PETE//HUEY

Category: April 2026

  • The things that stay with you

    A lovely clip from an interview with Ardal O’Hanlon on the Late Late Show, where he reminisces with Patrick Kielty about his recently-deceased father.1 O’Hanlon’s father, the politician and GP Rory O’Hanlon, was not, in his words, the most present due to his tremendous commitments to community and state – but the younger O’Hanlon speaks particularly fondly of the times when, as a child, he was brought along for the house calls.

    I have to admit, this resonates deeply with me. My own father, a vet, was similarly constantly on the go, but I have warm memories of climbing in the car and being taken to all sorts of places: when he was still in practice, sat at tables, drinking juice whilst small pets were examined; perched on the end of a cattle crush, watching the dehorning with increasing disgusted; wedged on top of the wall as a group of men ran the herd through the sheep dip.2 Later, when he worked at the meat plant or for the department, Saturday mornings often meant time wandering around the mart, or memorably once getting to go and literally see the sausages getting made.

    It resonates now because I work in a role, in local church ministry, where you also spend a significant amount of time in people’s homes, and I too sometimes drag my children along. It is a reminder that, as they have already tried to say, they actually enjoy something of these times. I sometimes feel guilty for bringing them, as if they’ll be bored or uninterested, or as if they might need to be shielded from the realities of real life; but I suppose on reflection, there’s something magical about stepping into that grown-up world when you’re little, and there’s also something magical about being invited into it by your parent.

    O’Hanlon connects these times with his own sense of relationship to people; Kielty goes as far to prompt him that he, too, engaged in a type of public service and that may be influenced by his childhood memories. It’s a reminder, too, that no artificial construction or so-called social platform can replace the magic of face-to-face time alongside those who mean the most to you; and that, without the need for extravagant, ‘memory-making’ experiences, there is little that replaces the mundane joy of simply being brought along for the ride.

    1. Around a decade ago or so, a bunch of us happened to see Ardal O’Hanlon doing an afternoon warmup gig for the Galway Comedy Festival – I think there might have been around thirty people squeezed into a tiny room upstairs in the bar, and maybe ten were us rowdies. O’Hanlon was trying out material, opening confessing the bits that didn’t quite work and, in a very meta way, also explaining how he would put the act together for that evening based on what we as an audience were responding to. In person, he seemed exactly as warm and affable as you would imagine, and to be fair to him, the embodiment of what he describes in the clip above. ↩︎
    2. When I was maybe five or six, I famously took a tumble and fell off a wall, rolled across a small bit of yard, and ended up immersed in the tank. I must have been guaranteed mite-free for at least six months afterwards. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 15 – Next Year (1999)

    Inching towards academic deadlines at the end of this month, 40×40 has not been getting the attention I would like. However, setting aside such distractions, and reviewing recent posts, one can spot a minor trend in recent entries which is crying out for resolution – that is, songs that primarily emerged from TV watching habits in the early 2000s.

    A footnote to an earlier post discussed the incredible run that was RTE 2’s (then Network 2) Monday night comedy lineup; today, a tip-of-the-hat is due to the UK’s Channel 4’s morning setup. The weekday early morning run of that time is legendary: on any given morning you could be watching Cheers, Frasier, Friends (heavily edited for the time slot), and if you missed the school bus, King of Queens or Everybody Loves Raymond. However, hang around until later morning and there might be ER, criminally-underrated procedural Without a Trace, and the sweetest of all early 2000s comedy-dramas: Ed.

    Ed remains slightly mythical for having never made it to DVD due to musical rights issues – a trap into which many pre-streaming shows fell.1 A vehicle for future stars Tom Cavanagh and Julie Bowen, the small town aw-shucks-fest mixed schmaltz with belly-laughs, but the soundtrack was a highlight – no more so than the original track for the opening credits: Foo Fighters’ album track, Next Year.

    Aged around 13, I knew Nirvana from my older cousin’s cassette tapes,2 but hadn’t yet discovered the Foos; watching Ed led to purchasing There is Nothing Left to Lose and my mind falling out of my ears.3 Yet, in contrast to most of the album, Next Year is a gentle lyric, wending its way through an ambling tune to create an audio landscape that perfectly fit the TV show it was used to introduce. This track and that album were a gateway into a whole world that part of my nostalgia-tinged brain still lives in. Maybe things will change sometime.

    Maybe next year.

    1. Vulture have a good explainer here. A few years ago, some absolute hero ripped the whole lot from what looks like the broadcast tapes from a local affiliate TV station in the States; the internet overlords have never seen fit to action a takedown, and you can watch the entire run on YouTube with 90s-style VHS flicker. Typical of the era, the finale, four seasons in, is a mess, but the joy along the way is worth it. ↩︎
    2. Like something out of a coming-of-age film, my cousin Seline spent a summer in our house and commandeered my cassette player to blast Nevermind on a daily basis, and her (maybe ten year old?) cousin was absolutely on board. Her most played track was not, as I remember, Smells Like Teen Spirit, but definitely In Bloom. ↩︎
    3. Dave Grohl’s best album. It’s been self-pastiche ever since; often enjoyable, but still a bit of a parody at times. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 14 – These Photographs (2006)

    Whisper it – of all the millennial properties being revived in these current times, the reboot of Scrubs has bucked the trend and been both fresh and familiar in equal measure.1 (Frankly, I’m gutted there are only nine episodes in the first run). Admittedly, I am absolutely the target audience: it first hit TV when I was finishing school,2 and the boxsets came with me through uni (alternating purchases with series of The West Wing).

    Among the many things to like was, famously, the sound tracks, as mentioned in a previous post in this series.3 Music was used both in and out of camera to amazing effect – Colin Hay’s cameo might be the best example. But perhaps the greatest beneficiary was Zack Braff’s bestie, Joshua Radin, whose music is synonymous with some of the shows most famous moments.4 Scrubs, therefore, was also a gateway into Joshua Radin’s music; I was tempted to pick something from his (unusually upbeat) third album, Road to Ride On, but the Scrubs connection anchors us in the first record, and so I’m going for These Photographs.

    Radin specialises in breathy, heart-felt and quiet songs – and he’s very good at it5 – but I often think its a pity as his more up-tempo tracks, primarily limited to his second and third album, very on high quality pop. These Photographs sits somewhere in-between; I’ve always enjoyed the wordplay of the verses, casting various historical literary figures in a way that could feel very heavy-handed, but I think manages to say the right side of sincere. The album, We Were Here, is well worth a spin.

    1. Disney Plus in the UK – I’ve loved it. ↩︎
    2. It was on Channel 4 in the UK, but was also part of a frankly obscene Monday night lineup on Network 2 in Ireland, were us dual-nationals in the north could also tune in to see lots of US comedies weeks ahead of their UK screenings. At one point, the run was something like: That 70s Show, followed by Scrubs, followed by Friends, followed by Father Ted. Today, in a streaming world, no-one would raise an eyebrow, but at the time, there was nothing like it. ↩︎
    3. Let’s shoehorn in two things here: firstly, the show’s theme song itself, Superman by Lazlo Bane, and some lovely banjo; and secondly, you can’t mention Scrubs and music and not take a moment to pour one out for the amazing Sam Lloyd and his a cappella group, The Blanks. ↩︎
    4. Season 3, Episode 14 – ‘My Screw Up’. ↩︎
    5. Paperweight is a good example, from the soundtrack to The Last Kiss, an excellent – and forgotten – genre-twisting rom-com from the Scrubs extended universe. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 13 – A Praise Chorus (2001)

    At friend Dave’s 40th birthday party last weekend, one of the first tracks on the generated ‘Indie Rock 2000s’ playlist was Do You Want To? by Franz Ferdinand. When we were roommates over two decades ago, the first two Franz Ferdinand records were on heavy rotation in Dave’s CD changer – along with Floggin’ Molly and Dropkick Murphys – and though I was never a massive fan, the time we went to see them in November 2005 was one of the all-time great concerts in terms of crowd participation. Those art-rockers knew how to work a big room; the bounce for that song was something else.

    It got me musing on other great gig moments. I’ve never been a massive gig-goer – certainly not arena-sized ones where you’re basically watching a big screen. Foy Vance was on the BBC recently getting misty-eyed about the Rotterdam Bar;1 it is incredible that we used to be able to wander across town and, for the price of a pint, sit in that wee dark room and watch artists like Foy or Duke Special doing their thing. Other favourites from that era included the Frames at the Ulster Hall, Dave Matthews in the Waterfront2 – sonically, a perfect match of artist and venue – Oppenheimer in a beer tent3, and Bell X1 at the old Mandela Hall. Then I stopped: the best Mandela Hall gig of all (in my time): Jimmy Eat World.

    For a long time, Work sat at the top of my last.fm all-time charts (before they were destroyed by my children’s access to Spotify); but as I mused on, there’s only one choice: the collision of lyrical precision and genius with the sweaty guitars of A Praise Chorus.

    The most recent time I saw Jimmy Eat World, it was getting to that slightly annoying stage where you could barely hear the band over an entire room full of people shouting every single word back at them – but on reflection, this is really just a testament to how, for a very specific age bracket of millennial, this band were seminal. That swell of guitars and the perfect production mix of vocals over the top – there’s so much going on, as the live video above hints, but on the album, Bleed American, you can hear every part.

    A later post in May-time will pick up on the music that has been adopted by our kids, but Jimmy Eat World is gladly one of those which our eldest, the drummer, has studied. Long may it continue.

    1. RIP. There’s an appropriate Facebook page of people sharing memories here. ↩︎
    2. For the DMB fans: what a setlist that was. ↩︎
    3. ‘When the city’s awake, you wanna go down to the subway to make your way… UPTOWN…’ An amazing live band. ↩︎