Flour Power

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might have noticed how I like music covers. That’s why The King’s Head is probably my favourite pub in Galway on Mondays and Tuesdays. From 10pm to around midnight there’s usually a gig featuring two guys with acoustic guitars, playing covers of well-know songs.

Fred & James are one of the duos, playing Mondays, and their version of Galway Girl is the one I mentioned before, with the slightly altered lyrics. This time I managed to get a much better recording of it:

They also play this great version of Hotel California, ending with an awesome solo. Which I’ve been meaning to record for a long time now, and it’s finally here:

Enjoy the videos, and see you at The King’s Head one of these Mondays!

This past weekend I had the first of what I hope to be many visitors while I’m in this rainy land full of beer and short skirts. Said visitor was my neighbor and childhood friend, Ricardo, who can actually confirm the existence of lots of beer and short skirts. He can’t testify about the rainy part though, as he was lucky enough to find a fairly mild weather (although if you ask him he’ll say it was really cold and quite unpleasant…).

As the visit was quite short (just the weekend, plus Monday), the initial plan was staying in Galway and doing a couple of those tourist trips to the main attractions this side of Ireland has to offer, namely the Cliffs of Moher, the Aran Islands and Connemara. And the nights would be spent in the numerous pubs and nightclubs around here. Sounds like a good plan, right?

I now realize that the plan had a flaw: not a lot of time to sleep was scheduled… Add that to the fact that the trips start at 10am, and what you get is 2 missed trips, Saturday and Sunday.

Friday night we started with The King’s Head (for some live music) and then headed to Halo (which is supposed to be the fancier nightclub around here) and that made it impossible to wake up early.

Saturday was then spent basically by sleeping in the morning, then going for a stroll around town for an hour or two (enough to see most of it), and heading for the pub at 5pm to watch Ireland’s match for the 6 Nations tournament, which ended with an historic win for Ireland. Dinner at home and then another nightclub, CP.

Sunday: waking up late. Again! Crap! Just had time to wander around the house like a zombie for some time and then starting to prepare the Portuguese dinner. For dinner the other Portuguese people I know in Galway were invited and we enjoyed a few delicacies brought by Ricardo from Portugal. After dinner? Pubs, of course. This time we decided to do a bit of a pub-crawling: The Quays, Busker Brownes, Front Door and Róisín Dubh. No more, because Monday was the last chance to go for a trip, and we really didn’t want to miss it.

The chosen trip was the one to the Cliffs of Moher and the Burren. A 10am-to-5pm tour that took us through a few nice places, and also managed to irreversibly damage our backs, due to all the bumping around the crappy countryside roads. But more details and pictures will come in another post. At night, and despite Ricardo’s complaints that he was very tired, I insisted we visited some more pubs. So we went to Taaffe’s for some live Irish music and the night ended at The King’s Head, where we listened to the same guys I saw there some time ago.

That was about it. A quite intense weekend, that was balanced by the fact that there’s not a lot to see in Galway city and so we could just stay at home and sleep on those days that we missed the tours.

I’m now waiting for the next visitors.

On my attempt to really get to know Galway’s nightlife, I took upon myself the task of not staying at home a single night during this this week. Only two days have passed and the tiredness is already building up, but so far it has been worth it.

On Monday the destination was The King’s Head. It’s one of Galway’s oldest pubs, and well known for it’s nightly live music gigs. I have to say that there is a good reason for it to be known for the live music gigs. A two-man band was playing a nice selection of covers, including some Jack Johnson, The Beatles and Counting Crows. The crowd (mostly foreigners, a lot of them Americans) was always very involved, especially in everyone’s favorite Galway Girl (with a few improvised, and much more interesting, verses).

I was too lazy to record any videos, but I did take a couple of pictures:

On Tuesday the idea was going to some other pub, but after checking out a few of them, all of which were either too crowded or too empty and with no music, I ended up at The King’s Head again. And I was again greeted with a two-man band (a different one), playing great covers. A special reference to the awesomely performed Hotel California and, of course, Galway Girl. And this time not only did I take pictures but I also recorded a couple of songs. The problem is, they turned out pretty dark, but at least the sound is decent. So, here’s Galway Girl (a few seconds missing at the beginning, but the more interesting verses are still there):

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjvexKdt1-w

Update: Did some editing on the video to try and make it less dark. The result is embedded above.