So. Farewell then, Eugene McGee, Conqueror of the Conqueror of the World

Buaiteoir Buaiteora an Domhain

Alexander II, Tsar of all the Russias, described the Duke of Wellington as the “conqueror of the conqueror of the world” after Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. And it’s a fitting epitaph also for Eugene McGee, who died suddenly on Sunday morning.

McGee was a complex man. One of the greatest Gaelic football managers, while one of its worst players. A sometimes dour, if not downright rude, man who could inspire fierce loyalty. A pundit who was at once blinkered and revolutionary.

But whatever else is said or written of the man, and for all the great and terrible personal loss he is for his family, Eugene McGee will forever be associated with 1982, and the greatest All-Ireland football final the nation has ever seen.

We are lucky that, in an Association whose dedication to preserving its own history is spotty at best, we have a marvellous document of that Offaly team, their spectacular act of giant-killing, and a Kerry Golden Generation that came back from that defeat to become even more lustrous than before. It is Kings of September by Michael Foley, and it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Ireland. Essential reading.

McGee is not noted as a Gaelic football tactician, as Jim McGuinness or Mickey Harte are. He liked his football, to use his own phrase, “tough, but manly.” Both Roy Keane and Graeme Souness have been preaching the worth of getting to the damn ball and worrying about tactics later in another code. McGee was of their church.

So was he lucky, or was he good? The results are there. Mick O’Dwyer conquered the world, and McGee conquered Dwyer. McGee was successful with UCD in Sigerson football, Offaly in senior inter-county, and even in International Rules, back when the Australians cared in the ‘eighties. (After an Irish triumph, some Australians believed that the Irish had an advantage because the game was played with a round ball. McGee was asked if he thought the Australians would have won if the games were played with the Australian oval ball. “We’d have won playing with a square ball,” spat McGee).

McGee was a proponent of the black card and the qualifier system, and was wrong on both counts in the opinion of the current writer. He believed that the first step to professionalism in the GAA came with sponsored jerseys, and was correct, again in the opinion of the current writer.

But that’s all these things are; opinions. The man’s record cannot be denied, and neither can the personality, the cut, the gimp of the man. He was proudly rural in a way that didn’t even allow for a rural-urban debate. He was who he was, and he made neither bones nor apologies about it.

It is possible that, reading the eulogies today, some misfortunate sophist with a algorithm where his or her soul ought to be will sit down and watch a tape of that 1982 final. He’ll see a game played on a wet day, with poor fitness levels compared to modern standards, poor skill levels compared to modern standards, and a game in which the best team did not win.

Reader, pity that man. There are those who would look on a rose and see only a bush, or hear a symphony and hear only noise.

The scientific approach to sport has its place, of course, but if it reigns supreme then sport becomes just another job, with carefully measured outputs and inputs and strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats.

It’s the sheer human drama of sports that compels, as players battle skills, yes, but also bravery and courage and the huge hand of Fate itself.

Sport is at once serious and trivial. Winning the All-Ireland is the most important thing in the year, after everything else, like births, marriages and deaths. There is a ceiling to how much sport can be parsed.

A wise and thoughtful friend of the blog cried when Kerry lost in 1982. He believed in merit as a child, and that the best team should win. And if that game between Kerry and Offaly were played ten times, Kerry would win it nine times. Of course they would. But the game was played only once, and Kerry didn’t win it. Offaly did, in the most unforgettable moment in Irish sport.

That could not have happened without Eugene McGee. Offaly went one stage further in the Championship every year he was in charge until they won the entire thing, and they did it at that turning point in history when the greatest team of all time were set to collect the uncollectable crown.

If that’s not the very illustration of the sublime, what is? And none of it could have happened without Eugene McGee, now called Home to his Reward. Suaimhneas síoraí dó, agus go raibh príomh-áit aige i nDáil na Laochra Gael.

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.

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.

So. Farewell then, Socrates of Brazil

Today is a sad day for people of a certain age. News that the great Brazilian soccer player Socrates has died from an intestinal infection at the age of 57 reminds everyone who watched the 1982 and 1986 World Cups that we are mortal and we shall die.

It was a different era. There is saturation soccer coverage now – so much so that it’s easy to forget that one of the reasons the World Cup was a big deal previously is because there was nothing else.

In Ireland, what you knew about soccer you read in the papers or saw in highlights or what you saw in those strange midweek European Cup games, where Liverpool or Nottingham Forest would play in Belgrade or Budapest in a stadium ringed by an running track and a phalanx of heavily-armed military with the crowd deep in the shadows.

And then, every four summers, weeks and weeks of the stuff. Because you didn’t know who the players were, you were always ready to believe the hype, that these were colossi who bestrode the very earth, while mortals worshipped at their feet. Or at least, that's how they looked to a child.

Ricky Villas and Ossie Ardilles were the only players from outside the British Isles playing in England, and they both had to go back home to Argentina when the Falklands War broke out. Pre-internet and pre-satellite TV, all you knew were names and reputations – Rummenegge of West Germany, Platini of France, Maradona of Argentina. And everyone who played for Brazil. Every one of them.

Brazil arrived at the 1982 World Cup with too many central midfielders and not enough wide men. In a language that had yet to be invented, Brazil saw that as a feature, not a bug.

Brazil lit up Spain playing in a 4-2-2-2 formation, with Zico and Socrates as the penultimate two. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, nor would again. Brazil were at once fire and ice, rapier and broadsword, and became the most beloved international team since their own 1970 incarnation.

And then they lost. Brazil met Italy, the supreme pragmatists, in Barcelona’s Estadio Sarriá in the final game of their second round group. Brazil needed only a draw to go through. They lost, 3-2. Paolo Rossi scored a hat-trick and Zico would later describe the game as “the day football died.”

That was Zico enjoying the benefit of hindsight. Because four years later Brazil returned to the World Cup, and they lustre still shone just as brightly from the famous yellow jerseys.

Mexico 1986 was the last great World Cup. It was the last World Cup to showcase a man who was undeniably the Greatest Player in the World (don’t forget, Messi has yet to perform on the greatest stage, as Maradona, Cruyff (when he was bothered) and Pele have all done). Not only that, it had a number of teams who could have won it and deserved it just as much as Argentina did. Chiefly Brazil. Of course.

What a magnificent, frightening team Brazil were. Zico was a fitful due to injury, but Socrates was still there, pulling the strings. Unusually tall and gangly for a soccer player, with a distinctive thick black beard, he looked both completely at home and strangely out of place.

Brazil met the European Champions France in the quarter-finals. France weren’t that good, but Brazil ran out of luck that day in Guadalajara, losing to France on penalties.

The game turned on a penalty during the ninety minutes. Socrates had been taking them all during the tournament. He had a bizarre action – one step before striking the ball – but it worked. Keepers had no idea what to make of it.

But Zico had come on as a sub just before the penalty. Zico wore Brazil’s iconic No 10 shirt. Zico had never missed a penalty in his career. Zico had to take the penalty, because he was Zico.

France’s Joel Bats guessed correctly in goal. Zico missed, and the game went to penalties.

Socrates stepped up for the first. Bats was inspired by the earlier save of Zico. Bats saved Socrates’ shot, France won the shootout 4-3, and Brazil were gone. France went onto face Germany in the semi-final, and lost 0-2, to goals by Andy Brehme at the start and Rudi Völler at the finish. Bats was at fault for both of them.

And meanwhile Brazil are gone forever. The world waits for another Brazil to turn on the magic like they did in the 1960s and 1980s but that’s thirty years ago, and counting. The game has moved on. Whether it’s evolved or devolved is a debate for those who still love it. I don’t. Not any more.

All I do know is there once was a man, Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira, whom the world knew simply as Socrates, and he had magic in him. May God grant the eternal reward due him for the joy he brought to millions and millions of people, all over the world.

So. Farewell Then, Moss Keane

Moss Keane, second row forward for Lansdowne, Munster, Ireland and the Lions, was claimed by cancer at the ridiculous age of sixty-two yesterday. Des Fitzgerald, the former Irish tight head prop forward now famous as Luke Fitzgerald’s Da, said on the TV news yesterday that Moss Keane brought rugby to the masses in Ireland. Fitzgerald was correct.

When the nation saw Moss Keane in the emerald green jersey of Ireland, we saw someone who was recognisably ourselves. Rugby has always been an elitist game in Ireland, something the IRFU seem quite content to maintain, but there’s something in the fundamental nature of the game, the hard smashing intensity of the thing, that chimes with the Irish spirit, even outside of the rugby heartland of the country.

Rugby’s heartland exists in very small pockets in Ireland. That heartland is bigger now because of the Golden Generation but even though the heartland has always been small the fanbase for the national side is many times bigger. That’s because of the fundamental appeal of the game to Irish spirit, and the fact the nation has spent so many years welcoming the spring by watching the national rugby team playing regularly in the Five Nations Championship on Sports Stadium on RTÉ 1 with your host, Brendan O’Reilly.

The nation outside the pale respected great players like Phil Orr or Michael Kiernan, or the great Ulstermen who didn’t need to hear Ireland’s Call wafting on the breeze to come to Dublin and wear the green for an all-Ireland team, but we knew little of them beyond the national cause. But when the Irish nation looked at Willie Duggan, at Ciarán Fitzgerald or at Moss Keane, we saw ourselves, and liked what we saw.

Rugby was an infinitely simpler game in the amateur era. There was no lifting in the lineout, there were proper scrums and games were won because heroes seized the day and not because assignments were missed and gameplans incorrectly executed.

The international games of the amateur era, with its combination of ritualistic pomp and battle done between dentists and dustmen, farmers and financiers, was a combination of medieval pageant and a nineteenth century faction fight. And for Ireland in the 1970s and 80s, the man in the van with either lance or shillelagh as appropriate was Maurice Ignatius Keane.

Was Moss Keane the greatest player of his generation? Probably not, but the fact he was never dropped in a nine year career from 1975 to 1984 should say something about the man’s ability as a player, behind the image of the hard pinting and messing.

But more than that, Moss Keane’s larger than life personality gave the nation outside of the private schools of Cork and Dublin, the dreary steeples of the North and extraordinary independent republic of rugby that is Limerick, a reason to love the team and celebrate their deeds.

There wasn’t a lot going on Ireland in the 1980s. Johnny Logan winning the Eurovision in 1981 with What’s Another Year was enough to get a half-day off school. The Triple Crown wins of the Ciarán Fitzgerald era were a precursor to the great deeds of the soccer team under Jack Charlton. And there in the middle of it in 1982 was the man with the funny name and the country accent, busting fellas and laying them out. One of our own.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh anam cróga uasal Moss Keane, agus go raibh sé ina sheasamh ard arís i síntí amach ar ghoirt ghlasa na Flaithis.

Oidhreacht Mick Lally

Nach gearr crua é cailleadh Mick Lally dúinn? Ní h-amháin gur tharla chomh tobann é, ach gur nochtadh a bhás dúinn chomh mór a bhíodh sé inár saolta.

Ba óg an fear é Mick Lally chun imeacht ar shlí na fírinne - ní raibh ach 64 bliana d'aois. Ach chaith sé leath na blianta sin os comhair an phobail ag aisteacht. Is dócha gur chuimhin daoine go raibh sé ina Gharda sa scannán Poitín, faoi stiúrthóiríocht Bob Quinn, ins na seachtóidí, ach mairfidh a chlú don chuid is mó mar Miley Byrne, feirmeoir agus fear tuath, sa sobalchláir Bracken agus Glenroe.

Deirtear gurb fhuath é ról Miley le Mick Lally. Níor thaitin leis gurbh Miley é in aigne an phobail agus an méid oibre níos fearr aige tar éis Glenroe, ar stáitse agus, ar ndóigh, ar scannán dá chuid The Secret of Kells agus Alexander.

Dúirt fear éigin ar Raidió na Gaeltachta inné go raibh dífríocht mór idir Mick Lally agus Miley Byrne agus is dócha go raibh sé sin crua ar Lally freisin. Fear clíste léite é Mick agus saghas amadáin é Miley. Is fíor é sin, ach níl an fhírinne go léir é. Bhí Miley Byrne mór i gcroithe na daoine mar ba fear uasal é, agus chuir Mick Lally an uaisleacht sin air.

Níorbh fhéidir le aisteoir eile é a dhéanamh, mar níl an saghas uaisleachta sin coitianta sa tsaol. Níl an amadánaíocht ach rud beag; agus dearmad déanta ar pleidhcaíocht tumthéitheora no caorach as láthair ar Domhnach éigin is í uaisleacht Miley, fear a sheas ar rudaí luachmhar mar teaglach, macántacht agus cothrom na Féinne déanta le saibhir agus daibhir, a maireann gach seachtain, gach mí, gach bliain.

Níorbh an uaisleacht a thagann ó rugadh uasal agus tógadh i dTeach Mór í, ach an uaisleacht a thagann ón anam. An uaisleacht a thagann ó fhear atá cneasta macánta le daoine, agus a thuigeann an ceangal idir an duine agus an dúlra atá ina thimpeall. Bhí na tréithe sin i Mick Lally, agus ba é bua Mick Lally na téithe sin a chur isteach i Miley Byrne.

Bhí grá ag na Gaeil ar Miley Byrne, mar thaispeán sé dúinn an Gael mar ba mhaith linn é. Uasal, tuathach, macánta, deas. Sin bua agus oidhreacht Mick Lally - mar fear a rinne an Gael is Gaelaí, an chuid is fearr cine na nGael.

Is cuimhin liom seoladh fheachtais Uachtaránachta Mary Robinson - nó ceann díobh; bhí níos mór ná an t-aon tús amháín aici - ar mullach leoraí i mBéal an Átha i 1990. Maidin Dé Sathairn, Sráid Uí Raghailligh, slua mór istigh sa mballa. Ceathrair an an leoraí - sagairt áitiúil, Dick Spring, Mary Robinson agus Mick Lally. Fuair Mick Lally an gáir is mó ar an lá, i bhfad níos mó ná ceannaire Pháirtí an Lucht Oibre nó an chéad Uachtarán eile agus bean ón mbaile. Mar ba duine dúinne féin é Mick Lally, agus bhí, bíonn agus beidh go deo meas againn air dá bhrí. Ar lámh Dé go raibh a anam dílis uasal.

So. Farewell Then, Alex "The Hurricane" Higgins

The Hurricane is at peace at last. Alex Higgins, the most glamorous, sulphurous and exciting snooker player in the history of the game has finally succumbed to cancer at the age of sixty-one. One generation will feel very old at the news, and struggle to explain their sense of loss to a coming one.

Snooker is not now what it was then. The standard is higher, but the appeal is less. Ronnie O’Sullivan reeling off yet another maximum break doesn’t make the news now, because nobody cares. Back in the 1970s and 80s, it seemed like everybody cared, and it was Alex Higgins that made people care.

In the 1970s and 80s, Alex Higgins was exactly what mothers didn’t want their sons to turn into if they heard young Johnny had started hanging around snooker halls. Nobody approved of Higgins. He drank, he smoked, he chased women, and he even wrangled an exemption from the WPBSA that meant he didn’t have to wear a tie.

Mothers hated Alex Higgins as a supreme bad influence on their boys, while the snooker establishment despaired of a rising generation ruined by Higgins’ unorthodox, cavalier style of play.

Snooker in the 1970s was a staid game played by retired Welsh postmen and policemen. A wide boy drunken Irishman, with a blond on each arm, a bottle of whiskey under his seat, and a tendency to lance the cue ball like a matador applying the coup de grace to a particularly truculent bull was not what the authorities wanted.

Naturally, Higgins then proved to be the best thing that ever happened the sport, because he was that bright flaring light, blazing away in the smoky fug over the baize while the outside world dealt with oil crises and miners’ strikes.

Higgins as a player was probably at his best when he won the first of his two World Championships, in 1972 against John Spencer. But 1982 was Higgins’ masterpiece, and fixed the sport in the popular imagination for the next twenty years.

Snooker, in its days of immense popularity, was never about the game alone. Snooker at its height was soap opera, and 1982 provided melodrama in spades.

The WPBSA had a limit of 128 professional players at the time, and that meant the players were all known, even to casual fans. They were recognisable personalities who appeared over and over again. The grand old men, Reardon and Spencer and Pullman. Steve Davis, the heir to the throne. Kirk Stevens, who was so zany he had long hair and a white waistcoat. Jimmy White, the teenage star whose talent would surely claim the World Championship someday. And Hurricane Higgins. The crazy, drunken Irishmen whose natural talent for snooker was in perpetual battle with his equally felicitous talent for self-destruction.

The 1982 final opened up as a contest when defending Champion and red hot favourite Steve Davis lost in the first round to Tony Knowles. Davis would go onto dominate the game in the 1980s but his early exit in 1982 allowed the final became a twilight of the gods event when Higgins played Ray Reardon, a six time winner whose final great showing at a tournament this was to be. Higgins outlasted Reardon, and the erstwhile Hurricane’s tearful embrace of his wife and child at the end of the match is one of the iconic images of sport in the 1980s.

For both Higgins personally and game of snooker itself, things were never as good again. As the standard of snooker got better in the next twenty years, the drama slowly drained out the game. The players’ talent evolved past the limits of the twenty-three balls on a table to the point where watching snooker became like watching expert craftsman building a wardrobe. You know not everyone could do it, but it’s not very exiting to watch for four hours.

Everything went downhill for Alex Higgins after 1982. He only won one other ranking competition, in 1983, as he slowly faded away as the years went by. The hard living caught up with him, as recent pictures so distressingly proved.

An Spailpín saw Alex “The Hurricane” Higgins in action once, playing a pool exhibition in Sally Long’s bar on in Galway in the early 1990s. He came into the bar surrounded by bouncers fore and blondes aft, played some frames against selected opposition, and took great care not to mingle with the locals at any stage, his attention being concentrated on the ladies instead. It seemed a lonely and empty life.

But Alex Higgins’ worldly troubles are over now. He’ll feature heavily on the news bulletins tonight, and young men will momentarily look up from their wiis or x-boxes and playstations and wonder what all the fuss is about. Sic transit gloria mundi. God have mercy on the Hurricane.

So. Farewell Then, Jean Simmons

Jean Simmons, who died last Friday at the grand old age of eighty, was an actress from the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood (which we may date as from Gone With the Wind until Bonnie and Clyde – it’s as handy a metric as any).

Simmons wasn’t Grace Kelly or either Hepburn but she was in three of An Spailpín’s favourite movies – two cast iron classics, in one of which she has little to do inand one of which in which she was quite central, and the third one of the great guilty pleasures from the Hollywood biblical epics of the 1950s.

After making a name in English cinema, Jean Simmons crossed the Atlantic to play Richard Burton’s secondary love interest – after the LORD, of course – in The Robe, the first movie made in Cinemascope. If that means little now, image how little people will give a rooty-toot-toot about Avatar in fifty years’ time.

Burton was Oscar nominated for The Robe and is the best thing in it. Simmons just has to look around and match the young Burton for prettiness, but it’s chiefly the Burton’s incendiary performance that makes the movie worth watching. The role of Miriam the crippled girl is theologically fascinating for those who enjoy that sort of thing, but theology is pretty much a minority interest these days.

It’s possible that Simmons and Burton had an affair during the filming of The Robe. There are different stories about the details, the best of which is not suitable for the sort of family reading that is normally available in this space. But if you meet An Spailpín on the high stool some evening remind me and I’ll be more than happy to go raconteur about old Hollywood.

The biggest hit that featured Simmons was Spartacus, in which she played Mrs Spartacus. It’s a nothing part, and Simmons gets lost in the picture among such notorious scenery munchers as Kirk Douglas, Peter Ustinov, Charles Laughton and Laurence Oliver.

Jean Simmons’ greatest role is as schoolteacher Julie Maragon in The Big Country, one of the great Westerns of all time. The movie stars Gregory Peck as James McKay, a sea captain engaged to marry the heiress to a huge ranch in the west. But McKay discovers when he visits the ranch that his fiancée, Patricia Terrill, is something of a spoiled brat, her father is two bit dictator feuding with a neighbour the same way that Jock Ewing feuded with Digger Barnes in Dallas, and married life is not going to be simple.

Simmons’ character owns the farm that separates the feuding ranchers, and she has done her best to keep the peace over the years. McKay’s arrival is the spark that finally leads to the dispute’s final resolution.

The Big Country is a magnificent film, from its superb opening theme music on. Peck was the epitome of nobility, and the film is remarkable for Charlton Heston as Steve Leech, the only “baddie” Heston ever played. The real villain of the movie is played by Chuck Connors in a tour de force performance as a low down dirty rat of a man. Connors and Heston would share screen time again the Sci-Fi classic Soylent Green.

Great scenes abound in The Big Country. There’s a wonderfully filmed fight between Heston and Peck, where the camera pans back to put the fight in perspective against the huge sweeping plain of the surrounding land. Peck’s potential father-in-law, swine though he is in many ways, get one wonderful scene that shows how maybe he got to be in the position he is, and Peck and Simmons share a lovely scene where the perils of the sea and the perils of the big country are compared and contrasted.

Jean Simmons was also in such big movies of their day as Elmer Gantry and Guys and Dolls (opposite an hilariously miscast Marlon Brando) but it’s for The Robe, Spartacus and especially The Big Country that An Spailpín will remember her best. God have mercy on her.





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So. Farewell Then, Bill McLaren

Another voice of our childhoods has been silenced. Bill McLaren, voice of rugby on the BBC, has been called home at the age of eighty-six.

Bill McLaren was old school. He was from the village of Hawick, in Scotland’s rugby heartland. The name means nothing now in the professional age but back in the day the news that the Scots had found yet another raw-boned forward from Hawick was enough to cause the bruises to rise and the teeth to loosen on even the most hardened of men before a ball – or anything else – was kicked at all.

Scotland had a very particular way of playing rugby in the amateur era, a dour, grinding relentlessness that gave way to grudging admiration from vanquished opposition that they pulled it off so well. Sheep farmers’ rugby – a ten man game for strong, muscular men who needn’t have trained at all, having spent all their time on the mountain pulling sheep out of ditches in the freezing, sheeting rain of Scotland. No gym in the world hardens muscle on bone like that sort of work.

McLaren was a schoolteacher. You could tell, listening to him. He loved the great theatres of Twickers and the Parc des Princes of course, but you got the feeling, like a catch in his voice, that he’d be as happy on the back pitch of some school teaching a young lad the skills of the game, and being delighted when the young lad bound properly, or didn’t bash his head off the hooker in the scrums anymore. It was hard not to get the feeling that being true to the traditions and ethos of game meant as much to him as JPR crossing the line in the Arms Park, or Andy Irvine going over at Murrayfield.

McLaren’s great gift was his perspective. He knew that rugby wasn’t actually a matter of life and death, that it was just a game. The BBC did a documentary about him on his final season – his first assignment that year was Italy v Scotland in Rome. The last time McLaren has been in Italy was fifty years beforehand, when he was there as a Royal Artillery man during the Second World War.

When the war was over, he was on the verge of an international cap when he contracted TB. TB would have done for him were it not for a miracle drug called Streptomycin. After all that, it was easy enough to keep the Calcutta Cup in perspective. Crucial certainly, but by no means serious.

Bill McLaren was old school. That BBC documentary ended with him waltzing around the sitting room with his wife, an old-school courtly pleasured beloved by that most courtly of sports commentators. Bill McLaren was of a generation where men danced with women, didn’t sneer for the sake of sneering and looked on triumph and disaster, treating both imposters just the same. He will be missed, and his like will not be seen again. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam Albanach uasal.






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So. Farewell Then, Liam Clancy

Liam Clancy was not a traditionalist. He was a revolutionary.

That’s the most important thing to note about the man whose death this weekend draws a line under the Irish folk boom of the 1960s. Luke, Ronnie, Tommy Makem and now all three Clancy brothers have softly risen and gently called goodnight, and God be with you all.

But Liam Clancy was a multi-faceted man, a man gifted and flawed if not in equal, certainly in significant, parts. It is to do him and his legacy an injustice to describe him as just a ballad singer, a singer of come-all-ye’s.

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were revolutionaries in a time of revolution. They were men in the right place at the right time, Greenwich village of the 1960s when there were folk clubs abounding on every corner with middle class kids just out of university pretending to have ridden freight cars, hobo style, to get to New York in the first place. They craved what they themselves could never bluff – authenticity – and the Clancys and Tommy Makem delivered that authenticity in spades.

They originally wanted to be actors, all four of them. Paddy and Tom Clancy had fought in India with the RAF during the war, and then moved to the States, there being nothing at home to go back to. Liam Clancy and his friend Tommy Makem moved out ten years later. They had all grown up listening to the old songs, and old songs were exactly what the US folkies craved.

But the Clancys and Tommy Makem didn’t treat the old songs as old songs. This is the essential thing about them. What the Clancys and Tommy Makem did had never been done in Irish music before.

Firstly, Irish singing was a solo performance. The rousing choruses of the Clancys were anathema to the tradition, and were like a bunch of drunks on St Patrick’s night in comparison to the drawing room tenors of the James Joyce tradition. Which, in some ways, is exactly the point.

Irish songs as existed pre the Clancy brothers were chiefly of the Tom Moore drawing room tenor variety. Even when they were written, some critics saw Moore’s melodies as being a little bloodless. William Hazlitt, a contemporary of Tom Moore’s, once famously remarked that Tom Moore had taken the wild harp of Erin and put it into a snuff box. That Moore had imposed gentility on something that was far from gentle.

One hundred and fifty years later, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem turned all that on its head, leading to Ciarán Mac Mathúna’s famous saw that the Clancys had taken the wild harp of Erin out of a snuff box and put it into a pint glass.

And that’s exactly what they did. They restored the people’s music of Ireland to the Irish people. They rode the tide of the sixties revolution, a time of changing social order, and said that not only was being Irish not a source of shame, it was a source of pride and something to be gloried in.

For this they were not always thanked, of course. For a lot of the country they had a bit too damned much of the Yank about them. The Aran sweaters and the stagecraft stuck in the craw. The Clancys were respected but never loved, the way the Dubliners were loved. In many ways, the country never really knew the Clancys at all.

The USA was as much a part of them as Ireland was, and Liam Clancy’s life will get as much, if not more, obituary space in the US because of his role in that folk revival than he will here. Liam Clancy was a recidivist hippy in many ways, a man who was just the right age in just the right town when the love was free and the living was easy.

When Ronnie Drew died last year it was noted in this space that he was a man who seemed ill at ease with his legacy. Liam Clancy was much more aware of his legacy, and spent time leaving documents for history – a volume of autobiography, and two fine documentaries, the Legend of Liam Clancy and the recent Yellow Bittern.

To An Spailpín’s mind, Liam Clancy’s legacy is this: he was proud to be Irish, and through him people of his generation got the courage to be proud to be Irish too. This is my favourite photograph of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem – in tuxedoes, with the Aran sweaters over their arms. It’s the American dream, in its way. Men who had arrived. The Irish nation is still on that journey to being at peace with itself, but for Liam Clancy, and for all of them, the long voyage is over. I hope they’re all together again in the great hereafter. We owe them.

As a final tribute, here’s Liam singing Ar Éirinn Ní Neosfainn Cé hÍ, and reciting Austin Clarke’s The Planter’s Daughter beforehand. He really had the most beautiful voice, whether speaking or singing. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal.






Technorati Tags: Ireland, music, culture, Liam Clancy, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, obituary

So. Farewell Then, John Martyn

How shocking it is to hear of John Martyn’s death earlier today at the age of sixty. Martyn did not live a particularly healthy life, even to the extent of suffering the amputation of part of his right leg six years ago, but still. Sixty seems no age to take the path of the Faithful.

John Martyn was never mainstream. Solid Air, released in 1973, is probably his greatest album, and Sweet Little Mystery was on the radio in the mid-‘eighties, one of those songs that you look back on wondering why you didn’t like it at the time and blushing deeply at the memory of what you did like at the time. Another case of youth wasted on the young.

That said, Martyn’s fan base was extra-ordinarily loyal, as your correspondent discovered at one of John Martyn’s shows, at Vicar Street on November 25th last year. A friend of An Spailpín’s was kind enough to present me with a ticket, and we went, not expecting much but glad to be in out of the rain.

I had forgotten about Martyn loosing his leg; seeing him rolled in from stage left in a wheelchair was disconcerting. But he had a super, jazzy backing band and for two hours John Martyn gave it socks on stage. He also had a marvellous line in between song patter; like a lot of men who write sad songs, he had quite a sense of humour himself. If you imagine Tommy Cooper with a Glasgow accent you’d need a shipyard saw to cut you get an idea of it.

There was no pretence about John Martyn. You got what it said on the tin. I couldn’t help but notice how tarnished the saxophonist’s saxophone was, and realised this is probably because he spent more time playing it than polishing it. Martyn had the reputation of something of a guitar virtuoso and even to your correspondent’s uneducated ear, his guitar playing was extraordinary. And who would have thought then, as the hall rang with applause, that he would be gone with three months?

May God have mercy on John Martyn, and we may we remember him this way – in his prime in the early seventies on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test, singing one of the great secular hymns of our age, May You Never.







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So. Farewell Then, Tony Gregory

How sad it is to hear of the death of Tony Gregory, TD, this evening. Mr Gregory died today at St Francis’ Hospice in Raheny after fighting a long and brave battle with cancer. Cancer eventually won, like it does.

Tony Gregory’s death marks the end of an era in Irish politics. The eighties were not a good time for the country, but Mr Gregory will always be remembered with fondness and affection as a good man in a bad world.

Persons of a certain age will remember Tony Gregory’s vivid entry into Irish public life in 1982. Country bumpkins, such as your correspondent, An Spailpín Fánach, were always aware that there were some hard chaws in Dubbalin town but seeing some bowsie with no respect for God, man or the divil marching into Dáil Éireann with no tie on him was taking things a bit far. Gregory delivered his famous Gregory Deal to his constituents in the north inner city of Dublin, while we in the hungry west left the snipe grass for Cricklewood and Camden Town, just like we always did. One-nil to the De Dubs, once more.

And then the years rolled on, as they do, as the country changed through the eighties with the building of the IFC and the re-generation of Temple Bar (both in Dublin). Eventually, the first mewlings of the Celtic Tiger became a full, throaty roar and all those heaps and heaps of money suddenly manifesting around the country affected Tony Gregory not in the slightest. In the slightest.

This, I think, is Gregory’s greatest asset, and what makes him such a remarkable man in our political life. Irish politics is notoriously short on principle; principle Gregory had in spades. While others bleat about injustice over plates of smoked salmon, Tony Gregory did stir in the ‘Joy out of solidarity with the Moore Street traders. We live in an age where socialist candidates for the Dáil canvas outside Morton’s supermarket in Ranelagh, just about the last place you’d think of to cash in your butter vouchers. Tony Gregory kept his head down and stayed with his people.

It was interesting, listening to some of the radio reportage on him this evening, to find out just how private a man Tony Gregory was. Most politicians, whether they are aware of it or not, choose that terrible and doomed-to-failure life because they cannot resist the siren songs of power and prestige. Tony Gregory dealt with that world with gritted teeth. He was an unlikely candidate to appear on Fáilte Towers or Celebrity Jigs 'n' Reels.

Stephen Collins, political editor of the Irish Times, told Ivan Yates on Newstalk this evening of how little Gregory cared for journalists or their company, and how deeply suspicious he was of them. This is the diametric opposite of most politicians, who normally try to inveigle themselves with the fourth estate by attempting to drown the quillsmen with free whiskey. An approach that can be very successful in that very clubby world of Irish public life.

Speaking of whom; a journalist remarked on a radio station this evening that Tony Gregory’s refusal to wear a tie to the Dáil was revolutionary in the ‘eighties, whereas the Green Party’s Paul Gogarty now regularly appears in the chamber with an open collar. Tony Gregory famously remarked, when questioned about the tie back in the ‘eighties, that most of his constituents couldn’t afford a tie. Mr Gregory represented the damned and dispossessed, the people of Sherriff Street and Amiens Street, of Ballybock and Summerhill and Mountjoy Square. Mr Gogarty has a You Tube link on his page on the Green Party website about confessing one’s carbon sins at the Electric Picnic. Maybe a tie is not the only measure of a man.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh anam uasal Tony Gregory, fear cróga a sheasadh a fhód ar son a mhuintir gan bogadh gan bacadh. Ní bheidh a leithéid arís ann.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, politics, Tony Gregory, obituary, Dublin

So. Farewell Then, Paul Newman

What made Paul Newman a great actor was not what made him a star. It is often thus. Jazzmen loved Sinatra for his phrasing; the masses wanted to hear him eat it up and spit it out. So it is with Newman.

Today’s obituaries speak of transcendent performances in Hud or Sweet Bird of Youth, but who watches those movies, really? They’re the definition of classics in that they are movies that are respected but never watched. Very few people say I put Hud on the DVD there last night again; God, you never get tired of it.

This does not mean that Paul Newman wasn’t a great actor. He was, and a very great actor. Just how great is expertly outlined by William Goldman in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade. In reminiscing on his time as the scriptwriter on Harper, Goldman remarks on Newman’s almost complete absence of ego. Even though he was a major Hollywood star, Newman was willing to work off-camera, to supply reactions in scenes for Robert Wagner, who was just starting out, and to up the ante if he saw Wagner was taking off. Most Hollywood stars hate and despise other actors getting any good lines at all, as they believe it takes from their own luminosity. Newman was bigger than that; Newman realised that movies are a collaborative art form, and hogging the limelight just doesn’t wash.

To An Spailpín’s mind, Paul Newman will be remembered for two roles above any others. The first of these is Luke – we never do find out his second name – in Cool Hand Luke. Cool Hand Luke is often seen as a rebel-against-the-system picture but it’s much more complex than that. It’s not The Wild One, for instance, a picture to which thy years have not been kind. The Christian allegory is striking and repeated throughout Cool Hand Luke – the camera pans back after the egg scene to show a loin-clothed, crucified Luke; Luke addresses God as “old man” in the church at the finale; Dragline is sitting slightly higher than his audience at the end of the picture, telling them about “that old Luke smile,” just as the teachers are often elevated in medieval and Renaissance religious paintings. There’s a lot going on in that movie, and there’s always something more to see.

But An Spailpín’s favourite Paul Newman movie is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is often described as the progenitor of the buddy movie in Hollywood but Butch and Sundance isn’t a buddy movie at all - the Sundance Kid’s role is just as subservient to Butch’s as Robin’s was to Batman back in the day. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is about Butch Cassidy, and that means it’s about Newman’s performance. The only imbalance is that Sundance gets the girl, but the Raindrops scene is done with Katherine Ross and Newman, not Robert Redford. That’s not an accident.

Just a couple of years ago we got a glimpse of just how hard it is to make a movie like Butch and Sundance. Mr and Mrs Smith was a buddy movie, and it should have been ever better, because it starred the two most beautiful people in Hollywood at the time. But whereas Butch’s ending is sublime and magnificent, Mr and Mrs Smith’s was just a shameful copout that should have been lustily booed at every screening.

The ending is part of what makes Butch and Sundance great of course, but the centre is Butch himself, that most charming man. Butch Cassidy charms us the audience completely, just as he’s always charmed Sundance, the Hole in the Wall gang and even Woodcock, representative of EH Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad. He is a man of vision in a world of bifocals, and his three minute scene on the bicycle with beautiful Katherine Ross is one of the most joyous scenes every committed to celluloid. Reader, remember Paul Newman this way. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal.








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So. Farewell Then, Ronnie Drew

How shocking it was to hear this afternoon that Ronnie Drew is gone at last at the brave age of seventy-three, a little over a year since the passing of Tommy Makem. We knew that he was ill, but there’s an awful finality about death, a never no more that brooks no argument.

Ronnie Drew has been a public figure in Ireland for over forty years. That’s a long time. Is it possible that every generation has their own Ronnie Drew? In the recent documentary September Song, made by his son Phelim, Ronnie Drew was surprisingly dismissive of his legacy, even the notion of him having a legacy in the first place. “I never did anything much,” he kept saying during that lonesome film.

A generation may now know him only as the feature of that recent travesty, the wretched and depressing Ballad of Ronnie Drew – what other evidence have they? The Dubliners got very old in the past decade, and Ronnie Drew no longer toured with them. Their last recording of significance had Paddy Reilly replacing Ronnie Drew as the band’s frontman. To fully understand Ronnie Drew and his role in Irish life, if there is such a thing as Irish life, it’s necessary to excavate further.

Ronnie Drew and the Dubliners came into the consciousness of my generation – children of the 1970s – when they appeared on the Late Late Show tribute to the Dubliners in 1987, twenty-one years ago. Ronnie Drew and the Dubliners themselves were initially apprehensive about the program, not least as it was made only three years after the death of Luke Kelly, the Dubliners’ greatest talent. In Luke’s absence, Ronnie Drew became the personification of the band, their grit and attitude, and they enjoyed a return to the bigtime when they returned to Top of the Pops, twenty years after their first appearance, to guest with the Pogues on their version of The Irish Rover.

The Pogues saw The Dubliners as their trailblazing forebears, in terms of singing and drinking. It’s hard to say if the Dubliners themselves ever really knew what to make of the Pogues; they certainly didn’t see themselves as handing on any torches to Shane McGowan et al.

Ronnie Drew was unconcerned with his legacy; he seems a man that just didn’t want to go back working for the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. The Dubliners were one of the acts in the Phoenix Park welcoming back the Irish soccer team after either the 1990 or 1994 World Cup. After a song, Ronnie Drew quipped that the crowd were to tell their Mammies and Daddies that The Dubliners would be playing in the National Stadium later in the week. Whereas the crowd should have answered in one voice “no, Ronnie – we’re here to see you, and to inherit and gladly accept the birthright that you’re passing on to us.” But they didn’t, of course. They never do.

Come West Along the Road, RTÉ’s magnificent and essential archive program about Irish traditional music, featured The Bothy Band last Friday, and presenter Nicholas Carolan remarked that some acts are so revolutionary that it’s hard to recognise just how revolutionary they are, as the revolution has become the accepted norm. If that was true of the Bothys, how much truer is it now of The Dubliners?

When we think of Irish traditional music, we think of ballad groups. But prior to The Dubliners, there were no ballad groups. There was John McCormack, Ruby Murray and the Batchelors, and that was it. Music was being played and sung as it has been for generations in Clare and Corca Duibhne and places like that, but nationally, it didn’t exist. It took the international folk boom of the sixties, and the success of the Clancys and Tommy Makem in America, to legitimise Irish music to the Irish nation, and the blessing is that it happened at just the right time.

A confluence of talents – Seán Ó Riada, the Clancys and Tommy Makem, The Dubliners, Donal Lunny, Christy Moore and others were all in the right place at the right time to breathe new life into the old forms, and to save the music just as surely as the language is lost. Irish singing was always done solo – to sing to accompaniment of guitar, banjo and fiddle was no less revolutionary in the staid sixties that the Pogues’ London punk infusion of twenty years later.

How revolutionary were the Dubliners? Ronnie Drew always said that America didn’t know what to make of them – the suits suggested they weren’t weirdoes, but the beards man, the beards! Had the G-Men heard that, a few weeks after Nelson’s Pillar was blown up by the IRA to commemorate the Rising in 1966, The Dubliners brought the Admiral’s head on stage with them at the Olympia, they might have needed more than suits to get the band their US visas.

In a national context, before Ronnie Drew formed The Dubliners, there was nothing. Ciarán Mac Mahuna said he’d meet fiddlers down the country who used to hide their instruments, and he had to coax them to play. Ronnie Drew and The Dubliners destroyed that stigma forever, and this is why he and Luke and Ciarán are together again now in that little piece of paradise that is reserved solely for heroes of the Gael.

I don’t know what plans RTÉ have to commemorate Ronnie Drew’s passing; I just hope the national broadcaster doesn’t let the nation down. Just repeating September Song would be bitterly disappointing. A repeat of the Late Late Show Tribute to the Dubliners would be more in keeping the momentous nature of Ronnie Drew’s passing – the show had an air of “beloved entertainer” about it which was one of Gay Byrne’s few weaknesses, but the performances remain outstanding and vivid in the memory.

What would be really wonderful, however, and what would perhaps go furthest to clearing away the cobwebs and showing just how revolutionary the Ronnie Drew Folk Group and The Dubliners were, would be a broadcast of O’Donaghue’s Opera, insofar as it can be broadcast.

O’Donoghue’s Bar on Merrion Row, D2, was the seedbed of the Irish traditional and folk revival in Dublin in the 1960s, and a short film was set there based on the ballad “The Night Before Larry Was Stretched.” The short highlights that exist on You Tube are startling and remarkable forty years on, and feature a young Ronnie Drew – how raven black is his beard! – as the eponymous Larry. Reader, imagine what it was like to be in the midst of it at the time, and there, at last, we'll have found the true Ronnie Drew.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh anam uasal Ronnie Drew, laoch mór an cheoil, agus go tseinne sé ceol binn bríomhar na nGael go sioraí lena gcomráidithe Luke agus Ciarán, atá imithe roimhe agus atá buailte go léír le cheile arís i bhFlaithis.








Technorati Tags: Ireland, culture, music, Ronnie Drew, The Dubliners, appreciation, obituary

So. Farewell Then, Charlton Heston

The late Charlton Heston, who died last night at his home in California after a long battle with Alzheimer’s, remarks in his autobiography In the Arena that his single greatest asset was his face.

Some people’s faces fit, some don’t. One of the reasons put forward for the decline of the Western is that so few actors today would look well on a horse. It’s hard to imagine Tom Cruise, for instance, holding Fort Apache with Henry Fonda and John Wayne. Some people’s faces are of their time – Stephen Spielberg has remarked, for instance, that the biggest challenge in casting Saving Private Ryan was finding actors who faces looked like 1940s faces. Tom Sizemore’s role as the Sergeant tells how well they succeeded in that endeavour.

None of that applied to Heston. Heston’s biggest gift was that face, the face that represented Everyman. Or at least, Western Everyman – Heston’s portrayal of the Mexican policeman Miguel “Mike” Vargas takes the theory to the tipping point. But Touch of Evil excepted, who else but Charlton Heston could have represented mankind at every stage of his evolution, from Moses through to El Cid to Michelangelo to the Omega Man to the astronaut George Taylor, the last man standing on the Planet of the Apes?

Charlton Heston was born John Carter in Evanston, IL, eighty-four years ago. He got his first big break in 1952 in The Greatest Show on Earth, the circus movie directed by Cecil B de Mille, where Heston played the circus manager. The movie is remembered primarily for Jimmy Stewart as the clown – he never takes off the makeup during the movie, an extra-ordinary thing to ask of an actor of Stewart’s talent and star-wattage. Four years later, De Mille hired Heston to play Moses in his Technicolor remake of the Ten Commandments – a movie that looks a little outré now, but that must have been just like hearing the voice of God then.

And then, in 1959, came Ben-Hur, a Tale of the Christ, as Lew Wallace’s original novel was titled. Ben-Hur had been made already, as a silent movie in 1925, but by 1959 Hollywood was on the crest of a Bible-movie wave, starting with The Robe and Quo Vadis in 1950s and ending when The Greatest Story Ever Told wasn’t in the 1960s. Ben-Hur was the pinnacle of those movies, epic in every sense of the world, and it is the movie for which Heston will be forever remembered.

It is a pity to reduce Heston to that one picture, however, great and all as it is. An Spailpín always considers The Big Country, directed by Ben Hur’s William Wyler a few years before Ben-Hur itself as a particular treat. Heston is part of a tremendously strong ensemble cast and plays Steve Leach, a ranch foreman who has the hots for the rancher’s daughter, the rancher’s daughter, however, having no interest in getting involved with the help. Watching it, it’s hard not to wonder how Heston would have fared had he been cast against type as Henry Fonda was in Once Upon a Time in the West.

For cineastes who wish to look beyond the Prince of Hur, An Spailpín Fánach posits the view that Heston’s greater legacy will be the three hugely influential science fiction movies he made in the 1960s and 70s – Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green and The Omega Man. The Omega Man was remade recently with Will Smith, re-titled I Am Legend, while Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes remains the nadir of an otherwise stellar career. Soylent Green has not been remade, of course, because that future is more than likely already here.

Heston in despair on the beach on the Planet of the Apes, looking at the sunken statue of liberty, represents us all. It is one of the iconic images in all cinema, and only Heston, with his Everyman face and gloriously gravely voice, could have carried it off. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam uasal.





Technorati Tags: culture, movies, Charlton Heston, Ben-Hur, Planet of the Apes

So. Farewell Then, George MacDonald Fraser

Sir Harry Paget Flashman is demobbed at last. The wires are reporting this morning that George MacDonald Fraser, the author of the Flashman series of historical adventure novels, has finally succumbed to cancer at the age of 82, and fans all over the world will now never get to find out just how exactly Flash Harry ended up fighting for both the Union and the Confederacy during the American Civil War, or if Victoria ever sent her Harry to Ireland to sort out those beastly Fenians.

In his first literary incarnation, Harry Flashman was the bully in Thomas Hughes’ famous school novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, whose particular party piece was holding the younger boys over the fire until they squealed. Nice. Flashman gets his comeuppance, being expelled from Rugby school for drunkenness, and served as an example for one hundred years of How Not to Behave at School.

And then a Scottish journalist called George MacDonald Fraser had an idea. I’ve never heard or read how he came up with the idea, but my own guess would be that it was during his time in Burma with a Cumbrian regiment during World War Two that Fraser first realised a certain truth about empire-building. While you might talk about Tom Brown values at home, the boys you need to cut through the jungle and put smacht on the natives are much more like Harry Flashman than the authorities are generally willing to admit.

And this is the genius of the Flashman papers. Fraser puts Flashman at all the great historical moments of 19th Century British Imperial history – Kabul, Balaclava, Cawnpore - and even takes him on some American jaunts (with one eye on the great big market over there, of course), but Fraser does not change Harry Flashman’s essential character. Flashman remains, to the end, the coward, the bully and, in that marvellous Victorian word, the poltroon that he has always been.

The irony is that nobody knows it. To the outside world, Flash Harry is a folk hero, one of the men who helped civilise the world. But we, the readership, are complicit in his cowardice – we feel a guilty thrill of recognition when some old warmonger of the era, like Lucan at Balaclava, puts his arm around Flashman and says “good news, Harry old boy – the Light Brigade charge the guns in the morning, and you’re going with ‘em!” Harry puts on the brave face, but inside his bowels are as water as he searches desperately for the nearest rat to follow away to safety at high speed.

This change in narrative perspective is the making of the Flashman papers. PG Wodehouse said of the first book that "if there was a time when I felt that watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman," and that’s just how jarring it is, to have Flash Harry wink at you and say “yes, I was at Cawnpore, and I would have sold out the garrison in the morning if I thought I could trust the mutineers to save my yellow hide.” The tone of the books is the secret, and it’s a act of high skill on Fraser’s part, in book after book, to keep Flashman likeable as an anti-hero despite all the available evidence. Although a coward to his liver himself, Flashman recognises bravery in others and, while they may have been warmongers and racists and worse, the men that flew the Union Jack from Cape Horn to Bombay were no cowards, whatever else they were. Fraser has done his homework on the era, and the books are rich in historical detail about what was a very fascinating time. But most important of all, Fraser’s skills as a journalist superbly convey what it might have felt like to exist in that era, when the Empire was at its height, to the extent that you can almost smell the gunpowder and spices as you enter the kashbah, eyes peeled for danger.

Reading Flashman has been one of the great guilty pleasures in recent years, even for a poblachtánach Gaelach such as An Spailpín Fánach. It seems from this remove that Britain is currently trying very hard to forget she ever had an Empire, and the figure of Flash Harry’s lip curling before the natives isn’t one that’s officially encouraged. Flashman’s notorious wenching – he makes James Bond look like Saint Simeon Stylites – is a little infra dig also, of course. And that’s what makes him so glorious a guilty pleasure, and it’s a source of sorrow this New Year's morning that when the warhorse’s nostrils flare once more at the sound of the bugle, Sir Harry will no longer be there to wonder how in God’s name he’s going to get out of this one.





Technorati Tags: culture, books, George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman

So. Farewell Then, Joe Dolan

An Spailpín Fánach was greatly saddened to hear of the death this St Stephen’s Day of Joe Dolan. I knew he had been ill, and had cancelled some of his recent shows, but I guess we never really expect death, even when the Reaper has sent his card ahead; it always seems like we’re all due another five minutes.

What I’m trying to figure out this evening, a few hours after his death, is why Joe Dolan was so popular in this country, without his having had an original hit since More and More and More in the early ‘eighties, over a quarter of a century ago. Joe Dolan, and that loud, brash and brassy Joe Dolan sound, has been a part of the Irish cultural landscape for over thirty years – what did Joe Dolan have that others didn’t?

The best guess that An Spailpín can come up with is that Joe didn’t do ironic, even in later years when hep cats starting “ironically” going to his shows. Joe put his heart and soul into every performance, and gave it socks every time. If you wanted to come and rock, that was great. If not, that was fair enough too, as long as you paid at the door and bought a drink at the bar.

There’s a cracking clip of Joe Dolan in his prime (in the mid-seventies, judging by the extraordinary mustard-yellow of that quite frightening shirt) currently on You Tube. They won’t let me embed it, but if we watch it carefully we might stumble on a clue as to why Joe Dolan was so popular.

The first thing you notice, once you get over the shirt, is that Joe is cutting a serious rug. He’s shaking, bopping, rocking and rolling, and giving it loads. He’s really into it, and his signature tune, Good Looking Woman, the song that everybody I know associates with Joe Dolan more than any other, suits his performance exactly. The verse lyric of Good Looking Woman is cat, of course, but the verse doesn’t matter, because it’s only side-dressing. Good Looking Woman, the song, is about three things – the Oh me, Oh my! bit, the brass that follows it, and Joe’s big voice booming along, mopping up the survivors. Good Looking Woman is a song about the joy of being alive, and it’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying anything as much as Joe Dolan always appeared to enjoy singing that song.

And, if you were in rural Ireland in the past thirty years, looking at Joe Dolan up on stage belting out Good Looking Woman, it didn’t matter that you were nearer to Craughwell than Carnaby Street, or that two hours earlier you were dosing cattle or cutting thistles. Joe Dolan proved that cool and contentment were states of mind, and he brought them with him where-ever he went.

A personal memory: When your correspondent was attending UCG in the early 1990s, I remember walking down the Dyke Road – what we were doing out there God only knows – in our tuxedoed finery after a Faculty Ball in the early hours of some winter morning. One of the party, filled with the joy of youth, started singing Good Looking Woman, something of a party piece of his at the time. For the oh mes, oh mys, he took of his suit jacket and started swirling it around his head, even though there were no girls there to impress. He just did it for the joy of the thing, just as the man himself would surely have done in similar frosty circumstances. Joe would have been proud of him.

God have mercy on Joe Dolan. He brought an awful lot of joy to an awful lot of people, and there are few indeed that do that. Ní bheidh a leithéid arís ann, gan amhras.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, culture, music, Joe Dolan, Good Looking Woman