Tom Dunne: Playing in Connolly's of Leap really is a life-affirming experience
Connolly's of Leap in Co Cork is one of Ireland's great small venues.
I played Connolly’s of Leap in Co Cork a few weeks back. It was my first time on its hallowed stage in about, ahem, 35 years. A lot of water under many bridges. A lot of change. But one thing unchanged: Connolly’s is still magic. Playing it is life-affirming. How can that even be?
It reminded me of an interview that I did in the years since I last played there. It was with an American singer song writer called Jewel. She was a bit of a cause celebre at the time as she had graduated from sleeping in her car to huge international success.
Her journey, from growing up in a home with no running water to 30 million albums sold was mainly down to a song called . After it took off she found herself playing in the biggest venues all across the world. Running water would never be a problem again.
She’d even got to meet her musical hero, Neil Young. “What did he have to say?” I’d wondered. “He said all of this can go away you know: the hit records, the sell-out tours. But as long as you can fill a room, you’ll have a career,” she told me. “As long as you can fill a room.”
I’ve never forgotten those words. Filling a room is what it is all about. After writing a song it is the next most basic thing.
“Write songs and play gigs” is the mantra. But filling a room is the validation part: what you’re doing is working. Filling a room is worth its weight in gold.
Every full room is good, but some rooms have a magic quality. They feel like churches, sometimes they are churches. The ghosts of gigs past resonate. The Troubadour in LA, The Whiskey a Go Go, CBGBs, The Stone Pony, Max’s Kansas City, The Cavern, Eric’s, The Marquee, and King Tuts. Legends all.
Their reputations precede them, but the venues themselves might surprise you.
CBGBs was one such. Hilly Kristal opened CBGB’s — full name: Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Underground Gormandizers — in New York in the early 1970s. You might avoid being mugged getting to it, but the Black Death would get you if you used the toilet. I played there about 10 times. It was shocking.
He had a dog that no one cleaned up after. The stage was low and PA inadequate. But if you complained he would look at you and say, “Well if it was good enough for Iggy Pop, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Television and Blondie.”
We discovered Connolly’s of Leap in 1990. Something Happens were at the peak of our powers. We were selling out venues like City Hall in Cork and the National Stadium in Dublin when word reached us that we had to play Leap. “It’s tiny,” we pointed out. “Just play it,” came the response.
We were met at the door by its owners Paddy McNicholl and his wife Eileen. They were so excited to see us. The venue was incredible, all old posters and instruments, a shrine to music and their passion for it. You could feel the buzz, people traveling in from all over Cork.
It was rammed and boiling when we went on stage. The Happens, just off a three-month US tour, the success of Feile ’90, and having had top the charts, were on fire. Hello Hello, and Parachute were bright young things and so were we. We took the roof off.
Afterwards Paddy introduced us to a drink he said he’d invented called Turbo Baileys. It had Baileys in it. That is all I can remember of it and most the next day. I got to play the other legendary clubs since, but few compare. Connolly’s was simply magic.
Going back after all this time was emotional. Paddy passed in 2010. His son Sam, a musician himself, has taken over the music reins with his mum Eileen still the powerhouse presence she ever was. Its 400-year-old walls exude, history, family and music. Someone should be filming it.
I picked my way through posters of my peers and sang some songs I’d written when this world was younger. Alan Connor, keyboardist par excellence, remarked that of all the audiences he’d played to in his first band, this was the one he remembered best. “Why?” I asked foolishly. “Because they listen,” he explained.
It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? And yet…
