Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? Page 15
The thing is, though, is Irish music any good? It’s a pleasant enough soundtrack to getting pissed in a whitewashed country pub, but it can sound trite and contrived to the untrained ear. Until my first trip to Ireland in the mid eighties, my experience of this musical form was reduced to two or three key moments. Firstly the Spinners on BBC2 – a crowd of bearded Liverpudlian teachers with woolly jumpers (Hey – the Doolin art and craft shop!) who came on after Pot Black on a Sunday evening. We watched the snooker round at my Gran’s because she had a colour TV – snooker is crap in black and white (‘and so he goes for the grey then the grey, the grey and the grey’), and we’d sit through a couple of Spinners numbers before falling into a deep, deep sleep. Then a folk club above a pub in Louth, Lincolnshire, where I was mesmerised by the sight of bearded teachers in woolly jumpers (spooky or what?) sticking their fingers in their ears and singing ‘gentle ladeeeeeeee’ over and over again in Spike Milligan voices. Well, so I exaggerate a bit. Sometimes they did Harry Secombe voices too. Finally Playaway with Brian Cant (strangely enough, also on BBC2) in which he would burst into song at the slightest provocation.
Cant (now there’s a good old Celtic name – from the Cantii tribe of Kent) was a sixties-seventies phenomenon, as influential in his way to kids as Dylan, the Beatles and the Velvet Underground were to teenagers and twentysomethings at the time. If only his name had begun with a K he would have been assured a place in the post-modern stars’ lexicon. Cant did all the voices for the rural puppet animation trilogy, Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley. Of the three, it’s Camberwick Green which has stood the test of time. The series can be read as a playing out of anachronistic class structures in modern Britain. Trumpton, the urban scrawl, entrepreneurs, go-getters, civic administrators, Camberwick Green, the fast-disappearing rural idyll, Chigley the even older feudal system, the Lord Belborough character, juxtaposed with the Communitarian philosophy of the workers who all dance the same steps at the six o’clock whistle.
Cant’s rendition of ‘PC McGarry’ (n. 452) remains the highlight of consensus-era children’s TV folk music.3 ‘PC McGarry’ was the link between Jack Dixon ‘PC 49’ period of neighbourhood coppers, and the more aggressive The Sweeney. One string guitar intro, then the jaunty riff, then the chorus, culminating in the self-revelatory, ‘PC McGarry number 4 … 5 … 2 …’ … der der der dum, de dum, de der der der der de dum de dum de der der der der de dum de dum de dahhh …
It’s fear that makes people dislike Irish music. Fear that you might have to sing yourself. We all do crazy things when we’re drunk, but you’ll know if you’ve sung a ballad on your own in a session – who can forget the sweaty palms, the increased heartbeat, the trembling? Even some Irish people are scared. They call it diddly-idee (from the Gaelic díghle ad – meaning ‘music of the woolly-jumpered one’). It’s the sort of thing that your boring uncle with a beard would be into. And before any irate folkies write in, I am often a boring uncle with a beard. And yet I’ve been to many parties during which my Irish friends who are scared of Irish music get very drunk and proceed to do an impersonation of their boring uncle with a beard. As I walked down. Her eyes so blue. Fair autumn wind. Bonnie lassie. Heartfelt, no doubt about it. But up there in the cringe stakes with ‘Streets of London’ and ‘Yesterday’. And what’s worse is that you know you’re next up.
Although he’s not everyone’s cup of tea, one of my favourite Irish musicians has always been Christy Moore, a man who’s done his fair share of gigs and sessions in and around Clare. Opinion seems to be divided over this great Irish troubadour. Some say he’s pretentious. Some that he’s too political. Even fellow singers I’ve talked to don’t, for some reason, really approve. But I think that’s all crap. To me, Christy is a genius, punk, hippy, mystic, politico, lover, comic all rolled into one. OK, so he’s no oil painting – or at least he’s an oil painting by Lucien Freud (he looks like a prop forward or light-heavyweight boxer). His best songs describe the characters he has heard of or encountered on his musical travels. A wandering bard. But I see him as a recorder of our times in the best oral tradition, the epitome of unpretentiousness.
Irish music has become big business in recent years, with Boyzone, The Corrs and B*witched following in the footsteps of U2 and Sinéad O’Connor. There’s also been a new brand of Celticky music doing the rounds. Some of it, however, especially the ethereal high production ‘mood’ albums that seem to emanate from the States (Celtic Swirls, Swirly Celticness, etc.), is merely a slightly more ethnic version of the Mantovani Strings albums. A more interesting angle had been taken by musicians like the Afro-Celt Sound System and Jah Wobble, with their world music infusions. Arabic pipes, Spanish guitar, dub bass, added to the yearning sound of Celtic fiddles and whistles.
I determined to buy Jah Wobble’s 1997 album The Celtic Poets because it fused urban London and Blake with the Celtic, with titles such as ‘London Rain’, ‘The Great Hunger’, etc. etc. Except for track no. 3, which was called ‘Market Rasen’. My home town, in Lincolnshire. What could he have been thinking? Friends told me not to be so daft, like some sad, anal teenager thinking that a star has written a song specially for them. (For a couple of years I was also convinced that ‘Armagideon Time’ by The Clash contained a reference to me. ‘Tim Bradford, arh eauug oorrgh euuurggh oooohhhh Armagideon Time’, sang old Joe Strummer. Take a listen if you don’t believe me – it’s on the twelve-inch version.) Of course, I knew that there was nothing in the Jah Wobble connection but it was just another sign to me of the things I should have been doing. Like writing to Jah Wobble and asking him why. I wrote to Jah Wobble, like a sad anal teenager. Like the mystic and mature musician that he is, Jah didn’t write back.
A musician friend of mine who also used to review world music for Q magazine, once played me a CD of Islamic pipe music. I listened to the whole album under the illusion that it was uilleann pipes. There is a connection between the Eastern, Middle Eastern and Celtic traditions, but it goes back further than the Irish Celtic era, perhaps back to the root culture of Indo-European warriors, the forefathers of most of the peoples of Europe. The thought of incredible charioted beings charging into battle playing bohdráns and singing, ‘When She was Sweet Sixteeeeeeeeeeen’, is absolutely terrifying, and makes you glad you live in the twenty-first century.
A place like Doolin4 is seething with amazing people, mad characters, poets, artists and entrepreneurs who in another setting would be mould breakers, movers, shakers and horse thieves. They come here because they have been hurt by the real world, or need more ancient rhythms in which to fulfil their life ambitions. Or they fancy getting off with Scandinavian backpackers. One such madman, er, I mean lovely eccentric rogue, is Ted McCormac. Ted, a Dubliner (though not actually a Dubliner as in Dubliners, Chieftains, Spinners or whatever – he’s from Dublin. Though like the Spinners he does wear woolly jumpers) is a bear of a man with a mass of grey blond curly hair who not only sports the folk musician’s de rigeur impressive beard but also an equally impressive missing leg. Unlike many (all other?) great Celtic bards, he’s a teetotaller. He is also a raconteur who loves to surround himself with people, which he manages to do by playing bass and singing in various sessions in the area. He knows the stars too – at night he’ll point up to a little red dot in the sky and shout ‘Mars!’ to anyone who’s listening.5
Ted knows everything there is to know about the district of Doolin, and what he doesn’t know I’m convinced he makes up. He’ll tell you that the best way to see the Burren, the ancient limestone area a few miles out of Doolin, a world conservation site, is through a small local tour company called Doolin Tours. This is run by … Ted himself. Doolin Tours is a little blue bus that operates from the converted barn he lives in next door to his daughter’s cottage. Pop in to visit him and he’ll tell you how Brian Boru fought some big battle there or thereabouts and mad Marie-Rua married an English soldier to keep control of Lemanagh Castle, then threw her English husband off the battlements, etc., etc.
At the time of writing, Ted is packing out McDermott’s6 with his regular sessions, miked up to his new £1,000 amp (partly for sound, partly, no doubt, to piss off the purists), with his bass guitar tutor sometimes sitting in to give him moral support.
At the risk of sounding like an advertisement for Doolin Tours, it probably is the best way to see the Burren for the first time (book early to avoid disappointment). Unless you go out on a golden summer day (very rare) the Burren usually looks magnificently bleak. A terrible beauty, as some have described it. Stone everywhere. Grey stone. White stone. You try to imagine families scratching a living from this land over the centuries, as they were gradually pushed west by the British. You take all this in while Ted will chatter away at the front, explaining about how Brian Boru fought some big battle there or thereabouts and mad Marie-Rua married an English soldier to keep control of Lemanagh Castle, then threw her husband off the battlements, etc., etc.
Doolin is now becoming well known as a mad music place, with the odd travel piece in the English broadsheets giving testimony to its craic and its food. Then there’s the celebrity visitors like Paul Hill and his wife who can be glimpsed occasionally in McGann’s. Several people have told me that it’s time to move on, that everybody will be in Miltown Malbay or Lahinch next year or the year after. But they never do move on. Doolin will always be packed and slightly chaotic. Lying beside the shore at the harbour near O’Connor’s pub, staring at the big sky, feeling at ease with the world, when there is not a sound and no-one around, my only advice is to live in the present – learn an instrument, kiss a colleen, fall in love, fill your belly with existential Irish stew, find ‘Mars!’, sink a pint, stare at someone else’s pint, have an argument, change pubs, build a Spanish archway, try to sing a song without dying of embarrassment. Basically, don’t plan anything. No-one else does, or ever has done. Apart, that is, from mad Marie-Rua.
* * *
1 Although at the time of writing I do not frequent it as much as I used to because of some obscure subclause in the Pub Politics Charter (i.e. some friends of mine have fallen out with the landlord), I still like to start my Doolin stopover in McGann’s. It’s the quietest of the three pubs, partly due to the fact that the clientèle (German and Scandinavian backpackers) have read their Celtic literature in which it is stated that people must go ‘Shhhhhh’ like tight-arsed librarians before every piece of music. Ah, those lovable daft blond bastards.
2 Learning the guitar was harder than I expected. It wasn’t until I got hold of the Clash songbook that I learned to play anything remotely similar to a real song. I bought it one Saturday afternoon at Langford’s record shop in Market Rasen and took it along to the Ropewalk, the local football ground. I was half-way through ‘London’s Burning’ (mostly E major) when Mr Brumpton, a geography teacher at our school, got the ball on the half-way line and dribbled around three or four defenders before burying the ball in the net from twenty yards out. We (the crowd) all got up and cheered. Mr Brumpton waved, slightly embarrassed but dead pleased with himself. We (there were five of us) exchanged commentaries on the goal then I got back to reading. A minor and a minor 7th – pretty basic chords but you still got a good facsimile of the song. Later that day I perfected the chords to ‘Police and Thieves’, Lee Perry’s classic covered by the Clash on their first album.
3 I’ve also been told there’s a bar called McGarry’s (note A) somewhere on one of the main streets of Ennis (about twenty miles from Doolin – a grand looking town, not to be confused with Enistymon, slightly nearer and with a name that reminds you of the long elegant parts of a flower), but that it’s number 238. I’m probably being wound up. A bit like the music box at the start of Camberwick Green, hey kids? But if McGarry’s does exist, I’ll have a pint there then go out and find the nearest bookshop, where I’ll head for the philosophy section and pick up a book of Kant (note B). The first passage my eyes alight on will become my theme for a day of music and beer.
Note A
I’ve subsequently discovered that I was given false information and what they were referring to was McGariggle’s on O’Connell Street in Sligo. Which kind of ruins this story, really. Fuck it anyway, as PC McGarry might have said.
Note B
I did go to Sligo and went to McGarrigle’s. The next morning in the bookshop there was no philosophy but I did pick up a copy of Shanks, the biography of former Liverpool manager Bill Shankley by Dave Bowler. And the first passage I turned to was about Shankley’s captain, the indomitable Ron Yeats. Coincidentally, the Yeats museum is about thirty yards down the road from the bookshop. Crap coincidence, perhaps, but enough to keep me going in this heroic project.
4 Quick guide to Doolin
Places to stay in Doolin:
Cuckoo’s Nest
Doolin Hostel
Self-catering houses
Pubs:
O’Connor’s (most touristy)
McGann’s (quiet. The session pub)
McDermott’s (used to be for locals – now packed out)
Music:
Rough Guide to Irish Music – Various
The Time has Come – Christy Moore
Sharon Shannon – Sharon Shannon
Anything by Mico Russell
Rough and Ready – Ted McCormac
‘Camberwick Green’, Brian Cant and BBC folkies
The Celtic Poets – Jah Wobble
The Best of the Pogues
The Black Crow – Altan
The Spinners Greatest Hits (fine stuff)
5 I am now related to Ted. That’s Doolin for you …
6 It’s now McGann’s again – See note on Pub Politics chapter.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limerick to Galway
I decided to take a bus to Galway and found myself, as is usual in these public transport moments, next to a thirtyish Europacker who seemed more interested in the Italian-language version of Hello! that she was reading than the scenery outside the window. Just look out there dammit, I wanted to say, see the soil become thinner, the walls more numerous, feel the history, the hardship, the conflicts, the mystery, the ancient sites. Suddenly I saw a sign that said we were ten miles away from Gort and I got all excited, as I always do when I recognise a placename that appears in a well-known film. Paris, Texas (Paris, Texas), Walsingham in north Norfolk (Elizabeth), St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall (Michael, the Al Pacino character, in The Godfather – OK, so I’m struggling here).
In the fillum The Day the Earth Stood Still, Gort is the giant robot who accompanies some skinny alien guy in a baggy spacesuit whose name I can’t remember to Earth and who famously stands majestically proud and tall at the top of the little ramp of the spaceship that the skinny alien guy in a baggy spacesuit whose name I can’t remember uses to get himself from the flying saucer to the ground of New York City. Gort was a proper robot, like the cybermen in Dr Who. The Daleks were not proper robots – they had little fondue forks for hands (though some of the higher-ranking Daleks had to make do with plungers). I can’t remember whether I said all this stuff aloud to the woman next to me, but as I pressed my face against the window and started singing ‘Oobee doobe doo dap dang a doh doo’ – like the black-clad female jazz singer in the cool subterranean club while the skinny alien guy in a baggy spacesuit whose name I can’t remember goes native in a suit and tie and sips a martini – she buried her head even further into the magazine. The skinny alien guy in a baggy spacesuit whose name I can’t remember eventually gets beaten up, or shot, and Gort goes out to find him. I had always wondered what Gort means.1
I saw that film a couple of times when I was a kid and it always frustrated me that the human race – specifically those loudmouth New Yorkers – just couldn’t get their acts together and be nice to people who were slightly different.2 I had walked around Gort one Tuesday lunchtime a year before, with this in mind – why they had been so cruel to Gort and his master. I had long hair and was unshaven, with a baggy, dishevelled jacket and an open-necked s
hirt. I looked like death. My face was white, my eyes were gone and each step felt as though it was taking up all my energy – I looked like a tinker-school drop-out (‘no graduation day for youuuuuu …’). I went into a shop to buy a paper and the look the woman gave me said, ‘No we don’t have any scrap metal here for you.’ She seemed surprised when I only asked for an Irish Times. I had wanted to immerse myself in the local culture but really couldn’t be arsed, so went and had scampi and chips in a local café. Gort’s stony greyness reminded me of riverside towns in Yorkshire or the Derbyshire Peak District. They are outwardly pretty but the preponderance of grey stone suggests hidden angst, melancholy, repression, stern fathers with top hats and fuzzy side whiskers saying thou shalt stay and learn thoust Latin and not have Christmas dinner with the rest of the family, and kids being whacked before bedtime with the family bible. Though I could be over-reacting.
Anyway, in the film the skinny alien guy in a baggy spacesuit whose name I can’t remember is not your typical Hollywood leading man – I may or may not have said that to my temporary travelling companion, but she certainly wasn’t listening. For a start he’s too skinny. He looks ill. He’s got lean, rugged, dark-haired regular looks, but haunted eyes and very pale skin. He is anti-hero, a proto-Shane MacGowan, except he’s clean shaven. A similar look to Robert Walker, that spooky skinny guy who was in Strangers on a Train with Farley Granger. Or Monty Clift with TB.