DARING ADVENTURES

IT WASN’T the best of times. It wasn’t the worst of times. 1994 has been a middling year. In the annals of musical endeavour it will hardly go down as a landmark period. Then again, maybe with the benefit of 12 month’s hindsight and a couple of kegs on Dec. 31st, it’ll all look a whole lot more rosy than it does in the cold light of a Sunday morning after a long Saturday night on the Wicklow hills.

If my recollections seem a tad spartan blame it on the wintergreen that’s pummelling my sinuses (and hopefully my calf muscles) as I teeter over the keyboard, a hostage to ‘adventure’ sports yet again. (How I wish I wasn’t so easily seduced by all that luminous Gore-tex year in, year out.)

Anyway, I digress. Yes, 1994 – live performance kudos have to go to the older hands who just know in their bones how to best please themselves and their audiences with the same material. Eclectic, creative, lateral thinking all make for supreme satisfaction and a fair adrenaline flow – and it took the unpretty mugs of Lyle Lovett and Randy Newman to get that particular mathematical equation spot on. And let’s face it – it shouldn’t be so hard, should it?

OK so they didn’t quite have a monopoly on sublime performances . . . but even when I cast my mind over the other shows it’s still the thirty-somethings or almost-thirty-somethings who leap to attention. Eddi Reader. The Crash Test Dummies. Freddie White. None of them novices but each savvy to the skills that make for magical entertainment crossed with the odd morsel for thought.

And so the albums. Nothing on a par with Aimee Mann’s 1993 solo debut. J.J. Cale produced an apt sleeper in Closer To You that took more than a handful of plays to seep into the subconscious, but once it did, there was no ignoring it.

A cycling holiday in West Cork was a good test of the year’s releases. Pedal pushers of worth were Dervish’s re-release, The Boys Of Sligo and Arrested Development’s Zingalamaduni. And Steve James provided some soothing off-the-saddle balm with American Primitive.

Yes I think I’ll plead a watering of the brain cells courtesy of the wintergreen. 1994 is rapidly being deleted from my long-term memory stores. Let’s just hope that next year’s a tad more inspiring – and a tad less taxing on the leg muscles too.

Siobhán Long