ROOTS REVIVAL

In 1994, I took a year off from rock and seemed to spend my sabbatical in Whelan’s, Mother Redcap’s, the Harcourt, an Béal Bocht and wherever fiddlers were swaying the rafters with their tunes. And whisper it not: I may have even heard the future of Irish music.

We all got hot and bothered about the inroads dance was making on rock but rock was also losing out to a pincer movement. As the Rock Garden closed, the above-mentioned were the Dublin venues prospering. Somehow there was a chasm between Dublin indie rock and this Irish Music Industry we kept on writing and reading about. Now the provincial wave led by Therapy? and The Cranberries was soaring up, up and away to the great rock god’s penthouse in the sky, the replacements weren’t emerging though I fancied Schtum one night in the Baggot. But then they were unique; they actually seemed driven by the need to say something of their own.

Otherwise Irish bands had little to appeal beyond the indie ghetto and I wasn’t stopping around to experience the same mistakes made for the fifth time. Certainly Kurt Cobain’s sad suicide said “No Future” in all the wrong accents.

A Woman’s Heart, Garth Brooks and ‘Riverdance’ were the phenomena and it was easy to scorn them all as an Irish Saturday Night At The Olympia variant on the Q and Classic Hits formulas. But that was a superficial estimate: people were looking further afield for performers of quality as Jeff Buckley and Townes Van Zandt at Whelan’s proved.

My most powerful, moving musical experience of the year had to be my first: New Year’s Day in Dunlewy in the Gweedore Gaeltacht watching Altan and Frankie Kennedy playing to their own, with everybody in the house knowing Frankie might not survive the year. He didn’t but I cherish and am still privileged by the meaning of that moment. Was there a powerful symbolic and artistic difference between the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Frankie Kennedy? Let others and the music decide.

Otherwise it seemed to be a year of fiddlers: Ciaran Tourish, Martin Hayes, Eileen Ivers, Máire Breatnach and Seán Smyth to name only the first handful. The littlest local labels underpinned a deluge of traditional music releases and probably, more significantly, a new generation was taking over. Just as in politics, Green was getting a new meaning.

And Irish rock’s best moments came from those with the talent to twist the tradition, as Katell Keineg belatedly but deservedly released her debut album and Sinéad O’Connor and Shane MacGowan bounced back to prove they were far more than subjects for scandal. Gavin Friday’s collaborations with Sinéad and Bono on In The Name Of The Father will be seen as a landmark, while Shane’s own Thursday night at the Olympia pulled out the self-same audience Irish indie bands spurned.

Meanwhile politics seemed to be a constant gladiatorial tournament for the trophy of an increasingly meaningless truth between publicity and bureaucracy, the media and the law. “A thing is a thing because I say so” or Gun Law, Beef Law, Canon Law but all expensive law and no cheap justice. We also learned that Newt Gingrich might be the next name to make us shiver.

As for the IRA ceasefire, I joined with those who believed that our peace in our time doesn’t necessarily mean our own Munich, a betrayal before the resumption of hostilities. But there will be turbulence that hasn’t been experienced since the IRA statement. After the storms, may we reach a peaceful shelter next Christmas.

Bill Graham