How Elvis Made Ireland Shake, Rattle & Roll

Ivor Casey’s Elvis & Ireland is a genuinely original take on how the man who invented rock ‘n’ roll changed the world – and specifically our own little patch of earth.

There’s no shortage of contenders for the accolade of inventor of rock ‘n’ roll. I’ll go with John Lennon who is said to have said: “Before Elvis, there was nothing.” In Ireland, nothing meant nothing except country ‘n’ Irish, patriotic ballads, Josef Locke and showbands. None of them entirely to be sneered at, but all antipathetic to the ethos of rock ‘n’ roll.
There was a glowering consensus among the cloth-eared, the clergyites and the muddle classes that rock ‘n’ roll was brimstone music and Elvis a devil in disguise as a regular guy. To become a fan of Elvis was to fall in with the wrong crowd. A portrait on the cover of Time was overprinted with a verse: “When they guzzle rot-gut and snarl in rage /And reject as corny advice that’s sage /You’ll know they’re in the Presley age… /But when they turn to Crosby and Patti Page /You’ll know they are leaving the Presley age.”
Patti’s breakthrough hit was the unutterably charming ‘How Much Is That Doggie In The Window (the one with the waggily tail)’. She made the first-ever recording of ‘The Tennessee Waltz’. She died last New Year’s Day at 85.
The point is – had she been Irish, it’s not the fact that she sold a hundred million records but that she figured on a magazine cover which also featured Elvis that would have entitled her to a page of exegesis and rumination in Ivor’s entrancingly idiosyncratic work.
‘Hound Dog’ was the first record Christy Moore ever bought. Damien Dempsey covered ‘Always On My Mind’. The Pogues made a version of ‘Gotta Lotta Livin’ To Do’. John McCormack recorded ‘O Sole Mio’ which was covered by Elvis as ‘It’s Now Or Never’.
Almost any Irish musician of the last 50 years is only two steps away from Elvis. He recorded ‘Danny Boy’, aka ‘The Londonderry Air’, meaning all Derry people are near-enough his cousins.
The book’s detail is dense and the allusions occasionally overstretched. But the cumulative effect is startling, surprising and not without significance. Sean Lemass became Taoiseach in June 1959, dismantled the protective walls and opened the Republic out to the world. Rock ‘n’ roll gusted in, like ozone into smog. Elvis epitomised the moment when we sloughed off the muck of ages. The other plot-point that came in June 1959 was the release of the first Elvis single pressed in Ireland – ‘A Fool Such As I’ /’I Need Your Love Tonight’.
A coincidence, of course, although not quite. Ireland had to come to terms with Elvis before it could take its place among the nations of the changing world.
No other artist, in any genre of high art or low culture, has so clearly demarcated the difference between the way we were and the way we wanted to be.
Ivor has spent 11 years compiling material to sustain this thesis. He has published the book himself, having had more than a few difficulties along the way. But, he says, “Nothing dissuaded me from following this one small dream, to write a book on Elvis.” His next challenge is to get it onto bookshop shelves. Keep an eye out.
 
I noticed a survey in a magazine a couple of weeks back suggesting that 85% of Irish workers have had sex with a work colleague they were not in a relationship with.
Not in the places I’ve worked, they didn’t – unless the rest of them were keeping me in the dark about what they were doing in the dark, which, now that I come to think on it, is probably true.
There are other dismaying findings too distressing to recount.
I have to say I was surprised to learn that, “Some 62% of respondents say that size doesn’t matter.” It has often seemed to me that I might have had more success in my sparse romantic life if I had had a couple of extra inches. Five-foot-seven-and-a-bit doesn’t put me in the midget category, but those six-foot fellows always seemed to find it easier to get off. Regrets, I have a few.
 
It’s a bit late in the day for comment on the laying to rest of Margaret Thatcher, who gibbered her last in a suite in the Ritz Hotel. I wonder why they waited a week before the funeral. She must have been three-quarters putrefied. We should give thanks the coffin didn’t leak as they shouldered her into St. Paul’s.
Patrons of the Ritz have high standards, which I suppose is the reason that units of the London fire brigade are still in there hosing down the walls.
 
I arrived at the Verbal Arts Centre for an RTÉ radio programme which Soak was to close with a song. Where is she? I asked. “Under the table,” explained George Lee. And so she was.
“For fuck’s sake, Bridie, what are you at?” I enquired. Or words to that effect. “It’s nice.” she responded, sighing contentedly.
Mad as a hatter and a shoe-in for superstardom, which I’m told amounts to much the same thing.