Some U2-type lads, a few years ago.
As The Heraldy Press was going to print, or at least, online, a week ago last Tuesday morning, nine bands, most of them fairly useless, had complained about U2 hogging all the headlines with their free album giveaway to anybody with an iPhone, iPad, iPod or iHairdryer. The Irish act’s latest album; ‘Songs of Innocence’, was given free earlier this month to the approximately 2.5billion owners of products beginning with a small ‘i’ (excluding but not exclusive to: ingrowing toenail removers, imitation mustache growers, illiteracy-conquering manuals etc).
A spokesperson for ‘Irish Artists Occasionally Opposed to Bono and The Lads’, Fernando O’Hagan, from Ballyjamesduff, County Cavan, who asked to remain anonymous, said; ‘Ah jayziz, sure that’s desperate carry-on’. The band’s 13th studio album is the first which they’ve chosen to go such a route, though a spokesperson for the band claimed that they’d inquired with iTunes back in 1979 for a similar such venture, but it took 24 years for some bloke to think up the idea for the company, then get around to answering the phone to the lads.
Jason Flavin, part-time trombonist and exotic dancer with Leitrim’s ninth biggest-selling jazz/funk outfit, The Hounds of Desire, claimed that it was a clever move by U2, but not an original one; ‘They’re a fine band, and I said ten years ago that they were destined to be big, but this idea is not new. We gave away copies of our first album, ‘Sensual Adventures in Eastern Offaly’ to most of the local petrol stations and garden centers in the midlands and parts of Donegal back in the late ’60s’. When asked whether this was a successful venture, Jason said; ‘Nah, most of them were f***ed in the bin and the band split up’.
U2, a four-piece rock act from Dublin, though often claimed by Cork-folk to hail from Bantry, Clonakilty or Mallow (an early song, ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ was misread by a former Cork lady mayor as ‘Langer in a Strange Land’, hence the confusion) are not expected to comment upon the issue, due mainly to the fact that most of the artists who have voiced their concern over the issue, being, as one fan, Seamus De Vasquez-Burke, from Edenderry, said; ‘A bag of oul’ shite’.
The band’s move has also been criticized by other individuals, in particular, those guys you see in Starbucks with no coffee, because they’ve just finished their Vendi Half-Frap Pumpkin Lightly Foamed Fully Skimmed Soy Latte, writing their screenplays on one of their eleven Apple devices. We asked one such individual for his opinion, but we didn’t really know what he was on about so we pretended a pebble from a passing cement truck had gotten lodged in our ear and we ran off crying.
Words By Bosco Coppell, Picture by Harriet’s Street Lighting and Crumpets.