Tom Dunne: Patti Smith voice note stopped the clocks at Glen Hansard's funeral
I’ll tell you one thing Glen, that was some send off. Picture: Damien Eagers/PA
Funny things funerals. Even funerals that are being televised to the whole nation. Cameras or no cameras, you are left alone with your thoughts. Was Glen Hansard a protestant? Why are we in St Patrick’s, a Church Of Ireland premises? I spot a line of ancient Union Jacks in the church. Funny old island this.
I’ve never been inside St Patrick's Cathedral before. I did play a gig outside it once in the early days of my band Something Happens. A guitar tech put two D strings on the same bass that day. Disaster.
My family are from nearby in the Liberties. I wonder how they viewed this cathedral. I see it largely as a music venue.
Two days earlier I had interviewed the comedian Aoife Dunne about her show Good Grief. It’s inspired by the traumatic death of her mother in 2010. She’s harnessed that grief into an amazing, cathartic comedy show. At funerals you laugh and cry. Humour breaks the tension. Something has to.
We’re here to give Glen a good send off. So far I have hugged and cried with Steve Wall, Jerry Fish, Bronagh Gallagher, Hozier, Jack L, Mundy, Paddy Casey, The Cronins, and various others. I can see Josh Ritter, in from America, but I can’t get over to him. They are like my music cousins.
I meet filmmaker John Carney. He’s telling the story that Glen had often told of how Glen and the Frames had bought him his first real camera when he left the band.
“He told me that story too,” I blurt out, “I wasn’t sure it was true!” We laugh. “There is truth in it,” he tells me, cryptically.
“Are you in the choir?” fiddler Colm Mac Con Iomaire asks me as I arrive near the front of the church. Stage left are the performers. I fear if I’m asked to sing it will be a verse that I don’t know. “No!” I tell him. “You would be if Glen was here,” he laughs. There is truth in this too.
It’s great to see people and yes we laugh a lot. But not all the time. Glen’s remains arrive and we crumble. We experience the other part of being at a funeral. The part where you stare at where Glen lies now and gently weep. How can this be? How have we come to this?
We are a solemn congregation now. Here in our best suits to show support for Glen’s family in their hour of need, pitifully aware of how seemingly weak but utterly necessary our words are. The mass and the readings start. No avoiding the substance of it all now.
Then the music begins. The other reason we are here. Glen wasn’t just our friend — everybody’s friend, as Bono points out — but a fantastically gifted musician and artist, as are many in this room. The haunting performed by Colm Mac Con Iomaire, Séamus Ong and Liam Ó Maonlaí drifts across the ancient pews and we are transported.
I get a sudden feeling of enormous gratitude. These talents, these people, have illuminated our lives. That passion they all connected with in school and followed come hell or high water. I’m proud to be part of this. These are special people. Glen would be blown away.
Eddie Vedder’s version of from Glen’s 2012 album is simply stunning. Eddie’s voice is one of the great voices. To see the Pearl Jam man sing beside his friend’s coffin in this ancient, venerated cathedral is moving and lifting and calming all at once.
But it’s Bono’s playing of a voice note from Patti Smith that stops the clocks. I feel I need a bit of perspective on that. I am sent back to my thoughts. I think I know the identity of the man who imported the first copy of her album into this country in 1974. He harangued Pat Egan to get it.
That was Ireland then. One solitary copy of one of the most important albums ever for the entire country. And this is Ireland today. Patti Smith composing a song for Glen in a protestant church teeming with talent.
“It was a beautiful day, across the valley, he came my way,” she sings, “a book in his hand and a melody.”
People like Glen, Sinead, Christy and Shane have transformed this island. I slip away afterwards. Duty calls. I’d have loved the pub, but I need some quiet time. I’ll tell you one thing Glen, that was some send off.
