by MacRua Tue Jan 24, 2006 11:24 am
... in general and Ronnie Drew in particular.
Raising hell and music standards
Sunday Independent
22 Jan 2006
Barry Egan
Full URL
<blockquote>I WAS in Nearys pub the day before Christmas Eve. I bumped into Ronnie Drew, leaving as I was going in.
Even forgetting about the big beard and the bellowing belly laugh, there was something intrinsically Christmassy about spotting a national institution on Chatham Street at that time of year. Patrick Kavanagh probably could have come up with a poetic line or two on the occasion of meeting Ronnie Drew in Nearys on the eve of Christmas Eve. Drew, of course, knew the poet from bumping into him in Dublin pubs.
He once interviewed Drew for the RTE Guide in 1965 and misquoted him notoriously. Drew said to Kavanagh that he wasn't a great guitar player and that he wasn't really a singer either. Kavanagh wrote that Ronnie Drew, by his own admission, "can't play the guitar nor can he sing".
Drew didn't talk to Kavanagh for some time, until one day the poet stopped Drew on Baggot Street. And as a way of making it up, asked him if he would like to go for a pint. This, in itself, presented something of a logistical problem despite the parties' mood for reconciliation.
Drew: "Grand. We'll go to Mooney's."
Kavanagh: "I can't. I'm barred. What about the Waterloo House?"
Drew: "Well, I'm barred out of the Waterloo House. We'll go to the Crookit Bawbee."
Kavanagh: "I can't go in there. I'm barred. I know, we'll go to Searson's."
Drew: "For f**k's sake, Paddy. I'm barred there."
I remember I spent three unforgettable nights in London with the Dubliners in 2002 on the occasion of their 40th anniversary.
I will never forget that night when Drew told me how he knew Brendan Behan, and got to know his wife Beatrice after Brendan died. About a week after Brendan was caught in England with the makings of a bomb in 1939, a woman was killed by an IRA bomb in Coventry with her kid at a post-box while posting a letter. Beatrice told him that for years her husband was haunted by the mental picture of the woman and child being blown to bits. He felt guilty by association. Brendan was very sensitive. He carried a lot around with him.
I also recall asking Drew, who doesn't drink, what it was exactly that would get you barred in a public house in Ireland in the mid-Sixties.
"Shouting. Generally being abusive. Being a f**king nuisance," was Ronnie's considered reply. "Get too much gargle and start misbehaving and you'd get f**ked out. This was the Sixties when people wanted to 'talk' in pubs. They didn't want heads like Patrick Kavanagh and Luke Kelly going around roaring." Being something of an expert on modern sociology, Drew then expounded that the dismal decline of Irish pubs began when barmen started serving drinks they couldn't pronounce. "Furstenberg? Now it's fashionable to drink quare drinks."
None were so quare, orbrilliant, as the Dubliners with their untameable facial hair, inflammable whiskey breath, and their liver-shrivelling, Hemingway-esquehigh jinks.
For over 40 years, their ageless potent music touched Irish people in some deep way and became an important part of their - our - lives. Without the Dubliners, the landscape of Irish music, and Irish culture, would be a lot flatter. They changed the perceptions of traditional Irish music. They were also anti-establishment in a way that many of us possibly forget. The Catholic church certainly didn't approve of the Dubliners singing about drunken sex.
Nor did RTE seem to approve in 1967 when it banned Seven Drunken Nights - a song that had the gall to suggest that the archetypal Irishman was coming home every night out of his brains on drink while his wife was committing adultery.
Songs like Monto about the Montgomery Street area in Dublin once notorious for prostitutes or The Holy Ground about the sailors in Cork going off to sea saying goodbye to their hooker lovers or Dicey Reilly being on the game possibly didn't endear the Dubliners to the establishment either. But you suspect Luke Kelly et al didn't give a f**k.
"Dicey Reilly selling things you don't buy in shops," Drew told me during one of those nights in London. "It was one finger up to the establishment," added in Eamon Campbell. "They loved Monto in Dublin," chipped in Barney. "We were telling the truth, and that was banned as well. The Banks of the Roses was another bawdy favourite."
"That's symbolism as well," explained Sean Cannon before quoting the lyrics: Out of his knapsack, he drew a fine fiddle. The songs had been there for donkey's years. Kids sang them at school in all innocence. They were disguised eroticism. But it was the way it was couched." Barney took up this line to explain. "Look at the Dublinese skipping song for kids: Down in the lane, there lives a big fat woman/ And if you want to know her name you have to pay a shilling/ Sailors two pound ten/ Soldiers three and a penny/ Big fat men six pound ten/ Little boys a penny."
Liam and Noel Gallagher grew up in Manchester listening as much to the Dubliners as to the Beatles. The Dubliners were admired by the Stones, the Beatles and The Who; met and hung out with Jimi Hendrix and appeared to have the capacity to drink entire breweries. And in the doing they predated and inspired the Pogues. In reality, Shane MacGowan's gang were only in the halfpenny place compared to Drew'sdesperadoes.
There was this one famous night in Munich in 1973 when the beautiful Barney McKenna had drunk his quota at the hotel bar and retired to his room. The great musician couldn't find his key but, being the charmer that he is, persuaded a porter to let him into his room. Inside the room, things started, as they often did with the Dubliners, to go slightly pear-shaped. Barney suddenly became violently ill. He fell on to the toilet, breaking it. In an honourable attempt to get up, he grabbed on to the sink, and managed to pull it off the wall, causing a pipe to burst.
A tsunami of water came gushing up out of the floor. The water was so ferocious that poor Barney was pushed on to the broken plaster. He severely cut his foot. The room, as you can imagine, was completely destroyed. Not surprisingly, before very long, the noise, and the water seeping through the floor, had alerted the hotel manager to the fact that all was not well. He was far from sympathetic when it emerged that Barney McKenna wasn't staying in that hotel at all. He was in the one next door.
John Sheehan remembered the times the Dubliners did an early evening gig in the Royal Hotel in Howth on a Sunday, and then headed in for amidnight show in the Grafton cinema. There was no bar but people would smuggle in carry-outs.
"One night Luke Kelly was doing an unaccompanied version of Blackwaterside and there was an almighty crash of bottles. He stopped singing and said: 'I've absolutely no time for anyone who can't hold their drink!'"
Please make sure you get your Dubliners CD with this issue. </blockquote>
------------------
© Copyright Unison.ie
... in general and Ronnie Drew in particular.
[size=150]Raising hell and music standards[/size]
[i]Sunday Independent
22 Jan 2006
Barry Egan [/i]
[url=http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=129&si=1546906&issue_id=13579]Full URL[/url]
<blockquote>I WAS in Nearys pub the day before Christmas Eve. I bumped into Ronnie Drew, leaving as I was going in.
Even forgetting about the big beard and the bellowing belly laugh, there was something intrinsically Christmassy about spotting a national institution on Chatham Street at that time of year. Patrick Kavanagh probably could have come up with a poetic line or two on the occasion of meeting Ronnie Drew in Nearys on the eve of Christmas Eve. Drew, of course, knew the poet from bumping into him in Dublin pubs.
He once interviewed Drew for the RTE Guide in 1965 and misquoted him notoriously. Drew said to Kavanagh that he wasn't a great guitar player and that he wasn't really a singer either. Kavanagh wrote that Ronnie Drew, by his own admission, "can't play the guitar nor can he sing".
Drew didn't talk to Kavanagh for some time, until one day the poet stopped Drew on Baggot Street. And as a way of making it up, asked him if he would like to go for a pint. This, in itself, presented something of a logistical problem despite the parties' mood for reconciliation.
Drew: "Grand. We'll go to Mooney's."
Kavanagh: "I can't. I'm barred. What about the Waterloo House?"
Drew: "Well, I'm barred out of the Waterloo House. We'll go to the Crookit Bawbee."
Kavanagh: "I can't go in there. I'm barred. I know, we'll go to Searson's."
Drew: "For f**k's sake, Paddy. I'm barred there."
I remember I spent three unforgettable nights in London with the Dubliners in 2002 on the occasion of their 40th anniversary.
I will never forget that night when Drew told me how he knew Brendan Behan, and got to know his wife Beatrice after Brendan died. About a week after Brendan was caught in England with the makings of a bomb in 1939, a woman was killed by an IRA bomb in Coventry with her kid at a post-box while posting a letter. Beatrice told him that for years her husband was haunted by the mental picture of the woman and child being blown to bits. He felt guilty by association. Brendan was very sensitive. He carried a lot around with him.
I also recall asking Drew, who doesn't drink, what it was exactly that would get you barred in a public house in Ireland in the mid-Sixties.
"Shouting. Generally being abusive. Being a f**king nuisance," was Ronnie's considered reply. "Get too much gargle and start misbehaving and you'd get f**ked out. This was the Sixties when people wanted to 'talk' in pubs. They didn't want heads like Patrick Kavanagh and Luke Kelly going around roaring." Being something of an expert on modern sociology, Drew then expounded that the dismal decline of Irish pubs began when barmen started serving drinks they couldn't pronounce. "Furstenberg? Now it's fashionable to drink quare drinks."
None were so quare, orbrilliant, as the Dubliners with their untameable facial hair, inflammable whiskey breath, and their liver-shrivelling, Hemingway-esquehigh jinks.
For over 40 years, their ageless potent music touched Irish people in some deep way and became an important part of their - our - lives. Without the Dubliners, the landscape of Irish music, and Irish culture, would be a lot flatter. They changed the perceptions of traditional Irish music. They were also anti-establishment in a way that many of us possibly forget. The Catholic church certainly didn't approve of the Dubliners singing about drunken sex.
Nor did RTE seem to approve in 1967 when it banned Seven Drunken Nights - a song that had the gall to suggest that the archetypal Irishman was coming home every night out of his brains on drink while his wife was committing adultery.
Songs like Monto about the Montgomery Street area in Dublin once notorious for prostitutes or The Holy Ground about the sailors in Cork going off to sea saying goodbye to their hooker lovers or Dicey Reilly being on the game possibly didn't endear the Dubliners to the establishment either. But you suspect Luke Kelly et al didn't give a f**k.
"Dicey Reilly selling things you don't buy in shops," Drew told me during one of those nights in London. "It was one finger up to the establishment," added in Eamon Campbell. "They loved Monto in Dublin," chipped in Barney. "We were telling the truth, and that was banned as well. The Banks of the Roses was another bawdy favourite."
"That's symbolism as well," explained Sean Cannon before quoting the lyrics: Out of his knapsack, he drew a fine fiddle. The songs had been there for donkey's years. Kids sang them at school in all innocence. They were disguised eroticism. But it was the way it was couched." Barney took up this line to explain. "Look at the Dublinese skipping song for kids: Down in the lane, there lives a big fat woman/ And if you want to know her name you have to pay a shilling/ Sailors two pound ten/ Soldiers three and a penny/ Big fat men six pound ten/ Little boys a penny."
Liam and Noel Gallagher grew up in Manchester listening as much to the Dubliners as to the Beatles. The Dubliners were admired by the Stones, the Beatles and The Who; met and hung out with Jimi Hendrix and appeared to have the capacity to drink entire breweries. And in the doing they predated and inspired the Pogues. In reality, Shane MacGowan's gang were only in the halfpenny place compared to Drew'sdesperadoes.
There was this one famous night in Munich in 1973 when the beautiful Barney McKenna had drunk his quota at the hotel bar and retired to his room. The great musician couldn't find his key but, being the charmer that he is, persuaded a porter to let him into his room. Inside the room, things started, as they often did with the Dubliners, to go slightly pear-shaped. Barney suddenly became violently ill. He fell on to the toilet, breaking it. In an honourable attempt to get up, he grabbed on to the sink, and managed to pull it off the wall, causing a pipe to burst.
A tsunami of water came gushing up out of the floor. The water was so ferocious that poor Barney was pushed on to the broken plaster. He severely cut his foot. The room, as you can imagine, was completely destroyed. Not surprisingly, before very long, the noise, and the water seeping through the floor, had alerted the hotel manager to the fact that all was not well. He was far from sympathetic when it emerged that Barney McKenna wasn't staying in that hotel at all. He was in the one next door.
John Sheehan remembered the times the Dubliners did an early evening gig in the Royal Hotel in Howth on a Sunday, and then headed in for amidnight show in the Grafton cinema. There was no bar but people would smuggle in carry-outs.
"One night Luke Kelly was doing an unaccompanied version of Blackwaterside and there was an almighty crash of bottles. He stopped singing and said: 'I've absolutely no time for anyone who can't hold their drink!'"
Please make sure you get your Dubliners CD with this issue. </blockquote>
------------------
© Copyright Unison.ie
