Ten Albums That Rocked My World
Blondie - Eat to the Beat (1979)
I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t Debbie Harry’s good looks that captured my attention when I saw Blondie performing Denis on Top of the Pops for the very first time. But after a minute or two, it was clear that there was more to Blondie than just Debbie’s obvious and alluring beauty. More importantly, the song sounded great, and behind it lay a gritty punky New York attitude. The band was tight and punchy, the words and the melodies easy.
Eat to the Beat was released in 1979 and contained the hit singles Dreaming, Union City Blue, and Atomic with the immortal Your hair is beautiful, one of the many lines to die for, delivered with the attitude of a smoking gun. But it was the darkness contained in Die Young Stay Pretty that stood out for me. A striking ballad alluding to the possibilities to be gained of living life in the fast lane, like a shooting star destined to fall to earth too soon. The desperation of our infinite mortality demands that we live fast because it won’t last.
Debbie taught me that looks go hand in hand with what you have to say and do. More importantly, I found out that dreaming is free, and all of these years later I reckon it’s about the only thing that still is. Her attitude was to die for, the don’t fuck with me edge to her facial expressions, which I’ve tried to emulate, without much success, from time to time. Like my father, Debbie doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
Back then her attitude was everything I wanted to be.
U2 - The Joshua Tree (1987)
I remember buying The Joshua Tree cassette in Golden Discs on Dublin’s Talbot Street and sprinting back to the hostel I was working in on Frenchman’s Lane off Gardiner Street. I pushed it into the tape recorder and lay back on my Catalan girlfriend’s bed, the opening bars of Where The Streets Have No Name rising to meet the opening line that would define the entire album and my own view of the world from then on. I want to run I want to hide I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside. Having just escaped secondary school it perfectly summed up how I was feeling.
U2 opened me up to a universe far beyond Dublin, beyond the shores of the country Bob Geldof aptly described as the Banana Republic. They introduced me to the wild wide-open spaces of the American desert, which took up residence in my mind. I could feel the desperate search for identity and liberty in I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For and the desperation of heartbreak contained in With or Without You. But it was the lines in Running To Standstill…You have to talk without speaking, cry without weeping, scream without raising your voice that best summed up what it felt like to be living in Ireland during the late 1980s.
But the good news was that things were stirring and U2 was a big part of that. Along with the likes of Phil Lynott, Bob Geldof, Jack Charlton, Neil Jordan, Eamon Dunphy, and the many others who stood up to the monopoly on thinking imposed by church and state. By challenging it, they revealed the opportunities for success waiting for us in the wider world.
The Doors - The Doors (1967)
This album might mess up the timeline, but I have to admit to arriving late to The Doors party. In my defence I was only two years old when this album was released. In the end, it was Light My Fire that forced me to finally surrender to their charms. There would be no going back. My mind has always been a meandering maze caught up in a desperate search understanding and meaning. Jim Morrison had the ability to take us there and more.
I remember my good friend Philip Prosser driving us back along the road from Doolin towards Lisdoonvarna as the sunset on a perfect summer’s day in the early 90s. Mister Mojo Rising to the challenge on the car’s cassette player to declare the west os the best, get here and we’ll do the rest, the blue bus is calling us, the blue bus is calling us, driver where you taking us? Jim’s words wrapping themselves like a silhouette around the black hills on either side. The darkness inviting us into the centre of its heart. We always headed west to County Clare to lose ourselves so that we could find our own way back home. We always left replenished. The energy we felt was similar to what Jim was singing about.
Another song from the same album that I played over and over was Take it easy baby, Take it as it comes. Jim was good at dolling out life lessons in a simple catchy way that challenged you to live life as it was meant to be lived, wild and free. Finally liberated from school I was wide open to new ideas and fresh perspectives. I was desperate to find the real me, rather than the one who had stumbled through the academic side of school life, and was lucky enough to be working in a tourist hostel In Dublin where I was meeting people, young and old, from all over the world, and even more importantly girls, the kind of girls to be found in a Doors song. Come on, baby, light my fire, Come on, baby, light my fire, Try to set the night on fire. I was ready and waiting.
The Pogues - If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1988)
It was Rum Sodomy and the Lash that introduced me to the individual irreverence and the collective chaos of The Pogues. But it was their third album If I Should Fall From Grace With God that cemented them in my consciousness. Like its predecessors, it was a mix of melody and madness, all of which was anchored by the wonderful lyrics. Their songs have a way of painting pictures in your head, like on Thousands Are Sailing when Philip Chevron invokes the emigrant stepping out onto New York’s busy streets… In Manhattan's desert twilight In the death of afternoon, We stepped hand in hand on Broadway Like the first man on the moon.
Later in 1988, I moved to London where I lived for a year meaning that the album resonated even more. I was now part of the London Irish, finding work and going to Highbury every second week to watch Arsenal win their first League title in eighteen years. The Pogues, like the Rats, U2, and others before them, were pushing back at the conservative view of what it was to be Irish and it felt good to be part of that seismic shift in our consciousness. It was like the musical equivalent of the civil rights movement. As much as the music, it was what these people stood for. The Pogues represented both the emigrant forced to leave home and the many cast adrift in a foreign land. The fact that they did this by unashamedly connecting to their past, whilst also being wide open to the wider influences beyond their own boundaries, mirrored what Ireland was trying to do as it struggled to cast off its Catholic identity as another decade drew to a close. And they did it through songs laden with the ability to melt even the hardest of hearts.
Like many others at this time, I was struggling to find my own idea of what it was to be Irish. The Pogues helped me to finally realise that it didn’t have to be old-fashioned or set in stone, that we could take the steps towards becoming a modern nation, and even more importantly we could do it individually and collectively. If I Should Fall From Grace With God made me realise that I could be myself and Irish all at the same time.
The Sawdoctors - If This Is Rock and Roll, I Want My Old Job Back (1991)
I always think of The Sawdoctors as the west of Ireland version of The Pogues without the craziness of their London cousins. The songs are similar in that they paint a powerful and vivid picture of life in a particular place. The quality on this particular album never lets up, even the so-called fillers could all have been hit singles. Just hearing the jaunty opening bars of Red Cortina still brings a smile to my face.
Like The Pogues, The Sawdoctors capture the sadness that breathes through emigration, through the eyes of the people leaving and the forgotten who are left behind. Many of the characters could have stepped out of a Sawdoctors song straight into a Pogues one or vice versa. The magic of this album is anchored in its sense of place and the ability of each song, for example N17, to make you laugh and cry at the same time.
I remember giving the album to my friend Kathryn when I visited her in Barcelona, soon after it was released. She got it immediately, as I expected she would, playing it on loop at a party in her apartment. There is something special about listening to Irish music overseas in the company of other Irish people. A sense of belonging and pride in what it is that makes us who we are. Our music, our literature, our sense of humour, our poetry, our art, our history, and our easy ways. I often feel we’re at our best abroad, freed of the chains and the suffocating expectations of home.
The Sawdoctors have an innate sense of the warmth that lies within us. Their music has a unique connection that reaches out to everyone. I’ve always done my best to avoid a bandwagon, to walk in the opposite direction of the crowd, but for once I had to let my guard down regarding The Sawdoctors who convinced me that this album was simply too good to pass up.
The Waterboys - Room to Roam (1990)
It wasn’t an easy choice between Fishermen’s Blues and Room to Roam but in the end, the sweet melodies of songs like A Man Is in Love, How Long Will I Love You, The Raggle Taggle Gyspy, and When Spring Comes to Spiddal proved too difficult to ignore. There’s a distinctly west coast feel to the album, reflecting the sense of place present in many of the other albums I have chosen.
Like McGowan, Morrison, and Bono, Mike Scott is a songwriting genius. His words, images and melodies combine to tell beautiful stories. Like Ger Whelan in An Emotional Fish, Scott see’s the world through a kaleidoscopic lens, one where imagination and possibility triumph over the ordinary to create a magical world, full of colourful characters that demand we sit up and take notice. I love the west of Ireland and when I put on Room to Roam it takes me right back there.
Reading Mike Scott’s autobiography felt like one long beautiful river of words, full of force and texture as it meandered downstream, just like Mike’s music has a habit of doing. There’s a rhythm to his thought. I have an awful lot to thank this man for, after all he really did help me to see The Whole of the Moon.
U2 - Achtung Baby (1991)
If The Joshua Tree was U2’s American opus, then Achtung Baby was a return to the eclectic European feel of The Unforgettable Fire. My own love affair with Berlin began with this album. Years later I would have the privilege of living there for three months. Interestingly my film work also brought me to the Mysterious Ways of Morocco. Perhaps Achtung Baby was a glorious glimpse into my own future. It was certainly a massive leap for a band that had slammed one door shut, with the express intention of kicking open another. U2 taught me that you can be different in a country where to this day people still struggle with the very word. They also showed me the importance of evolution, stretching yourself, stepping out of your comfort zone into places were you have to come face-to-face with your real self.
Nowhere on an album is this more prevalent than on One, for me the greatest love song ever written. Have you come here for forgiveness? Have you come to raise the dead? Have you come here to play Jesus To the lepers in your head? I am guilty as charged on all counts. I kind of like that Bono is hated by so many in Ireland because it means he must be doing something right. I like it that he doesn’t give a fuck. If Bruce Springsteen had been born in Crumlin, we’d probably stick him up on a cross on the top of the Dublin mountains and stone him to death.
An Emotional Fish - Junk Puppets (1993)
Sometimes it only takes one song to make an album special. On Junk Puppets that song is Hole in my Heaven. The immortal line I smoked about it, joked about it, Lord I even talked about with you spoke of troubled love in Hole in my Heaven. I was already high on the extraordinary Celebrate, from An Emotional Fish’s first album, still to this day one of the best Irish singles of all time. Ger Whelan’s status as a legendary frontman was backed up by great songs. Careless Child. Time is on the Wall. True Friends. Upside Down.
There’s a kindness about Ger but it seems real anger too. He can see the world as a better place and he’s desperate to take us there, fuelled by the wild energy within and the power of the music behind him, all of which echoes the search for something bigger, better, greater than anything we are prepared to accept. That’s a common thread running through my choice of albums, the drive to reach a place where our spirit can once again access the way it was when we were born. Pure, simple, uneducated, and unblemished. I’ll leave you with a verse from Careless Child that perfectly sums it up…Where are you now careless child? Were you halfway and turned around? Or did you fall from higher ground? Reaching out? Don't be afraid you won't let us down. Wear your heart like a crown. Don't try to hide what you found. Let it out, let it out.
Oasis - Definitely Maybe (1994)
In 1994 anything seemed possible and that’s probably because it was. I felt trapped in the body of a teacher when all I really wanted to be was a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star. I still do. What’s not to like about having an excuse to wear funky clothes every day of the week? Oasis had come from nowhere, well that’s not strictly true. In fact they came from a council estate in Manchester. And they were telling anyone prepared to listen, and there were many, you need to be yourself, you can’t be no one else. The brilliance of the lyrics is captured in the simplicity of the message, so simple that it is still way beyond the capacity of many. I’m feeling supersonic, give me gin and tonic, you can have it all, but how much do you want it? Songs like Live Forever, Cigarettes and Alcohol, and Slide Away capture the hope that suddenly felt so real that you could almost reach out and touch it. Almost…
The fact that the members of Oasis were Manchester City fans only added to their charm. This was a time before City had money anyone and anything other than United was a breath of fresh air. There was an irreverence to the Gallagher brothers and they knew how to play the media and the music industry. I remember going to see them in The Point Theatre in Dublin and my feet not touching the ground for the first half-an-hour. The crowd went crazy, singing along, dancing, hands punching the air. Everything about Oasis was at odds with the monotonous routine of the everyday. The Gallaghers always said it like it was and thankfully they have remained true to their core.
Along with Blur, Suede, Pulp, and the other bands of the time they brought with them a freshness that was fun to be part of, and that was the thing, we were part of it. That’s what made it different. That’s what made it real.
Suede - Coming Up (1996)
But we're trash, you and me, we're the litter on the breeze, we're the lovers on the streets, just trash, me and you, it's in everything we do, it's in everything we do. The chorus of the first song on Suede’s Coming Up had me hooked from the first time I heard it. A rush of adrenalin-fuelled pop goes the weasel rushing through my mind like a runaway train.
I have my good friend Andrew Deacon to thank for this particular gem. I had previously bought Suede’s first album and the follow-up Dog Man Star, but it was Coming Up that really alerted me to their genius and made me go back through their back catalogue with renewed enthusiasm. Coming Up was an album of its time, reflective of the world it was born into. Clever lyrics and catchy edgy melodies combined to tell a story of London cool, encapsulating the mundane of ordinary everyday life on council estates inhabited by Sky TV dishes and amphetamines, nowhere towns and cellophane sounds washed down with a nice hot cup of tea. Indeed, Suede had the ability and cunning to pull back the curtains on London life and reveal the beauty to be found in the monotony of ordinary everyday life, warts and all.
With my love of London, I was in my element listening to songs like Lazy, Film Star, and the haunting Saturday Night. It brought me right back to those nights when I would get the last tube home from Holborn to Loughton with any amount of alcohol swirling around in my brain. A perfect soundtrack to the city’s heartbeat. Here they come gone 7 am, getting satellite and Sky getting cable, Bills and Bens and their mums and their friends, who just really, really want to be loved.
Years later I had the pleasure of seeing, appropriately with Andrew, Suede performing the complete Coming Up album live at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. It turned out to be one of the best concerts I have been at, the tightness of the band and energy of the tunes as edgy as if we were hearing them for the very first time. Back in the mid-90s we really were the Beautiful Ones with shaved heads, rave heads, on the pill, got too much time to kill, get into bands and gangs, oh here they come, the beautiful ones, the beautiful ones, la, la, la, la…
Some might say that only the shaved head has survived.
