Liadh Ní Riada Can Win Sinn Féin the Presidency

Sinn Féin can claim an astonishing double-result this autumn if they contest the Presidency. Firstly, they can strike another devastating blow to Fianna Fáil, who were too quick to row in behind a second term for President Higgins. But more importantly, by selecting Liadh Ní Riada as their candidate, Sinn Féin can make a profound statement of nationalism and Irish identity, the kind of which we haven’t heard in at least half-a-century.

Why Ní Riada? Because of who she is and what she represents.

Liadh Ní Riada is the daughter of Seán Ó Riada, the man who saved Irish music from doom in the early 1960s. We have made a bags of many, many things as an independent state among the nations of the world, but two things we have to show for ourselves are our games and our music.

Before Seán Ó Riada, people were ashamed of the music. It was strictly for hicks. What made the difference was the music’s embrace by Ó Riada, because Ó Riada came from the classical tradition. He knew the table settings, as it were.

Ó Riada recognised traditional music’s inherent dignity, and brought it to the concert hall. And people who had thought nothing of the music heard the orchestration of Róisín Dubh that Ó Riada did for Mise Éire and thought: hold on – is that us? To echo Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Irish Nation suddenly realised that this music, which they had considered a joke, poor potsherd, was actually immortal diamond and worthy of admiration all over the world.

Ó Riada founded Ceoltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, from whom came the Chieftains. The Clancys and the Dubliners were the beloved sons of the masses but without the Chieftains the music would have sunk back to obscurity. Instead, it lives, survives and thrives.

Seán Ó Riada himself cannot run for the presidency. He died young, in 1971, two months after his fortieth birthday. But Liadh Ní Riada, in coming where she’s from and in being who she is, can be the avatar of what Ó Riada believed in, an Ireland Gaelic, united and free.

Because what does the President do, really? The office is the vestigial tail of the Lord Lieutenancy. It’s either a retirement home or a springboard to a cushy job in the UN or the Vatican (although that’s not going so well lately).

Perhaps the most important role of the Presidency is in telling us who we are, in being an avatar for the nation. And what better avatar than someone who believes in the causes for which independence was won, at the cost of so much blood?

At a time when it’s so hard to say what it is that makes us different, why Ireland deserves nationhood, why, God spare us, the island should be united under one flag, would it be so bad to return to first principles?

Even if she were not to win, Liadh Ní Riada could do her party some service in landing another kick to the prone body of what was once the mightiest force in Irish politics, the Fianna Fáil party.
Fianna Fáil was once renowned for its profound political sense.

DeValera said he only had to look into his heart to know what the nation was thinking. But that political sense is entirely absent from the party now as it lurches from one disaster to another.

The confidence-and-supply agreement was a good move. But everybody knew it was, to echo a phrase of the past, “a temporary little arrangement”. There was no way it could be long-lasting, because there would come a threshold when such kudos available to Fianna Fáil for putting the country first by supporting a government would all have been gained.

After that, the pendulum swings in the other direction, and Fianna Fáil gets all the blame for being in government, and none of the benefit. Fianna Fáil were always going to pull the plug.

Except they didn’t. Opportunities arose one by one, and passed by one by one as Mícheál Martin steadfastly refused to take advantage. The revelations about the Gardaí making up traffic violation reports was the sort of dream chance that oppositions of other eras requested from Santa in their Christmas letters, and still Fianna Fáil held fire.

And now, it is they who have presented an open goal to Sinn Féin, in a misunderstanding of both the age and the current political situation.

Our is a populist age. It an age of clearing swamps, and giving voices back to the people. It is an age of distrust of the establishment and cosy deals among the members of same.

Not only have Fianna Fáil backed President Higgins for a second term, they have done so absolutely, positively, with no way to back down. With Fianna Fáil now backed into a corner - the last place any sensible politician wants to be -  Sinn Féin can now run a candidate that hits Fianna Fáil in both the head and the guts.

The head, by making Sinn Féin look like a party more interested in what the people think than what is convenient for the establishment. The guts, by fielding a candidate who will be a siren song to the traditional vote of the (once) Republican Party.

Can Ní Riada win? Reader, she can win on the first count. She doesn’t even need to say anything. All they need do is play this at her rallies and the Park is hers. Go n-éirí léi.

Val Doonican, and the Fight for Irish Freedom

Val Doonican did at least as much for Anglo-Irish relations as the Queen’s visit, that spurious rugby game in Croke Park, or the existence in material reality of Roy Maurice Keane, Junior. That fact is not widely known in this country, for different reasons, but it should be. Val Doonican is a hero, in his way, and should be celebrated as such.

Not even Val Doonican’s most ardent admirer could deny that the man was born square. Val Doonican was never cool. The jumpers, the rocking chairs, the songs – Delaney’s Donkey, Paddy McGinty’s Goat – no. There is no hipster willing to carry the charade through to that extent. But, in the long and troubled history of two islands in the North Atlantic, Val Doonican provided a bridge when it was needed.

We know there was huge emigration from Ireland to Britain during the war and after. We sing songs about it all the time. But what was that experience like, really? What was it like for someone who had grown up on the side of a mountain to find him or herself living in a terraced house in Blackburn, Lancashire?

There was a marvellous story in the Bullaí Máirtín collection called Peadaí Gaelach Eile, about a man about to go to London to make his fortune but who finds out just how much of a fish out of water he’s going to be before he even leaves home.

It was hard on that generation. They never liked to speak of it themselves, because it was humiliating for them. The current generation doesn’t like to think of it, because they seem to have trouble conceiving of people who are not themselves.

It’s interesting as well that the literature of those who built up and tore England down after the Second World War seems stronger in Irish than in English. Where are the English language equivalents of the navvying memoirs of Domhnall Mac Amhlaigh or Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé?

Nobody wanted to go on the record about how hard it was to come from rural poverty to a major industrial city. And nobody wants to think about the Irish being considered in England the way the Romanians are considered here. Dirty, stinking, going around in gangs, leaving their rubbish lying around, speaking gibberish, not to be trusted.

And then, in the mid-sixties, one of those dirty, stinking Irish people got himself a variety TV show on prime time with the BBC. He wasn’t dirty. He was very well turned out, always with his hair cut and clean and nice sweater on him. He sang comic songs with a twinkle in his eye.

And maybe, after watching the Val Doonican Show on TV, maybe some Englishman heard his Irish neighbours the next day and detected that trace of Doonican in them. Maybe the way they spoke wasn’t gibberish; maybe it was actually a lot like that chap on the television. I wonder could any of them sing songs as well?

What was Val Doonican worth to the Irish community in Britain in the ‘seventies, when the bombs were going off in Birmingham and Guilford and in the car park of the Houses of Parliament themselves? How reassuring was it for the ordinary British person to hear of Delaney’s Donkey winning the half-mile race after the newscaster had just told them that the IRA had just admitted responsibility for the bombing of another bar, resulting in five killed and seven maimed?

Yes, Val Doonican wasn’t very cool. No, Delaney’s Donkey isn’t quite Carrickfergus. But Val Doonican was, by all accounts, a very lovely man who asked for little from life and brought happiness and security to millions and millions. Very, very few of us will get to say that we we are brought to account on the Last Day. Suaimhneas síoraí na bhFlaithis dó.

So. Farewell Then, Jim McCann

Sweet-voiced folk singers are as ladies of Shalott – their gift is their curse. The vogue is for the folk singer to have that bit of grit in the voice, with the late Ronnie Drew being primus inter pares of the species. Sweet-voiced folkies are viewed with suspicion, like opera singers slumming it until they get the call from La Scala.

All nonsense, of course. All musical terms are hard to pin down in prose, and to explain what it is that makes a voice sweet is a task beyond your correspondent. A sweet voice is something that you know when you hear it, and you heard it every time Jim McCann stepped up to the mike.

McCann, the man who replaced the unreplaceable Ronnie Drew in the Dubliners from 1974 to 1979, is the latest of that iconic ballad group on whom time has been called by the Great Barman in the Sky. He will be a footnote in today’s papers, and that’s a pity. His talent and artistry deserve more than that.

All their talent and artistry deserved more than that. John Sheahan’s son is an enthusiastic archiver of the band’s work, and there are a small, devoted gallant band of posters to YouTube who post some of the most glorious clips, many not seen since first broadcast all over the world over twenty-five years, each one a treasure in its own particular way. God bless them in their mission.

Hard-line folkies didn’t believe in recorded music, as such. Frank Harte, the great singer of Chapelizod, believed a song only existed at the moment of its being sung. It’s likely that McCann, and Ronnie, and Luke, and the rest believed that too, or else simply believed that singing was something you did to pace your drinking. It’s hard to imagine Coldplay or some other bunch of Gawd-help-us musos noodling around in the studio if the Dubliners were waiting outside, looking at their watches.

You can hear this disregard for the process on McCann’s version of Spancil Hill on the Fifteen Years On record – he fails to hold the notes on “dreaming” in his gorgeous cover of that gorgeous song. Why didn’t they just record it again? Too close to closing time is the most likely answer.

Is this neglect a bad thing? Is neglect even the correct word? Records by the ’sixties folkies like the Dubliners or the Clancys, or even the obscure records by the Grehan Sisters or the great Anne Byrne, should be thought of more as artefacts than things to stand with Blonde on Blonde and Pet Sounds. Besides; what does an album mean anymore in the Age of the Download?

In their recordings, we can get a glimpse of what Jim McCann and the rest of the Dubliners were like in their pomp, but it is only that. A glimpse. A fleeting moment.

Katy Perry, God bless her, does her thing for the telly. In real life, she might not make the same impression. With the Dubliners, it’s different. The recordings confine them in a way they were not meant to be a confined. A song is a song when it’s sung. Not before, not after. Katy Perry does the same show in Berlin, in Bali or in Birmingham. With the Dubliners in their prime, anything could happen from the first strum on the guitar.

So what, then, was Jim McCann like? He was a funny man – that’s clear from his appearance on the legendary Late Late Show Tribute to the Dubliners. He was a patriot – he always made a point of telling the story of Grace Gifford and Joseph Mary Plunkett before singing his greatest hit.

McCann had a successful solo career before and after the Dubliners, so his time with the Dubliners never fully defined him. But it is a reasonable argument to make that the five-year match between the Dubliners and Jim McCann brought out the best in each. He slowed them down a little, and let the music breathe. For their part, the Dubliners' artistry and virtuosity added embellishments to McCann’s voice and guitar that session musicians never could.

As a singer, Jim McCann will be remembered for the sweetness of his voice in songs like Carrickfergus, Boulavogue and Four Green Fields. But his Spanish Lady is the definitive recording of that liveliest of songs and McCann also recorded as blood-curdling a rendition of Follow Me Up to Carlow, a very ensanguined song to begin with, as was ever put on record. There was more to him than that soft cooing in the heather.

McCann’s greatest song, in your correspondent’s opinion, was Easy and Slow. It was another considerable hit for him, showcasing the true beauty, subtlety, sweetness and colour of McCann’s extraordinary voice.

I remember him singing it on an RTÉ series of the very early 1980s, strolling down along Thomas Street, down to the Liffey, and the impression it made has stayed with me in the thirty years since. I hope, in honour of his spirit, that clip appears on YouTube soon.

And in that thought, here’s another recently discovered classic, McCann singing Carrickfergus with the Dubliners in their prime from 1977. Ag moladh Dé leis na n-aingil go raibh Jim McCann, seisean agus a ghuth binn galánta.

Margaret Burke Sheridan - Visse d'Arte

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The birthday of the greatest female singer Ireland has ever produced falls on this Wednesday. She is not a national figure because she was an opera singer, and opera has never been popular in Ireland. It’s a pity though – opera is one of the great achievements in human art, and Margaret Burke Sheridan was one of our own.

Very much one of our own, in fact. Margaret Sheridan was born in a house on the Mall in Castlebar on October 15th, 1889, the fifth child of the postmaster in Castlebar at the time, John Burke Sheridan.

Margaret’s mother died when Margaret was five, and her father died when she was eleven. Effectively orphaned – the Sheridan family don’t seem to have been that close - Margaret was raised to adulthood in the Dominican convent at 19 Eccles Street, Dublin 7, now part of the Mater Hospital. And it was while a student with the Dominicans that Margaret Burke Sheridan discovered that she had a gift.

At the age of nineteen, Sheridan left Ireland to study music at the Royal Academy in London. She was a success, but there was a war on and the opera scene in London was something of a backwater. If you wanted to be a star, you had to go to Italy, where opera is all.

Sheridan went to Rome, and started training again under a teacher called Alfredo Martini. And it was while training that she made the decision that set her path for the rest of her life.

A singer in a production of La Bohème in the Constanzi Opera House (now the Teatro dell’Opera) fell ill while Margaret Sheridan was staying in the Quirinale Hotel. The Quirinale is on the other side of the block from the opera house, and the manager of the opera house had heard Margaret practicing - Sheridan was in the habit of practicing her singing at her open window in the hotel. The manager took a notion, and sent a cable to find out if the nobody wanted to become a star in four days, filling as Mimì in Giancomo Puccini’s beloved opera about young love.

Fantastic, you would think. But it wasn’t that simple. Martini, Margaret’s teacher, was dead set against the idea, and for reasons that are do with what makes opera such a challenging art form.

The singing that we do in the shower or when loaded with porter is a natural ability. Sometimes the singing isn’t too bad, sometimes it’s wretched – it’s down to accidents of birth.

But the singing done by opera singers isn’t at all natural. Yes, there are natural voices, but they have to be meticulously trained, not only to make sweeter, richer sounds, but to be able to make those sounds on demand, consistently, for show after show, for performance after performance.

Margaret Burke Sheridan had a natural gift. But she wasn’t yet fully in control of her voice. She could sing, but she couldn’t sing in such a way that she could guarantee her singing wouldn’t impair her ability to sing in future. That’s how severe operatic singing is – if you don’t know what you’re doing, you are in danger of destroying your voice every time you open your mouth.

On the other hand, Sheridan had been living off the kindness of strangers since her father died. Different benefactors had invested in her talent, but it’s not the same as making your own money. And opportunities to sing a major role in a major theatre don’t come along every day. What use was there in completing her training if she were to have a perfect instrument but nowhere to sing? Besides; she could always go back and finish up her training, couldn’t she?

Sheridan made her choice. She sang Mimì in Rome on February 3rd, 1918, and instantly became a star. Even today, Italians don’t always take to foreigners singing Italy’s national art form, but they couldn’t resist Sheridan.

For twelve years she ruled the operatic stage, something John McCormack could never do. Margaret Sheridan sang in London, Naples, Monte Carlo and Milan, and was acclaimed by all. And then, after a performance as Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello at Covent Garden in June, 1930, she never sang again.

She tried to, of course. At first, she would claim a cold or a chest infection and pull out of performances, in the fashion of primas donnas. But as the years went by it became clearer that she would never return to the stage. Alfredo Martini had been right. Without the proper grounding and technique, Margaret’s talent was a castle built on sand. It would last for so long but it was always doomed. And when the doom arrived, there would be no way to rescue it.

Sheridan was still a star. She was offered concert recitals – the form that made McCormack a household name and a very wealthy man - but she turned them down. As far as Sheridan was concerned, it was opera or nothing. Opera isn’t just the singing – it’s the acting, the music, the performance, the whole. To just sing without the rest of opera’s heady mix would be like drinking black tea. It just wasn’t the same.

Sheridan turned a brave face to the world, but the remaining thirty-odd years of her life were tough on her. She came back to live in Ireland but we are not a great nation for accepting our countrymen and countrywomen who have had success abroad.

But Margaret Sheridan was generous to the next generation, and did what she could for them. In her definitive biography of Sheridan, Anne Chambers writes of a Feis Ceoil winner, Phyllis Sullivan, who was tutored for a time by Margaret Sheridan.

Sullivan recalled Sheridan as being temperamental, but never mean. If Sullivan made a mistake, Sheridan would sing the line properly herself (while always avoiding high notes). Sullivan asked Sheridan why she didn’t sing in public anymore.

“My voice is finished,” replied Sheridan. “It’s all right singing for you, darling, but I would break on my top notes and I am nervous.”

Margaret Burke Sheridan died on April 16th, 1958, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. The back of her headstone reads “Margherita Sheridan, Prima Donna. La Scala, Milan. Covent Garden, London.” Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-anam uasal.

Soldiers' Songs, and the Irish National Anthems

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Thinking about the anthems booming out in Brazil during the World Cup turns the attention to our own anthem, Amhrán na bhFiann.

It’s a funny thing but in a country that loves its first language passionately up to but not beyond the point of learning, speaking or promoting it, the nation is insists the National Anthem is always sung in Irish.

While Irish is the State’s first language, it is not Amhrán na bhFiann’s. The lyrics to the Soldier’s Song were first written by Peadar Kearney in English in 1907. The music was written by Kearney’s friend, Patrick Heeney, and it was as a marching song for the IRB with lyrics sung in English that the song became popular.

The Soldier’s Song was translated into Irish by a man named Liam Ó Rinn, who was one of the almost forgotten legion of civil servants who laid down so much of the state Irish in the 1920s – for good or ill. The details of the translation are sketchy, like so much of the work of those men and women at that time. It seems the first translation of the lyrics was published in 1923, but there are claims the translation was done as early as 1917.

No matter. The Soldier’s Song was adopted as the national anthem of the Irish Free State in 1926 and that’s what it’s been since. When the Irish translation became the default isn’t at all clear but the Irish translation has been used for so long now that to find someone who knows the words in English would be an achievement.

It’s even sung in Irish by people who are not comfortable in the first language, because to not do so would be somehow outrageous. The most memorable of these in recent years was a rendition of Amhrán na bhFiann by a very beautiful model named Nadia Forde before a game between the Republic of Ireland and Sweden last year at the Aviva.

It’s always a difficult thing to criticise someone’s diction in a language that has no received pronunciation, and that counts for double when it comes to singing, but Ms Forde went to a seldom-visited place in her rendition. If she had sung the thing in Xhosa, the famous clicking language of South Africa, it could not have sounded stranger.

For the four years before Amhrán na bhFiann was made the National Anthem, the anthem of the Free State implored God to save either the King or Ireland, depending on which foot you relied on to dig your potatoes. As far as the Ascendency was concerned, God Save the King was the anthem in a State whose cabinet swore allegiance to the King, while God Save Ireland, a rollicking ballad about the Manchester Martyrs, seems to have been the favorite song of everyone who ever wore a broad black brimmer and a Sam Browne belt.

Parnell credited the Manchester Martyrs – three Fenians who were executed by the British as a result of a jailbreak gone wrong - with the awakening of his own nationalism, and the song was extremely popular in the revolutionary movement all the way through the Land Wars, Home Rule, the Easter Rising and war of Independence.

However. As an anthem, God Save Ireland is not quite the thing. The tune is borrowed from a US Confederacy prison song, and who wants their national anthem set on a gallows? WT Cosgrove’s own favourite song was The Soldier’s Song, and this may have played no small role in its eventual adoption as the National Anthem.

If Amhrán na bhFiann is the national anthem, the Fields of Athenry has become the people’s anthem. When the fans at Euro 2012 started singing the Fields of Athenry as much-maligned Giovanni Trappatoni’s team were getting eviscerated by Spain, it sparked a national debate about who were are, really – a proud warrior race, or just a pack of gimps, happy to make up the numbers?

It’s interesting how the Fields of Athenry, of all songs, has burrowed its way so deep into our hearts. RTÉ made a documentary in 2010 about the song, claiming that “In many ways The Fields of Athenry reflects the unbreakable spirit of the Irish people through times of past difficulty - political unrest, poverty and forced immigration.”

Beautiful, but not quite true. The actual reason the Fields of Athenry has become a sporting anthem is because it’s been sung at Celtic Park, Glasgow, since the 1980s. Not only has it been sung, but the good old Bhoys have added their own call-and-response section to the chorus.

This addition is about the one thing more appealing to the Irish psyche than the strain of eternal longing that runs through the lyrics and melody of the Fields of Athenry. It is, of course, the tremendous impulse of the Irish everywhere to act the maggot and see what happens.

We know that we’re very naughty to sing about the IRA, and that’s why we do it. If you don’t like it, you just don’t like having the craic. We’re Irish, we’re crazy, we break all the rules and everybody loves us. Look at us, aren’t we great?

There is one other national hymn, a song that could have been a national anthem, were the nation a little more united or culturally richer than we are now. It is not a well-known song, but to those that know it, it is the real anthem of the Irish, Gaelic, united and free.

It’s a song called Gile Mear, which loosely translates as Shining Spear. Sting sang an awful cover version of it on a Chieftains album twenty years ago, and it is not widely known outside of Gaeltacht or traditional music circles. But when Liadh Ní Riada was elected to the European Parliament, her friends and family sang Gile Mear to celebrate the victory. And why wouldn’t they? It was Ní Riada’s father, Seán Ó Riada, who rescued Gile Mear from obscurity – if not the entire canon of Irish traditional music itself, if truth be told.

The signing of Gile Mear drew no attention from the national press at the time. In a Raidió na Gaeltachta feature on Ní Riada’s election, the song played a central role. Two anthems. Two Irelands.

The National Anthems World Cup

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The World Cup isn’t quite what it was. This isn’t just old men getting misty-eyed after misspent youths, when hours in front of the telly were followed by the serial demolition of mothers’ flowers in the garden because not everybody’s eye for goal was quite as sharp as Emilio “The Vulture” Butragueño’s.

Once, the World Cup was the gold standard of soccer. But now, in the era of the superclub, how many national teams could keep it kicked out to Real Madrid, or Manchester City, or Bayern Munich? The softening of the ill-feeling against England in international tournaments may not be so much due to “moving on” as a vague feeling of pity for the poor eejits.

So why watch, especially when Ireland aren’t even in it? Because the World cup isn’t just about a game and who plays it best. The World Cup is about nation and identity and pride and who you are and who you want to be.

And anthems. Lots and lots of anthems.

Assessing the national anthems is one of the great hidden pleasures of the World Cup. It’s like watching the pint settle – no-one would buy pints if they couldn’t drink them, but savouring that moment when the pint turns completely black under its collar is one of the exquisite joys of life.

Disappointingly, most anthems are, not to put a tooth in it, cat. This is bad news for the smaller countries, for whom the anthem means so much. While you’re hearing some terrible dirge, salt tears of raw pride are streaming down everybody’s face back home in the competing country that Whereveria has finally taken her place among the nations of the earth.

Spain are the current World Champions, and Spain is one of those countries that has no lyrics to its national anthem. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as lyrics in national anthems aren’t always very good.

On the other hand, there are also anthems that have no end of lyrics. Step forward Greece, whose national anthem has a genuinely staggering 158 verses. Happily, they only sing two of them, or else the Greek anthem would last longer than their actual matches.

The most under-rated of the national anthems, in this neck of the woods certainly, is the Belgian anthem. La Brabançonne is surprisingly interesting and strangely beautiful. A plangent horn is sounded at the start, followed by a martial thrump-thrump-thrump of strings and drums, and then all the band sails in to sound a marvellous salute to king, law and liberty.

La Brabançonne isn’t a widely-known tune here because Belgium doesn’t play rugby and doesn’t get to that many international soccer tournaments. But the Belgians are dark horse bets for this World Cup, so maybe we’ll be hearing a lot of more of it.

An anthem that will not be heard often at the World Cup but that is very familiar to us thanks to Hollywood is the Star-Spangled Banner. This is interesting as an anthem because it’s such a difficult song to sing, with its huge range. Most anthems want to give that notorious fellow, the man in the street, some chance to bawl along in his or own fashion. The man in the street will not be reaching the rocket’s red glare or bombs bursting in air without a step-ladder at the very least.

One of the few sensible decisions taken by the current Russian Government was to use the old Soviet anthem as the anthem of the post-Czarist independent Russia. The USSR was a house of horror for the republics of which it was comprised and the serf nations it terrorised throughout its existence, but the Soviets cannot be faulted in their choice of soundtrack.

The Italian anthem, surprisingly, is a disappointment. The home of opera should have a better anthem than Fratelli d’Italia. What’s wrong with it? It doesn’t flow – it’s full of false starts, unsubtle changes, and bizarre stops, as if to give the singer(s) another lungful of breath. It sounds like a song written by a committee who never met, with the different pieces assembled together like Frankenstein’s monster, sent into the world to make the best of it.

It’s such a pity when you consider some of the best music produced in the western tradition is in Italian opera and could serve any nation as an anthem. You could use the Te Deum from Tosca if you’re a country that likes invading other countries and salting their fields. Alfredo’s first act declaration of love in La Traviata would do very nicely for a shoulders-back, chest-out sort of nation, and there’s the thrilling Di Quella Pira from Il Trovatore – who wouldn’t follow someone into battle with that ringing in their ears?

No such problem for the Germans, who are one of very few nations to have the music of their anthem written by a composer of genuine renown. Franz Joseph Haydn was a contemporary and friend of Mozart and a teacher of Beethoven. When you find yourself being swept away by the German anthem, know that it was written by a master.

And for all that, the greatest national anthem in the world was written by an amateur. La Marseillaise, the glorious national anthem of France, was written by an officer of artillery, Rouget de Lisle, in between battles in 1792. It proved so popular that it was adopted as the national anthem in 1795, and it’s been sung since.

The lyrics of La Marseillaise are surprisingly gory, with references to bloody banners and ferocious cut-throat soldiers. But there is something magical about how the first two lines of the chorus - “aux armes, citoyens! / Formez vos bataillons” - sit on the fanfare of their music that is unmatched in any anthem, anywhere.

Three years after the French adopted La Marseillaise as their national anthem, Napoleon sent an army here, under the command of General Humbert, to see what they could do to promote liberty, equality and fraternity in Ireland. It is quite something to think of La Marseillaise ringing out as that army marched down Bohernasup and into Ballina over two hundred years ago and what the natives must have made of it all. Vive la Republique!

Welcome Back, Kate Bush

Over the past weekend, you may have noticed people of taste in your circle grinning foolishly for no apparent reason. There is always a reason, of course, and in this case it’s more than likely because the people of taste in your circle have suddenly remembered that Kate Bush has announced that she will perform her first series of live shows in thirty-five years – thirty-five years! – towards the end of this summer, and cannot keep a lid on their happiness.

These are bleak times for music. Every generation seems a paler and paler imitation of the one that went before, and modern marketing produces records of such carefully-honed and deeply cynical soullessness and inhumanity that the old moon/June rhymsters of Tin Pin Alley seem as fearless chroniclers of the human condition in comparison.

And then there is someone like Kate Bush. When a modern – what? Singer? Performer? Personality? Is there even a noun for them? – writes his or her best-ever three minutes of music, he or she still can’t see Kate Bush on her very worst day in the far distance. The word “genius” is overused in our culture – in Bush’s case, it’s faint praise.

Pop songs are of their age. They bear their date like a carton of milk and stay fresh for about as long. Morrissey could only have been created by the British society in the ‘eighties. That’s why he’s such an embarrassment now.

Great music transcends that. Norwegian Wood could have been written tomorrow, and it would still sound like nothing else. The first time I heard Nick Cave’s Into My Arms I nearly crashed my car. Riders on the Storm sounds like nothing else. Heroes. There’s a lot of them.

And there’s no small amount of them created by Kate Bush – “written” is too limiting a word. David Bowie experimented with different genres – Bush is her own genre. You hear one of her songs and you know, instantly, that can only be Kate Bush.

Bush’s ideas come from somewhere known only to herself, and perhaps she herself doesn’t even know. There are esoteric theories of aesthetic creation that posit art is sometimes independent on the artist, that in the case of truly great art the artist is more a conduit than a creator.

Who knows? All we can be sure of is that nothing has ever sounded like Wuthering Heights or Running Up that Hill or any of the others.

She’s not too shabby at singing other people’s songs as well. Bush didn’t write Don’t Give Up, her mid-eighties duet with Peter Gabriel, but she owes it. It’s been written that Gabriel was generous in giving Bush the chorus parts of the duet, but it could be that he had no choice. When you sign a genius, you don’t have her singing backup.

Kate Bush’s version of Peadar Ó Doirín’s Mná na hÉireann is no less beautiful, and her Irish pronunciation should put some recent performances of Amhrán na bhFiann to shame (Brian Kennedy and Nadia Forde, named and shamed).

Hounds of Love is Kate Bush’s greatest album. Because she was so young when Wuthering Heights was released in 1978, by 1985 people began to think she was all-washed up. Her only attempt at touring in 1979 was a disaster, the records released in the early part of the decade didn’t do well, early fame is difficult to maintain.

And then Hounds of Love came out and it sounded like something coming through from another dimension. The drum-machines and synthesizers give the record an ‘eighties flavour, but there’s nothing ‘eighties about its sensibility, scope or ambition. It is astonishing, an expression of a genius at the height of her powers.

Also, the second side is unlistenable, which is something to consider about the upcoming concerts. John Lennon, for all his other faults, was correct in his assessment of the avant-garde, and some of Bush’s work is … challenging. It’s also highly unlikely that she’s do a greatest-hits show in Hammersmith, to send the punters home whistling. That’s not really in her nature.

But here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter a damn. Kate Bush has earned the right to do what she wants. Shy by nature, life hasn’t always been easy on her and the evil of contemporary fame hasn’t sat well with her. When she received a CBE from Queen Elizabeth last year, she made a point of having no interaction with the British media at all. This gives lie to the notion that the woman is nuts; making a point of avoiding the British media is not the act of someone who doesn’t have the head screwed on.

Bush’s own reclusiveness is the best thing about these shows. For many people they will be occasions of tremendous joy but, hopefully, for none more so than Kate Bush herself, who has earned joy over and over and over again.

And now, as a treat, here’s Kate Bush singing – or, more correctly, performing – the Elton John song Rocket Man on Wogan in the late 1980s. Leonard Cohen said once that the sign of a really great cover was that it transformed the song without actually changing it. For Elton John, it’s just another piano ballad. For Bush – well; you decide.

Singing Mayo Songs

First published in the Western People on Monday.

A friend of the column once told me that the real reason Mayo don’t win All-Irelands is because we don’t have songs. He is from Tipperary, and the memory of Pat Kerwick singing the Galtee Mountain Boy in the Hogan Stand when Tipp beat Kilkenny in 2010 won’t be soon forgotten by anyone who was there to hear it.

However. It is not true to say that Mayo has no songs. Of course we have songs. Our problem is that we are disinclined to sing them.

In some ways, it’s a general Irish thing. We don’t care for being noticed. So at matches, whether GAA, rugby or soccer, we are inclined to sing the anthem sotto voce, in a way that can barely be heard. This contrasts with the French, the Italians or, most impressively, the Welsh, who belt out their anthems con brio, and more luck to them.

Whatever about the national situation, it could be the thing in Mayo that we are inclined to be sheepish when it comes to singing because of the long tradition of being downtrodden in the county. It started with Cromwell and continued all our lives with the idea that the motto of the county was Mayo, God help us. Not the best of banners to bring into battle.

But the times are changing a little. A generation ago, Croke Park was a stadium for other counties to play football or hurling, while Mayo couldn’t get out of Connacht. Now, it’s as familiar to the Mayo fans as McHale Park, while St Jarlath’s Park, Tuam, a torture-chamber for the guts of half-a-century, means nothing. Not every change is a bad thing. Wouldn’t it be nice if, when Mayo take on Tyrone this weekend, we could do a bit of singing when we’re at  it?

But what to sing? The Sawdoctors’ Green and Red of Mayo is the people’s choice, despite Croke Park’s interesting decision after the Donegal game to play the N17 instead. But while it’s lovely and those booming chords are suitable for stadium rock, all proper Irish singing is done in more cosy venues, such as pubs, taverns and westward-bound buses. Without the guitars, the Green and Red of Mayo is something of a dirge.

The greatest song ever to come out of the County Mayo is Cill Aodáin, by Raifteirí. Brian Cowen, a great supporter of Irish, quoted it when declaring the 2011 election, which was about happy a moment as that unhappy man enjoyed in his Premiership.

Although a Mayoman by birth, Raifteirí spent much of his life in Galway. Cill Aodáin is the song he wrote about going home in the springtime, when nature begins to bloom and everything is looking lovely. The song lists what he’s looking forward to on his journey home and ends on a magnificent crescendo, where Raifteirí praises Cill Aodáin for all that grows there and says that were he only at home again among his people, the age would leave him and he’d be once more young:

“Cill Aodáin an baile a bhfásann gach ní ann
Tá smeara is sú craobh ann is meas ar gach sórt
Is dá mbéinnse arís i gceartlár mo dhaoine
D’imeodh an aois uaim, is bhéinn arís óg.”

Beautiful. Unfortunately for our purposes, the air is tricky and there are precious few recordings of it. When You Tube lets you down, you know something is very rare indeed.

Besides, when you’re looking for a sing-song song, you need a song that people can join in. High-stepping your way through complex notes is no good to you – you want songs where people can throw the head back and let her rip.

Even though it was written to be sung by men in tuxedoes standing beside gleaming pianos, Moonlight in Mayo fits the bill for a sing-song. The thing about Moonlight in Mayo is that it’s a fun song to sing. It’s difficult to sing well, of course, but so is Danny Boy and that doesn’t seem to stop people.

Both those songs are challenges. There are big soaring notes in both – “but come ye BAAAAACKK, when summer’s in the meadow…”, “when it’s moonlight in MAYOOOOOO.” You mightn’t hit them every time, but it’s satisfying to try. Less satisfying for the unfortunates who happen to hear you try, certainly, but good old crack when you’re the one doing the lowing.

The only problem with Moonlight in Mayo is that it doesn’t feel very Mayo-y. This is explained by the fact that it was first published in the USA by Percy Wenrich and Jack Mahoney, and it’s reasonable to doubt they were local. It’s reasonable to assume that, like a good professional should, Mahoney picked Mayo for his moonlight because of that soaring “o” at the end – try singing “moonlight in Cork” to the same air and you’ll quickly discover why that wouldn’t fly.

And then, of course, there’s the actual anthem, The Boys from the County Mayo. Widely known though seldom recorded or heard sung. One reason why it’s so rarely sung, perhaps, is because it’s so long and inclined to ramble.

However. If the clever sing-song-singer performs some judicious editing, and sings only the first and last four lines, making eight in total, the Boys from the County Mayo becomes just as anthemic as we would wish it to be. The first four lines set up the love for the home place well, and that magical county is rather beautifully described as a the land of shamrock and heather – what finer plants are there?

And then we get to the business end, which is rather more like the money, with the marvellous white feather reference, the aristocratic distain for the cowardly act, the call to the brotherhood and the identification of that brotherhood with the true-hearted boys of the County Mayo. It’ll be good to hear the home voices echo through the mean streets of the capital this coming Sunday. Up Mayo.

Blurred Lines, Blurred Lyrics - Nobody Ever Listens to the Words

It’ll be seven years this summer since Top of the Pops went off the air. Being Number One in the UK singles chart doesn’t have the same cultural impact it once had – we’re a long way from The Boomtown Rats tearing up pictures of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John when Rat Trap got to Number One in the winter of 1978, or The Specials’ Ghost Town being a commentary on Thatcher’s Britain.

The current Number One single in the United Kingdom is Blurred Lines, by the temptingly named Robin Thicke. You might have heard the song on the radio – it’s the “hey heyhey HEY!” one.

It is unlikely that anyone actually hears anything other than “hey heyhey HEY!” when they hear the song though, because if they did the song would surely have not done so well. An appearance by Thicke on the Ellen show in the USA - the video at the top of this page - makes the song beyond reproach as far as women are concerned, but would Blurred Lines be so popular if people heard any of the lyrics other than the “hey heyhey HEY!” part?

You’re always open to accusations of fogeyism when you wonder if it’s really necessary to fling this filth at our pop kids, but my goodness, the thought that people are growing up listening to this and concluding that this is how adult men relate to adult women is appalling. It’s not a question of feminism or ideology – it’s a question of simple manners.

It could be that the people who love Blurred Lines genuinely don’t hear the lyric. All they hear is the “hey heyhey HEY!” and hit the dance floor immediately, viewing all content other than the groove as superfluous.

Such a reaction would not necessarily be uncommon. Max Martin once told the BBC that the first few notes on the piano of Hit Me Baby, One More Time were the entire song – Britney Spears could have been singing a shopping lift after that and it still would have worked. And Martin, of course, should know, having written the thing in the first place.

This is how we consume music now. A series of motifs are expertly stitched together and rolled out the conveyor belt. And it’s not just the writing teams behind Thicke or Rhianna that do it; Sasha Fr ère-Jones expertly deconstructed Coldplay and U2 in in the New Yorker a few years ago. The tunes bounce around but mean nothing. The lyrics are just another sound in the mix, like raspberry ripple running through the vanilla ice-cream.

Is this a good or a bad thing? It could be that the consumers of these things are as oblivious to the lyrics as the 99% of internet users who have no interest in the mechanics of how this modern miracle works, with packets of information flashing back and forth through the ether in milliseconds. We just want to check Facebook, thanks.

It’s hard to know how many people ever listened to lyrics anyway. Bob Dylan is seen as the greatest lyricist of the modern pop/rock age, even though a huge amount of his lyrics make no sense whatsoever. He made his name as a protest singer and people assumed he was still protesting when he went electric. A quick glance shows this a very big assumption to make.

For instance, what makes Jokerman a great song is that it sounds Caribbean and Mark Knopfler plays guitar on it. But the lyrics are rubbish:

You're a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds
Manipulator of crowds, you're a dream twister
You're going to Sodom and Gomorrah
But what do you care? Ain't nobody there
Would want marry your sister

If there is a more forced rhyme in modern music than twister/sister, I don’t know what it is.

Of lyrics in pop songs, ABBA are much deeper than they’re given credit for. Not always, of course – the second line of Waterloo is one of the clunkiest ever written – but in his maturity Björn Ulvaeus wrote some remarkably sad songs, with Winner Takes It All being the most harrowing:

But tell me does she kiss
Like I used to kiss you?
Does it feel the same
When she calls your name?

“Does it feel the same / When she calls your name?” L Cohen himself would be proud of that one. Nothing blurred about those lines.

Going Dutch on Later with Jools Holland

It’s hard to believe that Later with Jools Holland is twenty years on TV. The aged and bewildered will remember Holland and the late Paula Yates presenting The Tube on Channel 4, the vanguard of a revolution that never arrived. The fossilized remains of those who remember the 1970s will remember Holland playing the piano for Squeeze, when up the junction was very cool for cats.

That’s a long, long time to be involved in something as ephemeral as popular music. Freddie Mercury thought that great pop songs should be like disposable razors, and God knows Freddie wrote plenty of great pop songs in his day. Why, then, this continuing effort to build and maintain a canon?

There was a fawning article of wide-eyed wonder about Later with Jools Holland in the Observer on Sunday, with a lot of puff pieces from various music industry sources about how great it is to meet one’s fellow artists, how competitive it is between them, and the incredible respect they all have for each other.

There were even star-struck ingénues – “In 2000 a debuting Chris Martin muffed the introduction to Yellow because, he said, Gary Brooker was in the room and he couldn't stop thinking about this being one of the guys that wrote A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

Well, pinch of salt to the green room, please. That’s all very hard to believe.

The only thing all these artists have in common is that they all work for record companies and all like to see a dollar at the end of the week. The notion of a giant love-in across the musical divide is hard to swallow. They’re all on Later for the money, because that’s what the music business, like any business, is all about.

For instance – Donovan was a guest in 1996, while Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros were guests in 2000. Donovan had “this guitar kills fascists” written on his guitar, while Strummer had “this guitar kills hippies” written on his.

So suppose they were booked on the same show in 1998. Would Strummer attempt to batter Donovan to a tie-dyed pulp in the studio, or would they find common cause in the fact that both their incomes are provided by Sony Music? Donovan covering Guns of Brixton and Strummer doing Mellow Yellow is my money, followed by a yard of purple prose in Q Magazine about music uniting across the generations.

An Spailpín read somewhere that the true power of Later with Jools Holland is the perfect symbiosis that exists between the old veterans laden with credibility but desperate for relevance and the tyros who need credibility to bolster their claim to be the Next New Thing.

The perfect episode of Later would be a duet between Aretha Franklin and Adele. Aretha would be grateful for Adele’s considerable popularity while singing with Aretha would be a further confirmation of Adele as the queen of popular music. Chi-ching, say the boys in the boardroom.

There are some great moments on Later, of course. There couldn’t not be on a music show, among all the grubbing for dollars. The Observer references John Cale’s performance of Hallelujah, and your correspondent was quite charmed by Katy Perry’s exhibition of campanology when she performed I Kissed a Girl a few years ago.

But while the Observer cites the four million views on You Tube of the Cale Hallelujah as proof that taste will out, the reality is that the vast majority of people who viewed it did so because it was on the soundtrack of Shrek.

The poet tells us that music has charms to soothe the savage beast, and it does of course. But the music companies know how to sell product too. It’s fifty years since Bill Haley rocked around the clock – a half-century is plenty of time for the boys in the boardrooms to have the formula down as pat as Coca-Cola’s.

FOCAL SCOIR: Speaking of Chris Martin, this 2008 article by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker sums up Coldplay, U2 and that whole horrible school. Here’s that Katy appearance on Later, then, to cheer us all up. Ding-dong.

Stuck Inside These Four Walls - Why is Everyone So Down on McCartney?

The generally unkind reaction on Twitter to Sir Paul McCartney’s appearance at the Olympic opening ceremony is further evidence that familiarity breeds contempt. McCartney’s dyed hair is reaching a Ronnie Reagan level of ridiculousness and his unrepentantly ‘sixties peace-and-love, man, persona is out of time in the edgy decade of the 21^st Century. But, as Paul Gambaccini once remarked, every time Paul McCartney leaves a room the correct reaction is to think “there goes Mozart.” That can never be taken from him.

A post-revolutionary world finds it difficult to imagine life in a pre-revolutionary one. John Lennon said that before Elvis, there was nothing, but he could say that because he was John Lennon. It was like Sinatra saying Tony Bennett was the best crooner in the world. We all know they’re only saying it to be nice.

The Beatles revolutionized music to such a degree that the revolution is now the establishment. Classical music had disappeared up a blind atonal alley by the 1950s and 60s, from which its never fully returned – The Beatles reminded the world that harmony and melody still have a place and, although the classicists themselves would be loathe to admit it, may yet play a play in the return of that high art. Check out Howard Goodall’s excellent discussion of this on You Tube. It’s superb.

Without The Beatles, rock music would have been limited to three chord tricks and twelve bar blues. The Beatles opened it up to a whole new world of depth. Without The Beatles, there could never have been a Bohemian Rhapsody. The Beatles blazed a trail for all to follow.

The Beatles were many bands rolled into one. Magpies who, to borrow a phrase from Mike Scott, heard the Big Music. They looked on all imposters just the same, and drew no distinction between Franz Joseph Hayden and John Lee Hooker, Ravi Shankar and Sir Arthur Sullivan. It all went into the pot.

In five years, The Beatles went on a learning curve from Rubber Soul to Let It Be that is unprecedented in popular music, and will never be matched because that’s not now the music industry works any more. Now, music is made like sausages, in factories.

The rock’n’roll ethos that rejected Tin Pin Alley has itself been consumed by Stargate and Xenomania. Pop has eaten itself. Hit records are made the same way as toasters and tricycles, with ISO 9000s and nothing left to chance. The commercialism is so successful that within six months it’s safe to use the songs in TV ads. The only thing missing is the humanity.

McCartney has never been forgiven for writing anything as good as Yesterday in the past quarter-century. Westlife’s Flying Without Wings isn’t as a good as Yesterday either, but it sold over 200,000 copies in the UK alone. Nobody’s calling for Mark Chapman to shoot them, even though the case can certainly be made.

There’s a movement to intellectualise pop music, not least because the exponents of pop’s golden era, the ‘sixties, are in the autumn of their days and everybody likes to look back on a life and see footprints.

There’s a strange deification of the Beatles that exists outside of the music too, that’s part of the continuing narcissism of that ‘sixties generation. But chances are Freddie Mercury was right when he said that pop songs were like disposable razors – you use them for three minutes, and then you throw them away.

McCartney is still big. It’s the music that got small. Modern music is something that plays in the background while you’re hoovering, and that can be used again to tell you about a great deal on life insurance. But in the centuries to come, when people look back to see peaks of musical achievement in the west, they will see men after whom music was never the same again. Beethoven at the start of the 19th Century, Richard Wagner at the end of it and McCartney in the middle of the 20th. That’s who that hoarse old guy with the funny hair was at Olympic opening ceremony on Friday night.

So. Farewell Then, Barney McKenna

There's a case to be made that Barney McKenna was the champion drinker of the Dubliners. Drink killed Ciarán Bourke, it made Ronnie Drew leave the group for five years, and it killed Luke Kelly.

But McKenna outlived them all and, although his death was sudden, he was spared his comrades’ mortal suffering. Yesterday, the day before Good Friday, he nodded off to sleep in his own chair in his own kitchen, and never woke up again. Would that we all are afforded such a luxury.

Kieran Hanrahan said yesterday that it was McKenna’s virtuosity that made the banjo popular as a traditional instrument in Irish music. It was not considered a “proper” instrument before that.

The banjo’s great virtue is also its great vice – it’s loud. You can hear a banjo at the back of the pub, above the roaring and the gulping. But when you’re that loud, it’s hard to be particularly tender. Steve Martin, no bad man on the banjo himself, once remarked that you can never play a sad song on the banjo, because it always comes out happy.

He never heard Barney McKenna play Ar Éirinn Ní Neosainn Cé hÍ.

I saw the Dubliners, once. It was in the Gaiety, ten years ago, when all the surviving members assembled to do their thing. They were old men then, and there was a strong sense of nostalgia in the hall, but there was also the odd crackle, the odd taste of what it might have been like to hear them in their roaring boy prime. That would have been something.

The band always liked to make a fuss over Barney McKenna, and his virtuosity. McKenna addressed this that night in the Gaiety – before playing his solos he said that he knew he had a reputation or drink and nights out, but he wanted to make clear, to anyone listening in the audience, that he didn’t become a virtuoso in the pub. He learned to play at home, by practicing, practicing, practicing. He would view a title like “champion drinker of the Dubliners” with a jaundiced eye.

Barney McKenna was a hero of Irish music, and his loss grieves our battered nation. He was first and last a Dubliner of course, in every sense of the word, but we should also remember his short but stunning TV series with Tony MacMahon, The Green Linnet. The two men toured Europe in a small green Citreon Fourgonette van in the summer of 1979, echoing the footsteps of the wild geese of the 18th Century. It wasn’t an easy trip, and neither man spoke to the other for twenty-five years after it.

Happily, the made up in 2006, each man being big enough to admit his own fault. Life is short and brittle. Only the art survives.

Here are Mac Mahon and McKenna playing My Love is in America, somewhere in Germany, on The Green Linnet TV series in that warm European summer of 1979. Go dtuga Dia suaimhneas síoraí ar anam usual Barney McKenna, ceoltóir, ealaíontóir, Bleá Cliach. Rinne sé a chuid ar son na hÉireann.

Happy Christmas Everybody

Another Christmas rolls around. Some of us are still here, holding our ground, some have moved on to what I hope is a better station.

In the meantime, thanks for coming to read the blog over the year, even though circumstances mean that I can't post as often as I used to or would like. I still like to hop a ball when I can, and I appreciate everyone who comes along to watch it bounce.

To celebrate the feast, here's Yo-Yo Ma and wonderful Alison Krauss performing The Wexford Carol. Go mbeirfimid go léir beo ag an am seo arís.

The Man from the ECB

Your country hasn’t any money,
it’s well and truly broke
You thought you had dollars by the barrel
but they’ve all gone up in smoke
I’ve orders here from Brussels,
this thing can never be
So I’m coming for your life,
your money and your wife
Says the man from the ECB

I’m afraid the blade is slashing left and right,
Cutting here now, trimming there now
I’m slashing day and night, at everything in sight
Confiscating now, amalgamating now
I’ll hack and I’ll saw by order of the law
And I won’t even stop for me tea
And if that doesn’t catch it
I’ll come at it with me hatchet
Says the man from the ECB

Maseratis heavy on the diesel
worry people with a pension plan
I’m plagued with beards in SIPTU,
and concerns for the working man
Everyone always has the paw out,
all I hear is me, me, me,
It’s no wonder that you’re busted
when you look at who you trusted
Says the man from the ECB.

I’m afraid the blade is slashing left and right,
Cutting here now, trimming there now
I’m slashing day and night, at everything in sight
Confiscating now, amalgamating now
I’ll hack and I’ll saw by order of the law
And I won’t even stop for me tea
And if that doesn’t catch it
I’ll come at it with me hatchet
Says the man from the ECB

You’re country’s falling all to pieces,
it’ll never stay afloat
While it’s always jobs for the boys here,
and nobody rocks the boat.
You haven’t much of a chance here
when you’re not from the right fam-i-lee
And you can think of how they failed ya
when you’ve moved out to Australia
Says the man from the ECB.

I’m afraid the blade is slashing left and right,
Cutting here now, trimming there now
I’m slashing day and night, at everything in sight
Confiscating now, amalgamating now
I’ll hack and I’ll saw by order of the law
And I won’t even stop for me tea
And if that doesn’t catch it
I’ll come at it with me hatchet
Says the man from the ECB

The Late Late: Guests from Aldi, 24 Carat Diamonds Left at Home

The galling thing about the Late Late Show’s booking policy isn’t just the pool of dodos from which guests are regularly harvested, painful though that pool is. It’s that the Late Late is remiss in its duty as the cultural flagship of the nation in bringing actual culture to the people, and churns out a lot of old gas from Frances Black, Eamon Holmes and Charles Bird instead.

An Spailpín was reminded of this when buying a CD recently. The CD featured Seán Ó Sé as a guest star of the Turloughmore Ceilí Band, which is a development that An Spailpín thinks worthy of a Late Late special all to itself. Bear with me for a few hundred words, and then decide if this isn’t of greater import to the nation than Ronan Keating or Mary Byrne.

Who is Seán Ó Sé?
Seán Ó Sé is a retired schoolteacher in Cork. But in his spare time he is one of the saviours of Irish traditional music. The economy is buggered, the language has been burning diesel for over a hundred years and survives from sheer spite alone, but one thing we did do right is that we saved the music.

The rising tide of the 1960s US folk scene helped in no small measure of course, t say nothing of the huge archive at the BBC offices in Shepherd’s Bush, but the indigenous impetus to save the music came from Seán Ó Riada and Ceoltóirí Chulann. Ó Riada showed that Irish traditional music was every bit as sophisticated as the great musics of Europe if arranged in a similar style and all of a sudden the nation realised that we didn’t have to hide fiddles under the bed like they were some sign of hopeless boggery. The music took her place among the musics of the world and hasn’t looked back.

Seán Ó Sé was the singer in Seán Ó Riada’s band. Why Ó Sé didn’t move on when Ceoltóirí mutated into the Chieftains after Ó Riada’s early death in 1970 I don’t know, but Ó Sé is still an unquestioned hero of Irish music and culture and should be treated as such even if he never cleared his throat to sing An Poc ar Buile again.

But he’s done even more than that. Recently retired from teaching, Ó Sé is using his retirement to push the boundaries of music even further, and the collaboration with the Turloughmore Ceilí Band is further evidence of that.

And Why’s That?
Because although he loved traditional music, Seán Ó Riada had very clear ideas of what traditional music is and what it isn’t. And Seán Ó Riada particularly despised ceilí bands. He hated them. He said they had “all the musical integrity of a bluebottle buzzing around in a jamjar.” It was a rotten and unfair to thing to say – not least for a man who played the harpsichord himself, hardly the prettiest of instruments.

Ceilí bands had their advocates too, not least the late Ciarán Mac Mathúna, who pointed out that buy playing them at dances ceilí bands saved countless tunes that could have been lost. But there has always been that snobbery associated with ceilí bands, that that are not fully of the tradition.

Crossing No Man’s Land
And that’s what makes the Ó Sé collaboration with the Turloughmore so significant. Ó Sé has crossed no man’s land to join the opposition. In recording a CD with the Turloughmore Ceilí Band, Seán Ó Sé has declared music to be all one, streaming out from the forts of Tuatha de Danann and the other weird peoples that have lived here before us.

If that magic is captured in the nets of the Pipers’ Club or Ceoltas Ceoltóirí Éireann or the hammer men on stage at a hooley while the dancers belt the floor, what matter, what odds? Isn’t it all music all the same, and all particularly Irish, resonant and harmonious with the Irish soul?

That’s what An Spailpín thinks a Late Late Show should be about. The Chieftains and Ó Sé talking about Ó Riada and what he did. Jim McCann and Barney McKenna talking about the folk singers, now the Clancys all roam the other worlds. Planxty and the Bothy Band and Altan to bring it up to date. And then a huge band of the whole damned lot of them, Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, giving it socks on the Rocky Road to Dublin.

And what do I get instead? “Ryan Tubridy chats to Charlie Bird about his new documentary series of legendary Antarctic explorer, Tom Crean. Mary McEvoy talks about her new book, Ireland's greatest slimmer gives advice on how to shed the pounds, Ali Hewson and Adi Roche talk about the Chernobyl Children and Jessie J performs her hit single, 'Price Tag'.”

Price Tag, indeed. Go gcuire Seán Ó Sé an dea-chath fós, go gcasa sé a amhráin go binn go bráth, agus go mbronntar an ómós atá tuilte do lá breá éigin gan moil.

Are Lyric FM Presenters Fit for Purpose?

Marty Whelan is a gentleman. Marty Whelan is self-effacing, witty, personable, and a professional to his fingertips. He’s a gentleman and an example to whole younger generation of broadcasters who are not fit to hand him his pearly hairbrushes before he goes on camera. But my God, Marty Whelan has no business presenting the Breakfast Show on Lyric FM.

When Lyric FM celebrated its tenth birthday two years ago its head honcho told the nation that the great thing about Lyric FM is that they put music first. The most important thing for them when choosing presenters is the music. Everything else comes second.

An Spailpín has no reason to doubt this man. But it does seem a coincidence that, in as small a broadcasting pond as Ireland’s, the persons with sufficient classical music knowledge, appreciation and ability to share that appreciation all happen to be on the RTÉ payroll.

Marty Whelan. Lorcan Murray. Geri Maye. Gay Byrne. Frank McNamara, for God’s sake. After a while, there’s just too many of them for it to be a coincidence.

George Hamilton, in fairness to him, is an exception to this. He witters on during his Saturday show, certainly, but no more so than he does when Aiden McGeady is closing in on goal and the nation holds its breath, wondering how McGeady’s going to screw it up this time.

But behind the bonhomie there’s an astute and very cultured mind who knows what good music is and who can teach you so that you know too. You couldn’t imagine Clive Tyldesley speaking ex tempore on Wagner and the Tristan Chord, for instance.

The ability to teach is the single-most important asset a presenter on Lyric should have. Classical music is not like pop music, no matter how much people may try to pretend it is.

To get it, unless you’re blessed with an innate musical sense, you’re going to have to do your homework and be told what to listen for. Or else have a presenter whose love for the music is so overpowering that he or she can’t help but sweep you away.

Marty Whelan, for all his gifts, just can’t do it. He’s still a wonderful radio presence – An Spailpín has watched his breakfast milk curdle while Frank McNamara is speaking – but Marty Whelan’s particular schtick isn’t suited to classical music. It’s just not.

This You Tube pianoman, one of the anonymous specialists that light up that marvelous website, is the sort of guy that should be presenting classical music on the radio. The love comes through all the time. Leave Marty to take over from Derek Mooney or something. Wouldn’t we all be so much better off?

Horse Outside vs. Frank Kelly's Christmas Countdown

Whatever they do when they take those bags off their heads, whatever paths their future lives may take, the Rubberbandits will never mine so rich a strain of inspiration, or resonate with so many people, as they have this Christmas with Horse Outside.

If that sounds a little limiting, it’s not. Most people don’t achieve in a lifetime of creation what the Rubberbandits have achieved in the three minutes and fifty-one seconds of Horse Outside.

The difference between their weekly output on late night TV and Horse Outside is the difference between water and whiskey. The bridesmaid is impossibly glamorous, the chief Rubberbandit dances like Michael Jackson, the lyrics are equally piquant and hilarious and the whole thing is carried off with such brio that you’re just swept away.

Listening to Horse Outside and hearing talk of a Christmas No 1 brought An Spailpín back to another Christmas record of the past. Frank Kelly wrote a parody of The Twelve Days of Christmas in 1983 that was a big hit at the time and even saw him make an appearance on Top of the Pops.

The idea was that Gobnait O’Lunacy, Kelly’s everyman character stretching back to his days on Hall’s Pictorial Weekly, is writing thank-you notes to his girlfriend, Nuala. Nuala sends the gifts mentioned in the song to Gobnait and his mother on each of the twelve days and Gobnait replies, each letter growing more exasperated as the wildlife grows more difficult to control in the house.

Kelly’s Christmas Countdown is much more gentle than the Rubberbandits’ Horse Outside. Gobnait lives with his mother and his girlfriend’s name is Nuala. If Gobnait bought a horse, he would use cash money, rather than a bag of yokes and the barter system.

While the Rubberbandits swear the house down Kelly limits himself to parliamentary language, but it works well for him “You have scandalised my mother, you dirty Jezebel ... listen, slurry-head!” “Slurry-head” remains one of An Spailpín’s favourite insults – although, sadly, your correspondent is much more likely to chose the Rubberbandit vocabulary when exasperated, having gone to the town school.

It’s a mistake to read too much meaning into novelty songs. Joyce got away with it for Finnegan’s Wake but he was an exceptional case. That said, it’s undeniable that each song holds a mirror up to its age and society.

Frank Kelly’s song is set in an Ireland that’s before the fall of the church, with poverty, middle-aged men living with their mothers and the that small-town-as-the-universe feel. Horse Outside is recognisably today, with people who don’t really care what’s going on so long as they can get wasted and have a good time. Celtic Tiger in excelsis.

Horse Outside is a much more vital song than the Christmas Countdown – it makes you want to get up and dance. But the fundamental engine of the song is what the Rubberbandit advises his rivals in love to do with their Mitsubishis, their Honda Civics and their Su-ba-ru. Good fun to make gang signs to and roar out when you’re twisted at the office party. But fundamentally cheap and a little bit nasty.

Again, it’s only a song. But what’s kind of sad is that there isn’t a counterbalance in the culture to the coarseness of it. The old-world civility of people who write thank-you notes, whose girlfriends are called Nuala but will never top Mammy in their boy’s affections.

There was a lot of repression and sadness in that Ireland, and lost potential and torn social fabrics. But it’s hard to think the Rubberbandits, inspired though they are, are progress.

Two Rock Star Autobiographies - John McGuinness and Keith Richards

Two of the greatest rock stars of all time have published books in recent weeks, just in time for the Christmas market.

John McGuinness, TD for Carlow-Kilkenny, needs no introduction of course. Rebel. Rockstar. Maverick. Outsider. A piper at the gates of dawn, a moonlight shadow, a zephyr howling through the Curlew Mountains and on into the members’ bar of Dáil Éireann.

While the lesser known Keith Richards is an Englishman with the face of a prune and who is said to have more of different people’s blood sluicing through his system than Count Dracula.

Both men laugh in the face of doom, and spit in the eye of terror. Both walk with hellhounds on their trail. McGuinness calls his book The House Always Wins, thus showing that he dreams the impossible dream, and fights the ungovernable sea. Keith Richards – well, you only have to look at the head on him.

Funnily enough, in calling his book “The House Always Wins,” the reader would be forgiven for thinking that maybe McGuinness is anti-establishment or something. You’d think that maybe he wants to tear down the house.

The fact that McGuinness remains very firmly ensconced in Fianna Fáil despite have roasted the Government on several occasions would indicate that our hero is happy as a tick with the way things are, actually. He likes to blow off a little every now and again, like some great whale somewhere between Greenland and Tarwathie.

In rock and roll terms, John McGuinness is very much like the former American president: he smokes, but he does not, under any circumstances, inhale.

McGuinness’ credibility as providing an alternative is lessened also by the first photograph in his book which is, unless I’m mistaken, a picture of his dear old Da and his dear old Da before him, both dressed in chains. Not because they were on the prison ship to Van Diemen’s Land now; it’s that they were both politicians before John himself, and thus got to dress up like Knights of the Garter. After all, what has been more important throughout the history of the Republic than royal blood? McGuinness is an unusual revolutionary if he’s leading the charge from inside the castle, aiming out.

Poor Dessie O’Malley was on Marian Finucane’s radio show a few Sundays ago, talking about how difficult it is to set up a new political party now. But at least Dessie tried. We have to say that much for him.

As for the guitar-picker: there’s an interesting quote from the manager of The Grateful Dead, Rock Scully, in Nick Kent’s recently published autobiography Apathy for the Devil, about the Stones, the ‘sixties and peace and love: “Woodstock and Altamount are seen as polar opposites in a mass-media generated parable of light and darkness, but they were just two ends of the same mucky stick, the net result of the same disease: the bloating of mass bohemia in the late ‘sixties.”

Not only did Joan Didion say more or less the same thing, but she called it at the time in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The sooner history swallows Keith Richards and his hopelessly narcissistic and utterly hypocritical generation the better. They’ll be no loss.

Tosca at the Gaiety

Tosca is one of the most popular operas in the repertoire, yet it’s appeal isn’t immediately obvious. Tosca isn’t charming like La Bohème or heartbreaking like La Traviata; you don’t hear the faintest echo of the voice of God like you do when listening to Mozart, nor do you come away from Tosca trilling the tunes like you do from Carmen.

Luciano Pavarotti chose Tosca as his last ever opera (at the Met in New York in 2004) even though the tenor role, Carvaradossi, is a bit on the watery side. Floria Tosca herself isn’t the most appealing heroine in the repertoire either, yet all the greats have sung her.

Everyone comes back to Tosca for two reasons. The first is the quality of the drama which, after a slow-burning start, is as tight as any operatic drama can be. And the second is Baron Scarpia, the villain of the piece, who is the greatest original villain in opera.

“Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma,” Tosca says of Scarpia at the end of the second act; before him, all Rome trembled. Scarpia is the chief of police in Rome at the start of the 19th century. What Scarpia wants, Scarpia gets, and he’s not too fussy how he gets it. And what he wants tonight is Tosca herself. He’s a bit of a buck that way, Scarpia.

The opening chords of the opera, are Scarpia’s theme, a motif that’s repeated throughout the piece. Scarpia dominates the opera just as Tosca says he dominates Rome and the story of the opera is how his uniquely evil shadow falls on the lovers, the painter and revolutionary Mario Carvaradossi and the opera singer Floria Tosca.

The first act is frustratingly complicated, but the drama really begins when Scarpia makes his sudden entrance half-way through, announced by his theme. This is the moment when you know if the opera will be a success; the singer playing Scarpia must carry the role or else the whole show falls apart.

You quickly find out if he can as, after a few minutes to con the flighty Tosca into thinking that Cavaradossi is cheating on her, Scarpia gets to sing his great set piece, Va, Tosca, against the Te Deum that the church choir sings to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon as first act finale.

There are other great arias in Tosca – Tosca’s own Vissi D’Arte, Cavaradossi’s E Lucevan Le Stelle – but nothing matches the Te Deum. The music builds up as Scarpia’s lust for Tosca contrasts with the religious music of the Te Deum itself until Scarpia becomes aware of his own damnation – because religion and faith, good and evil are strong themes of the opera – at the climax of the piece when he sings “Tosca, you make me forget God!” A fantastic exposition of what makes opera great as an art form, and worth the price of admission alone.

For those going to see Opera Ireland’s Tosca, the final production before the establishment of the new Irish National Opera, here’s a treat to whet the appetite. It’s the brilliantly bug-eyed Ruggero Raimondi singing the Te Deum in a TV Tosca from 1992 that was sung live in real time from the historical locations in Rome in which the opera is set – the Church of Sant’Andrea Della Valle, the Palazzo Farnese and the Castel Sant’Angelo. Staggering.