The cynics say it’s musicians working on their pension funds. But so what. The Planxty reunion was mighty nevertheless. Today’s Irish Times has an ad for two gigs by the original Moving Hearts minus Christy Moore performing music from The Storm. I wonder if that brand of ‘modern’ instrumental music has held up over time. They were never quite the same without Christy Moore.
The first time I heard “The Storm”, I was really impressed. Now…Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s a dated piece of shite. You could probably just about date the production of the album to the month based on the keyboards on it…Not Davy and Donal’s finest hour…I’m sure they would have been enjoyable enough to see back in '85, but now…I dunno.
I am a bit curious about how the arrangements will turn out, though: will they try and do a faithful reproduction of the original '80s-Celticky-schlocky stuff or will they try and give it a 3rd-Millennium-Celticky-shlocky twist (some instantly-dated sounding drum samples à la Mike McGoldrick, perhaps)?
Ha Ha!!
I just bought a ‘Best of Moving Hearts’ cd and you can really tell the age of the stuff with the DX7 keyboard..
The stuff from the other albums is great though, the material on the storm is super stuff, just dodgy keyboards. (my opinion)
It’s be a fun gig to see though!
Tommy
Hey, the DX-7 was a godsend in its day! And then there was the KX-88 … remember that?
My, how times have changed (though vastly for the better, I agree!).
God, I’m getting old.
So are you going, Peter? 
Always sounded like lame, cheesy New York yuppie rock to me… but then I was into hardcore and thrash at the time.
There is an instantly dated quality to it; ‘Retro’ is the future though it seems.
Regards,
Harry.
That “dated” thang is quite interesting. I never think of any early Planxty or Bothies’ stuff as dated in the slightest, yet, even allowing for recording quality, the early Chieftains albums sound dated to me (could be something to do with that 'orrible unrefined bodhran sound I suppose, or the somewhat breathless flute-playing). I listened to a Radio 4 documentary about the Cavern Club in Liverpool this morning (probably still up on the Beeb website if anyone wants to listen to it), and a lot of the old “Liverpool sound” clips they played did sound dated, but then, when McCartney opened his live set in 1999 there with “I Saw Her Standing There,” the years peeled away and it sounded as fresh as ever - in fact, the missus and I were left wondering what the hell had happened to pop music in the intervening 40-odd years! Maybe it’s all a bit subjective, but I started to wonder whether a judgement on the “datedness” of music is really a judgement on its intrinsic worth in the first place. I mean, there are those of us who think that Martin Codax, Hildegarde of Bingen and Thomas Tallis will never sound dated, no matter how many years elapse!
I would guess that in the case of groups like Planxty and the Bothies that the source material was still treated with respect, whereas groups like Heart Movement were bashing the source into another form just for the sake of doing something “new” with it, so anything they did would sound as dated as the group’s preconceptions of what constituted “new” at that time.
djm
I mean, there are those of us who think that Martin Codax, Hildegarde of Bingen and Thomas Tallis will never sound dated, no matter how many years elapse!
Yes was listening to the Mass for the Notre Dame by Guillaume Marchaut recently. That sounded less dated and a lot more mind expanding than The Storm (which I never liked in the first place to be honest). Wild stuff
Rachmaninoff’s Vespers is my musical mushrooms. That one parallel harmonic line that I swear is only a half step off the melody but PERFECT … 
Oh man, you do occassionally turn a phrase. 
Just because stuff’s a bit on the ancient side doesn’t mean it can’t be wild. I was listening to the Furiant from Dvorak’s Sixth Symphony the other day - wild stuff! And just listen to the Grosse Fuge by Beethoven, or the fugal finale of his Hammerklavier Sonata - both wild enough to blow your head off! Even religious music can be wild, as Peter intimates. Just try the Dies Irae or the Confutatis from Mozart’s Requiem!
Oh, it’s not like the good ol’ days. Ever since the Albigensian Crusade, I dunno, French music lacks that Je ne sais quois…