For St Patrick’s Day, this is my top ten playlist of Irish tunes! Sláinte!
Clannad were a band of siblings and uncles from Donegal who mixed folk, tradition and spiritual (alright, new age) music. I always loved Máire Ní Bhraonáin’s voice and it blends beautifully with a then young, up and coming singer named Bono. Incidentally, you may know her younger sister who left the band because she wanted to take it in a different direction. The band told her to go run along now and she released an album that would outsell anything Clannad would ever do. Her name was Enya. The lesson to be learned? The youngest is always the smartest!
Hothouse Flowers started as buskers playing the streets of Dublin and the first time they played Boston the buzz around them was huge! Their show at the Paradise sold out but my friends and I snuck in by going to a comedy club next door. Both clubs shared the same bathroom. When the bathrooms filled up, it was pretty easy to slip between the two clubs. Hothouse Flowers were great live!
Luka Bloom is the younger brother of Irish legendary musician Christy Moore, he changed his name as to not ride his brother’s coattails. He opened for Hothouse Flowers at that Paradise show and I’d never heard of him. I was surrounded by hundreds of people singing along with him to every song and he played his guitar with a reckless abandon. In a club in my town that I’d been in countless times, this was the first and only time I felt like I was in a stranger in a foreign country!
Sinead O’Connor has one of the best voices to ever come from the streets of Dublin! Unapologetic. Raw. Beautiful. Her first two albums are brilliant!
Some day I will find the photo of me with Bob Geldoff! Sadly, I think it was lost in one life’s many moves but before he was the mastermind whose exhaustive efforts brought us Live Aid he played in the Boomtown Rats. While everyone knows I Don’t Like Mondays, this was the song I used to play the most when working the overnight shift at WFNX!
I became friends with Eoin Woods when he lived in Boston, a tremendous musician and great guy! He once told me his main objective on stage was to make as much noise with one voice and a guitar as possible! His vocals are filled with beautiful anguish in the song. He plays around Dublin to this day so look for him at the Temple Bar as one of the Bunko Brothers!
Long before there was U2, the biggest rock band out of Dublin was Thin Lizzy! While many of us here in the states thought they were just another 70s southern rock band with hits like Jailbreak and the Boys Are Back In Town, they showed their Irish roots when they ripped up this traditional Irish song that was made famous in Ireland by the Dubliners. Metallica also paid homage to the Thin Lizzy version of the song.
There is a very cool statue of Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy just off of Grafton Street in Dublin.
My Dad used to play Irish music in the house around St Paddy’s Day when I was growing up, I always thought it sounded corny. Although, as kids we did laugh at that green alligators and pencil neck geeks song. That notion of Irish music sounding corny all changed the first time I saw the Waterboys on the Fisherman’s Blues tour. My Dad had passed a few years before then and we stopped listening to the cheesy Irish ballads for the holiday. I was in the back row at the Orpheum and they came out playing traditional music with a rock attitude and sensibility that instantly felt like home and something we could claim as our own. This was no longer my Dad’s Irish music, this was mine and I ate it up!
U2 was a gateway band to all things punk or alternative or post new wave modernism or what ever the Hell you wanted to call songs that weren’t silly love songs or played by awful hair bands in the early 80s! Their sound was refreshing and interesting. They sounded like something many of us had never heard before. Honestly, I was done with them after the Joshua Tree album,Rattle & Hum sounded like Ripple and Ho-hum to me, but I’ll always love these first few albums!
Very few have captured in music Irish nationalism and gift of storytelling better than the Pogues! Also, very few captured the worn out stereotype of the alcoholic Irish poet and writer like Shane MacGowan. I had the “pleasure” of introducing him live on stage one night and saw that first hand! That will be a blog post for another time, though. This song was written by the late, great Phil Chevron and showcased the Pogues’ mastery of words as they painted refugees escaping Ireland on “coffin ships.” It’s beautiful and powerful melancholy is perfect for celebrating St Patrick’s Day! Sláinte!
Duke of Dead Air 