Two more reasons for the Irish to be happy

Earlier this week, I took the opportunity presented by St Patrick's Day to offer some well-earned praise for Irish music of a certain era (mid 1980s to early 1990s). It was a good day and the sun shone, which is pretty rare here, and a welcome break from economic gloom and doom. There are many reasons to be fed up in Ireland right now, from bankers, businessmen and politicians who may be venal, reckless, incompetent, or any combination of all the above, to rapidly increasing unemployment and equally rapidly decreasing salaries, leading to a general feeling of dispair and malaise.

However, even in the few days since March 17th, we have two more reasons to be happy in Ireland, and we are prepared to take any crumbs of comfort we can.



Firstly, despite the fact that I know as much about sport as a fish knows about philosophy, even I know that we just beat Wales in Rugby to win something called the Grand Slam. I even watched the match (despite genuinely not understanding any of the rules), and got carried away with emotion and excitement, just like several million other Irish people at home and abroad. We haven't managed this particular feat since 1948 (this I know because my now very proud father was there in person to see that match), and this is an enormous achievement which just might pierce our current gloom and raise spirits across the country, if only until the hangovers kick in, so let's enjoy it while we can.

Secondly, despite my very recent proclamations on Irish music of a decade ago, we still have some very very talented musicians, and my favourite of them right now, Cork's own Mick Flannery, just won the Meteor award (Irish music awards) for best male artist, and he deserves it, as he is really good, and he proves that the golden age may have scaled down a bit (what hasn't in Ireland these days) but there is still a lot of quality out there.

Well done Mick!

I will end this post with a clip of him playing 'Safety rope' in Cork's Pavillion Theatre last October. I admit that, yes, he appears to be invisible, but he was there, honestly (he is just blocked from view behind his piano by his backing vocalist with the spine-tingling vocals).

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In praise of Irish music - for the day that's in it

Today is Saint Patrick's Day, and it seemed only fitting to fit in a post on the contribution of Irish music to my musical miseducation. Let's be clear here, I am far too uncultured to appreciate the undoubted wonders of the vast heritage of Irish traditional and folk music, and so I am not going to go there. The nearest I ever got to that type of Irish music was the Waterboy's Room to Roam (happy soundtrack to many an Irish holiday), which I guess is like comparing reading Shakespeare to watching Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet.

No, I am talking about Irish popular music (and, to clear up any possible confusion in the opposite direction, I am certainly not talking about Westlife or Boyzone either - I shudder even to type the accursed names). Of course, to consider Irish music over the last 30 years without mentioning U2 is close to impossible, but I am really going to try. Undoubtedly, there will be future posts on my struggle to decide what I actually think about them, but that is not for now (it's late and a feeling of need to recognise even briefly the day in question is driving my blogging tonight). All I will say on this day of celebration of all that is mystical and mysterious about Ireland (i.e., b****cks) is this: what fairy magic or portrait in a north Dublin attic has kept Larry Mullen looking EXACTLY the same for 30 years????

No, tonight's message is a simple and argumentative proposal. Despite my obvious love for lots of music from America, the UK and Australia, and the fact that I have barely mentioned Irish bands in my posts to date, I would argue that for a period from around 1986 to the early 1990s, Irish bands (and not necessarily U2) were among the finest anywhere, and we went through a true if brief golden age.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that this period coincided with my coming of age as a music fan, and growing up in Dublin meant that it was all around me, all the time, and I went to the gigs, and the free larks in the parks, and the college concerts, and soaked it all up like an impressionable sponge. Still, in my defense, at the same time I was also devouring the Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen and the Smiths and plenty of that stuff, so it wasn't as if my taste buds had yet to grow. There were genuinely great bands in Ireland at the time, all of which I will come back to discuss at later stages, but for now I will just name the names and list the roll of honour:

A House

An Emotional Fish
Hothouse Flowers

Something Happens!

The Fat Lady Sings

The Golden Horde

The Stunning

Whipping Boy

This is the kind of Irish culture that should be recognised on Saint Patrick's Day, without green hats shaped like pints of Guinness, pints of Guinness shaped like pints of Guinness, or in fact anything (e.g., hair, food, beer, dogs, the Hudson river, the White House fountains, grass) coloured green (well, the grass is probably okay). This is what Ireland can do and can offer, and I wanted to make that point today, just because it seemed like the right thing to do.

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Hazeldine and female alt-country

Return to the New West (Part 1)

I am finally getting back to my planned series of posts on songs on the Sounds of the New West (SONW) Uncut CD from 1998!

The first song on SONW is 'Tarmac' by Hazeldine, and it certainly kicks off the CD in defiantly non-country mode, with heavy drums and snarling guitars. I must admit, in fear of accusations of sexism, that my dalliance with country music, of various degrees of alt-ness, has focussed mainly on male singers, as I have found too often that female voices somehow make the sound far less alt and far more traditional (to be explored more in later posts in this series). Nonetheless, a sound like Hazeldene’s, dominated by the aforementioned grungy guitars, is not something one would associate with Nashville, and one could certainly never imagine Nancy Griffith seductively offering the intriguing invitation to ‘f**k me like Batman’.



I quite like ‘Tarmac’, and went as far as to buy the CD ‘How bees fly’, at a CD fair if I remember right. The album is fine overall, but I can’t say it would be a favourite, and many of the songs do ditch the heavy guitars for something more conventional; on occasion, such as ‘Allergic to love’, the result is actually quite lovely. In addition, there are some good songs, such as ‘Apothecary’ (such a beautiful word, archaic and arcane, faintly smelling of odd alchemicals) which hit something stronger and stranger.

In terms of other female country singers/groups, I have had a long-standing relationship with the Indigo Girls, discovered during college years and always retaining a soft spot in my heart, although their output over the last decade has done little for me. Their ‘Southland in the Springtime’ (from 1990’s career peak Nomads, Indians and Saints) is simply one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard, warm like an aural cuddle, incredibly and tangibly evocative of a place I have never been, and with a gorgeous combination of harmony voices and acoustic guitars and a richness of texture that is quite breathtaking.

I have also bought or downloaded quite a few Lucinda Williams albums; she is in some ways analogous to a female Nick Cave, veering from the scary to the sweet on different albums, from the utter beauty and tenderness of ‘Essence’ (from which ‘Blue’ and ‘I envy the wind’ defy my limited ability to find new words for beautiful without a thesaurus to hand) to the scary rap-country she practiced on her next album ‘World without tears’.

I guess my conclusion, circuitously reached and outrageously generalising, is that, while they have not dominated my collection, female alt-countresses (?) can undoubtedly hit peaks of heavenly beauty firmly denied to their male counterparts.

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