Moving on up

THE THING about Moving Hearts is you either get it or you don't. Some don't. Invariably, they are the kind of people who can count from one to ten alright but just not in that order. For the rest of us, however, the Hearts were, are and will always be one of the musical marvels of the twentieth century. Eamonn McCann used to call them "the greatest rock & 'n' roll band in the world." I always thought he understated their case.

This morning in Cafe Tomoto in Donnybrook, five Hearts have come together for a photo call and press puff to promote their forthcoming Midnight At The Olympia gigs. In civvies, they're an unprepossessing bunch - five workaday blokes, slouching around, slurping coffee and nibbling on vol-au-vents. There is, nevertheless, a shared air of confidence about them. They know what they've achieved and they're acutely aware of the awesome firepower that is still available at their fingertips whenever they reconvene.
"This is our music," proclaims bass maestro, Eoghan O'Neill. "As gigging musicians, we spend most of our lives playing other people's stuff. But this is the real thing."
"It's very uplifting music," adds Keith Donald, sax and clarinet linchpin. "It can electrify an audience like nothing else I've ever seen. One of the things I'll remember for the rest of my life is our first Point Depot gig. We had an audience of 7,000 seated and suddenly it was like a musical codeword went out. We suddenly had an audience of 2,000 dancing and 5,000 seated. There was fuck all the bouncers could do about it. There's something in the music that makes it an unstoppable force."
The reunification of Germany has been a tortuous, slow and precarious business. However, at least it has only had to happen once. Since they first officially disbanded in 1984, there have been numerous Moving Hearts reunifications, each one involving more inventive logistical juggling than its predecessor. Assembling a troupe this size is never easy, especially given that its membership has been scattered to all corners of the music business (aside from those with regular touring commitments, drummer Matt Kellaghan is director of the Ballyfermot Rock School while Keith Donald runs the MusicBase resource centre).
An all-present-and-correct turn out for every reunion is virtually impossible to achieve and for the Olympia gigs the missing-persons list is topped by percussionist Noel Eccles, who will be touring abroad with Eleanor McEvoy, and founding member, Donal Lunny, the explanation for whose absence is a little more vague. "I guess, you'd have to ask Donal himself why he isn't playing this time," suggests Donald.
"The opportunity is there for people to play this music together," adds O'Neill. "It's a question of rounding up the usual suspects who feel they want to do it or can do it at the time. We don't ask people to explain why they don't do things. Maybe, he just doesn't want to do it at the moment. I don't think anybody feels bad about the fact that other people actually do it. It always feels a bit odd playing without Donal but I think, as far as most people are concerned, we still have the basic core. We couldn't, for instance, envisage doing a Moving Hearts gig without Keith and Davy (Spillane)."
In actual fact, Moving Hearts have played their last four reunion concerts sans Mr. Lunny, though his non-appearance on the stage at Feile '90 was curiously overlooked by some genius in The Irish Times who singled out his performance for special mention. "Donal got a wonderful review for that show," laughs Eoghan O'Neill. "Probably one of the best he's ever gotten, and he wasn't even there."
For the Midnight At The Olympia gigs, the Lunny void will be somewhat compensated for with an augmented line-up: former Bogey Boy and Toni Childs henchman, Jimmy Smith, is being drafted in to join Greg Boland on electric guitars while Anto Brennan will provide some acoustic plucking; James Delaney sits in on keyboards and the RTE Symphony Orchestra's Lloyd Byrne fills in for Eccles behind the bongos. With Declan Masterson adding his by-now familiar second voice on pipes and whistles, that bring the current Moving Hearts membership tally to ten.
"The sound may be slightly different because of the nature of the instruments," says O'Neill. "But Moving Hearts music has always changed and adapted. It has a life of its own."
Indeed it has. Though their last recorded work was the astounding 1985 album, The Storm, the Hearts' reputation has continued to grow and spread at an astonishing rate. "The music is outliving all of us and our relationships," asserts Keith Donald. "I keep hearing little things that surprise me all the time. I know, for instance, that The Storm is now on the curriculum in a couple of music colleges in Scandinavia. And, a while ago, a friend of mine was stuck in a taxi in South Australia and he heard someone in the next car playing a tape of The Storm . . ."
"Which is very interesting really because we don't know how it got there," Eoghan chimes in. "We never released it over there. It's obviously yet another bootleg."
Mention of bootlegs and such like brings us to what was the central tragedy of Moving Hearts. For all their musical ingenuity, they never really mastered the financial side of things. Nobody involved ever made a penny from the band, they insist. Eoghan O'Neill, for example, remembers completing one gruelling twenty-four date tour during the latter days and being handed his cut of the profits which amounted to a princely £30.
Ten years on, though the massive debts they had accrued to AIB have now been paid off, there is still nobody taking care of business and it's not unusual for one or other of them to be handed yet another "unofficial" Moving Hearts compilation which they had never known existed.
"We were a collective and that would've worked fine if we'd had a management structure separate to the band, but we didn't," asserts Keith Donald. "We were self-managed and that's a terrible idea. We did try to get other people involved, like Ollie Jennings who went on to manage The Sawdoctors. Unfortunately, he got sick and ended up in hospital and we were back to square one, managing ourselves."
"We had as many managers as the English soccer team actually," says Eoghan O'Neill. "But, also like managers of the English soccer team, none of them lasted very long. We should've got Terry Venables in to do the job. With hindsight, I think our real problem was that we weren't trusting enough. In '80 and '81 when we first started, we'd all been through the mill with various different bands. We all knew the pitfalls but we were so paranoid about them that we overlooked the upside of having a manager. We were so paranoid we couldn't trust anyone. By the time we realised that we needed a manager it was too late."
In terms of future plans, Moving Hearts have not ruled out the possibility of entering a studio together again. A follow-up album to The Storm was recorded featuring all the instrumentals from their two previous albums and three new tracks, but was never released. Given the right offer, this project could be revived and perhaps even expanded upon. "We don't make plans," says Keith Donald. "Nothing is ruled in or out."
In the meantime, as Moving Hearts prepare to storm the Olympia, Eoghan O'Neill insists there are no regrets.
"When we stopped, we didn't split," he avers. "There was no animosity. It was just no longer financially possible to keep it going. We can still get together to do gigs whenever time and schedules permit. We still love the music and love playing it together. Even a lot of the political campaigns we were involved in, like the Nicky Kelly case and Section 31, have come right. It makes you feel good to know that we didn't back too many wrong horses."

Moving Hearts play Dublin's Midnight At The Olympia on Friday February 18th and Saturday February 19th.