Bay watching rock 'n' rollers
Frank Corr on the gigsters, being prudent, an Irish Sun heroine and verbosity

Competition for ‘gigster' readers has hotted up a lot of late with the daily and weekend papers all publishing listings, reviews and showbiz interviews in magazine supplements. The heat is turned up full on Friday when the Indo and Times go head to head with Day and Night and The Ticket supplements.

Both use specialist journalists and draw on the services of their resident film, theatre, music and art critics for contributions. They, in turn, occasionally look to what has already been published in other media.

So it was in Day and Night we discovered more of the collected thoughts of Bono, as U2 are about to release an album called No Line on the Horizon – a title inspired apparently by the view from Bono's pad in Killiney.

Nothing beats a new album in sending rock singers in search of journalists and it was in Q magazine that Ireland's Fab Four poured forth their wisdom on world problems. On the touchy subject of the move to Holland, Bono said: “We pay millions of dollars in tax, but we don't pay more than we have to.” He added that people like him because they see him coming out of pubs like Finnegans in Dalkey and admitting to being “a spoiled-rotten rock star”.

Just how much he is liked by the band's drummer, Larry Mullen, remains a matter of conjecture. Asked by Q about Tony Blair, Mullen replied: “I think he is a war criminal and I think he should be tried as a war criminal. And then I see Bono and his pals and I'm going ‘I don't like that'.”

Should be fun on the band's tour.

HE'S BEHIND YOU? Bono and U2 drummer Larry Mullen appear to have very different views about former British Prime Minister and Middle East envoy, Tony Blair.

BELT-TIGHTENING

While women's lifestyle magazines like Image, IT and The Gloss blossomed during the high-spending years that are now just a happy memory, Karen Hess of Dyflin Publications has been plugging away with her own title.

Prudence was launched four years ago following research commissioned by students at the Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, which identified a market niche for a publication directed at ‘savvy women' who wanted good value for their money, while keeping up with the latest trends.

Since then Prudence, which appears bi-monthly, has built up an ABC circulation of over 10,000 copies, but has yet to attract large amounts of ads. The situation may be about to change as women tighten their Gucci belts a notch or two and look around for optimum expression for their euro.

In the current issue of the magazine, readers are offered hints on acquiring a budget wardrobe, decorating on a shoe string, getting the best used car deal and finding bargain holidays. Best of all, we liked the list of ‘50 Ways to be a Frugal Fashionista' which suggests ‘wearing shorter skirts', rather than joining a dating agency, becoming a St. John's Ambulance volunteer as a means of getting free access to concerts, surfing the net for recipes, rather than buying cookbooks and waiting for the latest designs in Penneys.

Watch out for the photo shoot of designer hairshirts.

DOING HER BREAST

Columnists like Fintan O'Toole, Kevin Myers and John Waters may have to look to their laurels in the light of some new competition on their patch. Claire Tully, who revels in the title ‘Ireland's only page three girl', has begun a new regular column in the Irish Sun.

It's a task Tully regards as “a huge personal challenge”. Under the heading ‘I'll Do My Breast', the UCD science student devoted her debut lead story to explaining the earlier challenge of stripping off for her favourite newspaper. Writing about Irish Catholic conservatism, she wrote: “Part of my decision to become a page three model was driven by a determination to weather the storm and boldly lay to rest these attitudes, or, at least, to soften them.”

Tully assures Sun readers that they can expect to be entertained and informed with a bit of controversy thrown in. “Every model has her gifts, but I am lucky enough that one of mine is my brain,” she revealed.

WORDS, WORDS

Where better to find a column discussing new English words than in The Journalist, the house magazine of the NUJ. Humphrey Evans says that phrases such as ‘credit crunch', ‘extraordinary rendition' and ‘carbon footprint' have all slipped into our vocabulary over the past few years.

They have been followed by words such as ‘podcasting' ‘metrosexual' and ‘phishing'. Next up, Evans suggests, are ‘entee' (someone who is mentored), ‘obesogenic' (causing obesity) and ‘locavore' (a consumer of locally grown food), but hardly ‘rhinotillexomania' used and unexplained by the Guardian in a piece about a scientific study of nose-picking among teenagers.

fcorr@esatclear.ie