With God on our side

GOD is in the house, or at least, we’re in his. It isn’t often that you get to experience rock’n’roll in the confines of a church, no less, but we have been immersed in that unique and transcendent experience – so it has to be a suitable time and place to seek an audience with the Very Reverend Dr. D. Wayne Love from The Alabama 3.
The mutant Welsh/Scots/Brixton gang’s thoroughly unique techno-blues-C’n’W concoction has just had the audience dancing in the proverbial aisles. Notwithstanding their triumphant appearance, mere minutes later, the Reverend is nowhere to be seen. If Wayne has gone AWOL, not so his brother-in-the-Lord, Larry Love. “So where is the God-damned Reverend?”, I enquire. Larry adopts a clandestine pose and whispers in my ear that Dr.D is probably about the discreet business of adding to his vast collection of cassocks, the vestments he “borrows” from churches all over the world. Ah, so that explains his present absence.
The setting for this unholy chemistry is St. James’ Church, a beatific structure in Dingle, a short swim from Peig Sayers' old stalking ground on the Blasket Islands and a lengthy drive from most other traces of civilisation. It’s also a stupendously beautiful and socially congenial setting, and we’re gathered here for RTRs fourth annual filming of OTHER VOICES, a John Kelly-presented, Later With Jools-style collection of numerous stellar talents, both foreign and native, due for screening over 8 weeks starting on January 25 on RTÉ Two.
The warmth and magic that descends on Dingle throughout the eight-day duration of the series’ recording is utterly unique and special. The atmosphere takes on a festival-like quality, the town’s compact dimensions ensuring that the artists, hacks and assorted interested parties are practically elbow to elbow. With a level of industry that makes creation itself seem a bit lackadaisical, the first six days has seen a virtual Who’s Who of the great and good having come and gone, including The Walls, The Waterboys, Horslips, Trashcan Sinatras, Julie Feeney, James Blunt and the Wainwright siblings, Rufus and Martha. And there are even more appetising treats yet to be sampled – which is, of course, what brings me here.
The event is largely the brainchild of massively-respected musicologist and Dingle native Philip King, a man of such omnivorous musical curiosity and enthusiasm that he can effortlessly appreciate the psychic connection between such apparently unconnected phenomena as Iarla Ó Lionáird and the Asian Dub Foundation.
Indeed, Wednesday night’s bill could hardly have been more diverse if it had encompassed fire-breathing dwarves, military marching bands, sword-swallowing tribal chieftains and a cappella singing polar bears. The afore-mentioned Alabama 3 – who notoriously include several of the wildest party-animals in Christendom – had been scheduled to finish the night, but in fact kicked the proceedings off, fuelled by prodigious quantities of altar-wine, or was it tequila? It’s unlikely that any church has witnessed anything like it since that scene in the first Blues Brothers film. A motley crew of out-and-out space cadets united by their shared adoration of acid house, slamming techno, deep Delta blues and the more credible strands of country (i.e. whisky-guzzling, larger-than-life shit-kickers such as Cash, Willie and Kris), the gang have been ploughing their completely unique furrow for over a decade now and become cultish gods of a sort, without ever quite attaining the status of massive stadium-fillers.
Why this should be is uncertain, though the suspicion certainly strikes that the band’s Bacchanalian lifestyle might have played its part. Watching them at play brings to mind Tina Weymouth’s observation on the Happy Mondays: “I’ve seen plenty of people who live life on the edge, but this was the first group of people I’d seen who had no idea where the edge was.” Their twin driving forces would seem to be Larry Love and the Very Reverend Dr D.Wayne Love, a pair of absolute loons, and complete gentlemen to boot. The latter presents himself in daylight as Jake Black, a bearded, sharp-featured, somewhat wild-eyed shaman, who resembles an emaciated Billy Connolly. Having survived growing up a Celtic fan in Possil, a downright nasty Glaswegian suburb renowned for fanatical Rangers support, and an apocalyptic Buckfast/smack/valium epidemic, the rock’n’roll world holds no terrors for Jake. His partner in crime, Rob Spragg, is the victim of a Welsh Mormon upbringing, which he happily overcame with ‘huge doses of magic mushrooms and Velvet Underground’.
When I ask him if he has an explanation for the success of the OTHER VOICES concept, well, he sure has. “I put it all down to the Power of E. That’s E for Elvis. My mother was a piano player in a church and my father was a Mormon preacher, so both myself and the Reverend Wayne feel completely at home here in Dingle in this fine church,” he says.
On stage, Alabama 3’s inferno of sound had completely blitzed the church, deliriously invoking the demons at the black heart of rock’n’roll. They make the occasional nod to conventional notions of accessibility, such as on their sweet cover version of Aslan’s ‘Crazy World’, and their chaotic, lysergic sonics have a Screamadelica flavour. But despite their innate funkiness and apparent good-time party-soundtrack trappings, the Three are lyrically and spiritually mining the same well of haunted, no-way-out, pitch-black Faustian despair that engulfs the best work of The Doors, Gun Club or Crime’n’the City Solution (“When you woke up this morning/Everything you had was gone”). Hence, Larry Love joining your correspondent in whipping through a freeform medley of Robert Johnson tracks in the hotel lobby at five in the morning. His apparently limitless energy saw him jamming deep into the night with Mike Scott and local trad hero Seamus Begley. “As a Welshman living in Brixton, I got well used to the Irish music scene in the bars, and being here with Mike and Seamus is absolutely brilliant. We don’t have that concept so much in Wales. I reckon because it flies in the face of the chapel tradition.”
Also along to add to the general gaiety of the event were Jape – an ‘outfit’ known to his Mum as Richie Egan.
“I did the OTHER VOICES gig before with Kittser,” Egan confesses, “so I knew it’s a low-volume gig, and this time opted to lean towards the softer side of Jape. I tried a few songs on a lap-top and it crashed, but that’s what I like about these gigs. I love the idea of risk and the challenge of doing a gig in a church to seventy people. I don’t mind failure. In fact I find the idea quite funny. Last year I toured with Starsailor and they’d been on the road for eighteen months doing the same set every night. Who needs that? I thrive on spontaneity and even though the songs are serious I can only do what I feel at the time, so I felt great doing OTHER VOICES. I still feel I haven’t quite nailed it, so I’ll have to do it again next year, won’t I? Please?”
Jape’s role was to follow in the wake of the Alabama hurricane, and he’d have been forgiven for feeling a bit like Chuck Berry upon the occasion that Jerry Lee Lewis – enraged that Berry was headlining a bill both parties were booked on – took the stage, played a stormer, sozzled the piano with petrol, set it alight and stormed off shouting ‘Follow that, nigger’. As it turned out, unlike the aforementioned Berry, Jape rose to the challenge with typical good humour. Jape’s poison of choice on this occasion is a positively weird brew of hip-hop, experimental electronica and almost Mic Christopheric folk-rock. It’s difficult to describe and probably a bitch to market, being potentially too singer-songwriterish for electronica nerds and too beats-and-beeps-dependent for the standard indie crowd. That said, it’s never less than interesting, with Egan a convincing frontman – they’re sure to progress further if God doesn’t strike him down with lightning for his impertinence.
Much solemnity, and pin-drop silence, attends the appearance of Iarla Ó Lionáird. Beginning to achieve media prominence within the last four or five years, O Lionaird is a ferociously gifted singer from West Cork in the sean-nós tradition, whose work is delivered entirely as Gaeilge, thus torpedoing any possibility of its attaining world domination. The subject matter of which he sings, and his lyrical flair therein, may well be a complete mystery to the vast bulk of the audience – I can scarcely speak four or five phrases in my native tongue, and understand still less. But the voice itself is a phenomenon, floating on high over vales and hills, cascading through valleys and swooping to the sea – it’s a supremely evocative instrument, with simultaneous hints of Ibrahim Ferrer and Nick Cave (not easy). It’s impossible to forget.
It also demands an appropriate level of solemnity, so it’s entirely apposite that the next act up should be Asian Dub Foundation, whose floor-shaking brand of mega-bpm jungle takes the Goldie blueprint and cranks it up several notches. If God’s genuinely here, he must be scratching his head in bewilderment. Introducing themselves with a manic ‘HELLO DINGLE CITY!’ the band – often the subject of socio-political over-analysis on account of their counter-cultural position as anti-racist activists and outspoken revolutionaries – reveal themselves to be a stonking live garage-jungle proposition. Sure, their politics are impressive, but politics rarely redeem a dubious live act. The Foundation have far more going on, with ballistic energy levels to put vintage-era Clash or Ramones to shame, as they unleash an avalanche of hard, full-pelt, white-knuckle breakbeats. It’s aggressive, in-your-face, with echoing dub basslines, and strange and effective touches such as the occasional snippet of Asian folksong. The church shakes to its Irish dub foundations, and, miraculously, is still standing at the end of the night. Which is more than can be said for many of the revellers and at least some of the acts involved...
The Thursday dawns, with the breaking news, echoed from Vancouver to Vladivostok, that Roy Keane has signed for Celtic. The very mountains seem to smile wryly at that one. Topics such as world peace suddenly seem mere trivia to anyone in Dingle. Enthusiasm is maintained for the appearance of Bell X1, whose mainman Paul Noonan could be spotted, deep into the night, graciously and good-humouredly responding to idiotic advice from a well-wisher to ‘keep it up and work hard, you might make it yet’.
Bell X1 have long since become near-household names, despite the suspicion that Damien Rice’s gargantuan success since the Juniper split could be a source of periodic irritation. Live, their material is wistful and dreamlike - with slight Coldplay tendencies, but frequently downright lovely. There’s a fine tightrope to be walked here – they’re brimming with songs that can jump instantly and effortlessly onto radio playlists and make teenage girls swoon, but there’s a sense that they could go up another notch if pushed. Almost everything is in place, but at a deeper level, they’re capable of an almost Radiohead/Tindersticks air of achingly bittersweet melancholia that’s tangibly manifest but not yet fully-realised in their studio work to date. Reflective, introspective and soul-searching without succumbing to self-absorption, these guys shouldn’t be lumped in with the bog-standard MOR whingers with whom they’re invariably compared. If they can steer clear of studio over-production, they might yet escape the honey-trap.
The Immediate are odds-on faves to win a slew of Best New Irish Band awards this year, and they seemed on initial inspection to be an apparently conventional uptempo neo-punk outfit, playing hard, fast, loose and tough, hammering out a few essential chords over gloriously unspoilt songs about girls. The novel twist is that they swap instruments with abandon, every member having a go on bass, guitars and drums. It isn’t merely for gimmick value, as all four members display instinctive ease with whatever they attempt. The decibel level is considerable, but there’s absolutely no disguising the band’s spiky pop sensibility, while their visible love of stagecraft and performing could teach several established pros a thing or two. Of all the acts on the bill tonight, the Immediate are probably the most organic, unaffected and quintessentially worthy of posthumous John Peel approval. Energetic and melodic in equal measure, with blazing riffs and almost Walker Brothers-worthy crescendos, I await the day when they storm to global prominence. It can’t be long in coming.
Hal, by this stage, must be blue in the face at hearing reference to their ‘Beach Boys harmonies’ – but, it’s true, their sound is haunted to the core by the ghosts of Wilsons past. This is hardly anyone’s idea of a bad thing, and the band collected a slew of Best New Band awards last year – with Magic magazine nominating their self-titled debut LP the album of the year. Extremely accessible, they specialise in jangly, angst-free summertime pop that harks back to The Byrds and Help!/Rubber Soul-era Beatles: hook-laden, harmonious, gentle, and so unequivocally winsome that not only would your parents like it, your grandparents might even find it pleasant. This isn’t the dagger-handed compliment it may seem: I’m not renowned as a popster, but ‘Don’t Come Running’ has the capacity to echo through one’s head for days on end, and still shoots through mine. Nothing sums up their musical worldview better than lead singer, guitarist and studio perfectionist Dave Allen’s observation that “I always had a dream that if I’d been around in the ‘60s, I would have loved to work in the Brill building, where you’d go there in the morning, your desk would be a piano and you’d just write songs.” In short, Hal are more likely to go mega-gigantic than anyone this land has spawned since The Thrills. Especially since Dave seems to have conquered his fear of flying, never an advisable phobia to bring to the entertainment business.
Speaking to him later, it’s obvious that he found the whole Dingle experience truly exhilarating. “It was a great end to a year in which we really got caught up in the whirlwind of promoting the album,” he says. “We’d played the Summer Sonic festival in Japan, so coming to Dingle was like coming back home to the real world. It was great fun, like sitting in the studio working on new songs. We had to rework some of the songs and that helps keep them fresh and to breathe new life into them. Having to strip them down so that they work well with Stephen on piano and brushes on the drums and guitars was a challenge. Doing the gig in the church was a bit like a gig we did last year for the homeless in St Paul’s, a church near Covent Garden in London. It’s a great setting.”
As for Nizlopi, I suspect we caught them on the greatest day of their lives. If ever an act has taken to the stage looking like the cats that got the cream, this would be the one. Not entirely unjustified, since the news has reached them this very day that they’ve out-sold Sir Cliff to hit the No.1 spot in the pre-festive cross-channel singles charts. A whirlwind of activity consequently beckons, ensuring that the pair absent themselves from the debauched free-for-all that follows the session’s recording, the better to rise bright and early the next day. No-one can fault them on the work-ethic front. It could be that the bar has been raised to unreasonable levels by the three acts who’ve gone before, but whatever the cause, Nizlopi’s set doesn’t quite work its undoubted magic on this particular jaded hack. Sentiment abounds, and not all of it hits the right spot. Superficially touching though the bolt-from-nowhere success of ‘JCB Song’ might have been, it ain’t my cuppa meat. The crowd, it must be said, don’t seem to agree, reacting quite rapturously. And of course, any enemy of Cliff is a friend of humankind.
The hills are alive. No-one wants to leave. When OTHER VOICES hits Dingle, it’s the kind of celebratory occasion where the spirit of music takes hold and everybody succumbs – musicians, audiences, observers and television people alike. This has to go on, and on, and on. But after eight blissful nights it’s over.
So is this the best series yet? “It depends on what yardstick you use,” Philip King reflects. “Is it what ends up broadcast on TV, or is it the recollections of the people who were here, or the fact that you take a photograph of a moment in time, or the archiving of what went on? I think it’s the creation of an atmosphere that will strike people as unique and special, even in this day and age where it’s possible to see a good live act several times a week.”
Thankfully, it’s all been televised for posterity. Take a look for yourself and you’ll see why the musicians of Ireland – and beyond – have fallen in love with the experience.