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  The Search for the Celts

  Trim, Tara and Newgrange, County Meath

  The Celts are back. No longer content to be the put-upon people of Europe, they have started to push back into their traditional habitats of mainland Britain and the Continent, brandishing their diddly-aye music and their Gaia Appreciation workshops.

  What is it about them? Why are the Celts and their myths so enduring? This thought occurred to me in the bookshop at the foot of the Hill of Tara in County Meath. Tara is nearly five thousand years old and was at one time the most important archaeological site in the country – the seat of the High Kings of Ireland1 who for a hundred years ruled over all the tribes in the country. In this bookshop (which is about 4,980 years less old than the mounds of Tara) I saw a fellow with long blond hair and a droopy moustache with Celtic-style tattoos all over his arms, walking proudly but slowly through the shop, looking like a 3-D Asterix burned out on drugs and alcohol and about to enrol himself in the Betty Ford clinic. He had a girlfriend waiting outside who looked exactly the same except for the droopy moustache – hers wasn’t quite as big. I heard him ask the girl behind the counter for something – a cup of tea, possibly, a plastic ‘I Love Ireland’ fish (or perhaps W. B. Yeats’s Golden Dawn Potato Cookbook). He sounded as though he was from Holland or Belgium and it occurred to me that you never see people – especially people from Antwerp or Utrecht – styling themselves on other cultures from two thousand years ago such as Roman warriors, Greek philosophers or Carthaginian fish sellers.

  The Celtic look isn’t hard to put together. It’s partly early-period Freddy Mercury, part Teutonic biker chic, with a bit of ZZ Top and a soupçon of Julian Cope. The problem is having the balls to be seen in public. At music festivals in England, however, the Celts are now everywhere. And they’re called Jeremy, Polly, Elizabeth and Miles rather than Caractacus, Boadicea or Setanta. They wear swirly-patterned tattoos around their upper arms, perhaps only for the weekend, with little waistcoats over bare torsos. The really original and stylish ones (usually the Jeremys) sport those hilarious multicoloured tricorn jester hats. They keep their magic hounds close by their side, attached to bits of Celtic string. The healing field at places like Glastonbury is a breeding ground for the new Celticity, with natural remedies and mild psychotherapies based on pagan religions and Druidic beliefs (though with the human sacrifice taken out).

  What is it about the Celts that is so bloody attractive? Why are we all so fascinated with this bunch of brawlers and pissheads? Perhaps it is to do with the fact that, unlike the Romans, Greeks or Egyptians, they rather cleverly left no written record of their existence. What we do know is that they liked pretty swirly patterns, had long hair, made beautiful jewellery, were good at fighting each other but crap at fighting Romans and liked a drink and a sing-song. They left behind weapons, pots, countless forts and burial mounds and, of course, enough jewellery to stock every stall in Camden Lock market for the next twenty years.2

  The Celts, who once inhabited most of northern and central Europe, were gradually pushed west, first by the Romans, Angles and Saxons, into Wales and Cornwall, then into Ireland by the Normans and English and finally the Scandinavian backpackers. Celtic genes live on in various parts of Ireland – jovial dark-haired men with long lashes and grand and impressive beer guts and beautiful otherworldly women, with cascading red or black hair and slightly slanty eyes occasionally show their faces and everybody is spellbound and wants to have their babies. Strangely, no-one fancies the preening idiots with blond quiffs and vaselined chests who do long stints at the Hammersmith Apollo in musicals like Fiddledance and Lord of the Blarney. There’s just no accounting for taste.

  You’d think that in Ireland searching for the Celts would be easy. But like the Celtic general in Britain who, on looking at the invading Roman army, declared, ‘Wahay lads, what a piece of piss,’ you’d be wrong. One place to look is the cosy, rolling farmland of Meath. It certainly didn’t seem very mystic or Celticky. In fact it reminded me of nothing else than my home county of Lincolnshire. (A huge area of flatlands, with the odd hill – full of farmers, village halls, Trade organisations, Tory voters and a large and popular selection of football-playing lotharios.) Meath seemed to be full of prosperous little towns that all had a couple of hardware shops, old-fashioned men’s outfitters, a Berni-style steak restaurant, and a well-fed, content-looking populace.

  Anyone who’s read the Irish Myths and Legends properly will know that you can’t look for Celts in a car. Celts don’t like cars and will try to avoid them. So I found a B&B at the edge of a little town called Trim, the site of one of the biggest Norman castles in the country, and set out on foot. Trim is aptly named, with a couple of hardware shops, an old-fashioned men’s’ outfitters, a Berni-style steak restaurant, and a well-fed, content-looking populace. It didn’t feel like the heartland of Celtic lore. On the search for bands of low-lying Celts, I felt that I was more likely to run into a Young Farmers’ tractor-pulling display team.

  I eventually found some interesting Celtic artefacts, on the wall of a little backstreet pub where I’d stopped to have a pint of Guinness. They were mostly photos of famous Celtic warriors. One of them looked particularly like Mel Gibson in the film Braveheart. Coincidentally, many of the battle scenes from Braveheart were filmed at Trim Castle, giving employment to crowds of locals. A talk with the landlord confirmed my suspicions that there were Celts everywhere. Unlike other, more commercial parts of the country, where Celts might wear their hair long and wear swirly jewellery and sell ‘mystic’ art in their cute little craft shops, just so you know where they’re coming from, man, the Eastern Celts in Meath sport crew cuts and the football shirts of English Premier League clubs. Manchester United and Liverpool mostly, with the odd Arsenal and Aston Villa thrown in. Their myths were many and powerful, with much talk of Ryan Giggs and Paul McGrath. Rather than asking you to get in touch with your inner being they ask you to get in touch with someone you might know who can get World Cup tickets. The younger inhabitants wear the green and yellow of the Gaelic football team. It was the barman who suggested a bike ride out to Tara.

  The search continued by bike, first along the main road past ruined abbeys and castles, then off onto smaller lanes with high hedgerows, circling birds, neat houses and huge stud farms. I saw none of the little brown tourist trail signs that I’d become used to in other parts of the country. I didn’t even know if it was the right direction. Then I received a sign. A mad dog bolted out from a driveway – as they do in many parts of Ireland – and proceeded to attack my wheels. I gave it a couple of kicks, then was forced to take a sharp right turn, away from the little group of houses. A couple of miles further down this road I came to a village with a little building in front of a green. The Tara and District Credit Union Ltd. I was getting closer. I could literally feel the ancient aura.

  And then suddenly there was another sign. A brown tourist one with ‘Tara’ written on it. A further two miles and Tara suddenly loomed up to the left. I parked the bike outside the gift shop and walked up to the deconsecrated church, where I was treated to a nice low-tech audio-visual show with Celtic, swirly, Clannad-type music and slides with quaint illustrated reconstructions of the era, and a voice-over that sounded like the big-chinned guy who does the Barrett Homes adverts (you know, where he steps off a helicopter and takes off his helmet). The only other people there were a couple from the North of Ireland with their bored son and three Japanese tourists.

  Outside on the hill I got more of an idea of Tara’s power – you could see for miles in every direction. It then started to piss it down with rain. Out of the downpour I saw a group of mysterious-looking figures coming towards me from one of the mounds. It was the Japanese tourists, trying to get their camera to work in the rain.

  Next day I went to Newgrange. It was a totally different experience, completely and professionally organised with little buses to take tourists to the three main sites of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth. I ended up o
nly being able to get into the latter. Inside was a museum with all kinds of recreations of the past. It reminded me somewhat of Celtworld, the failed entertainments complex (with lots of technology, holograms and virtual reality mysticism) which was erected in another part of Ireland, the tacky amusement park of Tramore, County Waterford, in the very un-Celtic sunny south-east.

  If I was a mad un-eco-friendly entrepreneur with no sense of decorum, I’d have built Celtworld on the hills around Tara, amidst the gleaming detached bungalows. I’d have nicked standing stones from various circles and dolmens, Christy Moore would be piped through every room, there’d be electronically controlled moving Our Lady figurines buzzing about the place, perhaps a moving statue rifle range, a tacky jewellery shop, a ‘fight the warrior and win a tenner’ booth and, of course, the biggest bar in Europe. It would be run by that blond lad from Diddleydance and a couple of public-school hippies from Glasto. If only the Celts had had some kind of instantly recognisable foodstuff that could be recreated as a fast-food product. If they went for people’s stomachs, rather than their sentimentality, or love of swirly jewellery, or their insistence on having wild orange hair, then they’d really be back in business.

  * * *

  1 As opposed to the Small Kings who probably lived squeezed in next to the musicians in O’Donahue’s on Baggot Street in Dublin and made extra cash as jockeys in their spare time when they weren’t ‘Kinging’. (Note – Jockeys are hard workers, most of them merely low-paid serfs in a big money business. They are to be applauded for their dedication to the sport, their fitness, their grace and good manners, their judicious use of the whip and their high-pitched voices.)

  2 This changes constantly, like the amount of fossil fuels that mankind has left to burn. In ten years time, when proposed increases in the number of Celtic style artists and jewellers are taken into account, we could be looking at a European Celtic artefacts surplus leading well into the twenty-second century.

  Dunphy v. Charlton: the Celtic/Anglo-Saxon Dichotomy as Played Out by Me and My Friend, Kev

  Football

  At Cork Airport there’s a statue of Big Jack Charlton in the arrival lounge. But he’s not holding a football or shouting at some Cockney bloke with an Irish grandmother. He’s fishing. It’s a very pastoral, overly romantic view of such an arch pragmatist. Can you imagine Bill Shankley having a hobby and it being turned into a statue? Then again, I can’t imagine a statue of Alf Ramsey beckoning travellers at Gatwick airport. Charlton created something permanent in Irish culture and increased national self-esteem. Grown men and their kids were walking up to the sculpture and touching it as if it was a holy statue. So did I.

  George Best, Johnny Giles, Derek Dougan, Danny Blanch-flower. When I was a child I knew they were all Irish and that was that. I wasn’t quite aware that some of them played for Northern Ireland so were actually UK citizens and not real Irishmen. They sounded Irish to me. They looked Irish, too – particularly the exotic Best. They were mostly little niggly dark-haired blokes who’d nutmeg you (Best) or nut you (Giles) given the opportunity.

  In the mid to late seventies I became aware that ‘Eire’ was actually a different country. This was confusing because in rugby Ireland played as one team. It seemed stupid to me that the likes of Best and Dougan couldn’t play in the same side as Giles or Don Givens. ‘Eire’ or ear-ruh sounded slightly mysterious and very non Anglo, which I didn’t understand, as of course Irish people just spoke English with a funny accent.

  Next in line in my Irish (and footballing) education was Tom Coleman. He had the look of a slightly smaller version of the actor Harry Dean Stanton. Tom was the manager of Rasen Wanderers under-15 team. His son Kev – one of my best mates – was the left back and I made it to the right back slot. Some of the other dads were involved, in a coaching, bus driving, shouting, nagging or general hanging-on capacity. My dad wasn’t involved. Being a rugby man, he couldn’t quite get out of his system the feeling, although he knew it wasn’t true, that football was for girls. But Tom was the driving force behind the team. He was good-humoured and enthusiastic and – this was why I liked him so much – he did suffer fools gladly, so as well as me there were a few other bits of driftwood and old rubbish lying about in various positions in the team.

  And Tom didn’t burden our grasshopper minds with anything as sophisticated as tactics. I remember one cup final, when we were by far the inferior team but thanks to our dogged spirit we went in at half time only 1–0 down, Tom said to us in the changing room – and these were his very words, spoken in his soft Galway accent – ‘Knock it up field and run after it, lads.’ It was a great speech and we went out there and, of course, got thrashed. But this team talk struck a chord with me.

  Whereas Kev – with his mercurial Celtic genes working overtime (his mum was Scottish), would dribble and pass and shout at team mates, ref and opposition, I would diligently run alongside the opposing winger and attempt to trip him up before he got to the byeline. A contrast of styles. I didn’t mess about with fancy stuff like Kev. Kev might weave his way past two or three of the opposition before getting rid of the ball; for me – if I made the tackle – it was either a hoof into touch or a hoof up to one of our forwards, in the true English style. So Tom’s battle cry to knock it upfield and run after it was, in a sense, down to his complete understanding that he had to make the best of the very raw materials at his disposal.

  A few years later, the dichotomy between weave-dribble-pass and ‘knock it upfield and run after it’ became a big issue in Irish football when Jack Charlton was given the job of managing the national team. Charlton’s philosophy of management was like his playing style – tough, simple and uncompromising. It soon became clear that he was creating a team that would block out space for the opposition with the forwards pressing the opposing defenders then knocking long balls into space behind them; getting the ball into the danger zone as quickly as possible. It was football the way I had always played it. Jack was a ‘Tim’ through and through. This didn’t go down well in some quarters, being seen as a betrayal of the Celtic virtues of skill and wizardry. The writer and broadcaster (and former Irish international footballer) Eamon Dunphy was the champion of the ‘Kev’ faction. He believed Charlton’s style was evil. Players like Liam Brady and Ronnie Whelan were not going to be used to their full potential because of Jack’s obsession with long balls.

  I always liked the conflict between Charlton and Dunphy, which, simply put, seemed to be based on the difference between Celtic wizardry (Kev-ism) and Anglo-Saxon pragmatism (Tim-ism). It was ever thus in sports involving teams from the British Isles. The two men were both strong-willed and incredibly sensitive.

  Jack took over a team that had always underachieved and made it overachieve. I think they were at their peak at the 1988 European Championships – most Irish fans would admit that in Tim mode they were lucky to beat England but as Kevs they should have drawn against Holland (they lost 1–0) and beaten the USSR (1–1 draw). But the finest matches were both against Italy in the World Cup. In 1990, after some pretty turgid Tim-ist displays that saw them draw their group games and beat Romania on penalties (the winner scored by David O’Leary – a Kev who looked like he should be a Tim) they played a great Kev passing game in the quarter finals against the Italians and were unfortunate not to get a break. Four years later they met Italy again in the first round and a goal from Ray Houghton separated the teams (both Tims by that stage).

  I watched the 1988 game in the flat I shared with my old friends Plendy and Ruey and when Ray Houghton’s goal went in they started to dance around doing jigs of joy. They both had Scottish parents, and although born and brought up in England, it was as if it had only just occurred to them they weren’t actually English. I became highly sniffy and indignant at this slight. I can understand you supporting Scotland, you bastards, I said, but why Ireland?

  Their response was simple and intellectually rigorous. ‘Ha ha ha haaaaaa. Ha ha haaaa. Haaaaaaaaaa!’ they sang and jumped u
p again to dance around the room, while pointing at me. I started getting all pseudo-logical on them. Why should Scots do this? I had always supported the Plucky Nations – Ireland and Scotland – if England weren’t playing. But of course, nationality can be defined sometimes by what it is not, in this case Englishness.

  In the 1990 World Cup the ‘olé olé’ brigade of Irish support (it became a sort of moronic chant whenever Ireland played) had reached its zenith. I went to follow Scotland that tournament with my Anglo-Scottish flatmates and felt jealous that the Irish and Scots could celebrate their national pride without guilt. Again I was on the outside looking in.

  In ’94 Ireland did quite well in the World Cup again but it was the end of the road. People were so used to great success that they became bored when there wasn’t a hysterical aspect to the games. The ‘olé olé’ bandwagon was largely becoming discredited by then – even some of the players were keen to distance themselves from it. It wasn’t so much about football as about national pride. It was the same for Michelle Smith in swimming (though she was dropped like a hot potato after the doping scandal) or Sonia O’Sullivan in athletics.

  One rather cuddly aspect of sport in Ireland is that Irish people call their sports stars by their first names, Michelle, Sonia, Mick (McCarthy), Jack, Paul (McGrath), Dennis (Irwin), Roy (Keane). It’s like a village football team. Everyone knows everyone, or so the myth goes.