Musings on the byways of popular culture
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Rod Stewart has offered to pay for 10 or 20 NHS scans because he’s saddened by the state of the country’s health provider.
Rod called in to Sky News to make this generous offer. He’s a lifelong Tory but is so disillusioned he wants to give Labour a chance.
My friend Cormac O’Kane has done a wonderful job (technically and musically) to produce this in-isolation collaboration by an array of Northern Irish artists on a bespoke rewrite (by iits writer, Pat Gribben) of the Adventures’ 1989 hit ‘Broken Land’ in support of the NHS. I found it moving – simple and effective.
It’s linked to a fundraising platform:
https://www.qub.ac.uk/alumni/healthisbrokenland/
My pal Ali MacKenzie is, in my view, Ireland’s greatest bass player. His lifeblood is playing live music (it almost doesn’t matter what context – blues bands, 80s tribute bands, his own music…) and he’s always written and recorded music, though only ever getting a fraction of it ‘out there’.
I encouraged Ali to get his ‘Space Debris’ instrumental album ‘out there’ a year or two back, and I’ve since been encouraging him to get an Ali MacKenzie Band mini-album of vocal material out there. He was all set to film a video for this track from the forthcoming album, with all the players involved, when the current apocalypse came along and made that impossible – and, of course, a non-priority anyway.
Like a lot of us, Ali does something other than his real calling/interest for a living – he works in an NHS renal unit in Belfast. Doing that without the usual outlet of weekend gigs and the like is tough. Ali just wanted to get this piece of music out there – thinking that people might enjoy it is a morale-booster in itself – and asked me to do it. So here it is – ‘The Saddest » Continue Reading.
Not normally overly political, but is anybody else completely shocked at the news the Red Cross volunteers are having to step in to help the NHS? When you think of the Red Cross, you think of war-torn regions, refugees, humanitarian crisis etc. To think, in the day and age, this government is not intervening with additional funding, and instead allowing this to happen. The mind boggles…. What a disgrace Jeremy Hunt really is.
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Michael Sheen gives it some welly on behalf of the NHS – great to hear a Welsh voice at full throttle again.
