Swine-y Todd
Yesterday a blog was posted by a "Dublin musician" called Frankie Regan, explaining how he was so shocked by the sectarianism and bigotry on display on the LAD page, that he was moved to approach the distributor of our Christmas charity single and request its removal.
Take it away, Frankie...
So far, so funky. He's just a typical musician who jams with his friends before checking out chart positions of his other muso friends. Groovy.
LAD have a confession to make: We found it very hard to believe that anybody under the age of 55 would write such a toe-curling, embarrassing opening paragraph. Still, maybe the Dublin music scene is full of 25 year old hipsters who like to act like they're middle-aged advertising execs with no idea how to write something that sounds vaguely human.
On we pressed...
Like he said, he's a singer/songwriter from Dublin. He really thought we in the "Grim North" had moved on, but like he says, he has few friends from here.
So incensed was young Funkmeister Frankie by the deeply offensive and sectarian nature of the lyrics in 'Last December' he decided to dig deeper...
Still no mention of the fact that this was a charity single, with 100% of the proceeds going towards those in need. Regardless, our brave singer/songwriting hero from Dublin decided to press on, for the benefit of all the other musicians whom he hangs with, laying down phat tunes and recording them on their iPad minis, just like in the advert...
There then follows an IRC chat with the distributors that he prints in full (yeah, we read it so that you don't have to). The result was this email and a triumphant sign off by people's champion, Frankie Regan...
Note the emphasis that this was not a loyalist campaign, but a fightback by the public, presumably both north and south of the border, who are sick of LAD's behaviour and charitable endeavours. We particularly loved the Sláinte sign off (complete with missing fada). Cos that's what they do south of the border to avoid being mistaken for those dorty nordies you know.
And now, the truth.
You may have guessed this already, but we're not convinced that this horseshit was written by a young Dublin singer/songwriter, principally because most of the images belong to someone called David Todd. This piqued our interest, as a man of the same name had recently posted comments on Facebook and Twitter about our page, and specifically our charity single. This David Todd is not a singer/songwriter from Dublin, in fact he's a middle-aged man who lives only 160 miles from Dublin, near Coleraine.
How do we know this? Cos "Frankie" left little clues sprinkled all round his piece. And thanks to some eagle-eyed friends of LAD, we were able to piece together the evidence.
His Amazon screenshot for example, has his first name helpfully still in the frame, along the top of the page...
He also uses identical screenshots to the ones he uses on the LAD Exposed page (by the way lads, still waiting for the exposure)...
And in case there was any doubt, we were able to uncover the creator of the screenshot of the record company's email. Thankfully Davy likes high quality images that retain the "artist" data...
So who is he?
Funnily enough old Dave was emailing us last weekend a tad miffed that he thought we had removed some of his no-doubt fascinating and insightful musings from the LAD page.
He forgot 'false witness', but maybe he ran out of room. He also seems to be pretty keen on taking pictures of the bawnds. This is from his Flickr account...
And here's his opinion on Covenant Day...
So he's definitely not a loyalist then. We have one question: how did Frankie Regan end up with a load of David Todd's images in his blog?
Well, we're pretty certain Frankie doesn't exist, but we'll leave it at that and consider the matter closed.
Sláinte,
LAD