Tom Dunne's Music & Me: My favourite Irish albums of all time
Picking your ‘best ever Irish album’ is a fool's game. Within minutes someone called @wazzupXXX will tweet ‘Yo Boomer’ at you and name a band that formed this morning in Brisbane. Try to question this and you’ll be trending by five and cancelled by dawn. Even if you later discover @wazzupXXX is in the band the damage is done. You are no longer in your family photos.
This is why ‘best ever Irish album’ lists should only ever be assembled at 3 AM, with drink taken and in someone’s flat. The person you are trying to convince should be a best mate or a future partner. By dawn, they should agree with you or leave. Loved ones have no place in your life until they know where you stand on music.
But be aware: your albums date and locate you. They not only mirror the best time in your life, that time when you were making sense of yourself and the world, discovering, exploring, but where you did it. And you must be true to them. You can’t throw an earlier one under the bus to make space for something that makes you look cooler and younger. Like an older man getting a cool haircut after a divorce, it has the opposite effect.
Much of my generation took up arms after hearing the music of the Sex Pistols. The ‘shot that rang out around the world’ was heard in Drimnagh, Greenhills, Ennistymon, Ringsend, Finglas and all points West. It made people want to do something different to whatever 70’s Ireland had to offer.
In doing so I think they all contributed to that utterly different, confident Ireland that arrived circa 1990.
So, dangerous as it is, meet the Magnificent Seven, seven albums I would take with me anywhere. Note: they are in no particular order. And if they are not on your list, the buses start running again at 6, so on your bike. (PS: Leave the beer.)
My first ever live show, so young I was with my best friend’s parents! When Janie Cribbs leaned in to add her vocals to Thom Moore’s ‘Soldier On’ the world stopped spinning.
I became a lifelong fan of Moore and he was one of first people I ever asked to do a radio session for me! I remembered he wondered why he’d been asked. I was too star struck to say.
A glorious band. That a punk inspired band could so amazingly bring to life the old Dublin -from which we sought so fervently to escape- floored me. As did its sales. It didn’t sell, a first salutary lesson.
Dublin superstars long before U2 with a string of singles - Hot For You, Downmarket, Ghost of a Chance – that blew The Jam away. Dublin’s prime punk venue, The Magnet, was on their doorstep in Ringsend. Their shows there, sold out, rammed, were the stuff of legend.
U2’s early singles did not do well. They even performed a track called Fire on TOTPs only to see it then slip out of the charts.
People wondered, could they go the way of The Radiators?
So to follow their progress, the recovery from October (seen as a misstep) to War, the change in sound and producer to Eno, the Red Rocks gamble to ….the US number one album …..was life-affirming!
It lifted all boats.
Still the one for me. The combination of Cathal Coughlan and Sean O’Hagan remains the most potent song writing partnership this country has ever produced.
The Scott Walker voice, the razor sharp, venomous lyrics, the Beach Boys melodies. Be still my heart.
The A House journey to this album is wonderful, A major label deal, an album recorded on Innis Boffin and then a time spent in the wilderness.
To do all that and deliver this is why we formed bands to begin with. To look people in the eye and say, ‘trust me, inside, I am the greatest!’
Punk inspired great diversity. You might start out with just three chords but the challenge was to find something unique and authentic in yourself.
For Kevin Shield’s this meant making the Pet Sounds of his time.
Yes this list does not include The Undertones, Frames, Mic Christopher, Sinead, Dolores, Horslips… etc. Those albums would be for another night, another beer, another theme. Join me. Bring crisps.
