Irish Heartbeat

There was a fine documentary about Rory Gallagher shown on RTE last week. I was privileged to be interviewed for it and had the opportunity to express my appreciation of what Rory did for Irish musicians – and by extension for Irish society. A few days earlier, a monument had been erected to Rory in his original home town of Ballyshannon in Donegal. The recognition of a great Irish artist was welcome.

Because the truth is that, while he was alive, Rory was one of Ireland’s unsung heroes. He grew up at a time when committed, original, creative musicians were forced onto the margins. The establishment attitude was that rock music was an irrelevance and largely an irritating one at that. And so Rory did what he had to do to pursue his ambition to become a great guitar player and a full-time musician. He emigrated.
It says a lot about the kind of narrow, conservative society that existed here at the end of the 1960s, and into the 1970s, that Rory seldom if ever got his records played on Irish radio and was rarely covered on television. He was phenomenally naturally gifted, but he also worked like a demon at his craft. As the documentary illustrated very well, his genius won the respect of musicians all over the world, from legendary greats like Albert King, Jerry Lee Lewis and Muddy Waters to young guitar slingers like Johnny Marr, Edge, Slash and James Dean Bradfield. But here in Ireland, while he was revered by tens of thousands of fans, and was an icon to young musicians trying to make their own way into the game, his music was still marginalised by official Ireland.
Rory was driven by a deeply rooted feeling that music was, or could be, a voice for the people. He drew in particular on the blues, as the most potent artistic expression of an underclass – by which I mean the kind of class that those above them have no compunction about walking on – who suffered hardship and discrimination and who sought in music an antidote to the effects of being disenfranchised, of being treated as third-class citizens.
What motivated him, from beginning to end, was a desire to make great and lasting music: to imagine potent and memorable new songs into life; and to dig deep enough into the moment to find that special place where the player becomes the solo, where the dancer becomes the dance. He wasn’t even remotely interested in being a star for the sake of it. He wasn’t bending those strings till the guitar cried or wielding the bottle neck with dangerous intent for the pay cheques. Like every artist, sure, he wanted to know that he’d have a roof over his head and a square meal to eat on most days at least, but he was thoroughly suspicious of the commercial pressures exerted by the suits in the music business. He wanted to play to as many people as possible, yes, and to stand alongside the other blues and rock’n’roll greats as an equal. He had the hunger to be heard as far and as wide as modern transport might carry him, because this is what those old school musicians who believed in the road did. And so he subjected himself to a punishing schedule of live shows year after year and became a huge draw in Germany, Italy, Greece, Scandanavia, the UK, and so on further afield, in the process.
And still he couldn’t get his records played on Irish radio, with the honourable exception of the Dave Fanning Show when it started to air on 2fm. It occurred to me, looking back on all of this, that the treatment of Rory by official Ireland bordered on the scandalous. But it also struck me that Irish musicians are not being treated a whole lot better in 2010. It’s true that nowadays, if they do achieve international success, they are likely to get a bit of exposure on radio here. And some songs like Cathy Davey’s ‘Little Red’ get the nod often enough to make a difference. But the statistics do not lie: the fact is that Irish records of genuine quality still only get a very small proportion of air time during the day, when audiences are actually listening in numbers.
I know that loud and aggressive metal rock is not necessarily what the doctor ordered for daytime play on mainstream stations. But there are lots of records being made by Irish artists which wouldn’t frighten the horses, and which are as good as or better than the international opposition – and that are nonetheless routinely ignored.
This seems to me to be symptomatic of something else. Surely it is indicative of the health of any society, that people consistently have an eye out for the well-being of their fellow citizens, of their neighbours? Is it not natural, if you are in the business of giving air time to music, to ask: how can I help the people from down the road who are making records for a living or trying to? Is there a way that I can support those Irish people who are striving to carve a route forward for themselves in the turbulent waters of the music business?
There are people in Irish radio who do interrogate themselves in this way. But there are not nearly enough of them. And they are not getting through effectively to the people making the big decisions. Because if they were, 30% or 40% of the music being played on daytime radio here would be Irish. The quality is there. And I’m not just talking about this issue’s cover star Cathy Davey, whose album went to No.1 in the week of its release recently. Or Villagers, aka Conor O’Brien, whose marvellous Becoming A Jackal managed the same trick. Or Julie Feeney, who writes brilliant classically-influenced pop songs. Or at the other end of the spectrum Christy Moore, whose Listen, released last year, is arguably his best record ever. Or Damien Dempsey. Or pop songwriting whiz kid Ruth Anne Cunningham. I could go on but there’s no need. Instead of recognising these artists, by and large, radio stations follow safe and predictable formulae in an uncritical and derivative way.
Right now, we are at a very interesting moment in modern Irish history. Of course there are lots of reasons for wishing that we hadn’t got here, standing as we are on the precipice of fuck knows what, with the economy in a disastrous mess and people losing jobs left, right and centre. But now that we are in the middle of the worst crisis since the economic war in the 1930s, and everyone is hurting to one degree or another, and a mood of deep unhappiness with the status quo has established itself, the tectonic plates of Irish political life have started to shift.
The latest opinion polls have Labour as the No.1 political party in Ireland for the first time ever, with 32% support. Fianna Fáil have slipped to an all-time low of 17% – which is not surprising given that they have been involved in pushing through a hugely unpopular regime of cuts in public expenditure. But what took most commentators by surprise was the severe drop in support for Fine Gael to 28%. So what’s going on?
We’ll come back to that again. But in the meantime, what every political party must do, over the coming months, is to define their vision of Irish society as a modern, multi-cultural democracy. They must not only deliver a mission statement but also spell out how they see it being realised. It isn’t just about economics. It is about the nature of the relationship between citizens and Government. And more than that, it is about a broader sense of inclusiveness and how we can best achieve that.
The most important question which we all have to consider now is: what sort of a society do we really want here? What do we value? And how can we reshape Irish society effectively to encompass those things that matter most to us, or that should matter to us, collectively?
It’s easy to say, and it’s true, that getting people off trolleys in hospitals is a far more immediately pressing objective. But it would be an important symbolic contribution, and one that would cost nothing, for radio stations to step forward and make a commitment to playing Irish music, the music of the people. And it would also make sense of the kind of affectionate responses which have been so widespread to the documentary about Rory Gallagher.
It is heartening to see that, fifteen years after his death, Rory’s legacy is valued enough to erect a monument in his birthplace in Ballyshannon in Donegal. Of course it is. But an equally important monument would be for our broadcasters to finally get around to playing music by the people who are his spiritual and musical heirs.
Let’s make this the year when Irish music prevails.