A little help from our friends

On the occasion of hotpress 30th birthday, we decided to gather together an array of Ireland’s brightest entertainment stars from the past three decades. Enjoying the champers, the tea and cake at what was a kind of virtual shindig were Christy Moore, Damien Dempsey, Shane McGowan, Sinead O’Connor and Tommy Tiernan.
There is a noticeable kinship between Moore and Dempsey, two artists with similar outlooks and musical sensibilities who clearly have huge respect for each other’s songwriting talents. Sinead O’Connor and Shane MacGowan, meanwhile, have a different kind of friendship: having both enjoyed huge international success, beginning in the ‘80s, they have dealt with the pressures of the limelight differently. But both Shane and Sinead have come to be recognised as two of Ireland’s most uncompromising and gifted songwriters and performers.
And then there is Tommy Tiernan, the country’s biggest stand-up act, whose stunningly imaginative comedy marks him out as a humourist of rare brilliance.
What all of the aforementioned entertainers have in common is a uniquely Irish sensibility, which imbues their work with wit, insight and warmth. And as the accompanying photos indicate, they are also well versed in another cherished Irish tradition – having a good time!

Sinead O'Connor

Arguably the most famous Irish woman in the world alongside former President Mary Robinson, Sinéad O’Connor’s career has seen the singer display intense courage in the face of often-intense antagonism.
Few Irish men or women have confronted the prejudices in Irish society as determinedly or as heroically as Sinéad. Her appearance, when her fine debut album The Lion And The Cobra was released, as a bald-headed woman was derided by the small-minded who dismally failed to see the honesty that such nakedness reflected. But she was undaunted, speaking out, as her career developed, on such issues as abortion, religion, misogyny, sex abuse, child abuse, poverty, war and sex in formidably direct terms.
The shock and outrage that followed her tearing up of a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in 1992 and her call to “fight the real enemy!” meant that we would never again look at the holder of that position with the reverence accorded by previous generations. Never one to shy away from controversy, she posed nude on the cover of hotpress with her first baby and won a whole new army of admirers in the process. Later, she was ordained a priest. Always, she was in pursuit of a deeper kind of truth.
Her courage shines through in her music. The night she did for Pope John Paul II, she surrounded herself with candles and performed an a cappella version of ‘War’ by Bob Marley. Her most heart-rending recorded performance must be her interpretation of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares To U’, which was accompanied by a promo clip that took the art of the music video to another level. But through superb albums like I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got, Universal Mother and Faith and Courage, she has established herself as a brilliant songwriter as well as a marvellous singer and an interpreter of unparalleled sensitivity.
All of which, we think, makes Sinead O'Connor the finest and most important Irish female artist of the past fifty years.

Christy Moore

Irish folk music has a long and distinguished lineage, but of its late 20th-century exponents, two stand out: the late Luke Kelly, and the incomparable Christy Moore.
Something of a national treasure, and renowned as one of the warmest, sweetest individuals in the business, Christy first came to prominence with seminal folk quartet Planxty, and then left to pursue a solo career. He also formed Moving Hearts in 1980 with old comrade Donal Lunny.
Both groups’ work is widely acclaimed, but Moore is probably best known for a sequence of brilliant solo albums in the mid-’80s. At a time when it was neither ‘cool’ nor profitable to do so, Moore unapologetically espoused socialist republican politics. He supported the H-Block protestors on hunger strike, and subsequently covered the Bobby Sands-penned ‘Back Home In Derry’. He has also written about a variety of international issues, including the Palestinian occupation, and the Irish socialists who volunteered for the Spanish Civil War.
Not all Christy’s material is concerned with such weighty matters (‘Joxer Goes To Stuttgart’ chronicles the Irish football team’s historic 1988 defeat of England) and some contend that his work has become less relevant and challenging since the ‘80s, but Moore remains an engaging live performer and potent songwriter. He has occasionally retired, citing nervous exhaustion, but invariably returns to the fray, to the delight of his adoring audiences. Damien Dempsey has cited Moore as a massive influence, as have a number of contemporary acts.
Best seen as a protest singer in the Woody Guthrie tradition, but far more subtle and humorous than that might indicate, the man’s place in the pantheon of Irish music greats is assured.

Shane MacGowan

Grainy footage from a Sex Pistols gig in 1977 reveals an arresting sight: a visibly intoxicated young gentleman pogoing wildly in the front row, sporting a Union Jack T-shirt. A young lady affectionately attacks him with a broken bottle, and bites his ear: blood flows copiously, and the scene is widely photographed for posterity.
The lad in question was Shane O’Hooligan (nee MacGowan), already a notorious London scenester, a Tipperary native exiled from Ireland at the age of six. In years to come, he would forge a reputation as one of the finest lyricists on the planet. His first band, The Nipple Erectors (subsequently abbreviated to Nips), hammered out a few essential garage-rock chords with more enthusiasm than skill, but it wasn’t until he formed The Pogues in 1983 that the world began to sit up and take notice.
Informed equally by the punk ethos, the bawdy balladry of The Dubliners and MacGowan’s morose, poetic lyrical sensibility, their debut LP Red Roses For Me was an arresting, alcohol-fuelled rebel howl, alternately brutal (‘Boys From The County Hell’) and tender (‘Kitty’).
By the time of its follow-up Rum Sodomy & The Lash, it was evident that something astonishing was afoot. Spectacularly literate, darkly romantic, morbidly funny and wearily existential, MacGowan had struck a vein of creativity that (for a time) seemed unshakeable.
Despite uncompromising artistic integrity, the sheer quality of MacGowan’s songwriting made mass commerical success inevitable: the peak came on ‘Fairytale Of New York’, a heart-melting tale of an epic love affair between two down-and-out alkies, which sold zillions of copies and swiftly became a Christmas standard.
Never the most temperate of individuals, MacGowan’s notorious drink problem was accompanied by gargantuan consumption of LSD, heroin, coke and just about any other substance under the sun. The mad shadows, first manifest on ‘Turkish Song Of The Damned’ and ‘Down In The Ground When The Dead Men Go’, soon interfered with touring and recording, though the albums Peace & Love and Hell’s Ditch contain some of MacGowan’s blackest, finest writing. Nonetheless, Shane was habitually so off his tree he would miss gigs, fall on stage and forget lyrics, and the other Pogues fired him in 1991.
MacGowan hung out in London for a while with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, a sympathetic mutual-admiration society reflected in a recording collaboration. His duet with Cave on Louis Armstrong’s ‘Wonderful World’ was a mixed success, but his cover of Cave’s ‘Lucy’ is nothing short of perfect.
Shane made two acclaimed solo albums in the 1990s (The Snake and The Crock Of Gold) with his band The Popes. It’s now 10 years since MacGowan released any original material, but the canon of work he’s already produced is fit to ensure his status as one of the most talented artists of all time.

Tommy Tiernan

Not so long ago, Irish comedy amounted to the limp offerings of the likes of Hal Roche, Maureen Potter and sundry others who managed to gain lots of public attention without ever dealing with any of the pressing issues of the day. We won’t be going back there anytime soon though, especially since Tommy Tiernan dragged us kicking and screaming into adulthood.
The usually unshaven Tiernan has brought a rock ’n’roll sensibility to comedic performances that have not so much re-written the rule book as torn it to shreds, and in the process gleefully upset the dullards who still want us to kneel before the sacred cows of yore.
The Navan native has been justifiably savage in his lampooning of the Catholic dominance in Irish culture, delivering his barbed assaults on the hypocrisies buried deep in our psyches by borrowing, and then subverting, the revered style of the Seanachaoi. He uses their acute observations of the contradictions of everyday life, and smuggles his reflections past the thought police in frantically physical and in-your-face performances.
One particular appearance on the Late Late Show led to a clamour that he be banned forever from our TV screens. Yes, he’s that good! He’s had the “bottle” to admit that he sees alcohol as a good thing, and his fevered mind has even tussled with the thought of how history might have been different had Hitler been taught Irish dancing at school.
Tiernan has thus helped us to dismantle and analyse the unacceptable limitations of our culture, by casting a contemporary light on us, not least through the life-affirming sense of fun that shines through his oft-quoted atheistic call to arms, “Nobody knows we’re here, so let’s wreck the joint!”