Heat fightin' men

Sound City Beat, sees the return to action of The Radiators From Space. On what is just their fourth album in 34 years – their debut TV Tube Heart was released in 1977 – they have not only recreated an overlooked era in Irish rock, they’ve also made the music feel vibrant and relevant once again. And while the album features covers of Horslips, Taste, Thin Lizzy and Them gems, it also turns a spotlight on forgotten acts who deserved better than the scant attention they received at
the time.

“One of the first things we noticed when we started digging for real was the strength of the songwriting,” Philip Chevron says. “Rory Gallagher’s ‘It’s Happened Before, It’ll Happen Again’ was almost buried beneath the lengthy sax and guitar improvs on the second Taste album. That was how Rory worked. Sometimes it made his songwriting seem secondary, which of course it wasn’t. The two Brush Shiels songs, ‘New Places, Old Faces’ and ‘Head For The Sun’, are unrefined and unfinished, something we dared presume to repair.
“Part of the problem with almost all these bands was a lack of studio time,” he adds. “A friend who loves the album pointed out that overall, the lyrics are comparatively undistinguished. I’m not sure I agree wholeheartedly with that. Peter Adler’s ‘I’m Gonna Turn My Life Around’, though not an exceptional lyric per se, is clearly written by a man who understood the craft of
lyric-writing.”
The Radiator’s resident punk Steve Rapid says the idea to record a bunch of songs from Dublin’s embryonic rock era flowed from his and Chevron’s interest in records from the period.
“I’ve been particularly keen on that era,” he confesses. “I’d actually seen some of those bands live. The album sleeve has a poster of a 1968 gig at Liberty Hall called Beat Blast. It had bands like Skid Row, Creatures, Gentry and so on. I was actually at that gig. I’ve always been interested in ‘60s bands who played the same kind of high-energy stuff that we wanted to play when we started The Radiators.” Chevron reckons the years 1964 to 1971 were critical to Irish musical culture. “The most interesting music was occurring just below the radar. Although the pop hits, the music of the showbands and the ballad groups are, correctly, I think, identified as the soundtrack to a time of enormous political, social and infrastructural change across the land, most of the music of long-term influence and lasting merit was actually occurring elsewhere. Apart from the beat groups, only the decade’s Gael Linn singles and EPs were of true lasting value and influence.”
Pete Holidai didn’t encounter this music first time round as he was growing up in Britain. “I was going to places like the Hammersmith Palais on Saturday mornings for juvenile disco type things. I’d heard some of the music over the years, like the Orange Machine. I really didn’t get to most of it until we actually started work on picking songs for the album. So I was coming to these songs very fresh and took them at face value, and in many cases was blown away. Philip and Steve had grown with this music as part of their DNA, so to speak.”
Tracking down the obscure originals wasn’t as difficult as you might imagine. “Philip and myself actually had most of the original record,” Steve explains. “So we listened to them all, and each of us voted for those we thought we’d like to do and could do best. In fact, people have remarked that some of the songs Pete sings on the album actually sound like his originals. We gravitated towards ones that would suit us.”
Chevron says he is a lifelong record collector with a real fascination for connections and narratives that bypass the obvious. “I’d begun to sense an uncharted story crying out to be told,” he says. “Being a little older, Steve had more personal experience of the scene, though he was too young to attend the clubs in their heyday. Sound City Beat started to impose itself on us over a period of time and then we began to realise that probably only the Radiators could actually pull it off. Internet fan sites and Darragh O’Halloran’s book Green Beat persuaded us we weren’t entirely pissing in the wind. With Johnny Bonnie and Enda Wyatt in the band, the time seemed right. Once Horslips gave us permission for ‘The Lady Wrestler’ we had the Grail. It didn’t appear to have an Irish tune ‘concealed about its person’ so we added that ourselves. Boz Mugabe points out that if it had been the first Horslips single, instead of ‘Johnny’s Wedding’, the future of Irish music could have been very different. All popular culture tends to be comprised of what gets made, not what doesn’t get made.”
Back in that era, rock music in Dublin was generally confined to a fairly tight live scene. Rapid points out that The Five Club in Dublin’s Harcourt St. was a serious focal point, especially for psychedelic rock, which had a comparatively large following in Dublin. But there were numerous other clubs, where the best of the local bands, then called beat groups, play live and DJs like Pat Egan would play records by Irish outfits in amongst the international rock hits. “If you talk to people who were there at the time, like Ted Carroll from Chiswick Records, they’ll tell you that this was a vibrant, serious scene,” Steve agrees. “There were five or six key clubs around the city. Apart from The Five Club you had Sound City along the quays, Club A-Go-Go, Club Arthur. And all of these had a rotation of bands that played there.”
The impact went deeper than mere entertainment. “I remember a sort of gradual post-colonial awakening in the country after Kennedy’s visit,” Philip Chevron reflects. “I was much too young to perceive it as I waved my little paper flag at him on the old Airport Road, but there was a palpable sense of forward motion. We didn’t have our Carnaby St. or Haight Ashbury. But a version of the ‘60s definitely happened here. We just had different baggage to clear. Rural Ireland was becoming rapidly de-parochialised, while the urban centres tended to be more connected to the world’s growing pop culture and counterculture. It was probably the last time agrarian Ireland dominated the landscape and, as long as it did, the rock scene in the cities seemed to get squeezed out.
“You picked it up where you could: Ken Stewart’s radio show, Pat Egan’s column in Spotlight magazine and so on. I didn’t really start going to gigs until Horslips at the Stadium in 1972, but I made up for lost time and caught quite a few of the later bands in dingy clubs like Alice’s. By the early ‘70s, the Guru Maharaj Ji ashram in Santry was a hotbed of ‘60s Irish rock refugees too! That’s where I first met Pete Cummins, John Ryan, Ditch
Cassidy, Tony Koklin, Paul Scully, Danny Ellis, Terry O’Neill
and countless others.”
Apart from The Creatures, whose ‘Turn Out The Lights’ is majestically covered on the album, and who had been signed to CBS Records, few Irish rock acts then got onto Irish radio, which consisted of one ultra-conservative station.
“The Creatures had charted in the US,” Steve agrees, “and Ian Whitcomb with Bluesville had a top ten hit in the US in 1965 with ‘You Turn Me On’. But the showbands dominated Irish music at the time, especially radio, and a lot of these beat group records were actually made to sound like showbands by maybe adding brass to give them a better chance of radio play.”
To underscore that point, Holidai interjects that ‘Never An Everyday Thing’, which features on Sound City Beat, sounds “showband-y” on the original recording by Granny’s Intentions in 1968 – although that may have been a production line effect of being recorded in the studio that was used to make the showband records. Comparative youngsters might wonder if there was a Dublin rock sound as such back then. Chevron believes it was more an attitude, a hunger to learn and explore.
“These artists were bursting with ideas and styles,” he says, “The eclectic tendency in Irish rock music did not begin with Horslips, much less The Radiators or The Pogues. Though R&B remains the music’s foundation stone, Rory, Philo, Brush, Whitcomb, Ernie Graham, Dave Lewis and Van assimilated jazz, folk, country, soul and traditional into a new and fluid hybrid. And that openness, more than anything, is the common gene of all the best contemporary Irish music. We simply discovered it had been there all along.”
Rapid also agrees with my contention that a title like ‘You Turn Me On’ was something the Irish listening public were assumed not to be ready for in those dark ages. “I don’t think they banned records as such. They just didn’t play them. One of the DJs back them was Pat Ingoldsby who had a programme every Saturday morning and would play lots of psychedelic stuff. The showband heads used to ring up complaining that he was playing all this weird stuff instead of their records!”
Chevron points to the singular failure of Radio Éireann to do justice to the music and culture of that time.
“There were definite limits to how much Radio Éireann could reflect back the culture to itself,” he says. “It largely failed in its public service remit. Though the showbands were often a lot of fun and reflected a new optimism and an opening up of rural Ireland, not many of them had much intrinsic merit except as launch pads for rockers like Henry McCullough, Van, Rory, Eric Bell and so on. Yet the group records made in this period continue to stand the test of time and tell of a more interesting subculture than was previously supposed. But it was something of a golden age. Look closely at Rory, Philo, Van, Brush, Peter Adler, Bluesville, Dave Lewis, Henry, The Creatures and the rest – you see a gilded future for Irish music on the horizon. And I’m not sure it was just music either. The banned books list by Irish writers in that period makes phenomenal reading. There again, you could find them if you looked.”
Rapid concurs. “The beat groups did have some outlets where they could sell records,” he says. “There were a lot more labels than we might now think and a lot of LPs were bring pressed in Ireland. There was Tempo Records, whose house producer was John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin!”
Today there are bands stoically convinced they can make a living out of it in Ireland. What was going through the heads of rock bands in Dublin back then. Were they thinking of it as a hobby or a career?
“Any young guy at 17 or 18 thinks he’s going to take on the world by making interesting music,” Steve says. “It was the same back then. Henry McCullough was in The People, who later became Eire Apparent. They went to London, worked with Jimi Hendrix and were managed by his manager Chas Chandler. They lived in a van with a hole in the roof parked under a bridge. They all assumed that this was what you had to go through to get to be a big star. Sadly, most of them got the boat home and achieved little or nothing. But some made it work. Henry McCullough later played with McCartney and is still playing. So is Brian Harris from The Creatures. So these guys clearly had a deep love of this music. There was no infrastructure to the Irish music scene back then, so the groups tended to look towards England as the next step in their progress.”
Holidai points up another aspect of that time. “If you look at the records, quite often the A-side was a cover version, as that stood a better chance of becoming a hit or getting radio play. The B-side would be an original. With Sound City Beat we tried to avoid doing cover versions of cover versions. That’s why we picked the Orange Machine’s ‘Dr Crippen’s Waiting Room’ which was their original B-side to a cover of a song by the English band Tomorrow. It was co-written by Jimmy Greeley, the ex-2fm DJ.”
Holidai also explains an odd fact about McCullough playing on the album. “Henry actually didn’t get to play on the original Eire Apparent track ‘Yes, I Need Someone’! He was fired from the band in the States after being caught with a joint before the album was recorded, with Hendrix as producer.”
Rapid takes up the story. “What was amazing for me,” Steve says, “was that he just came in the studio, sat down with his guitar, listened to the music through the speakers and just played it! It just flowed from his fingers. Phil always reminds me I’m the continuing punk element in The Radiators because I have no musical skills whatsoever, so to me this was amazing!”
Asked about his favourite track on the album, Chevron says, “That changes all the time. Which is, I suppose, one sign that it’s a good record. An early favourite for me was ‘You Got What I Need’, which makes the case for the whole experiment in itself. Pete found a really simple descending lead guitar line which not only replaces the entire showband-y brass section on the original but kicks it into touch. I love his vocal on it too. He’s turned it into a Holidai song. I think it was beneficial that, because Pete grew up in Fulham, he was less familiar with this stuff than the rest of us. He brought his inner Professor Holidai to the proceedings.
“I can also listen to ‘Gloria’ ad nauseum because we recorded it in such an exhilarating single take, including Steve’s vocal, that it spontaneously returns me to that moment every time I hear it. I like ‘Behind The Painted Screen’ too because I felt I had unearthed a genuine, if forgotten, Irish classic and I really like our arrangement. It was so interesting to hear Terry Woods on bouzouki finding his way into a Radiators piece. Also, I like the harmony vocals, all of which are me on this one. Mojo compared our version to Gene Clark, which was perceptive of them!”