Eamonn McCann settles the debate on the best rock'n'roll band in the world

This other truth I give unto thee: that the Waterboys are the best rock and roll band in the world. It’s a long while since I mentioned that, which is sound enough reason to say it again. That, and the fact that I chanced on a YouTube compilation while searching for a Shakespeare quote to make me seen more learned and reminisced as my heart swirled that bouncing full-throated to ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ is a consummation devoutly to be wished, and tried to picture whether it was at the RDS that herself was tripping on tears and I told her I’d sing it again for her later if she took me home.

“You were there in the turnstiles, with the wind at your heels/ Stretched for the stars and you know how it feels to reach too high/ Too far/ Too soon.”

I found ‘Red Army Blues’, maybe the most powerful epic ever put to popular music, with its shuddering, apt summation: “Now only one thing remains/ The brute will to survive.” It’s eight minutes long so you can listen three times in under 25 minutes.

And this is a snatch of ‘New York I Love You’, from just-released Out Of All This Blue: “She wrote a bitter novelette and stuck it on the internet/ I believe you still can find it there for free/ In the morning she would jog then post updates on her blog/ And one day she upped and moved to Tennessee.”

That’s the problem writing about The Waterboys. The temptation is to just fill the space with words:

“Kiev! said the commissar/ From there your own way home/ But I never got to Kiev/ We never came by home/ Train went north to the Taiga/ We were stripped and marched in file/Up the great Siberian road/ For miles and miles and miles and miles/ Dressed in stripes and tatters/ In a gulag left to die/ All because Comrade Stalin was scared that/ We’d become too westernised!”

Ferocious fiddle, assertive brass, singing guitars, frantic vocals, hallelujah chorus. If you haven’t already got a Handel on Waterboys’ Music, now’s the time.

Thursday, 26 October, Dublin, 3Arena.
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Bumped into Technopeasant the other day at a frugal Enough Stuff extravaganza along the Pennyburn Play-trail, selling carrots from a cart, and potatoes - balls of flour, I tell you, bursting, fluffy balls of flour - and leeks and onions, cauliflower, spinach, lentils, runner-beans, sprouts. Organic veg by the literal bucketful. I settled for a mixed bucket. I think I’m healthier now.

Last time I’d set eyes on Technopeasant I was ambling through Body and Soul at the Picnic, when herself suddenly pricked up, “That’s sounds like Conor!” and, right enough, out of the corner of my ear, I detected the folk’n’blues skirl of O’Kane’s distinguished Donegal accent amid mayhem plunked from a banjo. “You could knit a hat and a couple of scarves/ From last nights half-baked metaphors/ It’s a tragic roundabout - please let me off/ I put it to you, dear Horatio/That these people offer brain fellatio.”

Later into the night, Techno. debuted his first play in an adjacent tent, about the radio ham from Carndonagh who became an orbiting cosmonaut’s sole connection around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union when nobody had a notion what was going to happen next, including the ground-crew, who abandoned space-ship with the result that, for more than a week, the Carn ham and the man sitting in the tin can high above Inisowen passed the while ruminating on the rights and risks of revolution, shooting the breeze and swopping songs.

It was from the Donegal man that the cosmonaut learned that Gorbachev had been turfed out of the Kremlin and replaced by the bumptious drunk, Boris Yeltsin. (What is it with Borises?)

By the time the guys at the Siberian landing site had re-found their bearings and brought the last hero of the Soviet Union back to earth, he had all the words of ‘Cutting The Corn Around Creeslough Today’. A lovely song, especially the Bridie Gallagher version.

All that, in case you are wondering, is nothing but the truth.

Conor makes killer dandelion wine as well, including a vintage labelled “McCann’s Red”. That’s true, too.
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James Joyce and his missus and muse Nora Barnacle and their son Giorgio are buried on a hill outside Zurich, just upstream of Rapperswil.

Every word Joyce ever wrote was a musical note. I heard David Norris once singing a par. from Finnegans Wake in the public street.

Also in Zurich even as I write is musical notable Rory Moore of Strength N.I.A. He’s been on tour with Edinburgh fringe smash choreographer Oona Dooherty, leaving fairy-trails behind from Dresden to Cognac and thence to Prague via Plzen, Pardubice and Brno, Luxembourg, Serbia et Altenberg. Soon to be seen at a venue near you. Details in a minute or maybe a fortnight.

In-between time in the meantime, here’s the link to crowd-funding Strength N.I.A.’s new album, set for release in November: https://fundit.ie/project/strength-nia---debut-album.
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I saw a young woman engrossed in TOUTS at Stradbally, as the three-piece punk ensemble put their heads down and ran at the tunes like they were set on giving them a kicking. She wore a black jacket with “TOUTS are scum” on the back.

“What’s with that?”, I tentatively enquired, to which she responded with a mumble that might have been “Fuck off.”

Young people today… brillianter than any previous.