If a flower billows with splendour as it blooms unseen, is it beautiful?

If a song to sweeten the soul goes all unheard, can we say it’s harmonious?
Some of the best songs, hardly anybody gets to hear. The sheet-music is shredded, the tapes discarded, the writer moves on, the band breaks up, the industry has ears of cloth, whatever. Maybe flibbertigibbet fashion just momentarily fails to notice, and the moment is gone.
I was lured up the stairs of Sandino’s the other night towards the sound of Paddy Nash and Diane Greer with ‘Martin’, a song about a suicide friend leaving only an ache to be savoured in sadness.
“When we were young
He was the first one out at night,
The last to come inside,
He never let you down in a fight.
When we were young,
He was the tallest in our street,
The captain of our team,
The boy with the biggest dream
Was Martin.”
“That’s one fucking great song,” I remarked to Keith Harkin, who crafts a moody, mean verse himself.
“Paddy’s a fucking great song-writer,” he responded.
Which he is. Although not many people know it. Not enough, anyway.

I find myself listening to Dory Previn much more since I worked out how to hook the iPod into the car stereo. Or maybe it’s that I’ve reached the right age for her. There was a time about 25 or so years ago Dory was all the rage with a particular set. She’d published an autobiography of intense eloquence and juddering horror, ‘Midnight Baby’, of how her father, back home mad from the war and Irish Catholicism – Dorothy Langdon is her real name – imprisoned herself and her mother for months in a sealed kitchen “My daddy says I ain’t his child, Ain’t that somethin’, Ain’t that wild?”
She was Howard Hughes’ lover when working as a showgirl at 16 in New York, then married Andre Previn, who later left for Mia Farrow. There isn’t a hint of celeb in the perfect, pointed songs she pieced her life together again with, of “Lemon-haired ladies or 20 or so, Of course you must see them, Of course you must go,” of friends, so-called, who’d stop by and “admire my unmade bed”.
“Would you care to stay ‘til sunrise,
It’s completely your decision,
It’s just the night cuts through me like a knife.
Would you care to stay a while and save my life?”
Noel Pearson produced her showcase Hunky Dory at the Olympia. She became close friends with Mary Holland. In Buswell’s in Molesworth Street, Dublin one night she made her boyfriend Joby give me one of his silk-lined suits because she reckoned nobody could dress as scruffy as I did unless they didn’t have a decent suit to put on.
‘Mythical Kings And Iguanas’ is one of the finest songs for 50 years.
“I have flown to star stained heights
On bent and borrowed wings
In search of mythical kings, mythical kings
Sure that every thing of worth
Was in the sky and not the earth
And I never learned to make my way
Down, down, down, where the iguanas play.”
She gave me a copy of her biog before she went home to LA, with a lovely loving inscription on the fly-leaf, but I lent it to Sinead O’Connor and, of course, that was that.

I was browsing the racks in a record shop in Winnipeg a few years ago when there suddenly came over the sound system a harsh, soft, flat, nasal voice of intoxicating intensity, driven by a percussive polyrhythmic acoustic guitar, singing “Brother, black brother, how much more do you want?” Tony Bird is a white protest singer from Malawi, with, as I was to discover, a musical style and persona unlike anything else you are ever likely to lay ears on.
He writes of jungle mountains lost in mist, lions, bicycles, lust, sunsets and monkeys, accompanies himself, too, with a repertoire of mouth-clicks and finger-drummed guitar, in what I’m told is a fusion of mbqanga, kwela and boer-musik rhythms, although I’d put it down as sort of rock and roll calypso, which shows how much I know.
His album Bird Of Paradise seems to be obtainable only on the net. I guarantee you won’t regret the effort. In 1986, People magazine critics’ poll put it in the top 10 albums of all time. Then, he was forgotten by everybody apart from aficionados of folk festivals. His recent Sorry Africa should have catapulted him back into the firmament, but didn’t. If you want to hear songs which make you know how it feels to fall asleep to the sound of a continent disintegrating and mynah birds singing in the dark, this is it.

Who’s going to roar out Republican ballads now? I am told Ruairi O’Bradaigh can’t hold a tune.
If you break into, “The radio said/There’s another shot dead/And he died with a gun in his hand/But they didn’t say why/Billy Reid had to die/He died to free Ireland” in a pub on the New Lodge these days, one of Billy’s erstwhile comrades now accoutred as a Security Officer is likely to warn you to wheest. So last millennium, the armed struggle and its songs.
War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Goes for the War of National Liberation, too, obviously.
Was ever political death so futile as in the Six Counties in the last 30-plus years?
No more the broad black brimmer, but the slim black briefcase of the IRA. Every man will stand behind the men behind the desk. Oh, grá mo chroi I long to see a partitionist arrangement in place.
Last year Eamon Friel wrote and released the first best song of ceasefire and loss.
“Burn them all. When all the flags are burned,
All the emblems and the anthems, too,
Then I’ll salute the flag of me and you.”
That’s from ‘Here Is The River’ on the album of the same name, reviewed in this space at the time. Hits the mood, hits the moment, zeitgeist stuff.
Tommy Sands wrote of Isaac Scott from Banagh and Sean McDonald from South Armagh who’d often meet on the Ryan Road while laughter filled the air. Isaac was Protestant, Sean was Catholic born. Sometimes in the evening when they heard the sound of drums, they said it won’t divide us, we always will be one
It was on a Sunday morning that the awful news came round of another killing done just outside Newry Town. Sean knew that Isaac danced up there, knew he liked the band.
Then there was fear in every home that a Catholic would be killed to even up the score. And, oh Christ, it was young McDonald who was taken from the door.
“There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people ran together.
There were roses, roses
There were roses...”
Well, I suppose the lads with the armalites and absolute certainty have liberated me in their own way. If this is what they think of the Republic they killed and died in droves for, then I’ll say it with them: Fuck the Republic.
Must be a song in that.