Win Nick’s Free Tix

at

Calling all Kate Bush fans.

The mother of all tribute bands is coming to town.

Cloudbusting: The Music of Kate Bush has featured some of the great artist’s original collaborators and comes highly recommended by Ireland’s foremost Kate Bush expert Sean Twomey who can be heard here interviewing lead singer Mandy Watson on a podcast for his authoritive fan website .

I have 2 FREE tickets to see Cloudbusting in the Button Factory, Dublin 2, on Thursday September 19.

In light of Kate being inspired by Emily Brontë and James Joyce, what is your favourite song which references a literary figure?

The winner will be chosen by my Siamese twin.

Lines MUST close at 2.45pm EXTENDED until 5.15pm MIDNIGHT!

Nick says: Good luck!

Cloudbusting: The Music of Kate Bush (The Button Factory)

Thanks to Michael Mayell and Sean Twomey.

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51 thoughts on “Win Nick’s Free Tix

  1. jonathan shortall

    Definitely Ramble On by Led Zepplin! Perfect fusion of Tolkien and the finest rock known to Man or Númenor.

  2. Spaghetti Hoop

    Oh yes, loads of LOTR-inspired songs out there (brilliantly done by Led Zeppelin), plus Homer’s Odyssey – inspired toons.
    A great one is Sex Crime by the Eurythmics – based on George Orwell’s 1984 and part of the film’s soundtrack.

    1. Brother Barnabas

      And bowie’s 1984:

      “they’ll split your pretty cranium and fill it full of air, and tell that your eighty. but, brother, you won’t care, beware the savage jaw of 1984”

  3. Clampers Outside

    The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a favourite Iron Maiden track, of the same name, of mine when I was a teen :)

    Do long poems count :)

    1. Clampers Outside

      ….I wouldn’t be able to make this event, so good luck to whomever wins! …should be a good one :)

  4. Bertie Blenkinsop

    As she reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circumstance
    Her heart, heart’s like crazy paving
    Upside down and back to front
    She says ooh, it’s so hard to love
    When love was your great disappointment

    Lloyd Cole – Rattlesnakes

    1. scottser

      ha! he’s such a name dropper is lloyd cole.
      four flights:
      You can drive them back to town in a beat-up grace kelly car
      Looking like a friend of truman capote, looking exactly like you are

  5. Harry

    Keeping the context in the Kate Bush area how about the late great Clifford T Ward and his song Home Thoughts from Abroad?… “‘I’ve been reading Browning, Keats and William Wordsworth” from the album “Gaye and other stories”. A great song and a great album.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akKVtGUsbbY

  6. B9Com From No

    So many choices with Lou Reed
    Here’s

    Sword of Damocles from Magic and Loss

    That mix of morphine and dexedrine, we use it on the street
    It kills the pain and keeps you up, your very soul to keep
    But this guessing game has its own rules, the good don’t always win
    And might makes right
    The Sword of Damocles is hanging above your headA

    Some other world that we don’t know about
    I know you hate that mystic shit
    It’s just another way of seeing
    The Sword of Damocles above your head

  7. B9Com From No

    Another Lou Reed one
    From Dirty Boulevard …

    And back at the Wilshire, Pedro sits there dreaming
    He’s found a book on Magic in a garbage can
    He looks at the pictures
    And stares up at the cracked ceiling
    “At the count of 3,” he says,
    “I hope I can disappear.”

  8. Tarfton Clax

    I was thinking of the live album by ,Motorhead, “What’s wordsworth” which ends with an exhortation from Lemmy to “Read plenty of Wordsworth”.

  9. Brother Barnabas

    in another incarnation, i once interviewed robert smith and asked him about this – specifically Killing An Arab (a pretty much straight retelling of albert camus’ the outsider). [aside: the cure were touring again and were getting a lot of grief about it in, especially, america – and he was bothered about right-wing nuts deliberately misinterpreting the song, taking as an anthem calling for some kind of reverse-jihad]. he said that this was one of his main techniques when writing a song – make a song out of a poem or a novel (or another song). my own favourite cure song – how beautiful you are – is a pretty much direct retelling of baudelaire’s ‘les yeux des pauvres’. he hardly even changed the words, but I’d never noticed up to then. there are a few other cure songs bases on the gormenghast.

  10. scottser

    the winner has to be ‘ain’t half been some clever bastards’ by the late ian dury. you can take your fukn pick of literary namedrops here:

    Noel Coward was a charmer.
    As a writer he was brahma.
    Velvet jackets and pyjamas,
    “The Gay Divorcee” and other dramas.
    There ain’t half been some clever bastards
    (Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
    There ain’t half been some clever bas-tards.
    Van Gogh did some eyeball pleasers.
    He must have been a pencil squeezer.
    He didn’t do the Mona Lisa,
    That was an Italian geezer.
    There ain’t half been some clever bastards
    (Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
    There ain’t half been some clever bas-tards.
    Einstein can’t be classed as witless.
    He claimed atoms were the littlest.
    When you did a bit of splitting-em-ness
    Frighten everybody shitless
    There ain’t half been some clever bastards.
    Probably got help from their mum
    (who had help from her mum).
    There ain’t half been some clever bastards.
    Now that we’ve had some,
    Let’s hope that there’s lots more to come.
    There ain’t half been some clever bastards
    (Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
    There ain’t half been some clever bas-tards.
    Okey-dokey!
    Oh!
    Segovia.
    Da-laa la-laa da-daa da-lee
    De dump di dump de dump-dump-diddle li-lee.
    There ain’t half been some clever bastards
    (Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
    There ain’t half been some clever bastards
    (Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
    There ain’t half been some clever bastards
    (Lucky bleeders, lucky bleeders)
    There ain’t half been some clever……..
    …………………………….bastards.

    1. B9Com From No

      now that is a good entry …

      And in “hit me with your rhythm stick”

      In the dock of Tiger Bay
      On the road to Mandalay
      From Bombay to Santa Fe
      Over hills and far away

  11. fez

    Cemetry gates by the Smiths.
    Keats and Yeats are on your side, while Wilde is on mine.

    Also has a quotation from Shakespeare’s Richard III.

    I also love the intentional misspelling as a nod to the Dublin pronunciation of cemetery

  12. Spaghetti Hoop

    The Cranberries also recorded ‘Yeats’ which was very ethereal at the time.

    Because of the previous Behan post, I’m reminded of Phil Chevron’s fantastic ‘Thousands are Sailing’ (and which he sings better than MacGowan imo);

    ‘And in Brendan Behan’s footsteps
    I danced up and down the street’

    1. Brother Barnabas

      And they did Yeats Grave on the Now and in Time to Be album – that had some great stuff on it, especially the Stolen Child by the Waterboys and an Irish Airmen Foresees his Death by MacGowan

      1. Papi

        Mr MacGowan also,

        “Last night as I slept
        I dreamt I met with Behan
        I shook him by the hand and we passed the time of day..”

  13. Mart

    Romeo and Juliet by one of the finest bands the world has ever seen. What I love is even thirty odd years on, Mark Knopfler still keeps it fresh and plays it slightly differently every time he performs it. The Radio 2 piano room version on Youtube is particularly good.

        1. B9Com From No

          Funny I heard it on the radio the other day. And was just wondering how in fupp did he do that

          It’s a great song –
          Musically – But he murders it. He’s a terrible singer

  14. Brother Barnabas

    libertines’ gunga din:

    “you’ve been beaten and flayed, probably betrayed, you’re a better man than i”

    from kipling’s

    “though I’ve belted you and flayed you, by the livin’ gawd that made you, you’re a better man than i am, gunga din”

  15. Otis Blue

    Dexys Midnight Runnners incendiary Dance Stance (aka Burn it Down) skewers British ignorance beautifully. As apt now as it was when released nearly 40 years ago.

    “Never heard about Oscar Wilde
    Don’t know about Brendan Behan
    Know anything about Sean O’Casey
    Or care about George Bernard Shaw
    Or Samuel Beckett
    Won’t talk about Eugene O’Neill
    He won’t talk about Edna O’Brien
    Or know anything about Lawrence Stern…”

  16. Nibor

    Surely these cheery lines by upstart haircuts-with-guitars Garfunkel & Simon merit consideration?…

    “And you read your Emily Dickinson
    And I my Robert Frost
    And we note our place with bookmarkers
    That measure what we’ve lost
    Like a poem poorly written
    We are verses out of rhythm
    Couplets out of rhyme
    In syncopated time
    And the dangling conversation
    And the superficial sighs
    Are the borders of our lives”

    The Dangling Conversation, 1966

    1. Tarfton Clax

      Endless Art, “A House”

      All art is quite useless according to Oscar Wilde
      Turner 1775 to 1851
      Toulouse-Lautrec 1864 to 1901
      Andy Warhol 1928 to 1987 RIP
      Ernest Hemingway 1899 to 1961
      George Orwell, Jimi Hendrix, William Butler Yates, Jack B. Yeats
      Richard Redgrave 1804 to 1888
      Henry Moore 1896 to 1986
      Henry Miller, Sid Vicious only 21
      Brian Jones
      Otis Redding 1941 to 1967 RIP
      All dead, yet still alive
      In endless time, endless art
      Masters of their arts
      Claude Monet 1840 to 1926
      Beethoven, Bach, Brahms
      Elvis Presley 1935 to ’77
      Man Ray, Johnny Ray
      John Donne 1573 to 1631
      Alfred Lord Tennyson 1809 to ’92
      Degeneration art, Joan Miro, RIP

      1. Cian

        Divine Comedy’s The Book Lovers has a similar bent:
        He lists off authors names, and after each they say a few words:

        James Joyce: Hello there!
        Virginia Woolf: I’m losing my mind!
        Marcel Proust: Je me’en souviens plus
        F Scott Fitzgerald: baa bababa baa
        Ernest Hemingway: I forgot the…
        Hermann Hesse: Oh es ist alle so häßlich
        Evelyn Waugh: Whoooaarr!

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPzS91gGzLM

  17. Otis Blue

    Notable mention for Nirvana and Pennyroyal Tea

    “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld
    So I can sigh eternally…”

  18. Cool_Hand_Lucan

    Tender by Blur.

    The song is a gorgeous ode to a relationship failing but the title and lyric “tender is the night” is a reference to the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Keats. 2 literary references for the price of 1!

  19. Otis Blue

    “I wish I had a Sylvia Plath
    Busted tooth and a smile
    And cigarette ashes in her drink
    The kind that goes out and then sleeps for a week
    The kind that goes out on her own
    To give me a reason, for well, I dunno…”

    Sylvia Plath by the wayward Ryan Adams

  20. millie vanilly strikes again

    I’ve always had a real love for Mark Knopfler’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s one I like to listen to with a nice glass of wine as I cook dinner in the evening.

  21. axelf

    the Police with dont stand so close to me (i prefer the 86 version)

    “It’s no use
    He sees her
    He starts to shake he starts to cough
    Just like the old man in
    That famous book by Nabakov”

    brilliant by gordon

    1. Otis Blue

      Similarly…

      The House that Jack Kerouac Built by the Go-Betweens. Bonus points for the lines:

      “Shake off your despondency, and your country girl act.
      You are reading me poetry, that’s Irish, and so black.”

  22. Otis Blue

    Van Morrison’s Rave on John Donne namechecks the eponymous poet as well as Walt Whitman, Omar Khayyam, Khalil Ghibran and Mr Yeats before its fitting last line:

    ‘Rave on words on printed page’

  23. f_lawless

    “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane is the one that comes to mind
    An ode to the psychedelic experience and 60s counter-culture, every line references “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carol

    One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small
    And the ones that mother gives you, don’t do anything at all
    Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall..

    ..Remember what the dormouse said
    Feed your head, feed your head

  24. Peter Johnson

    Got to be Ghetto Defendant by The Clash. vocals by Joe Strummer & Alan Ginsberg. deals with Jean Arthur Rimbaud & the Paris Commune. Classic Clash Reggae vibe

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