Sia’s another cover version
QUESTION
The singer Sia has garnered much publicity because she obscures her face with a wig. Which other singers have covered their faces? SIA is not the first singer to cover her face – and she will certainly not be the last.
The Aussie singer says she is making a stance against fame but her image has only served to draw more attention to her which of course doesn’t hurt record sales.
Grotesque masks and heavy makeup have long been the costumes of heavy-metal bands. The American superband of the Seventies and Eighties, Kiss, were recognisable as much through their look as their music.
More recently Eurovision winners Lordi took their inspiration from Lord of The Rings.
Closer to home we have our own Rubberbandits who made putting plastic shopping bags over their heads their signature look, all of which feeds into their hilarious lyrics.
Electro dance musicians have also been keen on this device with the best-known modern exponents Daft Punk. DeadMau5 also has his fans, the Canadian sporting a cartoonish mouse head.
And, of course, there are those who wish to obscure their faces to preserve their anonymity in a political cause as has been the case with Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot.
Terry Lynch, by email.
QUESTIONW
hat is known of Horst Wessel, the man who wrote the infamous Nazi song? HORST Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel was born in 1907 in Bielefeld, Germany. His parents, both Lutherans, were Dr Wilhelm Ludwig Georg Wessel, and Bertha Luise Margarete Wessel, nee Richter.
Wilhelm (1879-1922), became a doctor of philosophy in 1904 at Erlangenm, and was ordained in the Lutheran Church at DortmundBrechten in 1905.
In July 1913, Dr Wessel became the Second Deacon at the Nikolai Church in Berlin, and he and his family all lived in a large rectory in Jüdenstraße, 100 metres from the church.
He brought up his son on a diet of German nationalism.
Horst attended the Volksschule (people’s school) in Cölln from 1914, then two neighbourhood high schools ( gymnasium).
In 1926, he enrolled at university to study Law, but dropped out to work in the construction industry, and devote himself to Right-wing politics. He joined the Nazi party in December 1926, aged 19.
Wessel joined Goebbels’s brownshirted Stormtroopers, the SA ( Sturmabteilung), the party’s original paramilitary wing. He impressed Goebbels, and rose to become leader of SA-Sturm 5 in Friedrichshain, and was noted in his locality for being a public speaker and a writer of rousing songs for the party.
Wessel played a double-reed woodwind instrument, the schalmei, which is still played today and in early 1929 penned the lyrics for a new Nazi kampflied (fighting song) which became the Horst Wessel Lied (Horst Wessel Song).
Wessel led his SA group into the poorer parts of Berlin, where there were fights with Communist groups. In one fight, outside a pub used as a KPD HQ, five Communists were injured, four seriously. From then on, he was a marked man with his name, address and photograph featured on Communist street posters.
At about 10pm on January 14, 1930, two or three KPD members burst into the flat he shared with Erna Jänicke, a former prostitute, and shot Wessel in the face.
He was not killed instantly, but was taken to St Joseph’s Hospital. Surgeons stopped the i nternal bleeding, but were not able to remove the bullet from his brain. He was taken from hospital to his mother’s home to die — from blood poisoning six weeks later.
He was buried in Berlin on March 1, 1930. Hermann Göring, Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, and Goebbels were among the 30,000 mourners.
Changes were made to the song’s lyrics after Wessel’s death to promote the person of Hitler, and soften the words. Rather than implying the gaining of power by revolution, the Nazis tried to paint themselves as a normal political party wanting to gain power by legal means.
The song was recognised under Nazi law on May 19, 1933 as a national symbol. It had been the Nazi party song since 1931, but now had an equal status with Deutschlandlied.
Nazi Germany now had a double anthem, consisting of the first verse of the Lied der Deutschen, followed by the Horst Wessel Lied. The combination was known as the Lieder der Nation (Song Of The Nation).
From the end of World War II in May 1945, the song, both lyrics and music, was banned in Germany, and remains so today, other than for limited educational purposes.
Michael Cassidy, by email.
QUESTION
In the song Star of the County Down what is a ‘boreen green’ THE Star of the County Down is a ballad written just over a century ago; the boreen green included in its lyrics is a reference to the historic Irish term for a pathway.
Cathal McGarvey, a native of Ramelton i n Co. Donegal, who lived from 1866 until 1927, was the man who composed the lyrics of the ballad.
It tells the story of a young man who meets a lovely young woman called Rose McCann, whom he calls ‘The Star of the County Down’.
In the ballad, he becomes so infatuated with her that by the end of the piece, he imagines that he is getting married to her.
McGarvey imagined the setting of the song as being somewhere in the west of Co. Down, close to, or in, the town of Banbridge.
The ballad remains popular to this day. The first singer to popularise it was John McCormack, who recorded it for the HMV label on a 78rpm disc, in 1939.
He was accompanied on piano by Gerald Moore. Other artistes who’ve recorded it include Van Morrison and The Chieftains, as well as The Pogues and the Irish Rovers.
The latter group included it in on their 1996 album, The Irish Rovers’ Gems, but they rewrote the third verse. The Serbian band, The Orthodox Celts, has also had a lot of success with the ballad.
This catchy ballad usually begins with the following three lines:
Near Banbridge town, in the County Down, one morning last July
Down a bóithrín green came a sweet cailín,
And she smiled as she passed me by
As for the green boreen, this is the traditional Irish footpath, a name that goes back into prehistory.
It’s derived from the word boíthrín, a diminutive of the word bóthar, the word for road.
In prehistoric Celtic Ireland, long before the advent of Christianity, bothár was defined as a roadway wide enough for two cows to pass each other comfortably.
Martin Delaney, Dublin.