Dublin: rock n roll capital of . . . Dublin? Is the city dead again or merely hibernating? Okay, so that old Dublin Is Dead riff has been trotted out every couple of years since the birth of Irish rock n roll, but even the most empathetic observer must admit that the end of the century finds the city short on credit and credibility.
Much to the snotty rockerati s mortification and/or amusement, the only domestic act to achieve any kind of significant success at home or abroad in recent years has been Boyzone, and that organisation s recent relocation of their A&R links to London removes even them from the little picture. As time marches on, the town appears to be in the throes of torpor.
The country cousins are snatching all the garlands. Northern acts like David Holmes, Therapy?, Ash, The Bedhangers, Joyrider, The Skinflints, The Divine Comedy, Cuckoo and Watercress have equalled and even surpassed the halcyon days of the Terri Hooleygans. In fact, just about every county in Ireland can lay claim to some kind of happening band, whether it s Rumble, Starchild, The Marbles or Kerbdog. Previously, cities like Cork, Limerick and Galway were Dublin s only real rivals, but the current climate has facilitated some serious breeding in hitherto sleepy rural territories like the midlands. Only a fistful of the provincials might be deserving of any kind of international success, but once these tadpoles find their legs, they ll be lining up to give capital the kick up the posterior it needs.
But autopsies are easy. To some degree I m playing devil s advocate here I came to neither praise the capital nor bury it. Besides, there are some star acts in the city: Pelvis possess the panache, crackle and pop of true believers, the Plague Monkeys have strategy, subtlety and suss, Jubilee Allstars are delicate and delectable, and other contenders like Skindive, Coosh, Bawl and The Marigolds can justifiably count themselves as part of Dublin s vanguard. It would be not only glib to simply write the city off, but foolish. Plus, polemical post-mortems have a way of blowing up in your face; no sooner than you pronounce the subject dead by misadventure (or in this case lack of adventure) does it start kicking its way off the slab again.
Indeed, it could be argued that any article such as this is just the angling of a dirtbird journalist backed up by selective and subjective interpretations of the facts. So, is it the bottles o bullsheizer talking? It might be fair to say that Dublin is in much the same state as it s always been, that the recent Northern uprising has merely thrown into relief problems that have always existed in the capital s musical community. But if so, how come local acts are no longer selling concert tickets or records at the same rate as they did at the turn of the decade?
The influx of more and more foreign touring acts has damaged that, claims 2FM producer/promoter Ian Wilson. All the money is going into touring acts and it s not going into local stuff. That and dance music have made it much more difficult to sell tickets to events.
True enough, acts like Hyper[Borea], dEcal, and Liquid Wheel would appear to have converted a large proportion of those thrill-seekers who previously spent their disposable income on live gigs. And to make matters worse, the majority of the city s musicians don t even have consolation of the critical kudos once afforded bands like The Subterraneans and The Real Wild West. This is a city with the second largest growth-rate in Europe struggling to cough up as many decent bands as regional areas with one fraction of the headcount. So yes, while the Big Smoke can be justifiably proud of its handful of few new acts, when you consider the per capita factor, there ain t a whole lotta shakin goin on.
where have all the good times gone?
Cast your mind back to the end of the 80s. Dublin acts were coining it in the Irish charts and on the live circuit. This was an era when the likes of Something Happens, The Fat Lady Sings, Aslan, An Emotional Fish and Hothouse Flowers hogged the Top 20 and could headline the SFX or The Stadium with ease.
Mind you, the Flowers were part-responsible for the wild goose chase that was the raggle-taggle phenomenon. Raggle-taggle is crucial here because (a) it was probably the closest thing to an independent, indigenous musical movement produced and sustained by Dublin in the last 15 years, (b) it was immune to and blissfully ignorant of the caprices of the British press and (c) remarkably, it produced almost no homegrown work of any longlasting virtue despite being built on the principles of Soul, Authenticity and The Song.
That said, it wasn t all rotten in the state of Denmark that scene produced at least one classic single from Galway ex-pats The Swinging Swine in the form of Them Ghosts Do Come , and there was a genuine sense of community which fostered the likes of The Mary Janes, The Wilde Oscars, The Frames and trad warriors such as Kila. And while a fair few musicians got scuppered by industry endgames and returned to the dayjob or the dolequeue when the 1980s boom became gloom, as many again had the guts and resilience to rethink, relocate and remutate.
But The Commitments telegraphed the end of innovation and heralded a new breed of city seamster: the cabaret cash-in merchant. By 93, many of the city s brightest hopes and most established acts had either disbanded or taken sabbaticals from which they d never really return or recover. The Cranberries went global but Dublin could claim no part in their success. A cull ensued. With all the crowdpullers demobbed, big local gigs were replaced by Yellow Pack or Unplugged nights in the Baggot or Whelan s; dull, sparsely-attended non-happenings plagued with dullard, non-happening bands.
Things like the Yellow Pack gigs just killed off the live scene, recalls Donal Scannell, scene activist and presenter of the Friday night Radio Ireland dance show Insomnia. From an entertainment point of view, why go see a shite band?
So, with the old feudal system scrambled and the hierarchy fractured, the era of the smalltown rockstar was over. And with the death of the wild colonial smalltown boy, out went the last vestiges of glamour in the city. Rumblings from the Norn Iron contingent and the insistent thump of club culture put the word on the street that Sonic The Hedgehog was eating the rock n roll animal. Others maintained that the rock n roll animal was eating itself.
Anyhow, by 95 most of the capital s bright young things Revelino, The Frames, Whipping Boy were anything from five to seven years old and already an album or two down the line. But the real worry was that there were no upstarts snapping at their heels. Apart from Shane O Neill s Dirt roster, the emerging Tension label and a thriving hardcore contingent, few of whom would bother the mainstream, there was little to be recommended around town. Hearteningly though, instead of waiting for their major label dole to come through, acts like The Revenants and The Sewing Room were getting off their arses, financing their own recordings and getting their sounds out on the street.
Even Jim Carroll, one of the city s most scathing critics, admitted in his 1996 essay Dublin Is Dead (The Rewrite) : There s a grand DIY co-op network and the opportunities to collaborate are many. Not so much we re all in this together as the old rural meitheal system where the community mucks in to get the job done.
Certainly the infrastructure is in place. There are still enough city centre venues, rehearsal rooms and recording studios to sustain any scene that might happen an ironic reversal of the fact that the cities with all the new bands have no live circuit. Dublin, of course, does have its weak administrative links. There s a lack of decent managers, and the musicians themselves don t seem to know, or want to know, anything about promoting, selling, packaging and making money from their own music. But this is the stuff of another article and besides, it s not really the major concern. That, as ever, is the music itself.
the mothertongue
The majority of young Dublin songwriters and lyricists tend to avoid precisely the kind of subjects that might bring a fresh perspective to their artform (and anyone who doesn t consider rock n roll an artform, well, fuck em, and fuck the thesaurus they rode in on too). Certainly the young males of the species are loathe to write about the meat n potatoes of life, particularly the kind of marital and domestic matters that were and are grist to the mill of Hank Williams, John Lennon, and Elvis Costello. It s as if the young bucks can t sever the apron strings and are preoccupied with escapist values even into their 30s.
Rock n roll has always suffered from a Peter Pan complex but Dublin swallowed the Loaded gun and Ladrock fad slink, line and hooker. Taking Jagger rather than Keef as their oracle, some of those boyos fell to regurgitating mouldy ol misogynies, or worse, quasi-gothic rawk poetics .
The provincial patois smalltown tales of gossiping trollops, Sunday Mass and murder in the bogswamps utilised by artists like Pierce Turner, The Sawdoctors and The Hitchers is far more likely to strike a primordial chord with the great unwashed than any of Damon Albarn s condescending kitsch-and-sink vistas. Natives of Mallow or Tullow won t necessarily have time for songs about scoring the key to the golden crapper in Renard s or Lillie s Bordello a song like Musha God Help Her will always carry more common clout than any Pamper-clad blast of complaint rock.
(On that subject: why are all our young men and women so serious? Why isn t the much trumpeted sense of Irish absurdity embodied by everyone from Flann O Brien to Dylan Moran manifest in post-colonial rock n roll? I ll wager history will judge marginalised cranks like Aidan Walshe, The Joshua Trio and the whole damn Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy more kindly than it will The Word and The Pleasure Cell. In this (dis)respect, Corkonian lunatic fringers like The Franks, The Sultans, The Wassies and Cathal Coughlan have always been streets ahead of the capital.)
At the end of 1992 the late Bill Graham issued an accurate, if grim diagnosis of this parish s chief musical ailments in his broadside The City Of The Dead . It s a testimony to his insights and an indictment of the local scene that just about every point raised in that piece is still relevant, so much so that it s hard not to pilfer his lines of argument wholesale.
It isn t that Dublin doesn t speak to itself, he asserted. It doesn t even want to. 1980s bad examples still hang heavy over the city. Dubliners rid themselves of their own language and chose pop esperanto so they could bomb in Boston. Gazing outward, they never looked inward and so lost their reason to be. Even any passing Smiths clones didn t follow Morrissey s best example and look for Salford in Stoneybatter.
True enough, this is a city where scores of bands will slavishly ape Neil Young s lumberjack apparel and feedback squalls but ignore his compulsion to write songs about the terrors of random shootings ( Driveby ), or even the paralysing ambiguities of the pro-life/pro-choice fight ( Act Of Love ). I d love to hear the song that eulogises rent allowance, or the DART, or the tobacco hawkers on Moore and Mary Street. Perhaps a town once part-proud of its status as the Second City of Empire has inherited a passivity that allows it to happily import ideas from abroad rather than utilising its own, thus leaving the door open for a whole passel o power-hungry culchies.
Of course it s not all as black and white as the townies versus the bog warriors there s a long tradition of migrants like The Floors and Engine Alley becoming so assimilated into cosmopolitan culture that the line between urban and rural becomes blurred, but is it mere coincidence that the latest elite of Dublin media-hipsters Uaneen Fitzsimons, John Kelly, the Donals Dineen and Scannell et al are all blow-ins?
But Dublin has had its own share of parochial heroes in the past. Phil Lynott was the ultimate anomaly, a black rocker from Crumblin with a poetic sensibility cogged from his neighbours Dominic and Brendan Behan. Philip Chevron wrote about being isolated, gay and stood up, but he still located himself Under Clery s Clock . But offhand, I can only think of Fergal McKee (himself a native of Kildare), Dave Couse, and Damien Dempsey utilising the inner-city vernacular, puzzling when one considers that the likes of Joyce considered the pig-English of Dublin an equally, if not more fertile medium than the King s American or the Queen s Anglican.
As a matter of fact, if you interview any local band, they ll converse in a lingo more witty, wily and lyrical than the mid-Atlantic rockspeak they compose their songs in. Whether from being bottle-fed by MTV Europe VJs who don t seem to speak any recognisable language, or suffering subliminal colonisation courtesy of the satellite channels (Murdoch rock, anyone?), or from sucking up to that hoary old goat The National Inferiority Complex, Dublin rockers have lost some fundamental grip on the indigenous spirit which might enable them to become trendsetters rather than copycats. Given that rock music is the traditional recreative preserve of the young middle-classes, perhaps The Donnybrook Drawl has become Dublin rockers adopted tongue. At the moment, one might be forgiven for thinking that the gift of a gab had emigrated, skipped a generation and surfaced again in the likes of Jarvis Cocker and Shaun Ryder.
writers block
In the corner of a Dublin pub
The party opens blub-a-blub . . .
The boys go wild and toast the Joker
The master of the mediocre.
from The Paddiad (or the devil as a patron of Irish letters) by Patrick Kavanagh
Perhaps rock critics get the rock bands they deserve. And vice versa. Dublin musicians often expect exposure merely for having played a few gigs and released a four-track tape on Ballybuttfuck Records, and if they don t get it they respond by playing the conspiracy card and scuttling back to the comfort of the local porterhouse.
Thing is, what many local acts don t understand is that they re expected to compete with Madonna and Marilyn Manson, not only in the charts, but for print-space, and if they want coverage they d better make good copy. Which many of them don t, simply because they haven t lived or travelled enough to be a truly interesting read.
Still, Leonard Cohen once remarked that the two qualities most required by a young poet are arrogance and inexperience . The same could be said of musicians self-doubt is out. Equally though, Irish scribes could well be indicted for distorting the Dublin story: many hacks (present writer included) are prone to veering from sentimental mollycoddling to outright malice when dealing with local acts, substituting analysis for opinion. Could be we re all blowing hot n bothered rather than playing it cool.
And also true, there is a crusty old coterie of hardened hacks who wouldn t check out the support band at a gig if it killed them, whose main critical concern is that the circulation of free beer not get clotted, and that the major labels and promoters keep those drunken junkets coming. Ian Wilson regards them as A tiny little group of people who sit around and scratch each other s arseholes and tell each other they re wonderful and write it all up in the paper and nobody dare says boo about it. Hot Press is as guilty as anybody of it. Paper never refused ink.
get off the dart line!
How many Dublin bands territorial pissings extend beyond the core of the city and out to Finglas, Ballybrack, Swords, Drumcondra, Ballyfermot and Tallaght? The beer gardens and bingo halls of outlying townships mightn t have the same allure as a support slot in The Point, but they are ideal places for learning how to turn an indifferent or even potentially hostile audience into a supportive one, expanding the fanbase beyond the rock cognescente of Dublins 1 through 4.
Besides, support slots in The Point are overrated. We have a city full of support acts, happy to play the bridesmaid to visiting high-profile acts, never testing their stamina beyond the 40-minute mark. Over to you, Bill Graham: Think on this. Why do Dublin bands prefer showcase gigs? A band unable to convert their hometown isn t likely to move hearts and minds elsewhere.
But for all the working bands out there at the moment, there are few true performers. Dublin has yielded its fair share of headcases in the past; Ger Whelan, Dave Lavelle and Simon Carmody to name but three. And while the late- 80s brigade may have been guilty of reciting their own press releases whilst necking vodka in the town s more notorious rock n roll whorehouses, at least they understood the value of glamour, no matter how low-rent. Good songs are vital, but a real sense of magnetism, theatre, drama and danger, that s what separates Oasis from Ocean Colour Scene. The city appears to have quit breeding extroverts. If the stage is a place where, to recontextualise Nietzsche, Everything is permitted, nothing is true , then this parish is in sore need of someone willing to make a holy show of themselves.
Watching a 50-year-old Iggy slaughter The Fiddler last year, I noticed scores of local contenders skulking on the sidelines, wilting not from the heat but the hopelessness they just knew that they couldn t compete with the charred grandad. Mind you, the audiences are as bad for tolerating mediocrity. Dubliners will put up with the most conservative, cowardly performances from po-faced no-hopers without so much as a heckle or a jibe.
This doesn t just apply to locals The Eagles and Sting all recently turned in sterile or patronising performances in this city and were richly rewarded for it. Why do so many international acts begin their tours in Dublin? Because they know we ll let them get away with shabby opening-nights. The worst reaction you ll get from a Dublin crowd is indifference.
just who are the
mystery girls?
Recent genderquakes in rock n roll have not yet resonated through Dublin. We still produce stereotypical female artists: the Barbie-rella doll (Una, Chill), the put-upon, compulsively confessional chanteuse (Eleanor McEvoy, Naimi Coleman), the ex-trad balladeer (Mary Black) or the radio-friendly unit-shifter (Leslie Dowdall). Examples of unisex band line-ups are few. There have been exceptions The Forget Me Nots, Zrazy and the odd all-girl outfit like The Colleens but in the main, the clitorati have opted for traditional roles.
Baffling stuff, especially when you consider that there are now artists like Polly Harvey, Kim Deal and Courtney Love to take cues from, and acts like Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins, Spiritualized and Garbage all feature key female players. Gone are the days when (experimentalists such as Kate Bush and Lori Anderson aside) female rock n role models like Chrissie, Patti and The Runaways emulated rather than usurped the rat-haired rocker archetype.
If nothing else, Tori Amos and Madonna made it possible to play Mary and Magdalene in rock s rich pageant. Siniad O Connor (herself now in a self-obsessed slump that I fear will see her grow old before her time as a mere interpreter of trad standards and occasional composer of MOR fare) might ve breached the city gates but the suffragettes never stormed Troy. Even freshwomen like Naimee Coleman (herself owing an enormous vocal debt to O Connor, almost as much as Dolores but that s another day s work) are suffering from Pro-Minstrel Tension, content to fill the roles hackneyed out for them 30 years ago by Joan and Joni.
With the acoustic mistresses still too readily playing the victim and engaging in media rather than Medea games, we re missing the song that expresses both the profanity and profundity of the female experience in Dublin it s as if PJ Harvey convinced Sheela-Na-Gig to elope to Yeovil five years ago and she never came back. Crazy Jane has left the building.
kick out the deaf jams
With so many bands, it s all about the existential rush, the Kerouacian doing of the thing, not the craft. How many rehearsal sessions deteriorate into dry runs for the live show, an unaerobic workout? Surprisingly few Dublin bands are convincing freeformers how
many musicians interned in The Ormond or the Temple Bar Music Centre engage in the kind of improv exercises and listening techniques so beloved of jazzmasters, soundtrack scorers, dance acts, DJs or even (god between us and all marijuana farmers) Sun Ra or The Grateful Dead?
You can have your Tin Pan Alley and eat it too. Much-plundered pioneers like The Beatles, The Beach Boys and The Byrds always backed up their dabblings in the avant-garde with solid songwriting skills. Both approaches are valid but local players rarely attempt to reconcile them. Also, in the rush to get a live set together, new bands often relegate their most challenging material to the back of the class, thus allowing the straightforward (and by extension, more mediocre) songs to dominate the repertoire.
Also, Dublin musicians are often handicapped by the parameters of the genre they choose to work within. Your average indie guitar player will be well-acquainted with Marr and even McGuinn, but will he or she bring Link Wray, Wilko Johnson or even Bob Quine to the party? Not at the keg-houses I ve been frequenting. The jacks are bad at the oul Beck-like mix n match, even if that s where it s at.
Certainly, most Liffey-logged rhythm sections are still wearing badly dated Baggy trousers. They won t necessarily have considered that pre-Mondays, pre-disco even, pop music had to be danceable. In the days before the rift between rock n roll and dance was artificially inserted, Motown and Muscle Shoals ruled and even the white R&B students had to have a motherfucker of a rhythm section like Charlie n Bill or John Paul and Bonzo.
The average Dub bass n drummer will have suckled the funk second-hand off the likes of the Chili Peppers or worse, Primus, rather than sourcing it back to James B or George Clinton. Favouring rawkschool teutonics over feel, they ll dry-hump the funk, unlubricated by what Prince once called chicken-grease , that slippery body fluid that only starts to flow after several hundred hours of jammin time have been logged.
The smart guys take the time out to ask Bootsy Collins or Sly n Robbie about it they don t just lick it off The Stones. Scarey Iire and Marxman excepted, Dublin dance bands have long been represented by chicken-in-a-basket-cases burnt out from too many years of punching the clock in The Waterfront, immune to or unaware of madcaps like the The Blockheads, Grace Jones, BAD, the pioneering Was Brothers, or other stalwarts of the Ze label. If funk is a composite of the words fuck and fun then it makes you wonder about the personal lives of Dublin players.
But forget the hipshake for a minute. What about the vocalists and songwriters? Again, the role models are often as predictable and conservative as pub grub Kurt n Eddie, Jim Morrison, Neil Young, a dog s dinner of rock n roll sarcophoguys all invoked and aped as much for the cut of their jibs as the quality of their vocal chords. Brel, Brecht, Weill, Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone and Serge Gainsbourg are largely ignored by all but mavericks like Jack L and Katell. And if we take the musicians contact ads in the back of Hot Press as a barometer of where the freshmen are coming from, notices like Lead guitarist wanted for melodic acoustic rock outfit (Gothic/Celtic) or Bass player required. Influences Eagles to Radiohead are hardly heartening.
But I accept that it s unrealistic to expect a teenage player to be a junior musicologist. As a teenage yellabelly, I could to some extent claim geographic marginalisation as being a co-conspirator in my ignorance, but twentysomething Dubliners can t cry foul on this score. When I first moved to the city I was dazzled by the range of (often rare) cheap albums that could be found in the many stalls and second-hand shops, not to mention the galaxies of roots musics in Gael Linn and Claddagh.
With that in mind, I can think of few Liffey grifters au fait enough with folk, jazz or blues to have the confidence to abuse and transmutate those roots in the way, say, Jon Spencer, Polly Harvey or Tom Waits might. Or, to push the envelope a bit, how about Sergio Leone? The likes of Terry Edwards and Barry Adamson did not spring fully-formed from the womb.
Mind you, the radio doesn t help. While Messrs Fanning, Kelly and Dineen might constitute a formidable last line of defence in terms of stimulating listening, we all know that the daylight hours are a wasteland of ad-dominated classic hits factories staffed by idiots imitating FM Bay Area jocks, peddling all manner of codger-fodder. And as for the commercial stations actually playing Dublin bands before nightfall? Forget about it!
But speaking of copping chops off the radio, one of the more irritating characteristics of Dublin bands is the extent to which they re easily impressed by prevailing trends, favouring bare-faced plagiarism over porous osmosis. Time and again, they behave like little jackeen russells running after the latest flashy car. They don t suffer from lack of direction so much as being multi-directional. One wonders if they had an agenda of their own to start with, would they be as eager to hijack such shiny out-of-town bandwagons?
Dublin s copyists were losers, who always missed the bus, Bill Graham concluded at the end of 92. They cadged an English or American idea in its prime, delayed a further nine months to gestate, get signed and fulfil an A&R man s quota, and then released an album a year later to universal apathy exactly and inevitably because it was then two years after that style had peaked. Dublin mimics are always doomed to mistime and misfire, and then never get a second chance since they ve lost all sense of any creative identity . . .
just where are the
nightown boys?
So what am I trying to prove here? Well, where Dublin is concerned, there s no great QED in the sky. But it s tantalising to think of what could be if Dublin were to suddenly begin dictating it s own terms, or at least rejecting second-hand trends.
The precedents are there. A city that can foster artists and anarchists like The Stars Of Heaven and The Golden Horde must have some germ culture at work in its dirty Liffey water.
I suspect Gavin Friday s last record in particular might hold some clues for the future it opened a chink in the drab wall of dadrock n dole through which to voyeurise an entirely different Dublin, a blue-lit, hazy, updated take on Joyce s Nightown. Or is that mere fancy? Only as long as the visionaries stay underground. But one listen to The Radiators Ghostown back to back with Shag Tobacco confirms that Dublin ain t dead, it s just blocked.
Let The Joker have the last word: This town needs an enema!n