosive. You’re just eating yourself away from the inside out.”

The last time Cait had a drink was February 14, 2007. “Valentine’s Day ,yes.” she smiles, “but I am not the romantic type. I guess because I wasn’t raised to be romantic.”

From the outside, Cait’s 16-year relationship with singer-songwriter Elvis Costello appeared romantic. “I guess from the outside maybe.”

Legend has it that she and Elvis fell for each other while he was producing the Pogues’ 1985 masterwork Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, on which Cait sang the forlorn classic, I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day, and the Poguetry in Motion EP in 1986. (She later left the band completely to go on Elvis’s American tour with him. And she played Slim McMahon alongside the Pogues, Courtney Love, Joe Strummer, Dennis Hopper and Elvis, in Alex Cox’s 1987 spaghetti rock western Straight to Hell.) What drew her to Elvis was, she believes, that she “needed an excuse not to have to do anything. Not to have to try. You know — if you don’t try, you can’t fail. I just needed something I could hide behind.

“He’s not here, so I’m not going to talk about his motives. But I’m surprised anyone would have put up with the way I behaved for that long. That’s as much as I can say about it.”

Is that not Cait blaming herself for everything?

“Not blaming — taking responsibility, trying to be clear-eyed about it. To take the focus off someone who can’t speak for themselves here,” she says, meaning Elvis.

“You know Pat Henry [the fitness guru who runs the gym on Pembroke Street where Cait and I both go] don’t you? He has told me he knows couples right now where very plainly the man is punishing himself for being successful through his choice of woman. That really resonates with me. I think we can punish ourselves. We can use people to punish ourselves.”

Was that the need Elvis was fulfilling with you?

“You’d have to ask him.”

Is that what you felt?

“I hope it is not true, but it seems, just from my experience, that it might be true.”


Is that not a terrible thing to say about yourself: that someone would be with you for years to punish themselves?
“But I’ve done it. I have used people to punish myself. We let negative people in our lives for negative reasons.”

But doesn’t that merely reinforce your self-loathing?

She laughs. “Well, you are talking to a depressed alcoholic!” She roars with laughter. “So, yeah, I think there is an element of self-loathing in there.”

Last year, Cait started on a process to reinforce self-worth by making friends and making the effort to hold onto friendships, and also by connecting with her younger brother and his four children in Brighton.
“It is all working out very well,” she smiles. “I’m being optimistic.”

Perhaps it is an indication of the protective shell Cait has had to wrap herself in for survival since she moved out of home. When I asked her how she felt when Elvis married Canadian singer, Diana Krall. in 2003, the event appeared to be news to Cait.

“I just detached myself completelv,’ she says. (Her ex of 16 years was married at Elton John’s mansion in Surrey England, in a wedding attended by the likes of Paul McCartney). “When he left, that was the end of it. That was the end of contact. That was the end of my interest.”


Is that how you operate to protect yourself?

“Yes. Like with my family With the band. With ex-partners. Because I couldn’t deal with it in any useful way so I just didn’t deal with it at all.”

Fox News odiously described Cait in late 2002 as being “like Costello’s Yoko Ono, a Grim Reaper in person with seemingly no sense of humour. But then again, how muth could she take? Nearly every Costello album has some reference to the one-time love of his life, bombshell model/writer/rocker Bebe Buell. His current album, W7zen I Was Cruel, has a cover picture of two bumble bees. Get it? Bee Bee. You can’t keep doing stuff like that to a woman who doesn’t like to laugh.” But Cait O’Riordan does nothing but laugh.


I’ve never seen a woman laugh so loud when describing herself as “a depressed alcoholic” or say she was like Sarnantha in Say and the City for a few years in Dublin. “I spent a couple of years just like a real nightclub vampire.” she giggles.

“For 2004 and 2005, 1 was going out and just pulling 25-year-old rugby players. There must have been a reason. I was drunk and they were cute. My girlfriends thought it was fantastic. You know someone has to be Samantha in any gang of girls — and that was my role,” she laughs again, adding that she has relinquished that role because you have to be drunk to do that and, “I don’t drunk anymore. I’m 43 now and to think that a gorgeous, fit 25-year—old guy is going to have any interest in me — you have to he drunk to think that:’

That’s just the self-loathing part of your psyche beating you up.
“It’s self-confidence. I wasn’t raised to have self-confidence. That all needs working on.”

Fake it to make it, Cait.

“That’s exactly what they say to me in the hospital.” she says. adding, “One day at a time.”

She was diagnosed with depression in 2003. She was extremely ill. She had lost lots of weight and she wasn't sleeping. She went to a doctor in London and was sent to the Priory hospital immediately. After a week there, she was told by the psychiatrist that, from observing her and reading her notes, it was pretty clear to him that she had depression and had been suffering from it for a long time. Her therapy began in earnest then.

“It worked, yes, but looking back now it was very divided’ she says in hindsight, “because it was kind of a crisis situation in keeping me alive really - not starving to death or dying of lack of sleep. They didn’t deal with the drinking while I was in there. I had to go hack and do the drinking last year’.”

She adds that now that those two things — depression and alcohol addiction — have been dealt with, she thinks it is weird that she wasn’t upset when her dad died. “But the therapists say you can only deal with what you think yon can deal with.”
(Her Dad, she says. was very into Elvis and Johnny Cash and country music. “He always claimed he was the first Teddy Boy in Dublin.” Her mother. who was from outside Edinburgh, barely registers in her memories, other than bad ones. Despite repeated requests, I can’t get her mother’s name out of Cait.)

Cait has been through a lot and has emerged, bloodied and far from unscathed, but wiser, on the other side. Like a lot of people who have been through hell and survived, she is slow to take credit for her bravery and her struggle.

“1 have had massive help,” she says. “I don’t know how I would have managed if I didn’t have money.

“I don’t think anyone can do it on their own. I couldn’t have done it on my own. If I didn’t have the money.I wouldn’t have had the really good doctor.

“I went to see a doctor in Ireland when I was very ill and not sleeping. He prescribed sleeping pills. I thought that was veiy stupid. I went back to my doctor in London, who had been seeing me since 1 was a teenager. He immediately went: ‘Oh my God,’ and said: ‘You need to go to hospital.’ Whereas a doctor in Ireland gave me sleeping pills.

“In London. it was a psychiatric hospital. I went in as an inmate and you stay there until they think you are safe to leave. I did three months as an in-patient and then another as an out-patient.’

The first thing you notice about Cait after her height (five-foot 10 inches — “both my parents were giants”) is that she is always smiling. “Smile and stand tall.” she says, “it’s better than Prozac.”

Her three desert island discs are Elbow’s Fugitive Motel (“makes beauty out of the loneliness and the dislocation of the road”), the Pogues’ Rainy Night in So/ia (“Shane’s poetry at its most heartfelt, direct and beautiful”) and Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World (“makes grey days bright”). She wants Viennese lyric baritone Wolfgang Holzmair to sing An Die Musik by Schubert at her funeral.

“It’s all arranged,” she claims, before adding with a smile, “if Wolfie can’t make it, I’d like Toni Waits singing You’re Innocent When You Dream.”

And are you innocent when you dream?
“Sure, aren’t we all?’

Have you ever had sex to one of your records?
“Not that I can remember.”

Were you ever in love?
“No. . . not yet.”

Not even with Elvis Costello? Did you fall in love with Elvis Costello and wake up with Declan MacManus (Elvis’s real name)? “No, it was nothing like that. I was very young. I needed no one had ever loved me or been affectionate to me in my life and suddenly here’s someone being affectionate and kind and interested. And it was fantastic’.

What went wrong, then?
“You'll have to ask him. I didn’t leave him. He left me. I can’t help you on that one, Barry.”

The point is: Elvis was giving you everything you never had. Why didn't you accept and embrace the love, however alien to you, that he was giving to you, rather than withdraw from it?

“Obviously, I had no idea what to do with it.” she says. “I had no experience in retuning affection because I hadn’t been given affection. So it was just completely wasted. I didn’t know any of this until I went to therapy,” she laughs.

Elvis, on the other hand, she says, “will know’ why we didn’t work out because he ended it.”


In 1991. Cait wrote a song, Broken, for Elvis’s album Mighty Like a Rose. The poignant opening lines went:

If I am frightened then I can hide it
If I am crying, I’ll call it laughter
If I am haunted, I’ll call it my imaginary friend
If I am bleeding; I’ll call it my wine


Cait says the last time she saw Costello was at the end of 2002. She denies they got married, as was reported, on May 17, 1986. ‘You’re obsessed with Elvis. I got over it. I’m sure you could if you really tried.”

“We weren’t married.” she smiles wistfully. “It was a kind of Muslim ‘I divorce you’ kind of thing.” That made the split very easy, she says — no piece of paper with marriage on it and no children. “If someone tells you they don’t want to be with you any more, and if you are like me, you just say, ‘fine' and walk away, and you don’t look back.”


Keep walking, Caitlin O’Riordan. You’ll be all right.


Image

Image

Image

Image

Image
Last edited by johnfoyle on Fri May 02, 2008 4:18 pm, edited 2 times in total.
scielle
Posts: 672
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2004 4:14 pm
Location: Berkeley, CA; London, UK; Montreal QC; Toronto ON; New York

Million Dollar Baby

Post by scielle »

She took up boxing a while back, but gave up because she became concerned when it seemed to be damaging her knuckles.
For what it's worth - Diana's a boxer, too...

see this
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

From listserv -

It's funny, because I think the Elvis-related parts of that article
showed
her to be very sad and vulnerable. I mean, to sum up: 'he was only with
me
because he felt guilty about his own fame, and I treated him like shit,
and
I'm not actually all that lovable'? That's some seriously fucked-up
stuff,
right there. I wouldn't even know how to unravel that kind of
interpersonal
weirdness, if I were him. And it's not like he's exactly issues-free,
either.

Danielle, imagining some strange, emotional scenes in the
O'Riordan/MacManus
household in the 1990s


I responded -


I'm the world's worst when it comes to relationships so I'm reluctant to comment but, Danielle, you express exactly my main reaction to this piece.

It's good to see Cait is in good shape in many ways but her supposed mystification at why her relationship with Elvis ended shows she is either still in denial or still has a way to go in coming to terms with her demons. It would appear that Elvis' course of action was an extreme form of 'tough love'. In that it enabled Cait to, ultimately , reach her present state it has worked.

Her comment about her luck in having 'the money' to get treatment is especially telling in that , presumably, Elvis was the source of same. She is either deriving a direct form of ongoing income from him or benefiting from royalties from their co-compositions. For instance , she co-wrote The Judgement. Although that was originally for Solomon Burke and pre-dated the split it's release on TDM in '04 is two years after their last meeting. That album's poor sales may not have exactly created a ton of money but it says a lot about Elvis' generosity in ensuring she still had potential earnings from it.

All this extra information on their relationship clarifies a lot about Elvis' reluctance to comment on it ever since. In essence , it can be seen as the best way to deal with a tragic situation. On a personal level it explains completely his comment to me in Amsterdam in Sept. '06. Getting his autograph after the Metropole Orkest show I asked him when he would play Dublin again. His instantaneous, blurted out response - 'When Hell freezes over!'- is all the more understandable. That same day the news had come out that Ms Krall was expecting twins. Getting a reminder of the scene of a completely different relationship must have seemed especially ghastly.

However maybe now that the air has, to a certain extent , been cleared maybe things will change. My recent info. gathering on his '78 shows here was repeatedly accompanied by the comment from many people that they would love to see him in concert again.

Here's hoping!
User avatar
Otis Westinghouse
Posts: 8856
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 3:32 pm
Location: The theatre of dreams

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by Otis Westinghouse »

Blimey, never knew she had such a sad and weird family background. It does make Elvis' relationship with her seem more intriguing, but I'm not sure you can surmise much about it from this, it's so totally evasive.

She looks a lot like Chrissie Hynde on the mag cover. She looks attractive generally. If I was a fit and attractive 25-year old rugby player and she was sober, I'd give it a good shot. I'd describe her as being way more attractive than Diana, and that interview with her (I think the first one I've seen) makes me realise just how stupendously unattractive she seems all round. Her way of talking is as annoying as her face, and then she launches into that utterly dull, predictable version of 'They Can't Take That Away...'. Makes you wonder what on earth Elvis could have seen in her, but there's no accounting for taste. Elvis doesn't seem to have lost his edge in The Word interview, but his dreary wife and his schmoozing with Elton all indicate the world of a man who's lost his way. Cait, on the other hand, reveals herself to be a woman of exquisite taste: 'Her three desert island discs are Elbow’s Fugitive Motel (“makes beauty out of the loneliness and the dislocation of the road”)...'
There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more
MOJO
Posts: 1021
Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2006 3:05 pm

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by MOJO »

Harsh, bro... As a woman, I've assessed that both are pretty cool, As for passing judgement on who, what, now - WHATEVER, and wait, what are we talking about????? Oh, right... [crazy interlude] ... Obama 2008!
User avatar
Otis Westinghouse
Posts: 8856
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 3:32 pm
Location: The theatre of dreams

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by Otis Westinghouse »

Diana Krall 'pretty cool'? Chacun a son gout, as they say.
There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more
MOJO
Posts: 1021
Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2006 3:05 pm

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by MOJO »

Who says that?... and what the heck was I saying? ...Geez, I need to layoff the sauce! Obviously, I've been overloaded with political campaign messages... Diana seems OK by me. Maybe I'm not "cool" enough...
User avatar
Otis Westinghouse
Posts: 8856
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 3:32 pm
Location: The theatre of dreams

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by Otis Westinghouse »

The French! Glad you question what you were saying, I didn't dare!
There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

This interview from 20 years ago is a interesting comparison with the latest one -
(scanned from ECIS 38 , April 1988)

Image

Residents in the Dalkey area may soon witness a most curious new couple in their neighbourhood. The husband is a rather dour looking creature wearing priest's cast-offs and bulbous black spectacles, while the young wife, tall, bony and angular strides close to him in Oxfam elegance and Tinker’s reserve.

The pair are Declan MacManus (better known , perhaps, as Elvis Costello) and Cait O'Riordan, once a member of the raucous Pogues, now reluctant film actor and budding songwriter. Dec and Ciat are leaving London for Dublin in search of a quiet life which they will undoubtedly find , since pop personalities are far thicker on the Liffey shores than garrulous groupies or Sun writers.

Besides, the two aren’t scandal fodder. They don’t swallow much that’s stronger than the Complete Oxford dictionary, and the only embarrassing thing they’re known for is kissing in public thoroughfares.

Dec, of course, has already established a prickly platform for himself as the erudite king of post-Holly think music that you either love or can’t understand at all, at all.

But even as a bopping member of the boisterous Kenmare-vintage Pogues, Cait has ducked publicity at every turn and admits she’s only talking so me cause it’s in her film contract. It isn’t snootiness, she’s just fundamentally shy, and in the Pogues days used to try to take a chip on the shoulder that she thought suited the punk image. It was insincere, she admits.

At 23, her professional experience has been brief — a gender-bender twisting version of “I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Everyday” in the Pogues, a smokey jazz sIngle called “Tommy’s Blue Valentine” which seems to have ended up in a dusty stack in St. Jude’s basement, and a bit role in Alex Coy’s self-destructing turkey “Straight To Hell”, which nearly put her of acting forever.

Two Dubliners, Joe Lee and Frank Deasy, ar eto be thanked that it didn’t, They specifically courted Cait for her role as a junkie’s sister in their first feature length film, “Courier” As the female lead, it meant that London born Cait could spend three uninterrupted months in Dublin. She couldn’t wait to tell her Dad.

Cait belongs to that increasingly high-profile London subculture of second generation ravers that have rocketed the Pogues and caused the Camden Town Celtic Revival: immigrant romance with a jagged edge.

But Cait, daughter of an electrician from Lahinch and a Scottish mother with Travelling blood, has no lingering loudness for her London Irish culture. “It’s not that I have a bad feeling about London,” she explains in a soft, high, and reticent voice. “I have no feeling for London at all, it’s not roy home. Even when I was in the Pogues I told myself that when it was all over, I’d come hack and live in Ireland. I want my kids to grow up somewhere beautiful.”

Camden Town is not beautiful, and even less in the area near Heathrow Airport where Cait was raised.

Her first job was as an Au Pair to a dog named Rupert in the gentrifying borough of Camden, where she first squandered her dole money on pints and met Pogues leading light, Shane MacGowan.

Within the year she'd moved to an Irish hostel in Kilburn, sold her record collection to accompany a busload of Troops-Outers on a demonstration tour of Derry and Belfast, and been drafted into the Pogues with a £5 nylon string bass guitar. Cait believes she was chosen by Shane because of her Irish connections rather than her musical ability.

She realized that Shane had a vision to make Pogue Mahone culturally specific.

But her upbringing wasn’t conventionally materialistic. ‘I vaguely remember my Dad saying something bout being a Communist and not believing in God.” she recalls.

‘The thing that all of us in the family credit him for is not bringing us up Catholic. I think we avoided a lot of rubbish that way.”

As the Pogues began to gig regularly around London, Cait felt it was time she had a look at the Republic, and a curiously plural view she received when she arrived.

Her first stop was the pre-Westbury McDaid’s, hungry, and with two quid to last for the week. Here she was taken under the wing of a friendly junkie who kept her in drink and cigarettes and let her stay in his flat.

"I watched him injecting himself In the kitchen and I helped him out by dividing up this white powder into little packets,” she recalls.

Her innocence amazes her even now. "I knew it was a drug, but all I knew about heroin was from Velvet Underground records. I remember him turning to me with this needle us his arm and saying. “I really wish you took this, because I’d like to give you something, and it’s all I have.”

Mercifully, Cait declined.

The next day she hitched to Clare and watched the red sun set over the Cliffs of Moher, listened to sessions in local pubs, an altogether obverse view of her night in Dublin.

But it wasn’t her last brush with drugs. By the time the Pogues made a splash in the States and Cait was already engaged to MacManus, she pulled a notorious stunt in New York by suddenly doing a bunk on the band and returning to Declan in London. “True Love” snickered the press. But the truth is not so romantic.


“When we arrived in New York the press office got us gold cards for the Limelight Club,” she explains. “it meant we could go in when and with whom we wanted and drink for free all night in the VIP lounge.”

There the cocaine flowed. “It makes you feel great —for a while,” says Call. “I found I could keep drinking for twelve hours straight and still stay conscious. Then dawn would come, they’d chuck us out of the club, and I’d be out on the street, wide awake and wired.”

For three days Cait neither ate nor slept — after which her thin body completely packed up. “It wasn’t exactly a mental breakdown,” she explains, “I was just completely exhausted.”

“Apparently I made a few hysterical phone calls to Dec and said I wanted to come home. When I got back I slept for two days straight. it was really horrible, but I suppose it was the best bloody cure I could have had. I’ve stuck to the beer ever since.”

She married Declan on the Saturday afternoon of Self-Aid, between their respective gigs and practice sessions.

They just wandered down to Weir’s, bought a couple of rings , went to Stephen’s Green and committed themselves for life in front of a few paddling ducks and curious onlookers. “Dec’s a very romantic fella,” says Call shyly. “It was a spiritual wedding — Dec’s been married before so we didn’t get married in church — and a registry office would have been too cold. It was a beautiful May day - the best of my life."



Cait parted with the Pogues the following autumn without the slightest regret, “It was fun, but it was like being on a football team,” she explains. “I joined when I was seventeen and I’ve changed a lot in those years. I don’t want to be one of the lads anymore — I want to be me, and I’m a woman. I want a nice house, kids, and to be able to read in bed.”

And has her experience with drink and drugs helped her to relate to the theme of the Courier? Most emphatic ally. “if there’s a message in the film it’s that if you take junk, you’ll die” she insists.

“And I feel really sad when I’m out with the Pogues now and I see Shane spread out drunk, a couple of girls crawling on him, and people walking by laughing, no one helping him to bed. As a band I think they really need to learn what friendship entails, but I still think they’re the best baud, on earth,. and watching “Fairy Tale of New York” climb the charts was a mystical experience for me.”

Seven children, she wants, and most of them girls.

She’s soft, is Cait, worried about the state of the world, the plight of the poor.

Her current publishing deal awards her a princely £125 a week and she says if she had any more than that, she’d give it away. “I’ll never understand how people can have money and not immediately start thinking about those who don’t,” says Cait.

But Cait has packed in a lot of living for one so young, and being hungry on the dole is still sharp and clear in her memory.May it never falter.

Image
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

Pretty ecstatic review of Cait 'n co. here -

http://www.hflive.co.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3420

I hope to get along to this Wednesday's show .
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

Cait 'n co. , Prenup, did an engaging enough show in the tiny Crawdaddy venue in Dublin tonight. Performing only material from the album , they did an efficient c.80 minute set. With an audience of about 100 they succeeded in enlivening the rather commonplace elements of the guitar heavy studio recording , mostly as a result of lead singer Fiachna O Braonain's effervescence. Cait looked great ( dark blouse with cerise vertical lines , dark jeans and -maybe- those pink boots from the Hot Press feature) , her confident bass playing being a solid filler in the sound picture. Drummer Dave Clarke seemed to be out of sync a few times , but maybe that's a percussion element that is part of some kind of organic folk thingy that , like a lot of modern music, has past me by.

The song's messages are more striking in the concert format. It also serves to reinforce what a 'tough sell' the group/album is. The very name refers to a aspect of a failed relationship. Similarly , the lyrics dwell on the same theme. For all the performers smiles and artistry we are being served up a lot of implied glumness. While it is better than a lot of happy clappy nonsense about moon/June etc it's still not something to wallow in. Maybe it's just not bleak enough .

I didn't hang around afterwards 'cos I was/am tired....and really should be gone to bed by now!
User avatar
miss buenos aires
Posts: 2055
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 7:15 am
Location: jcnj
Contact:

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by miss buenos aires »

What a depressing article from the Independent; the writer seemed like kind of an asshole, prodding her to talk about a lot of things that were clearly extremely painful.
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

Cait 'n co. are on the promo trail again-

http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fu ... =136826303

PRENUP

17 Jul 2008, 20:00
23, Leeson St, Dublin, Dublin 2

PreNup play Dublin’s Sugar Club for the first time as part of the Oxjam concert series.


A new review-



http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/det ... 2008/7213/

LA CityBeat

July 3 '08

Prenup Hell to Pay (Yep Roc)

The first time I listened to Hell to Pay (last week) by the cynically named Prenup, I thought it sounded like college – 1992 or so, when “Life Is a Highway” and “Girlfriend” were all over my FM dial, and there is nothing not to like about that. But I was moving, and the movers stole my iPod, and most of my CDs are gone from when I loaned them to my dad in the nursing home that jacked them all, and here was this Prenup CD, right there in my suitcase fresh from abroad, and I listened for four days as I unpacked a disgraceful amount of shit for me and my son and the cozy comforts of Prenup soaked into my bones. It helped that I may have made out the week before with singer Fiachna O’Braonain (ex–Hothouse Flowers) in London after I’d met him through mutual friends in Paris, and if I read that sentence I’d want to punch me too. On the seventh listen, Hell to Pay turned into a time machine; all of a sudden, it wasn’t college anymore; it was 1987, and I was a high school freshman, hearing in the sexy whispery bass vocals “Somewhere Down the Crazy River”-era Robbie Robertson. Then I was minus-three, hearing a little bit of Jerry Garcia, circa Workingman’s Dead, and then Levon Helm singing “Cripple Creek” channeled from even further into my pre-nativity. I’ve now listened to Hell to Pay one million times and expect to eventually be transported back to the Big Bang. This is not masterful songwriting – it repeats itself a lot – but it is sad and sexy and heartfelt and soul and blues and rock, and hotshot lyrics are for weenies. All you need is a good yowl, a whisper, some purty guitar, and a fine memory.

–Rebecca Schoenkopf


Prenup aren't mentioned on the Yep Roc site
http://www.yeproc.com/
martinfoyle
Posts: 2502
Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 5:24 pm
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Contact:

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by martinfoyle »

Cáit was a judge at the Ranelagh Arts Festival Battle Of the Bands competition this afternoon

Image

Our spy, a brother of one of the members of the competing bands, (who, although they didn't win, were Cáits favourite) says she appeared to enjoy herself. Somehow I think Simon Cowell can rest easy.

http://www.ranelagharts.org/index.php
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuse ... =435925065

Thursday, September 25, 2008

PRENUP Irish tour Nov/Dec 2008

PRENUP are delighted to announce their forthcoming Irish tour.

The dates are as follows:

Friday 7th Nov: Sligo - The Clarence
Saturday 8th Nov: Waterford - Electric Ave
Sunday 9th: Dublin - Crawdaddy
Friday 21st Nov: Dublin - Crawdaddy
Saturday 22nd: Cork - Cyprus Ave
Friday 5th Dec: Dublin - Crawdaddy
Saturday 6th Dec: Limerick - Dolans (Upstairs)

We’d love to see you there!
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

Looks who's on the National University of Ireland Foundation Level Certificates site -


http://www.ucd.ie/adulted/access/

Image
Student Cait O'Riordan receives her certificate
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

Hot Press , Nov. 5 '08

Image

Image

WHERE ARE YOU NOW AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
I'm in my kitchen at home putting on my socks.

FIRST RECORD TO SEND A SHIVER UP YOUR SPINE?
‘T-R-O-U-B-L-E’ by Elvis Presley.

FIRST GIG YOU ATTENDED?
The Purple Hearts in 1979 at Feltham Youth Club when I was 14.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Hearts_(UK_band)

FIRST GIG YOU PLAYED?
When I was 16 I was with The Instant Automatons as part of the Notting Hill Yob Project which was run by Grant Showbiz, the guy who managed The Fall.

http://www.instant-automatons.com/ia.asp

http://hyped2death.com/catalog/product_ ... ucts_id=88

http://www.zavvi.co.uk/productdetails.jsf?code=671631
(extract)
Of particular interest to Automatons obsessives is an early version of "John's Vacuum Cleaner" (subsequently re-recorded for Peter Paints His Fence). Joined on vocals by Cait O'Riordan, Lancaster struggles manfully through this tale of malfunctioning appliances, love, betrayal and suicide, with hilariously bad guitar accompaniment and a patently absurd metronomic drum machine bolstering the track's morbid charm.

LAST RECORD YOU EITHER BOUGHT, BLAGGED OR DOWNLOADED?

I’ve just bought Blood On The Tracks by Bob Dylan and the Irish Tour album by Rory Gallagher for €15 in the Jervis Centre. I have a radio show (news to me - I'll check it out -J.F.) called Written In My Soul taken from a line from ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ on that Dylan album.



MOST MEMORABLE GIG YOU’VE PLAYED?
With The Pogues at The Barrowlands in Glasgow around 1985 (Dec. 14 '85). The roof was sweating that night.

FAVOURITE SPINAL TAP MOMENT?
Because I’m completely useless at any kind of technology, to me. all life is Spinal Tap.

MOST EMBARRASSING THING YOU’VE DONE WHILE DRUNK?
I don’t remember. It’s terrible! You’d better ask my sponsor.

WHO’D BE IN YOUR DREAM BAND?
It’d basically be me with Led Zeppelin. I’d play bass and let John Paul Jones go on keyboards. I wouldn’t sing, not with Robert Plant in the band.

MOST SHAGGABLE ROCK STAR?
I don’t really find rock stars fanciable. I’m more into rugby players.

WHAT SHITJOBS HAVE YOU HAD IN THE PAST?
None. I’ve been in bands since I was a teenager.

WHAT SONG WOULD YOU LIKE TO HAVE PLAYED AT YOUR FUNERAL?
An Die Musik by Franz Schubert
( presumably "An die Musik", op. 88 No. 4, D. 547 (1817))

Prenup play The Clarence, Sligo (November 7); Electric Avenue, Waterford (8); Crawdaddy, Dublin (November 9 & 21); and Cyprus Avenue, Cork (22)
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

I have a radio show (news to me - I'll check it out -J.F.) called Written In My Soul taken from a line from ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ on that Dylan album.
Prenup's PR person tells me Cait's show is for the radio station at UCD , Dublin , the college where Cait was /is a student.
The show is on Friday evenings. The station -

http://www.belfieldfm.ie/

Belfield FM is University College Dublin's Full Time Online Radio Station. Belfield FM is entirely managed and staffed by student volunteers. Our aim is to have the highest standard of quality broadcasting. We produce a wide range of quality programming, running live from 8am until 11pm Monday to Friday. Including News, Drama, Debate, Comedy, and a Wide Range of Music.

can be heard online. They haven't answered a query I sent asking when exactly Cait is on the air.
User avatar
migdd
Posts: 3009
Joined: Sun Jun 22, 2003 6:16 pm
Location: Rolling in Clover, SC

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by migdd »

johnfoyle wrote:
MOST SHAGGABLE ROCK STAR?
I don’t really find rock stars fanciable. I’m more into rugby players.

Ouch. . .thems sounds a little bit like sour grapes.
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

I spoke, this morning, to Danny Murray at the station . Cait has been moved to 8 on Monday evening for a one hour,live show. That's 12 noon in Los Angleles, 3PM in New York , 5PM Tuesday Nov.4 in Japan and ........figure the rest out yourself!

http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc

Danny tells me they are only online at the moment ; they hope to have a broadcast license in the New Year.
johnfoyle
Posts: 14852
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 4:37 pm
Location: Dublin , Ireland

Re: Cait O'Riordan

Post by johnfoyle »

Cait' headphones 'n all can be seen on a webcam.when you click to listen (now- 8.05PM, Mon.Nov.3'08) -

http://www.belfieldfm.ie/


This doesn't seem to be her first show - very confident, casual etc.

She has a guest , The Mighty Stef-

http://www.myspace.com/themightystefband
Post Reply