Pretty Happy about memories of Cork's unique punk scene
Finbarr Donnelly of Nun Attax on stage at the Arcadia in Cork in the early 1980s. Picture: Ciarán Ó Tuama
Four young men seated in a row: scrappy, a bit edgy, a distant look in their eyes. The portrait is of the late punk poet Finbarr Donnelly and his band, Nun Attax. It will be familiar to anyone who has walked Cork’s Grand Parade in recent times.
For the members of local punk trio Pretty Happy, the mural, unveiled in August 2020, was a mystery in plain sight.
Who were these awkward spirits captured for posterity so long ago? Pretty Happy’s curiosity was piqued, in particular, by Donnelly, a mercurial figure on the far left.
Donnelly’s gaze is directed away from his bandmates, his skinny frame radiating the same jangling energy that crackled through the music of Nun Attax. Your eye is also drawn to his hair – a play on the punk mohawk, lacking spikes with has a streak of blonde runs down the middle. Who is this person – so obscure yet obviously charismatic? And how was it that his image ended up along one of Cork’s central thoroughfares?
“A lot of people aren’t aware of what rich history we have in terms of punk,” says Pretty Happy singer and guitarist Abbey Blake.
I was 19, 20, gigging a while, before I ever came across this music. You’d walk past the mural on the Grand Parade and you wouldn’t know who they were.”
Nun Attax, led by the capricious and eccentric Donnelly, were one of the most influential groups to have emerged from Cork. And yet, Pretty Happy had come of age entirely oblivious to their existence.
It was only as journalists put it to them that their music was in a tradition of awkward and rebellious independent music going back to the late 1970s, that they decided to take another look at the city’s punk past. And now they have made an insightful and thought-provoking tribute to Cork punk in the form of , a one-hour documentary which has its first public screening at the Triskel Arts Centre on Friday, August 26.
“Early on, we were compared to a lot of early Cork punk. We weren’t necessarily aware of it,” says Pretty Happy bassist and vocalist Arann Blake.
“We weren’t citing them as the main influences. Even throughout the documentary, we played our music to people involved in those bands.
And they were like: ‘Oh, you must have listened to us’. And we were like: ‘No’.
"How much does place and cultural DNA come into music? We come from Cork and have a similar sensibility to those bands.
"It brought us down the rabbit hole of how the first iteration of Cork punk was almost post-punk. This weird Captain Beefheart thing — it’s not a straightforward punk. The film is an exploration of how punk came to Cork. And how this small city dealt with it. And put its own stamp on it.”
Pretty Happy have done more than investigate this past though. They have made a definitive film about Cork post-punk that traces the story through the prism of three of the dominant figures on the scene. Finbarr Donnelly, who fronted Nun Attax and later Five Go Down to the Sea and Beethoven, Mick Lynch of Stump, and Cathal Coughlan of Microdisney and Fatima Mansions.
With interviews with figures such as Ricky Dineen of Nun Attax, songwriter John Spillane, promoter Leagues O’Toole and journalist Mike McGrath Bryan, tracks the evolution of Cork independent music from the late 70s through to the early 90s.
It isn’t just history. The movie argues that Cork took punk and a new wave and made something new from them.
“Cork has had to document its own culture,” says Pretty Happy drummer Andy Killian.
“Documenting a music scene is the norm in places such as Dublin, where it’s so well publicised.
In Cork, you don’t have a lot of sources on this. You meet these people. And they’re like: ‘Sure what do you want to know about that for? Everyone knows that’.
"You’d be surprised. We had to track people down to tell us stories that had never been told on camera.
"If it’s not documented, it does disappear. It is crazy how big a cultural impact these guys had on Cork. Going back to how we were sounding like them without even realising it.”
Pretty Happy’s playful, cathartic music has put them on the map (they spent the summer touring the continent as support for Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth).
And though they are perhaps not yet at a point where they can be spoken of in the same breath as Nun Attax or Microdisney, they carry on that Cork tradition of creating their own rules. They also sing in their accents – which places them adjacent to groups such as Fontaines DC, who have so devotedly eulogised Dublin in their songs.
“I didn’t think about it. If I sing in an American accent I’ll cringe myself,” says Abbey Blake. “I’d be a disgrace to do any other voice. It wasn’t a conscious thing.”
What makes Cork music different? Pretty Happy don’t have a neat, one-line answer response, though there are lots of theories. One is that Cork music plugs into the Irish tradition of surrealism.
“It’s a question without an answer,” says Arann Blake (Abbey’s brother). "Or maybe there are 100 answers. Giordaí Ua Laoghaire [of influential trad-punk crossover act Nine Wassies From Bainne] talks about how Irish people deal with surrealism or absurdism
“These big figures like Beckett or Flann O’Brien… A lot of bands love Flann O’Brien… It’s this absurdist take. What Giordaí said is that Ireland is almost an absurd place, anyway. If you look at absurdist Irish literature — Flann O’Brien — versus French absurdism, where it’s completely weird stuff: someone walking on a ceiling.
"Maybe we all went mad during the Famine. It made us crazy. It’s a weird inheritance of that madness. Absurdism is a very big thing in Ireland. If you look at the 1990s, and a pub such as Liberty [a tumbledown drinking den beloved of local musicians]… that was a strange place. That wasn’t something someone was writing. That was ordinary life.”
The film is a celebration. But also a lament. Donnelly drowned in 1989 at age 27 swimming at the Serpentine Pond in Hyde Park, London. Mick Lynch died from cancer in 2015, aged 56. Just last May, Coughlan passed following a long illness — and shortly after the release of his Teilifís collaboration with producer Jackknife Lee.
“We took a break from the film for about a month because we were on tour,” says Arann Blake. “That was when we found out that he had died. Everyone was saying: ‘You need to interview Cathal’. It’s weird to feel sad about a person we never met. We feel we got to know him through talking to other people.”
- 'Leeside Creatures' will be screened at Triskel Arts Centre on Friday, August 26, followed by a performance by Pretty Happy
Led by the charismatic Finbarr Donnelly, this avant-garde quartet were Cork’s answer to Mark E Smith and The Fall.
Cathal Coughlan and Sean O’Hagan blended blue-eyed soul, indie angst and Beach Boys melodies — and are today regarded as among the most important Irish groups of the 1980s.
They appeared on and graced the iconic NME C86 indie compilation. Their 1988 album, — a line from Flann O’Brien’s — was critically acclaimed. Faith No More’s Mike Patton would later list the record as a personal favourite.
Following the break-up of Microdisney, Cathal Coughlan decided to try something else. The Fatima Mansions were angrier and funnier than Microdisney, influenced equally by Scott Walker and by industrial groups such as Ministry and the Young Gods.
