Black To The Future

ON ST. PATRICK'S NIGHT, 1985, in a bar in The Bronx, Larry Kirwan sank a skinfull of beer, dropped a tab of Ecstasy, and decided to quit the music business for good.

"I just walked away from rock 'n' roll completely," he recalls. "I didn't even listen to it for four years, pretty much. I was sick with what I was doing. I was bored. I didn't think I had anything further to offer. I also felt that rock music no longer had any social significance, that it didn't cause change anymore within the community and that is something I was always interested in.

"After a year or two, I'd occasionally think 'Shit, I'm never gonna play rock 'n' roll again'. It was a strange feeling 'cause that was what my whole life had revolved around. But I didn't regret walking away from it, not in the least."

It was a decade earlier when Larry along with his friend and fellow Wexfordian, Pierce Turner, had first arrived in New York, their heads awash with musical ambitions. They formed a band, inventively monikered Turner and Kirwan from Wexford at first but later The Major Thinkers, and unleashed their strategy for world domination. The Big Apple itself, however, had other plans.

"The city got in the way," laughs Kirwan. "I lived a wild and, let's say, varied life when I went over there first. I've seen both the dregs and the heights of the place. I've passed through all its social levels."

But that's an entirely other story. By the time he hung up his plectrum in 1985, Larry Kirwan had become infinitely more interested in plays than in playing. He submerged himself in the New York drama scene, writing, directing, acting, and generally building a theatrical reputation for himself. One of his plays, Liverpool Fantasy, a tale about what might have happened to The Beatles if they hadn't become famous, was an immediate hit and provided him with the all-important box-office 'break'.

Spool forward to 1989 though and things begin to come full circle. Kirwan found himself in Prague performing improvised accompaniment for a "free-form poet" called Copernicus (another entirely other story). It was at the height of Vaclav Havel's velvet revolution and their concert was part of a dissident rock festival that was being staged as a direct challenge to the authorities.

"We ended up playing in an ice hockey stadium in front of twelve thousand people while rows of armed militia looked on," explains Larry. "It was weird but that whole experience of what was happening there brought it home to me that rock music could still affect social change."

Meanwhile, back in New York, Kirwan's wife was having their second baby, and they were broke, so he decided to earn some cash the quickest way he knew how, by forming a bar band. Conscious of the baptism of fire and apathy which awaited him on the notoriously hard-to-crack Big Apple pub circuit, Larry was determined to explode onto the scene with some really big audio dynamite.

He rounded up a squad of henchmen whose collective talents included expertise on the uileann pipes, trombone, sax, whistles, guitars, bass and drums. Together they concocted a sound that was as loud and as thumping as a St. Patrick's Day hangover.

Black 47 was born.

First, they took Manhattan. It wasn't easy. There was con-siderable resistance to the band's own peculiar brand of funky ceilí, not to mention their non-conformist politics, dozens of bar owners who asked 'D'yez not know nothin' by Christy Moore?'. Eventually though, they found refuge on a makeshift stage in Paddy Reilly's at the corner of 28th Street and 2nd Avenue where they played a residency every Wednesday and Saturday night.

Word about Black 47 spread like wildfire. The combination of the ensemble's raucous musical clarion call and Kirwan's exuberant storytelling struck a chord, and not just with Irish ex-pats. Within a few months, their shows became the hottest tickets in town, and the hippest.

At various times the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Robin Williams, Joey Ramone, Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer all dropped by for a gawk. After a while though the crush spilling out onto 2nd Avenue on Black 47 nights became too daunting for even the most heavily camouflaged celeb.

Today, Black 47 are the biggest band in New York, no contest. They don't play the city quite so often anymore but when they do they stop traffic. Meanwhile, with a national profile that seems to grow by the day, their political agenda has begun to reverberate throughout the U.S. A fortnight ago, for example, the influential right-wing magazine, Commentary, listed its Ten Most Hated Things About America. Black 47 were right up there, alongside welfare and feminism.

"Once the loony right start to hate you, you know you're doing something right," grins Kirwan. "The fact that we have a political message and are doing what we do at a grassroots level, that's having an effect. It may not be of the magnitude of Madonna but we're still having a pretty major impact. In the States, we've had twelve years of very right wing thinking, the Reagan/Bush years, and young people have grown up with all that kind of thought around them and they've never known anything else, certainly not left-wing thought. I'm not necessarily saying that left-wing is the way to do it, but in any society if you don't have a balance between the two wings the whole society is out of whack. That's the way the U.S. is now.

"A lot of people don't read anymore cause television is so strong so when Black 47 come along and say you should question the whole capitalist system that has an impact because so few people are saying that kind of thing. People are listening to us. On a social level we're definitely getting through."

There are any number of directions from which you can approach Black 47. With a grim sort of inevitability, however, there have been those on this side of the world who have chosen to portray the band as nothing but a squad of Provo rebel rousers who advance with a beatbox in one hand and an armalite in the other. Take, for example, the 2FM jock who whispered to me in portentous tones that he wasn't going to play Black 47 on his show because they're "the musical wing of NORAID." Or the British rock hack who closed a broadly favourable review of their act by pondering "I wonder how this music will go down in Warrington?"

Larry Kirwan is clearly irritated by this kind of attitude and is keen to set the record straight.

"First of all, I am not a republican myself per se but I think that we all do have a real obligation to the nationalist community in the North," he states. "Despite what some people think, I believe that Irish Americans probably know the nationalist community a lot better 'cause we meet so many people from Tyrone or Belfast in the States and people from the South here might never actually meet people from those places. So I'm very much tuned into the nationalist community.

"At the same time, I totally agree with the Unionist community's position that they don't want to become part of a thirty-two county republic because of the whole religious thing. Part of the reason I left this country was over religion. I just couldn't take being in a totally Catholic environment anymore. They have a point, man. The fucking bishops do have too much influence down here. Maybe that's on the wane a bit now but there's been such a build up of this Catholic Jansenism in this country that I think the Unionists are dead right not to want to be sucked into that.

"I obviously don't agree with the Unionist idea that by repressing other people you keep your own freedom, but I can certainly see that the Unionists in the North and the Catholic bigots in the South are two sides of the one coin. And it's that whole coin we should be trying to get rid of, not just one or other side of it."

It's a distortion to see Black 47 as purely and simply an Irish ex-pat phenomenon. From the very earliest days, they drew an audience from right across New York's ethnic board. "Up until very recently," says Kirwan, "The Sawdoctors would kick our arse any night in The Bronx. For us, Irish people used only make up about 10 to 15% of an average crowd."

Yes, Black 47 sing about the famine and James Connolly and the Guildford Four and suchlike, but their message of revolution is essentially a universal one. The irony is that much of what their music says is as much news to America's young Irish community - especially the newly arrived Irish community - as it is to people of completely different nationalities and backgrounds.

"Young Irish American kids were looking for songs like 'James Connolly' even if they didn't necessarily realise it," Kirwan avers. "The songs that had been turning them on tended to be The Wolfe Tones type stuff, 'A Nation Once Again' or whatever, and for younger people who were used to listening to rock and rap those songs were okay, sometimes, but they were their parents' songs.

"Then, we come along with a song about Connolly and he became a new hero to them. They started to look up their history and think 'yeah, this guy was cool'. He stuck it to the bosses but also had a form of nationalism that they could identify with."

Back here on the auld sod itself, however, where every reference to republicanism must first be drenched with opinion-disinfectant, things aren't quite so simple. Black 47 sing about nationalists, dead nationalists - ipso facto Black 47 are card-carrying Provos.

"It's sad, I find, that Ireland has become so closed-minded that to even give a nationalist point of view should be greeted with suspicion," says Larry Kirwan. "I found it especially sad reading those articles about John Hume in the Sunday Independent by Conor Cruise O'Brien, John A. Murphy and others. The Southern part of Ireland in general has pretty much given up on the nationalist community in the North and I found it very distressing that these kind of people can intellectualise that so well, but there's a soulessness to what they're saying.

"I feel, and a lot of Irish Americans feel, that seventy years ago a great mistake was made. We sacrificed a half a million nationalists to a system that would compare with South Africa any day of the week, and we're still forgetting about those people. It behoves each generation to face up to that and to realise that we still owe those people a debt."

From his vantage point, Larry Kirwan sees Section 31 as one of the major stumbling blocks in the path of any full or genuine Southern understanding of the North.

"I don't think you people here realise the effect Section 31 has had," he argues. "Having been away so long and coming back once a year, I see it more and more each time. Sean McBride said, twenty or thirty years ago, that an Irish American would probably know more about what's going on in the North than an Irish person would. Section 31 has made that even more the case. It has worked on the population in a very insidious way. It's kinda put down this green curtain between the six counties and the twenty-six counties.

"It amazes me and it really amazes a lot of Irish Americans. They just can't figure out why people down here aren't more aware about the six counties. They wonder how the Irish who are so aware of Bosnia and are so renowned for the charity they show towards every troublespot in the world, they wonder why the Irish don't acquaint themselves with what's going on twenty miles over the border and why they don't react more angrily to attempts to keep information from them.

"It is an indictment of the country. I don't come back here to knock it because in a certain way I understand it. My parents are here, and my brothers and sisters, and they feel that way. But if you deny people knowledge, ignorance breeds a certain thing that is not particularly pleasant. And if you try to expunge the past just because it has a few uncomfortable similarities with part of the present, that's not good for the soul of Ireland. They tried to do that in Russia and see what happened there."

All this talk about politics could give the uninitiated the wrong impression. Black 47 are not preachermen, they're storytellers. Their debut album, Fire Of Freedom, is a huge, sprawling tenement filled with characters from the past and the present, ablaze with plot and yarn. As with his musical touchstones, Larry Kirwan's tale-spinning influences are nothing if not eclectic.

"My father was a sailor and the thing I always remember about when he came back home to port in Wexford was that he brought calypso records and he always had stories to tell," he says. "When it comes to writers, I was really influenced by Flann O'Brien, and by the Spanish magic realists, by Márquez and by Henry Miller. I like the idea of taking the raw data of your life and then fucking with it. You use your life but put in a wild card, or even a Green Card (laughs) and then see what happens."

This modus operandi has given us songs as diverse as the band's eponymous track, 'Black 47', a haunting meditation on the Great Famine of 1847 which is based on stories and images which had been handed down in Kirwan's family for generations.

"My great-grandfather, Jack Hughes, narrowly escaped starvation during the famine," he explains. "He witnessed a lot of horrific things and passed on that legacy of nightmarish visions to my grandfather, Tommy Hughes, who made me promise I would never forget these forgotten people. Some lines in the song, like 'An auld wan rolls over on her back/The grass stains still green upon her chin' - images like that are taken directly from Jack Hughes eye-witness description of what he experienced then and there."

At the other end of the Black 47 canon, there's a song like the brilliant 'Maria's Wedding' which is an only slightly fictionalised account of Kirwan's own attempt to wreck the nuptial ceremony of a woman who had left him to marry "a jerk." According to the lyrics, a rather well-quenched Larry staggered into the church and began to dance "like Baryshnikov all across the high altar."

"I did do that actually," verifies Kirwan with a chuckle. "It was less than funny at the time, I can tell you. Bay Ridge Italian/Irish weddings can be incendiary affairs at the best of times and while 'Maria' has long forgiven me, I doubt her father and brothers ever will."

Drink and drunkenness feature strongly in Larry Kirwan's writing, both as a refuge for his characters and alter egos and as part of their ultimate downfall.

"I like drinking, I enjoy it," he says. "I don't drink as much as I used to or anything but I write about my life and it's been a big part of it. I'm no Shane MacGowan but I've had my moments. Black 47 started in bars and there's a bar ethic to a lot of it. We all drink when we're onstage and we like to give people the feeling that they're coming out for a couple of hours into this world of Black 47 and drink is definitely part of it.

"I think there's a new puritanism in certain parts of the world where you're not supposed to talk about drinking, but it's just been so much part of my life. I've hung out with a lot of alcoholics and I know the dangers of alcoholism and the effect it has on families and everything but I like to show the other side of it too. There are alcoholics who have a great time over there. Given the choice, they wouldn't have it any other way and some of my songs just attempt to depict that."

The bad news is that unless you've got access to a Green Card and the price of a flight to the States then you're not likely to see Black 47 in concert for some considerable time. As of now, there are no plans whatsoever for the band to play on this side of the Atlantic and that situation is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Even though they average around a hefty two hundred and fifty gigging nights a year, they are in such demand in the U.S. right now that any question of performing outside of America has been completely ruled out.

"We did New York on a grassroots level and achieved what we wanted to achieve there to a certain degree," he explains. "Now, we're doing the same thing throughout the States but it's just so fucking big that it's gonna take up all our time. But this is the way we want to do it. We're a roots type band, winning over one bar at a time, and that's the way it's gonna continue."

So how far does Larry Kirwan believe he and Black 47 can go with all this?

"To a certain degree, most of my ambitions have already been fulfilled," he says. "We're the top band in New York and in the States in musical terms we symbolise New York. That for me is a tremendous achievement, cause I saw the same thing happening with the Velvet Underground and with The Ramones and Television and Talking Heads so I wanted to do that but I wanted to do it on a much broader base than they did. I wanted Black 47 to symbolise not just Manhattan but The Bronx and Brooklyn and Queens and everything. By playing so many gigs all over New York our roots are right through all the communities in New York. That, to me, is a huge achievement.

"As a writer, I wanted to become, like, a poet of the city. I know that sounds very grandiose but in the same way as Patrick Kavanagh was to Dublin and Lou Reed was to New York at one time, that's what I aspired to. I wanted to write about New York and the places and people I've known.

"I feel I've got a good bit to go to achieving that but I think I'm getting there. I can at least see the clear road ahead to doin' it. In the meantime, I'm having a great time with a great bunch of musicians and you don't get better than that.

"Where it goes, it goes. The rest is all kinda luck. We all might get killed next year. Who gives a fuck," he laughs.

BLACK AND BLUE

WHEN Larry Kirwan was assembling the ensemble that would eventually become Black 47, the first person he invited on board was Chris Byrne, uilleann piper extraordinaire and a member of the New York Police Department.

To outsiders, the idea of a cop in a band like Black 47 seemed bizarre. Imagine, for instance, if there'd be a Garda in Moving Hearts or a bobby in The Clash. To those who knew him, however, Byrne's presence made perfect sense.

Chris was no stereotypical flatfoot. He was a highly politicised, intelligent left-winger with a particular interest in Irish history. He also played a mean chanter and drones.

Nevertheless, given Black 47's burgeoning profile and fast-growing popularity, it didn't take long before his employers in the NYPD began to take notice, and umbrage. They began a sustained campaign of harassment against Chris Byrne directly because of his involvement in the band.

"Chris got a lot of official hassle," insists Larry Kirwan. "He got busted at one point, from detective down to cop on the worst beat in town. It's hard to know exactly the full scope of it but it certainly had to do with his playing in a band like Black 47 which was political. A lot of it was heavy, very heavy. They certainly made their unhappiness about the situation very clear."

The pressure on Chris Byrne intensified when Black 47 became associated with the campaign against the extradition of Joe Doherty to Britain.

"A lot of that had to do with the British government of the time," asserts Kirwan. "They were having such an effect on the Bush administration in encouraging them to bring the case to yet another court each time he had been set free by one court. We were doing a lot of gigs for Doherty at the time and that brought a lot of heat down on Chris.

I know when they were interrogating him they brought up that subject quite a lot. He's convinced that the NYPD were coming under a lot of very high level pressure themselves at the time over his and Black 47's involvement in the Doherty campaign."

Twelve months ago, Chris Byrne took a year long sabbatical from the NYPD. On July 30th this year, he decided to resign from the force altogether. He is now a full-time musician.