Most of us like a drink and we’re all fond of music. Given this, you’d think a song dedicated to the joys and perils of getting hammered would have the ability to cross class boundaries. You’d be wrong.
Like a pair of divas from different sides of the tracks, Damo and Ivor may have a number one single with ‘Everybody’s Drinkin’ but the two of them have never clapped eyes on each other. Ivor is horrified at the very thought. “I’ve never met that total skanger. I don’t even want to be in his vicinity. I haven’t had my tetanus shots yet!”
Damo is not quite so vicious, but reckons his musical partner is a snob. “I won’t want to be around someone as stuck up as that. They’re all up their arse ya know.”
Ah, well that explains why Hot Press has to meet them separately.
Class war notwithstanding, Damo and Ivor are enjoying being number one.
“Well, number one is like a winning thing for me, I’m always winning – that’s the norm for me,” says Ivor challenging Charlie Sheen in the tiger blood stakes.
Future collaborations don’t seem likely. Damo has been “banging out tunes” for a while, he says, but Ivor is not exactly a musical prodigy.
“I also used to have a pirate radio station in me granno’s house, underneath the stairs. She used to have a bathroom in there. I’d be sitting on the jacks with the decks in front of me. It was real cramped in there.”
While Damo is signed to Skanger Records, Ivor is a bit of a mystery. Who the hell is he? A quick search on the interweb reveals that he’s wealthy and hangs out with the likes of Rosanna Davison, her boyfriend Wes Quirke and his brother Andy. But it seems fame might be getting to his head.
“I don’t even know those people,” Ivor is quick to deny. “I don’t know who you’re talking about! Never heard of them in my life!”
While the song may be high in the charts it’s not universally popular. In The Evening Herald, Michael O’Doherty slated it for glorifying binge drinking.
“That’s bad form, loike” sniffs Ivor. “Everybody does it in Ireland. The thing is if you do go out on the lash you have to deal with the consequences.”
Some of those consequences are worse than others. It was a night of heavy drinking that turned Damo into an unwitting celeb.
“I didn’t mean to do that. All the lads were just out having a laugh, having a couple of beers, the next thing you know the camera was jammed in me face. We were all off our knockers and then the video was up on YouTube, you know what I mean?”
Basically kids, drink too much and you could find yourself sharing ether space with someone you’d cross the road to avoid.
“Yeah,” warns Damo. “I’m not saying don’t drink or have a bit of a laugh, but if you drink too much you could do something that stupid as well. That’s the kind of thing that can happen to ye. It’s bad form, that’s what it is.”