Lost in Music Part One

I was listening to Ed’s National Anthems on Today FM on a Wednesday evening only a few weeks ago, the same night Stephen Kenny’s Republic of Ireland side was kicking off our latest World Cup qualifying campaign away to Serbia. Ed decided to mark the occasion with the first song of the night. The Celtic mist rising and rolling through the juniper, birch, pine and hazel trees that covered ancient Ireland long ago as Moya Brennan’s haunting intro to Put Em Under Pressure brings me right back to over thirty years ago. Music has a habit of doing that. The hair on the back of my neck standing to attention to match the positive energy racing through my arms and legs, the same feeling I get whenever I watch Stephen Cluxton’s All-Ireland winning kick against Kerry in 2011 or Barney Rock’s dramatic last-gasp goal against Cork in Croker to rescue a draw in the 1983 semi-final. Suddenly I’m right back there, sitting on a pavement with Trevor, outside Mother Redcaps pub in Dublin’s city centre, eating the best fish and chips in the world from Burdock’s, our brains numbed by an afternoon’s drinking, the sun shining high in the sky and the girls walking by smiling and saying hello, our dreams hanging in the air like the tri colours wrapped around their bare shoulders. A couple of hour’s earlier, David O’Leary’s penalty had done for Hagi’s Romania and we were off to Rome to face Italy in a World Cup Quarter-Final. For three glorious weeks in 1990 Ireland stopped turning and we let the good times roll. We put em under pressure.

It’s why programmes like Reeling in the Years work so well, tugging at our heartstrings with memories matched to the music that runs deep within us. It has a tendency to take us to the places we otherwise mightn’t want to go. Having two older brothers meant I was introduced to the likes of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Thin Lizzy, Supertramp and Status Quo to mention a few, but I’m proud to say Abba were my Waterloo and when I was eventually ready to move on it was Debbie Harry who awakened my previously dormant sexuality when I saw her singing Denis on Top of the Pops. Later I listened to The Whole of the Moon by The Waterboys before I went in to do each exam of my finals in college. I wonder, I guessed and I tried, you just knew. The hope in the lyrics and the melody calming my nerves and sending me on my way with a bounce in my step that otherwise would not have been there. People like Mike Scott, I saw him on the Tommy Tiernan Show last week and he’s still as connected to his creative side as ever he was, gave me hope in a world that I was desperately trying to work out. I’m back there now in this time of restrictions and I’ll be glad when the poets, the writers, the dreamers and the songwriters are set free again to weave their magic. It won’t be a moment too soon because scientists can only be allowed to rule the world for so long.

During my college years I worked in an international tourist hostel in town and was lucky to meet two lovely French punks, Veronique and Cecile, who took me under their wing and introduced me to the late night Dublin music scene. We saw Light a Big Fire singing if I was the CIA, I’d kill anyone who got in my way and you can love a woman but you can’t be friends, when the smoke clears and the war ends, the kind of life lessons that only come gift wrapped in a song. I saw the magnificent Golden Horde at the Olympic Ballroom and attended the last ever concert by The Blades, before they split, at the same venue. We went to see Gavin Friday doing cabaret as only Gavin Friday can. Later on, I fell head over heels in love with An Emotional Fish, a love that endures to this day and the line from Hole in My Heaven when Ger Whelan’s smokey voice rasps out I wrote about it, joked about it, smoked about it, Lord I even talked about it with you is one I’d like on my gravestone or a wooden bench beside a canal if someone sees fit, but somehow I doubt it. Ger was and is, now known as Jerry Fish, one of the great front men of our time possessed with the lyrics and melodies that go with such a title. Like that of Mike Scott, Ger’s imagination is tied to the moon. Celebrate remains one of the greatest ever Irish singles. I’ve been to see An Emotional Fish concert many, many times and those nights spent rocking and rolling in Whelans are right up there.

They say music makes the world go round, but it also makes it stop, stand still and take a moment. It makes us move, dance, shake or whatever it is our bodies decide to do to the beat. It’s a time machine, an escape from the relentless rhythm of every day experience. It allows us to breathe and to think about nothing else for a few precious moments. It enables us to step back and to go beyond. To be lost in music is such a magical place to be, that when you return you’ve changed from the person you were before you heard it in some way. Bruce Springsteen says at the start of No Surrender that he learnt more from a three-minute record than he ever learnt in school and I’m inclined to agree. Music taught me to feel, to listen to my heart and that of others. It made me realise that other people were feeling the same things I was feeling in a way that algebra never could. It introduced me to heartbreak, to love, loss, laughter and happiness. It opened the cracks and allowed the light in.

Music can move through any landscape. It’s summer in the early 90’s when I slip Rum Sodomy and the Lash out of the cassette holder and slide it into the gap above the radio in Prosser’s red Ford Cortina and wait for the riot that is the Sick bed of Cúchulainn to kick in as we leave Lisdooonvarna behind and head out into the wildness of the Burren, weaving our way along the twisty roads until all of a sudden we’re somewhere else entirely. When the final song on the album Waltzing Matilda is done, we stop off for a pint and when we climb back into the car we vote for Vanessa Paradis, her sweet voice making us lovesick. Later, driving back from Doolin at dusk it’s The Doors who guide us home, Jim Morrison’s haunting vocals telling us this is the end, our only friend the end as the sun slips slowly behind the hills on the other side of the road. The ghosts of the past rise up to meet us in the descending darkness, the car silent as we breathe the west in, our minds jumping forward to the pints of Guinness waiting in The Roadside Tavern. Music is also a product of the landscape, the west sending The Waterboys off on a completely different path. The Pogues turning London Irish. The Joshua Tree introducing U2 to American ways, just like Red Rocks before it.

When I arrived in Riyadh in 2013 I knew no one, so in the evenings after school, I’d put on my headphones and walk the streets after sun down, the heat wrapping itself around me as I walked for hours. The strange faces taking in the stranger passing by. I’ve never felt safer, the smiles of the locals welcoming me to their world, which was now my world too. The music calmed me and brought me back to life. U2, Simple Minds, Depeche Mode: these strangers in a strange land supplying me with the familiarity of the past to anchor the future in place. A year or so later I went to an event at the Dutch Embassy where they were giving out badges saying Keep In Touch With the Dutch when hey presto, there’s no such thing as coincidences, the following night at the American Embassy I met a Dutch girl called Suza with a thick Liverpool accent, the product of years spent living in the city, who introduced me to The National. Music can also a gift left by the people who come into our lives for a short while, something to remember them by, so when I hear that line I’ll be friend and a fuck up and everything, but I’ll never be anything you ever want me to be from Slipped it makes me think of Suza and that time when she taught me to laugh again. Suza was also responsible for tuning me into the relentless rhythm of Follow Me Down by Unkle Featuring Sleepy Sun, the perfect soundtrack for the drives with other friends across the endless desert from Riyadh down to Bahrain for the weekend and back again, the bleakness of the landscape stretching into forever, the skyline like some mad painting with the sun splashed orange, yellow and red in a brilliant burning kaleidoscopic mix across the usually blue canvas, the beat going on and on and on until we finally reached our destination. 

I also remember being in a Galway pub somewhere near Eyre Square during race week, the pub jam-packed, the sun shining in through the windows and life was good. I wandered over to the jukebox and slipped a euro in and chose three songs. I don’t remember the other two, but I’ll never forget the first for what happened next. As the words today is going to be the day that I’m going to throw it back to you exited the speakers, there was a moment of silent reflection as the wild chatter came to a halt and a hundred or more pint glasses were raised in the air and everybody sang along to Wonderwall. It takes something special for the Irish to stop drinking, never mind talking. It was a real we don’t give a fuck about anything else right now moment of reflection and connection. Let the good times roll. Life felt perfect for those three minutes before we went back to talking the usual shite. Nothing beats a good old singsong. There have been plenty of those over the years on Hill 16 and the North Bank at Highbury, magical moments when thousands become one in unison.

Moments I’ll never ever forget.