Thanks to Cathering Donovan who sent this comment in. I hadn’t known the song was being used. Very exciting. Now I just need a song on Gray’s Anatomy or Scrubs or something.

“I was watching an American film called ‘The Nines’ recently and almost yelped when I heard the strains of your version of ‘Sugartown’ in the background during a scene (I get overly-excited by such things). Whoever put the soundtrack together had excellent taste because Pink Martini also featured - it’s the first time I’ve heard either of you featured on a film and the latter was interesting in itself, too. I hope it brings you new fans. Looking forward to the new album and the upcoming tour (don’t forget to stop over in Cork!), and best of luck with any upcoming exams”

Catherine

Andy Lock sent this in to the guestbook, but I thought it should have front page status…Thanks Andy (and Colin). Apparently David Baddiel is a bit of a fan as well.

“There I was, reading ‘Murphy’s Revenge’, by Colin Bateman, and on Page 39 I came across the following paragraph:
‘When he was cleaned up and dressed he walked back into the lounge, took off the Springsteen and replaced it with an album by Juliet Turner. She was from his neck of the woods, and sounded like it. No mid-Atlantic accent for her. There was something very soothing about her voice, like she’d been badly hurt by someone but had crawled her way back to life and was happy now, but couldn’t help looking back. Whatever. It worked for him.’
Later in the book he puts the album on in his car”

A release date of June 6th has been set for the new album. Tour dates are being slotted in over the summer so please click on the calender for further details. More information will be given on the album and the first single on this site closer to the release date.

It’s half four in the morning and I can’t sleep. Two terms nearly over in second year and the course is making demands I hadn’t considered at the start. It has been the strangest day. A lot of our lectures recently have been on various speech disorders, dysarthria, dyspraxia, and this week, cerebral palsy. And the emphasis is on challenging ideas about disability, what in our society creates barriers so that people with disabilities can’t participate fully in life. We were watching some teaching dvds on very young children with cerebral palsy yesterday morning which were hard to watch. And then today the lectures were on AAC systems, augmentative and alternative communications systems.

And I can’t shake some nasty little thoughts. How fragile human beings are. How easily hurt. And how can I believe in human purpose and the indescribable value of each individual person when our afflictions seem so random, inexplicable and at times, so terrible? And how is that huge companies spend billions developing smaller and smaller mobile phones and games consoles and our tv screens get bigger and our i-pods can store thousands of songs that we don’t really listen to and all of this stuff gets cheaper and cheaper and more disposable, but an AAC system, which can make a huge difference to the quality of life of someone who has no speech and may spend most of their time in a wheelchair, costs twenty grand and is heavy and cumbersome and ten times bigger than a mobile phone? Not all talk is cheap.

So given that this was the way I was thinking today, it probably wasn’t the best night to go and see “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”. There is one point where the speech therapist becomes furious with Bauby. She asks him what he wants and he replies “death”. She berates him but I found myself thinking, “who could blame him?”. But there was another moment where someone tells Bauby to cling to what is human within him. What makes us human? All the anatomy and neuropsychology lectures are confusing me. Are we simply wired a certain way, left hemisphere, right hemisphere, corpus callosum? Evolved creatures, vunerable to the slightest electrical fault? That is true in one sense, but I am choosing to believe there is also something else within us and outside us. I don’t know what that is but the alternative is too bleak to contemplate. “Believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change”.

This is not the happiest or lightest of posts. But you can’t run away from the hard stuff.

It appears to be ticking along quite nicely, despite a horrible flu bug going around. I think it will be ready for the release date in June. It has a name, which i choose not to reveal at the moment, to build a slight frisson of anticipation, but there are three words in the title. There are no covers either. Thats about all I can say at the minute. Congratulations to Ham Sandwich to winning their Meteor Music prize last night.

Crawdaddy presents Julie Feeney and Juliet Turner - One Night Only

3rd Feb 08

Julie Feeney and Juliet Turner

Venue: Crawdaddy

Price: Tickets €23 (inc booking fee) available from Ticketmaster, Road Records, City Discs, Sound Cellar and usual outlets
www.ticketmaster.ie
Ticketmaster purchases subject to extra charges

Doors 8pm

I just received news about Christie’s death this morning and wanted to share a little bit about what he meant to me as a songwriter and a performer. I first heard Christie perform live in the Opera House in Belfast when I was sixteen. I had heard “If you were to fall in love with me” on the radio and was entranced by the melody and by his voice and that of his daughter Hermione. So I bought a ticket to the gig, caught the bus to Belfast and sat bewitched through the gig. It’s always hard to capture an atmosphere in words but it was something to do with the innocence and bravado of the songs, the self-deprecating humour, the way he closed the gap between audience and performer and brought you right into his world, building sites, emigration, working class London and grief and stars and love. It was a common-place world, yet completely magical and it left me with an sense of yearning, that I would love to do what Christie was doing that night, sending people home from a concert happy and uplifted in some way. I asked him to sign a t-shirt for me that night, “one day you’ll be doing this too”. He was shy and surrounded by people at the cassette stand.

Last year, David Hull asked me if I would like to do some gigs with Christie and I remember them as being some of the most fun gigs I have ever done. You can tell a man by the company he keeps and Christie had great people travelling with him. His manager Fran Cotton and sound engineer Martin Cregan helped make those gigs special and in a strange “full circle” way, I will always remember the gig we played together in the Opera House in Belfast as one of the most perfect ever. I was pacing with nervousness before I went on because it was sold out, but the sound was gorgeous, the audience were friendly and Christie had asked me to duet with him on “If you were to fall in love with me”. I left the venue that night in the same state I’d left it eighteen years after first seeing Christie in the Opera House, happy and lifted up.

Like his songs and his world, Christie Hennessy was an ordinary man who was also completely and bewitchingly magical. I feel extremely privileged to have shared music and time with him.

If any of you are people who have been listening to my music for a while and think your names are safely on the mailing list, could you make doubly sure by joining the list on this new site please? I sent out a mailing recently and lots of the addresses were no longer valid. And any new people, feel free to add your email addresses. I know you can sign the mailing list at the gigs but my P.A. usually forgets to leave it out for people and if you sign up BY CLICKING ON THE LINK “MAILING LIST” ABOVE, it saves my P.A. the trouble of typing them by hand.

(By P.A. I mean me).

The Guardian News and Media launched two digital archives today — one for The Guardian from 1821-1975, and one for The Observer from 1900-1975. While this is an extensive launch, it’s not complete — the rest of the archive will launch in early 2008 and will include the Guardian from 1821-2003 and the Observer from 1791-2003. You can access them at a 50% discount during November and then you can purchase time based passes.

I always loved those fascinating little sections in my local paper “The Tyrone Constitution” where they printed excerpts from the paper from 10, 25 and 50 years ago but the Guardian/Observer archives takes it to a new level. Katherine Whitehorn writes in today’s Guardian about the development of women’s pages.

“I was keen to see the groundbreaking women’s pages of Mary Stott, who transformed the face of women’s journalism. She was told in the 1950’s that she had to move to the women’s pages because, if you please, they needed her job of Deputy Sub editor to train up the next man to be chief. She was first heartbroken, and then belligerent and set out to change the whole women’s page concept. Women wouldn’t just concern themselves with clothes and cooking and such, but with everything women were interested in: personal relationships, education, medical matters, divorce - one forgets that such subjects, now found routinely in every paper’s feature pages, once didn’t figure in serious papers at all…
Mary Stott’s women’s pages became almost a political force, with the very name “Guardian woman” purred and spat at…and since we can call up the froth of indignation in the letters pages, we can see what these groundbreakers were up against.”

The archives from the year you were born is always a good year to begin.

I managed to scrape through my physiology re-sit and so find myself back at Trinity for my second year of Clinical Speech and Language Studies. I consider passing that physiology exam the greatest triumph of my life so far, surpassing winning the Meteor Music award and getting my drivers licence.

As part of our first year course, we had to do a ten day placement working in the community. One of my favourite authors, Henri Nouwen had written of his experiences with the L’Arche Community and I had wanted an opportunity to spend some time there. So I was delighted when they invited me to live in one of their community houses and be part of their lives for a short period at the end of the summer.

In looking back at my brief time with L’Arche Ireland, I found the term “intellectual disability” to be meaningless, the experience of living to be heightened in every way when it occurs in close contact with others and that truth, beauty, anger and pain appear in unexpected places. There was also a lot of laughter there. I want to thank everyone who made me so welcome in the community and for anyone wanting to experience L’Arche for themselves, click here