Great Gig Memories: A book that captures the magic of dozens of concerts through the decades
Great Gig Memories From Punks And Friends includes recollections of concerts by The Cure, The Fall and Rory Gallagher.
A new book chock-full of nostalgia on gigs through the decades is also raising money for charity. Great Gig Memories From Punks And Friends features contributions from band members of the likes of The Cure, The Fall and Teardrop Explodes, as well as fans of the music.
It's all the brainchild of Dublin’s do-it-yourself, not-for-profit Hope Collective, which has been active in the Irish punk scene since the 1980s, and had previously raised money for Syrian refugees with their 2017 book, In Concert: Favourite Gigs of Ireland’s Music Community.
Niall McGuirk is one of the organisers and is well aware of the irony of launching a concert book at a time when there are no concerts.
“If we wait we don’t know how long we’ll be waiting for,” he says with a rueful laugh. “And also, the idea of it is to try to raise some money, so we want to get it out there. You probably would be better off if you had a physical event to launch it at because you can’t beat interacting with people. You know, talking physically face to face and getting the word out there, but unfortunately it’s not to be.” McGuirk knows a thing or two about live gigs. As a founding member of Hope Collective, he was involved in bringing punk rock bands such as The Membranes, Fugazi and at the time a still largely unknown Green Day to Ireland from the late ‘80s up to the Noughties.
“Nobody else was doing it so we just did it,” he explains. “But it was around community and being at the gigs. We can look back with rose-tinted glasses and have this idealistic view of what we did where the audiences were part of the gig and the bands were just the same as the audience. That’s what we felt at the time. Whether that actually was the truth in reality, I don’t know. At the time that’s what we were trying to create.” It’s no surprise then that the contributors to Great Gig Memories, as was the case with In Concert, are people connected to alternative and underground music scenes. Just as with the first book, it was compiled and edited by McGuirk and Michael Murphy, a lecturer on the music industry at the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology with over 20 years experience in the music industry.
Says McGuirk: “We wanted to use In Concert as a way of documenting people who were involved in the Irish music community and their favourite gigs, telling a story of what got them into playing music in the first place. Great Gig Memories is nearly like a look through our record collection and seeing what the bands in our collection felt that their favourite gigs were. So it’s a broadening of it. It’s not just us trying to say, ‘yeah, this was Ireland over whatever period.’ This is like, ‘here’s music that we listened to over this period and some stories from people who were in those bands who provided great entertainment by playing music at the time.”
McGuirk reminds us that the people who are in the bands are actually music fans as well, so have plenty to say. He's right. The contributors to Great Gig Memories write vividly and with enthusiasm. As Stiff Little Fingers’ Jake Burns concluded after seeing Rory Gallagher in Belfast in 1976: “I have found my drug.”
Locksley Gichie, The Cimarons:
“The first outdoor festival in Ireland was set to take place in Macroom, a little town in Co. Cork.
When we got on stage the place erupted – by now the fans knew every song word for word and we had them singing away to ‘Freedom Street’ and ‘Ship Ahoy’. But ‘Civilisation’ was the anthem – we couldn’t stop playing that one. The energy from the audience was electrifying and, as we left the stage after a long encore, there were a few fans waiting to present us with a trophy engraved out of stone. It’s priceless when you get something like this from your fans. Our fans in Cork have got to be the best in the world.”
Dave Long, Into Paradise:
“Finbarr Donelly from Nun Attax in an army jumper with his skinhead haircut dyed green, white and orange, Giordai O’Laoghaire from Micro Disney wearing a cool hat with a feather in it playing brilliant spacey guitar riffs and Cathal Coughlan from Micro Disney singing ‘Let’s go down, down to Mitchelstown’.
I loved the energy and madness of those two bands. The only thing I remember about that night was Donnelly sitting at a table in front of the stage moving his head up and down to the music.
Years later, Donnelly’s band Beethoven and my band Into Paradise were the first two releases on Setanta Records.”
Stan Erraught, Stars of Heaven:
“Joy Division were a revelation, obviously, but the abiding memory is of seeing The Fall for the first of many times. I’d bought the first two singles, but didn’t yet know Live at the Witch Trials; but already they’d passed that point and the motoric/glitterbeat stomp allied to the sight of a man who looked like the quiet, weird guy at school possessed by something or other was both more ordinary and more unearthly than anything I’d seen on a stage up to then.”
Laurence Tolhurst, The Cure:
“We played a nightclub and had our first stage invasion for quite a while by some skins. We should have guessed what was coming when the lady owner asked us before we went on if we ‘Could try and keep them (the audience) off the tables’. After the predictable skirmish on the stage, we apologised to her for not being able to do so. ‘No worries, she said, ‘they don’t think they’ve had a good time unless they get a guitar round the chops!’
Cathal Coughlan, Microdisney:
“Don’t play in car showrooms: This once happened in Foggia, Italia, with Microdisney. We played on one of the several podia, and the 1985 Datsun range commanded the remainder. One guy, out of his mind, kept screaming at me to, I quote, ‘take my f**king clothes off’.”
