SPEEDWAY
WAVELENGTH #30
SEPTEMBER 3RD - 11PM
At the Joe Strummer
concert; at a CD store; at the Primal Scream concert; in a local eatery —
drinking and enthusing about what is inspiring — about people that have
inspired us — about things that have mattered and why it is important they
happened.
It is a simple thing that can sometimes be overlooked. It is an
odd occurrence that life should set itself up as it does. People float in
and out; drift through our trajectories, interweaving, revealing different
things to us at different times. The spheres forever intertwine in this way.
We share influences and experiences, and talk about them excitedly when
given the opportunity. Always there is someone there reminding us why it is
important to be honest, earnest, convicted and true to the spirit of that
which is meaningful. Sometimes that reminder gets through. Sometimes it is
remembered what it is to be inspired. And it is the least one can ask of
oneself. And the most. — Paddy O’Donnell
Here are the words of Speedway to explain Speedway:
Formed out of an interest in simply doing something that doesn’t sound like
every other band, Speedway spent considerable time holed up in a disused
auto-body repair shop known as the Chameleon Café.
Tinkering and rewiring riff-rock rhythms with their own cataclysmic chirps
and squeals they soon found themselves far outside easily pinpointed
categories.
With literally hundreds of hours of recording under different line-ups
compiled over the last five or six years, only forty-five minutes has ever
been made available to the public.
Painfully slow at times and awash with slide/feedback guitar counter-point,
their 1996 cassette-only release boasted individual covers complete with
conflicting track listings, personnel data, and album titles known to some
as farewell to the last golden era, or as dead doctors don’t lie or
killcityhills to others.
Speedway’s sole musical document to date is still a
debut of astonishing intensity which inevitably drew favourable comparisons
to The Verve, Spiritualized, Spectrum, Radiohead, and The Dandy Warhols.
They’ve spent plenty of time perfecting their live show.
Controlled one moment, deranged the next, at a Speedway show you never know
what’s going to happen next.