Thanks to a conversation on Twitter earlier today with @thegurrier, I now feel the urge to express (in more than 140 characters) why I think that Twitter’s “new retweet” feature is A Good Thing™ on the whole. As a Tweetdeck user I was pleased to see it implemented so quickly and it is interesting to see that the new feature is being adopted by many users from what I can see in my own timeline. Posting a Retweet has been integrated into Tweetdeck very tidily, but a huge amount of confusion remains about how the new-style retweets are appearing (or not) in our twitter feeds regardless of client. Read more…

This is a slight departure on my usual Sunday Spotlight as, this week, I feature another songwriter’s song. In The City is the work of my good friend Nigel Coleman, a singer-songwriter from Co. Tipperary. From the moment I first heard this song, I loved the atmosphere and images it conjured up in my head. I tagged it on at the end of my recording time during the day I spent at Shay’s Studio in 2005 – a quickie cover to see what it might sound like. You can listen to this interpretation below alongside Nigel’s own recording which appeared on his Highway to the Sky EP in 2004.

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WMD are back in the news again, like a synthpop band (War-mongering Manoeuvres in the Dark?) from the Cold War days reforming for a comeback tour and a new album for the twenty-first century. Under the spotlight this week is a song that takes a lot of the language of the current Gulf War and reclaims it in the language of love. Like swords into ploughshares – killing words into loving words.

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This week I point my spotlight on a rather private song I wrote in 1987. It was born out of the shock of hearing that my flatmate George had suffered quite a serious fall, smashing his elbow in the process.

Download song | Lyrics

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In my second and third years as a student in Edinburgh, I shared a flat with the same 3 friends. Two years is like an eternity when you’re 19 and 20, so we became a really close-knit bunch. We shared our flats in Tollcross and Marchmont with a couple of canine flatmates: Acorn and Ember. So regular dog-walking trips to the Meadows, the Hermitage of Braid and Blackford Hill.

Blackford Hill, Edinburgh, scene of the falling incident 22 years previously

For my Sunday Spotlight this week, I’m going right back to my songwriting beginnings with a song that was born back in 1985 on a Friday night in Kelly’s Cellars, Belfast. It wouldn’t be accurate to claim it as one of my songs as it was a spontaneous collaboration – a blues number that sort of wrote itself between a bunch of 18-year olds out for a bit of a laugh with a few pints and a sing song. For me, it became a fun song to belt out when the mood was right and it has endured in my repertoire down through the years.

Download song

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In the spotlight this week is a song I wrote just over a year ago when I travelled to Edinburgh for a weekend with a group from my East Clare football club, Mixed Bag United. The football was over and I was enjoying the last evening of the weekend, touring a few of my favourite pubs with one of the other Mixed Bag players.

Lyrics | No studio recording for this one, but I’ve got this video shot in November 2008 as part of the “Hats Challenge”, which was just a bit of fun on YouTube involving hats and songs.
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