Friday 18th May
The Dublin Castle Get Cheap Tickets Here
Starsha Lee/The Blue Carpet Band/Kajiki Volt/GYB
+ DJs We Got Killers
Starsha Lee return to the DC this weekend, which is always a reason to celebrate and get your head suitably realigned ready for the fray. Ex Daisy Chainsaw/Queen Adrena/Dogbones main player Crispin gathers forth his remarkable cheekbones and even more remarkable paint stripper via Ron Asheton guitar sound with mad for it artnik vocalist Sophia Martins upfront disrobing, disclaiming, dissenting from the moral strictures. All good lean fun, and no flab in this band, everybody hits it to the max. Essential.
The Blue Carpet Band are a total joy for anyone who digs a bit of Punk n roll, or rather punk rock and roll- a bit of Godfathers, some Hot Rods, Rezillos, early Damned- and a bit of that Jim Jones schtick.. And they deffo like a 12 Bar ramalama punked to fuck. Nice to see some youthful punkers, no wonder these guys are turning heads wherever they go, heads old and young, respeck.
Kajiki Volt-Post punk through a surf guitar/garage punk lens, Kajiki sound freaky and are very well turned out with it. Think a more frenetic Gun Club via Magazine, with shades of Gallon Drunk and the sorely missed Penthouse too. Great tunes interesting arrangements, played with cool and conviction. Fab. Openers GYB perform Classic Punk rock and then some, fierce and fast in a GBH cum Discharge manner. As fierce, fast and furious a start to tonight’s high octane affair as you could hope for, get in early and enjoy the lot. Sat late and have We Got Killers spin you up some tasty punk, reggae, soul, exotica and 50s/60s sass. Only killer tunes, no dead ends til them wee wee hours.
Wed 6th June
The Dublin Castle Rock And Roll Book Club
D J Taylor’Rock And Roll Is Life’ Get Cheap Tickets Here
‘The True Story Of The Helium Kids By One Who Was There: A Novel’
‘Rock and Roll is Life’ is the new novel from the country’s leading man of letters, D. J. Taylor. Click on the fabbo image above to hear the latest Bugbear Soho Radio show including special guest DJ Taylor, not to mention The Cockney Rejects’ Jeff Turner chatting beautifully about his new ‘Canning Town Beach’ project with The New Deal. Meanwhile on June 6th in the Dublin Castle DJ Taylor will be in conversation with writer and DC RNR Book Club hostess Julie Hamill as DJ Tony Bugbear provides the aural XTC…..[more]
You may remember the Helium Kids. Back in their late ’60s and early ’70s heyday they appeared on Top of the Tops on 27 separate occasions, released five Billboard-certified platinum albums, played sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden and were nearly, but not quite, as big as the Beatles and the Stones. Three decades later, in the big house on the outskirts of Norwich, Nick Du Pont is looking back on the rollercoaster years he spent as their publicist in a world of licensed excess and lurking tragedy. What follows is not only the story of a rock band at a formative time in musical history, when America was opening up to English music and huge amounts of money and self-gratification were there for the taking. For the tale is also Nick’s – the life and times of a war-baby born in a Norwich council house, the son of an absconding GI, whose career is a search for some of the advantages that his birth denied him. It is at once a worm’s eye of British pop music’s golden age and a bittersweet personal journey, with cameo appearances from everyone from Elvis and Her Majesty the Queen Mother to Andy Warhol.
‘Rock and Roll is Life’ is a vastly entertaining, picaresque and touching novel inspired by the excess and trajectories of the great ’60s and ’70s supergroups, and of the tales brought back from the front line by a very special breed of Englishmen who made it big in the States as the alchemists and enablers, as well as the old making way for the new in the era of the baby boomers. At its heart is one man’s adventure, and the poignancy of the special relationships that dominate his life. D.J. Taylor’s novels include English Settlement (1996), which won a Grinzane Cavour Prize, Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Kept: A Victorian Mystery(2006), a Publishers Weekly book of the year, and The Windsor Faction (2013), joint winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. He has also written several works of non-fiction, including Orwell: The Life, winner of the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography and, most recently, The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918 (2016). He lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore, and their three sons.