Some 'old' Irish Music for St Patrick's Day

Just a quick post tonight, but it is Saint Patrick's Day, and I thought I should mark the occasion with a few Irish music videos, as I did this day last year. This year, I thought I would delve a bit backwards, to the 1980s and 1990s, and some perhaps less well known (at least outside Ireland) songs.

The first is 'Friends in time', by the Golden Horde, which was from the mid-1980s, although the TV clip (perhaps deliberately?) looks like it came from the 1950s. I don't remember much of the Golden Horde bar this one magnificent, wonderful song (quite popular at weddings, apparently!), but it is enough that they should never be forgotten:

I do remember seeing 'the Horde' one or twice at outside concerts in Dublin's parks (called Larks in the Park), but the star of those shows, in my memory, was always the Hothouse Flowers, famously known in Dublin for being labelled by Rolling Stone magazine, no less, as the best unsigned band in the world. Their gigs, which i saw a lot of, were sort of mad free-wheeling things full of passion, energy and skill, which they somehow lost on record, although their debut single 'Love don't work this way' (with Maria Doyle Kennedy on duet vocals, not the version that appeared on their debut album 'People') remains one of my favourite Irish songs ever. I could not find that one on Youtube, but did find their summer classic 'Don't go', with a video I fondly remember from (ahem) the Eurovision, which I watched that year only because it was in Dublin, and this video (or perhaps a longer version) was shown at the interval:

That is one song which will always be evocative for me of an Irish summer of my youth ('the smell of fresh-cut grass, filling up my senses') and the other is this one, even older, called 'Summer in Dublin', by Bagatelle:

Hopping forward a few years brings me to 'Arclight', by the Fat Lady Sings, with a lovely unusual melody which lingers affectionately many years on. I saw them live a few times too, and they were great, and Nick Kelly (who I have also seen solo a few times, and whose e-mailing list I am still on) always seemed one of the nicest guys in Irish music:

I will finish off a few years later with 'Eve the apple of my eye' by Bell X1, an absolutely almost perfect song:

So, it may be raining, the country may be in tatters, the economy may be bust beyond repair, but on this national holiday, it is nice to remember we will always have our music, and maybe soon that is all we will have!