10 Irish Bands Who Didn’t Want To Be U2, The Corrs, Boyzone, Westlife et al

Following on from his comprehensive lists on Scottish post-punk bands who saved the world (they actually did), and Australian bands who didn't stink like a decomposing wallaby (a much shorter list, obviously), Craig Stephen had a date with some Guinness and found a bunch of Irish bands who didn't give a flying feck about fame and fortune ...

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Yes, Ireland has given the world some of the biggest as well as some of the worst in music over the decades and the headline only scrapes the surface.

Here are some of the bands that didn’t sell four million copies of their ninth album.

Stiff Little Fingers

Originally a Deep Purple covers band, they saw the light when punk arrived, changing their name to that of a Vibrators track. The Fingers now sounded as raw and uncompromising as their Belfast environment with a singer Jake Burns who sounded like his throat was on fire.

The first two singles and the debut album are as good as anything you’ll hear from the era. ‘Suspect Device’ and its killer flip, ‘Wasted Life’, was followed by ‘Alternative Ulster’ and an album Inflammable Material, which was certainly the case. 

However, their rock roots couldn’t entirely leave them: the riff at the start of ‘Suspect Device’ is a direct lift from American rockers Montrose's ‘Space Station #5’ (true, I’ve listened to both) and others have suggested they borrowed from the likes of The Wailers and (other) Irish compatriots.

That matters little, as there’s original sounds popping out all over Inflammable Material and subsequent releases.

Sadly, one of their best moments, ‘Safe As Houses’, from the 1981 album Go For It! has largely been forgotten about.

The Divine Comedy

Neil Hannon's witty songs, with their blend of upbeat poppy tunes and romantic melancholia, have established their own place in Britpop history, peaking in the late 90s when every student in the country seemed to know the words to ‘National Express’.

I’ll remind you of some: “On the National Express there's a jolly hostess/ Selling crisps and tea/ She'll provide you with drinks and theatrical winks/ For a sky-high fee/ Mini-skirts were in style when she danced down the aisle/ Back in '63 (yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)/ But it's hard to get by when your arse is the size/ Of a small country.”

Collaborators have come and gone but Hannon’s talent for clever wordplay and grand orchestral arrangements has continued, and he’s just released Office Politics, which is worth buying (on vinyl, naturally) for the cover alone. 

My Bloody Valentine

My Bloody Valentine have become one of the most namedropped bands in the world. No one sounds remotely like them. 

They formed in Dublin in 1984 around Kevin Shields and Colm ó Cíosóig, and after burning off their twee indie pretences, were Creation Records’ stars when they headlined above the House of Love and caused ripples with Isn’t Anything (1988), the Glider EP (1990), and Loveless (1991).

Brian Eno claimed the track ‘Soon’ "set a new precedent for pop" and deemed it the vaguest piece of music ever to get into the charts. Can’t argue with that.

A House

The Dubliners went down the traditional route of indie/alternative acts and after a series of singles, EPs, and two albums, signed to Setanta and teamed up with Edwyn Collins. This work produced perhaps their most memorable moment, the single ‘Endless Art’, where the lyrics were almost entirely a list of deceased, talented artists, among them Turner, Warhol, Henry Moore, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Ian Curtis, Sid Vicious and Mickey Mouse.

The list was entirely composed of men, causing the predictable kerfuffle, which resulted in ‘More Endless Art’ where all the talent were women (Emily Dickinson, Marilyn Monroe, Woolf, Shelley etc).

The Undertones

‘Teenage Kicks’ isn’t even their best song. That honour could belong to ‘Jimmy Jimmy’, ‘You’ve Got My Number (Why Don’t You Use It)’, ‘Wednesday Week’, ‘Here Comes the Summer’, or their biggest selling single, ‘My Perfect Cousin’, which celebrated both Subbuteo and the Human League.

Hailing from Derry, the Undertones were Mars Bar-chomping spotty working class teenagers when they kicked off and while they matured over their six years together, culminating in Top of the Pops appearances and several great albums, they always had a daft wee laddie attitude to them.

I must also mention That Petrol Emotion which included the O’Neill brothers but suffice to say that this was the natural progression to more adult subjects (ie, the situation at the time in Ireland), and a meatier sound.

Undertones singer Feargal Sharkey had a No.1 solo hit then retired to be a suit, becoming chief executive of the British Music Rights.

The Sultans of Ping FC

To get a picture of the Sultans (the name mocked a Dire Straits single) here’s a sample of lyrics from ‘Where’s Me Jumper?’ …

“I met a groovy guy, he was arty-farty/ He said, ‘I know a little Latin: anicus anicae’/ Said, ‘I don't know what it means’, he said, ‘Neither do I’/ Eat natural foods, bathe twice daily/ Fill your nostrils up with gravy/ Don't drink tea and don't drink coffee/ Cover your chin in Yorkshire toffee”.

A Cork version of Half Man Half Biscuit with better tunes and songs called ‘Riot at the Sheepdog Trials’, ‘Eamonn Andrews (This Is Your Life)’, ‘Kick Me with Your Leather Boots’, ‘Back in a Tracksuit’, and the album, Casual Sex in the Cineplex. They dropped the “FC”, then dropped “Of Pings” to become just the Sultans (yawn).

The Stars of Heaven

Stars of Heaven played melodic, guitar-based rock which combined elements of country, Britpop and psych. An unusual mix that was influenced by the Byrds, Gram Parsons and the Velvet Underground, but one that worked well, with John Peel frequently playing their songs on his show. They signed to Rough Trade and someone at MTV Europe clearly liked them too. 

I obtained their second album Speak Slowly (1988) in a bargain bin knowing nothing of the band at the time, but it proved to be an essential purchase. They were a band not of its time: the 1980s wasn’t a time to be playing stripped-down, guitar-based rock music so their audience was, sadly, limited.

The Pogues

If you’ve ever listened to the radio over Christmas you’ll be familiar with the following lyrics: “You scumbag, you maggot/ You cheap lousy faggot/ Happy Christmas, your arse/ I pray God it’s our last.”

Suitably, Shane MacGowan’s caustic lyrics were sung by Kirsty MacColl as a woman down on her luck and at the end of her tether.

Putting ‘Fairytale of New York’ aside, The Pogues were one of the illuminating lights of the 1980s, alongside The Smiths, New Order, and Half Man Half Biscuit.

They were part Irish, part Londoners, formed in 1982 as Pogue Mahone (aka “Kiss my arse”) but if you really need me to tell you anything about the band you haven’t been paying attention.

Rudi / The Outcasts

Grouped together because they were both punk bands, performed in the same era, and were on the same label, Terry Hooley’s Good Vibrations.

Rudi predated the Fingers by a good couple of years, but were initially a glam rock act. The arrival of the first Ramones album soon sorted them out.

In April 1978 the quartet released its finest moment, ‘Big Time’, which received promising reviews and quickly sold out.

Things were looking good until the police division the SPG moved in to clear the punks out of Clapham in London where they were now based, arresting both Ronnie Matthews and Graham “Grimmy” Marshall, on driving offences, jailing them for a week before they were ordered to return to Northern Ireland - or face a six-month jail sentence.

They released three more singles before splitting.

The Outcasts’ birth came about around the same time as SLF with three brothers, Greg, Martin, and Colin Cowan, and Colin Getgood.

Debut single ‘You're A Disease’ was followed later in 1978 by the poppier ‘Another Teenage Rebel’.

On a shared EP with fellow local acts, Rudi, Spider, and The Idiots, they contributed ‘The Cops Are Comin'’ about killing a girlfriend and having sex with the corpse. Yep.

They did release an album, Self Conscious Over You on Good Vibrations in 1979 which was more mainstream than the singles.

Fatima Mansions

An art rock group formed in 1988 by Cork singer/keyboardist Cathal Coughlan, taking their name from the infamous flats in Dublin.

The band’s lone foray into the world’s attention was their version (needless to say, a somewhat different take) of Bryan Adams' ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’, which was one half of a double A-side with the Manic Street Preachers' version of ‘Suicide is Painless’.

They opened a European leg of U2's Zoo TV Tour in 1992, and almost started a riot when Coughlan insulted the Pope. In Milan. Released a brilliant single ‘Blues For Ceausescu’ about the dead Romanian dictator.

Honourable mentions: The Frank and Walters, Into Paradise, the Boomtown Rats, Microdisney, The Pale, Schtum, the Virgin Prunes, The Chieftains, Sweeney’s Men, Andy White, the Saw Doctors, The Cranberries and Christy Moore.

The Vinyl Files – Introduction

For the blog’s 600^th post (yay me, etc) I want to introduce a new “series” focusing on the small but precious set of vinyl records in my collection. I plan to roll out a post per week, over the next few months, looking at ten of the best or most important records within that collection. But first, some context … 

We all consume music in different ways. I’m not much of a fan of Spotify. I don’t have the premium option and therefore don’t “store” albums for future streaming. I only occasionally check into Spotify for one-off album previews and only rarely check out the odd playlist that platform offers. It isn’t that the cost of premium is prohibitive or anything like that, far from it, it’s just that Spotify doesn’t really hold much appeal for me. Other members of my family swear by it.

I’m relatively old-school, and most of my current music collection consists of CDs and mp3s (albums downloaded). My collection in each of these formats is extensive and varied. Some might say its huge and rather excessive. The mp3 option, for all of its flaws – compression, variations in bitrate quality – offers the portability I crave in a way that still allows me to “own” a copy or file of the music I listen to. The CD option appeals because I like to collect “physical” things and stack them on a shelf. 

Having said that, purchasing CDs is a less frequent indulgence these days, and the vast majority of new additions to my music collection in recent years have arrived in the form of album downloads/mp3 files, which are meticulously tagged and filed away with all the pedantry of a particularly speccy and spotty OCD librarian. 

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, when I first started collecting music, it was a combination of vinyl records and cassette tapes. By 1992, my collection was extensive and – in the wake of CDs becoming the most fashionable form of consumption – largely redundant. Desperate for cash, and determined to embrace the CD format just as soon as I could afford it, I sold virtually everything I’d spent the previous 15 years collecting – vinyl and cassette tapes, the vast majority sold in bulk to a trader on Wellington’s Cuba Street. Sold for peanuts. It broke my heart. 

Well, it did, and it didn’t. It did because they were my life; the only tangible thing(s) I had to show for more than a decade in the workforce. And it didn’t because my life was undergoing major change and I desperately needed the money to fund long-yearned-for overseas travel. And hey, I couldn’t fit that little lot into the one backpack I left the country with, could I?

It just made sense (at the time) and it made even more sense that when I was flush with the green stuff, I’d be able to rebuild the collection – replicate it, even – in the form of CDs, which had fast become the mainstream poison of choice. And that's exactly what I eventually did … but I also held on to a number or tapes and records I couldn’t or simply wouldn’t give up. I stored them at my parent’s abode for the duration of my travels. The most precious and sentimental stuff; the first vinyl record my Mum ever bought me (Glen Campbell’s Goodtime Album, 1970). Something passed down to me by my Dad (The Green & White Brigade’s The Holy Ground of Glasgow Celtic, 1968), and naturally enough, a childhood first love, 1978’s Solid Gold Hits Volume 22. Plus a few others, which I may or may not get to in future posts. 

Among the handful of cassette tapes I couldn’t bear to part with were The Cure’s ‘Seventeen Seconds’ (1980), and New Order’s ‘Movement’ (1981). Those albums remain firm favourites today, although I tend to listen to each of them in a newer format nowadays. 

Since then – since The Great Purge of 1992/1993 – I’ve purchased very little in the way of vinyl, but I have added a few records here and there, and I’ve “inherited” a few albums to add to that small core set. Last Christmas, when I was gifted a very cute and portable “record player” I had yet another purge because it was clear that some of the vinyl I had was simply unplayable – badly scratched, tatty, and/or filthy – and I figured there wasn’t much point in keeping them or trying to salvage them. Which means my collection today is even smaller (about 40 albums and a handful of singles) but rather more selective. I can play what remains and what remains tends to be those records I value most. That’ll be my focus in this series of blogposts. 

With new vinyl so much more readily available than it has been at any time across the past couple of decades, I also harbour sneaky plans to add to this wing of my wider music collection. But for now, it strikes me that the most unique or more interesting works in my post-purge music collection exist in the vinyl format, so I’ll try to cover off ten of the best in the coming weeks, with a short post about what makes each one so special.

Introducing ... Black Market

Black Market is a US-based dub producer who caught my attention a few years back when he started releasing top notch name-your-price dub downloads on Bandcamp. I say he’s “US-based” because he’s more than a little mysterious and relatively low profile. His Twitter profile suggests he’s working out of Los Angeles, while his Bandcamp page suggests he’s based in that bastion of hardcore dub vibes, Nashville, Tennessee.

Let’s just say he flies well beneath the mainstream radar, and his location is probably not all that important anyway given that he’s easily enough found on the internet. In fact, you can find all of his Bandcamp releases here and his Facebook page here.

What’s most important is the music, with his latest work – Complete Clash – offering five dubby remixes of tunes by The Clash. What I like most about this one is the fact that we get less obvious Clash numbers, and these edits reek of someone who is a genuine fan of the band.

Being honest, I’ve been less impressed with his reworking of the Beach Boys and Michael Jackson, although his Bowie stuff stacks up well enough.

Best of all though are his themed releases on the X-Files, Twin Peaks, Star Trek, and the Twilight Zone, where he cuts up narrative from those shows to create whole new dimensions of his own. Anyway, enough from me, this blurb from his Bandcamp page pretty much covers it:

What would happen if The Beach Boys had The Wailers as their backing band instead of The Wrecking Crew? What if David Bowie spent the summer of 1975 in Kingston, Jamaica with King Tubby instead of Philadelphia? Michael Jackson meets Lee Scratch Perry? These questions are the basic thesis of Black Market. Listen loud, dance, enjoy, and share. I make these albums for free but accept donations at blackmarketdub.bandcamp.com 

Album Review: Blabbermouth - Hörspiel (2019)

Craig Stephen returns with another guest review ...

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Blabbermouth – now there’s a band name and a half – are two Englishmen with a long history in diverse and enigmatic acts. Lu Edmonds has appeared in two versions of Public Image Ltd with John Lydon as well as The Mekons and Billy Bragg’s band; Mark Roberts is a former member of The Godfathers and has also played, ahem, with the Bay City Rollers. Thankfully, there’s none of the Tartan boy band poppycock on Hörspiel (which translates as radio drama in German). 

It’s more interesting perhaps to note the guests, including throat singer Albert Kuvezin, Mekons vocalist Sally Timms and “the Blabbermouth Voice-Robot Ensemble”. 

Over nine tracks you will hear singing or audio in Russian, Turkish, Spanish, Japanese and even English as well as French-Canadian and Tuvalan (from an obscure area of Siberia), and the ‘voices’ of Marx, Stalin, Eisenhower and Tony Blair.

It’s an album that I don’t imagine being played on Radio Happy; but it is an album whereby experimentation and challenging notions abound. 

The concept is a world, not too far in the future, where artificial intelligence - AI - and robots have become our new rulers. It’s not a new idea as sci-fi has been toying with the threat, if you like, for decades, but the notion of humans being a helpless minority in a world of advanced, and fearful, technology we have ourselves created, isn’t one that often gets much traction in the music world. 

Appropriately, Edmonds and Roberts use industrial, post-punk, ambient and world music using everything from accordion to Hawaiian guitar. It has a “let’s throw it all in and see what happens” feel about it. 

So, on ‘Facts Don’t Lie’, the duo delve into weapons of mass destruction and the fake-news underbelly via a cut-up of the Chilcot Inquiry into Britain’s role in the illegal war on Iraq that concludes with the irritating tones of ex-British PM Tony Blair. And ‘Maschine-Fragment’ dissects the supposition that the last freedom in a world of pervasive and invasive AI is art. 

It isn’t by any means an easy listen, with Kuvezin’s throaty modus operandi difficult to adjust to. And yet its pursuit of the notion of a post-human world is intriguing and frightening; the usage of such diverse musical instruments and sub-genres as well as the concept of “guest appearances” from the dead and the living make for a body of work that ensures it will never be afforded the status of a throwaway pop album.  

Gig Review: Herbie Hancock, MFC, Wellington, 5 June 2019

Maybe I expected too much. Maybe the slow build anticipation of seeing a living legend perform up close had set me up for disappointment. Maybe if I’d been able to stand and sway rather than be forced to endure the rock-hard all-too-compact seating at the Michael Fowler Centre, Herbie Hancock’s set at the opening night of Wellington’s Jazz Festival would have been far more bearable for me. Enjoyable even. 

Perhaps it was a combination of all of the above, but whatever it was, my own enthusiasm for “jazz” had been well and truly diluted by the time I left the venue last Wednesday night. My gig-going companion was far more upbeat about it all, and I’m quite certain the vast majority of the sold out crowd enjoyed the gig a lot more than I did.

The band - Herbie Hancock (piano, keys), James Genus (bass, orgasmic facial expressions), Lionel Loueke (guitar/various vocal FX), and Vinnie Colaiuta (drums) - was fantastic, polished, and thoroughly professional throughout the near two-hour set. That wasn’t the issue. No question, these guys are all world class musicians, and it was a privilege to be in their company. 

But I’ve got to be honest; there just wasn’t enough “funk” for me, and the entire set was an excursion into the trippy excesses of what might otherwise be called prog-fusion. I knew enough about Hancock - a spritely 79 years of age - to know that work from 1983’s Future Shock album was always unlikely to feature, but most of his best material has always featured horns/brass and there wasn’t much of that on the night. 

We got variations on ‘Actual Proof’, ‘Chameleon’, and ‘Cantaloupe Island’ (during the encore), and some great Afro-fusion-vocal stuff from Loueke at various points, plus a raft of other work this jazz-pleb struggled to identify, but it was clearly more about an appreciation of the “vibe” for most in attendance, and I was having some difficulty with that. A little bit of variety, and a little more wiggle room might have helped. 

In his review for the Dominion Post, learned scribe Colin Morris, a man who knows a thing or two about this stuff, called it “a contender for concert of the year” ... so what do I know?

Maybe it was just me.

Book Review: Backstage Passes, by Joanna Mathers (2018)

I’m usually quite easily pleased when it comes to books of this nature. Local music stories with a grassroots and historical bent are right up my proverbial alley. I’m always game for some of that. It’s fair to say then, I had high hopes for Joanna Mathers’ Backstage Passes, “the untold story of New Zealand’s live music venues 1960 to 1990” …

Mathers’ background includes journalism work at the NZ Herald, writing business stories and lifestyle columns, so she’s no mere novice, and it therefore came as something of a surprise that Backstage Passes proved to be a bit of a mixed bag. There’s some good, some average, and a little bit of ugly. 

The Good … for the most part, that untold story gets told, and Mathers’ informal pub-chat writing style ensures that the narrative is never boring. We move through the decades effortlessly, chronologically, and all key locations - the four main centres: Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin - are covered off in detail. We’re only occasionally transported out to the regions, which is fair enough. All of the most relevant stuff tended to happen in the cities where the population is, or was, large enough to sustain a vibrant live music scene. The book is crammed full of first-hand accounts from those who were there at the time; venue owners, promoters, musicians, and punters alike. And there’s plenty of photos on offer to supplement those words. Mathers clearly dug deep to source anecdotes, quotes, and photos (all black and white). 

Of specific interest to me was coverage of the late 1970s and 1980s, because that’s the era my own earliest gig-going experiences align with. This was the good oil for me, and it was heartening and nostalgic to see boxes ticked for important venues like Mainstreet, the Gluepot, the Windsor, and Zwines in Auckland, the Hillsborough, the Gladstone, and the Dux de Lux in Christchurch, plus the Captain Cook and the Empire Tavern in Dunedin. Near the end, in a section titled “Now”, which takes us beyond the timeframe outlined in the book’s title, Napier’s Cabana is quite rightly acknowledged (if a little belatedly), and the recent closure of popular Auckland venues like Golden Dawn and the King’s Arms is justifiably lamented. 

The Average … the book feels a little front-loaded and we’re nearly halfway through its 190-odd pages before the 1970s come into view. I found the coverage of Wellington in the 1980s (in particular) to be very lightweight and it almost felt like the author was paying mere lip service to the capital. We learn a little bit about key venues like the Last Resort and Bar Bodega, for example, but the iconic Terminus pub only gets a very short paragraph, the Cricketers Arms gets even less than that, and there’s no mention of places like the Electric Ballroom, the Clarendon, or the Clyde Quay, all of which were important venues during the era. 

And how hard would it have been to include an index for reference purposes? 

The Ugly … there are several glaring errors in the book. It really does - rather surprisingly - fall short on a few basics in the area of proofing and editing. Simple things like getting spelling and some names correct. Miramar becomes “Mirimar”, Lambton Quay becomes “Lampton Quay”, Bodega owner Fraser McInnes becomes “Fraser McGuinness”, Dave McArtney is twice referred to as “Dave McCartney”, and there’s a mix up between onetime Wellington mayor Fran Wilde and pioneering punk turned film producer Fran Walsh. Mathers gets Walsh’s name right in a later chapter but only after referring to her band as the “Wallflowers”, when its actual name was the Wallsockets. Meanwhile, a fan account or extract on page 50 is titled ‘Pretty Things in Palmerston North’ yet the content within that account deals only with a Pretty Things gig in New Plymouth, without any further reference to Palmerston North whatsoever. 

These may only be minor flaws, but they were enough to (OCD alert!) undermine my enjoyment of the book. Near the end, I found myself questioning nearly everything. After all, if I could identify a few basic errors regarding the (mostly Wellington-related) stuff I already knew about, then could I really trust the detail around the other stuff I knew very little about? 

A few years back, after my own poorly written but nonetheless popular “scene” piece on Wellington nightclubs in the 1980s was published on AudioCulture, I was contacted privately by a fellow site contributor who offered the sage observation that when you write an overview of something small-town or regional that nobody else has previously written about, your account needs to be as accurate as possible because it more or less becomes the definitive account by default. 

To be fair to Mathers and Backstage Passes, much of this has been written about before, and she makes no claim to have written a definitive account. In fact, in her Final Word, she states … “this book is a tiny snapshot of those days. The stories contained in here do not claim to represent historical fact” …  which may, or may not, be taken as something of a disclaimer. And for me, the point about accuracy still stands, and if this is supposedly the telling of an “untold story”, then why not ensure all of the minor details are absolutely spot on? 

Having said all of that, it would be churlish not to acknowledge that the good here does indeed outweigh the average and the ugly. Thanks mainly to the rich reserves of subject matter and the small fact that we all love a bit of nostalgia. 

So yeah, it’s probably just as well that I’m usually quite easily pleased when it comes to books of this nature, and Backstage Passes gets a pass mark … but only just. 

Published by New Holland Publishing 

ISBN: 9781869664879 

You can buy a copy of Backstage Passes here