Tom Dunne's Music & Me: The time has come to just open the venues again
Electric Picnic is just one of the casualties of the current policies.
Breaking point: reached and exceeded. Music is a tough business at the best of the times, “a cruel mistress” as we only ever semi joke. The pandemic was swift and brutal, but the sacrifices made sense. In the last few weeks it has swung decisively. It no longer makes sense.
Most musicians, regardless of success, tend to have two voices in their heads. One is urging them to make the most of any talent they might have. God will judge them on that, they are told. The other voice tells them they are a fraud. It’s a continual battle for the upper hand.
My mother, through an ‘excess of caution', put that second voice in me. I still recall her saying, “Would you not just get rid of those auld records?” She really meant “put down these childish things.” I went crimson. I was 13.
I was having none of it. That particular day’s ‘auld record’ was Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I found its risqué sleeve illustrations and songs like All The Young Girls Love Alice mind-blowing. I listened and read, stared and studied. This album was my internet, my escape.
History will record that my mother didn’t win. I still have that exact copy of Yellow Brick Road. But I did try the real world, UCD, a degree, even a job. But I wrote songs and performed and somehow made music my life. I did escape.
But the mid-Nineties were hard. In the midst of it a record company said that they would release an album if we would write it. It would mean months with no income. Signing on became almost a noble aspiration. A ‘writer’s life’ and all that.
I wasn’t happy but I got in the queue.
For whatever reason this triggered a feeling of overwhelming shame in me. I blushed to the soles of my feet, suddenly mortified. What was I doing here? How had I ever thought I had the talent to pursue this life? Why hadn’t I dumped those stupid records?
I’ve managed to put some perspective on this over the years. I’ve talked to enumerable talents whose artistic journeys have involved years on the dole (The Verve) or late night talks with spouses about ‘re-mortgaging the house’ (David Gray). I see it now as part of the deal, the belief, but that does not make it easy.
It is a sacrifice, a risk, you can only really commit to at the start of a career. When it is just you, three chords and the truth. Not you and a spouse, children, a mortgage, healthcare costs, a bank loan, bills, responsibilities and aging parents who need you.
We tend to see these people as semi-magical. Their music has often been as central to our lives as the events they soundtracked. The nights out, dates, weddings, births, parties. But behind it is hard graft and dedication. Behind it are families and bills and the same realities it sometimes helps us escape.
As I write this it is obvious that scenes like my own little humiliation years ago and far, far worse, are being experienced right now by musicians and people in the entertainment industry all across the county.
The entertainment industry is now bearing an inordinate amount of the burden in our country’s fight against Covid. As the thrust of the Government’s response to Covid increasingly hinges around ‘responsible behaviour’ the entertainment industry is not being trusted.
And it’s getting harder to take. When you see experts say that the Electric Picnic should go ahead, when you see 5,000 people at a gig a bit further north on this very island, or know you could get on a plane and see The Manics in London, or a match with 75,000 people, it stops making sense.
The stages are all dark and the Christmas season, a time in the year where so much of the sector’s earning capacity is concentrated now looms ahead of us. The prospect of that not going ahead, or being undermined is quite simply terrifying.
The cost to this sector in terms of its self-worth is becoming incalculable. It is at a critical point. We need to open the venues and quell the voices in their heads. We need a plan. We need above all else, hope. Because right now there is none.
