We're all `flexible workers' now

Aren't The Corrs great? There they were at the European Parliament recently, posing for a photo-op with the equally dishy Niall Andrews MEP, and coming over all serious-minded as they argued the music industry's case over copyright infringement. It appears there are people in our midst who flagrantly commit criminal acts and show scant regard for the working practices of the industry by downloading music from the Net for free - this, you will agree, is as heinous a crime as home taping.

Christ on a bike, just where do these people get off? The multi-billion pound music industry already over-charges on the price of CDs (particularly singles, which are an astonishing rip-off); not to mention the sheer greed involved in the price of concert tickets and in shoddy merchandising. For a group like The Corrs to do the industry's bidding over such a scuzzy corporate attempt to further maximise profits in an already bloated sector is beyond contempt.

By a spooky coincidence, at roughly the same time as our Dundalk heroes were bravely "protecting copyright" in Strasbourg, two other Irish bands, Ash and The Divine Comedy, were holding a press conference to announce their involvement in the Campaign For A Living Wage benefit gig. The CFLW is a British initiative, supported by the trade union group, Unison, which is looking for the replacement of a "minimum wage" with a "living wage".

Ash and The Divine Comedy, along with Space and Travis, will be topping the bill at the benefit gig in the Telewest Arena in Newcastle on April 10th. The ticket price is a symbolic £3 - as this is the under-22 minimum hourly wage in Britain. Leaving aside the fact that paying anybody £3 an hour - whether they are stacking shelves in a supermarket or designing web pages - should be a punishable offence, the more important thrust of the CFLW argument is that a whole generation of people are now experiencing the full brunt of "casual" labour working conditions. All those little luxuries like job security and sick pay, which were fought for successfully decades ago, have now being eroded in the name of "worker flexibility". And eroded - funnily enough - by the same people who benefited from, and continue to benefit from, the old system.

The Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon had this to say: "The advances in social justice made since the post-war era have been brought to an abrupt halt. The time for countries to re-embrace the ethics of welfare and social democracy is long overdue and the right to a basic living wage seems as good a place to start as any."

Why isn't this gig on in Ireland? Why aren't other Irish bands doing something about an issue which is of fundamental concern to anybody who listens to or buys music or goes to gigs? It's 1999. Something had better change.

Due in to play as part of the Here Comes The Night series of gigs in two weeks' time, Lamb are a state-of-the-art meeting place between straightforward electronica in the shape of Andy Barlow and a traditional singer-songwriter in budding diva Lou Rhodes. Their eponymous debut album three years back went virtually ignored by both indie and dance camps - possibly because it was a 50/50 mixture of both. "I think a lot of the dance floor purists looked down on us back then, because we wrote lyrics," says Lou. "But now that whole thing has turned around and a lot of them are trying to write songs too. People just need to realise that the breaks and the grooves you use will always ground you in the time you're working in, but a good song really is timeless."

The new album is titled Fear Of Fours, for the very reason that Lamb don't recognise the need to produce four-to-the-floor dance floor fodder and instead are open to all sorts of time signatures. "That's the nature of the album," says Andy Barlow, "four/four music has become like guitar music, in that guitars are so over-accepted that people can't imagine life without them. It's the same with dance music, when in fact there's a whole lot more that can be done that hasn't necessarily got a kick drum on every beat. It's not that we're forsaking it - we just feel that there's a lot more that can be done."

Fear Of Fours is out now on the Mercury label. Lamb play The Olympia, Dublin on March 19th.