Eamonn McCann: On emerging new Derry band Strength

Finn Harps and Athlone Town rarely get a look-in in rock and roll, but Strength NIA have put that to rights.

‘Brendan Bradley’ from new Strength album Northern Ireland Yes is, far as we know, the first song ever written about the Creggan man who holds the all-time goal-scoring record in League of Ireland football. Bulged the onion bag 248 times in 425 games. A big, boney, bustling number nine, with twinkle-toe capacity when called upon, he was the terror of Turner’s Cross, Tolka Park, Dalymount, from 1969 to 1986.

Rory Moore’s apt and overdue track isn’t your standard-issue tribute, more a reflection on the unmarked majesty of a towering hero that football people in these here parts are half-pleased not to have to share, and done with a sense of yearning withal.

But there’s no sporting aspect to ‘1956 Olympics’, more about Melbourne than about the Games where half the street was up all night waiting for Ronnie Delaney to take gold the 1,500 metres, which he did. Moore homes in instead on the penal colony, massacre, the ethnic cleansing of the aboriginal people, 10,000 years of history and inheritance trashed to clear the ground to later hijack swathes of children for civilising by savages lately arrived, some in angry flight from their own oppressions.

“The stolen generation must be remembered for all time… The story of eugenics must be remembered for all time.”

It’s joltingly, formidably, thoroughly original, sparse, unornamented, no poetical presentation to ease the sentiment into the mind.

CORNERED IN A BILLABONG

The song is in response to one of the very best tunes to have emerged from the darkness beneath the Troubles truths, commonly expressed in maudlin tones or with patriotic strut, The Shifters’ ‘Creggan Shops’, an astonishing, unflinching achievement by a Melbourne band none of whom seems ever to have set foot in Ireland. Many a kneecap was blasted into shattered bone behind the Creggan shops, or a youngster cowed and battered and her hair tugged in tufts from her scalp for some imagined offence, all in alleged “defence of the community” but actually designed to clamp the authority of one or other of the people’s armies on the community they purported to represent.

“Meet me down at the Creggan shops/ Where I’ll take your kneecaps.” Odd that’s it’s taken a band from so far off to feed that through the speakers. Or maybe not. The perspective on ugliness we don’t want to examine might be clearer from distance.

Years ago, everybody in Ireland knew ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’, especially when drunk. There was a semi-serious campaign - my memory tells of a Healy-Rae involvement – to found a Jack Duggan Summer School in Castlemaine, which is where he came from. Jack left Kerry at the early age of 16 years ‘cos he felt inclined to roam, to Australia as it happened, where he robbed the rich to help the poor and stabbed James McEvoy, and was eventually cornered in a billabong by Troopers Kelly, Davis and Fitzroy. “A bullet pierced his brave young heart/ From the pistol of Fitzroy/ And that was how they captured him/ The Wild Colonial Boy.”

It’s been recorded more than 100 times, was a huge hit for the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, but has never sounded like this before, couldn’t have, given that punk only erupted relatively recently. Rat-a-tat rhythm, frantic vocals, snarling keyboards, enclosed in an ominous soundscape, all about now. Strength brings it abreast of the title track.

FLASHES OF ENERGY

When you are greeted “Yes” in the North, in the better areas anyway, it’s “hello” in an intimate, ultra-positive way, affirming that the both of us know what’s up. “God is a Catholic man from the Creggan/ God is a marching band from the Fountain.” And it’s the sound of rough revolution we need rather than comforting rebel song, and this is it.

‘Up Smelly Pig’ – best song title ever? – deals with the significance of the plight of hogs in central Philippines, not to mention the wild boars of Borneo. It’s a scream against factory farming, I think, and terrifically timely.

Arlene Foster might be remembered coming back from a promotional trip to China late last year announcing she’d done great business for the “agribusiness sector.” Now the biggest pig-farm ever contemplated in these islands is looking for planning permission just outside Limavady. Eighty thousand piglets a year they intend, permanently standing on slats, crated so they can’t turn ‘round, feed brought in from Latin America, meat shipped onwards to China, millions of tonnes of slurry the only deposit left for spreading around Limavady.

Up smelly pig, and at ‘em!

These are dark songs brimming with original bright ideas, sparking flashes of energy and imagination along the way. Moore can sometimes take his voice to a panting basso profundo. Nick Cave, the Fall, Leonard Cohen, Bastard Fairies, Talking Heads. Different thoughts might enter other minds. And a lot of it is great fun, too.

This isn’t like anything else you will have heard from Ireland in recent times. Whether there’s a market for it, we’ll soon see. But, whatever, some will reckon it a milestone anyway.

The album launch is at the Glassworks in Derry on November 10th. Come the new year, Strength will be here, there and everywhere. Listen out.