Triskel Arts Centre, Cork/
Vicar St, Dublin, 13&14/04/00

After the difficulty of finding anything useful and affordable to do, gig-wise, in the UK, it was great to get out and do something. My friend Gary Sheehan at the Triskel in Cork, who is currently putting that venue on the map with shows by people like Charles Gayle, Windsor For The Derby and Jim O' Rourke, helped with most of the organisation, and Interactive, the Irish distributors of the album, managed to get a lot of press, so, in advance of the trip, it really felt right.

The Cork show came out marginally on top, for my enjoyment, as the atmosphere was more relaxed, though going onstage that close to midnight is never easy. And at some point early in the set I did something to my voice and it didn't really recover for the rest of the set (I was expecting annihilation the following night in Dublin, but the problem went away as suddenly as it appeared). We crossed the one hour barrier with the set without boring people too much (I hope), which came as a relief.

The negatives? The smallness of the venue turned out to mean that the show was sold out well in advance, and could have been sold out twice over. I walked out into the cafe afterwards and recognised no-one - long as I've been away, that is an avoidable state of affairs. Should have risked another show - but you can never be sure of that, when looking at the possibilities two months before the fact.

A protracted road trip took us to Dublin. In spite of the wider access to consumer luxuries, which is turning Ireland, or the bit of it where all the money is, into the most complacent society in Europe (making the Brits look like models of caution, for Christ's sake), public infrastructure is still a poor relation in Ireland, and the trip from Cork to Dublin remains as crap as it was in 1980. What gains are possible due to the stretches of motorway which pepper the route are lost on the outskirts of Dublin, as long queues of L-plated 2000-reg high-end cars await green lights to pass them through to their new-found expensive pastimes.

So I was a bit frazzled in Dublin. My first words on going onstage involved a slip of the tongue where I welcomed the audience to London. Took a while to recover from that. Vicar St is a really nice venue - something of an innovation in Dublin. The heating, however, was not working, which impeded audience and band alike. I was actually shaking with the cold during much of the set. But it was fine. An hour and twenty slipped by pretty quick, and the Mark Three "Bertie's Brochures" blurb seemed to go down okay. Highlights for me were "The Bacon Singer", which is getting pretty wild by the standards of this band, and "Unbroken Ones", which sounds better than ever before (due in no small part to Audrey's cello).

Ongoing adjustments are being experienced in respect of the following: soundchecks which don't commence with someone whacking the shit out of a snare drum; no towels needed onstage; playing while I sing (still not crazy about that - it's not permanent).