Still Raging After All These Years

I was browsing through the ‘musical instruments for sale’ section of adverts.ie recently when I noticed an old friend’s guitar for sale. It’s a very distinctive guitar (he’s left-handed for a start). When he bought it, his band had just raised some money to make and promote an album, and things were looking pretty rosy. Seeing it for sale meant one thing only; that times had gotten very tough. I knew he wouldn’t sell it unless he absolutely had to, and my heart sank for him. I knew too that the only reason he would be selling it would be to inject some further finance into the band.

Sure enough, a while later I saw a FundIt campaign e-mail looking for fans to support the making of another album. Like many a musician before him, he’ll stop at nothing to stay in the game. Making music is not something he does for validation, or fame, or the money. He does it because it’s inescapable, it’s coded into his DNA.
Another friend told me she was making a record. Her father had been encouraging her for years; she’d sung a song at her brother’s wedding and everyone had told her she had a gift. She’d gone into a studio and put down two vocals, to backing tracks with a little guitar laid down by the producer. He’d told her she should record an album, that he could get her onto the radio. She seemed a little perturbed, though, that between her and the dazzling heights of success stood the prospect of having to learn a few more songs – she only really knew the two she had already recorded. Mind you, the fame would probably be worth it. Being famous, adored and respected was definitely where it was at.
Another friend asked me to recommend artists making political music. I thought long and hard and, Christy Moore aside, couldn’t really come up with anyone. There has been a creative response to the mess we’ve found ourselves in at the hands of our political and financial classes, but by and large it hasn’t come from the music fraternity. Poets like Stephen James Smith and agit-prop performers like Kalle Ryan’s Brown Bread Mixtape have risen to the challenge, but we seem utterly devoid of protest singers.
So: what has any of this got to do with anything, I hear you ask?
Christy Moore has just released a new album. Why? What gets him out of bed after all these years and all these records (over 30 if you bundle in the handful of Planxty and brace of Moving Hearts albums that bear his indelible mark)?
It certainly has nothing to do with the perceived glamour of the music business. He’s well-known for packing out the Point Depot for weeks at a stretch, but he’s also played more than his fair share of dive bars and dingy cellars and slept in his fair share of vans. He’s had his brushes with conventional celebrity – duetting with Coldplay at last summer’s Oxegen, for instance - but he’s seen the other side of the coin too. He has been held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and had his album launches busted by the Special Branch, so he’s way beyond any X-Factor fuelled daydream of swimming pools and mansions. Needless to say, Hello magazine are not knocking down his door.
It can’t, either, be the elation of making a record. That novelty must also have long since gone.
Folk Tale, his latest, features 11 tracks. Alongside Christy and his ever-present foil Declan Sinnott, other musicians include banjo-meister Gerry O’Connor, Tim Edey and Neil Martin with The West Ocean String Quartet. This album finds Christy expressing both his joy at life’s small pleasures and his dismay at the inequality and indignity meted out to his fellow man. It’s this ubiquitous trait, common through all his work, that has marked him as the one perenially political figure on the Irish music map. Small wonder that his rendition of ‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll’ is one of only two Irish recordings to make it into the Rough Guide To Bob Dylan. (Interestingly the other, Sinéad Lohan’s version of ‘Ramona’ was also produced by Declan Sinnott).
Here, the joy is exhibited in ‘My Little Honda 50’. An icon of the Irish rural scene, you might be inclined to dismiss the humble Honda 50 as unworthy of being eulogised in song, but bear in mind that Christy has raised this form of praise singing to an art form. Who else could make a national treasure out of a song about a shovel? The best folk music keeps its roots firmly in the soil it grows from. Or, in this case, its rubber planted firmly on the back road between Edenderry and Prosperous.
The dismay is evident in songs about the disastrous response to the earthquake in Haiti, about the events that led to the murder of Imelda Riney, her son Liam and Joe Walsh, the local priest who died attempting to stop the horrific cycle of events and about the plight of the 23 Chinese migrant workers killed picking cockle in Morecambe Bay in 2004.
In case you were wondering, my friend never sold the guitar. He’s happy and he’ll muddle through regardless. As for Christy Moore, you don’t need to worry about him. This album will be salve enough for his soul until it comes time to make another.