The Gargle Dims Me Brain – The Dubliners

The Dubliners were part of the soundtrack to my childhood, and I hated them. It was the music of my parents, and I couldn’t relate to it. Much better were the other musical strands: the ones that came from my older brother and sisters. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were cool; traditional Irish folk music wasn’t.

I’ve had a strange relationship with Ireland. After several trips as a young child, I lost all interest in the place. For 30 years I stayed away, never even considering making the brief trip over the water. Despite growing to love and understand English folk music, I managed to ignore the Irish variety.

Then in 1994 or thereabouts, the Dubliners came to Huddersfield, where I was then living. A female friend whose name I can’t even recall, suggested we see them. I shrugged. Why not?

To lubricate the occasion in the appropriate way, we called in at the Union pub for pre-concert Guinness. The conversation soon turned to my Irish ancestry, and for the first time in years, I was encouraged to think, and talk, about what it meant to me. Did it mean anything? I described my childhood visits to the West of Ireland, and the trouble I had trying to reconcile my Irish and English halves. The truth is that as a child, I couldn’t reconcile them at all, and had to choose a dominant side. As usual, England came out on top. Other schoolmates in similar positions were drawn to the Irish side of their DNA.

That conversation stirred something in me. It softened me up. When the concert started, I was in a melancholy fug, a process no doubt assisted by the Guinness. The band appeared, and struck up. Some jigs and reels as a brief aperitif, before the main course of their well-known songs. They sang Peggy Gordon, which I recall being crooned at childhood weddings. The door was being pushed further open.

As they worked their way through the set, I started to feel overwhelmed by a strong sense of relief; the feeling that something long supressed was being released.

Into The Town I Loved So Well, and now there were tears on my face. Before long, I was sobbing into my hands, and stayed like that for much of the rest of the evening. The girl whose name I can’t recall kept whispering: “Are you alright?”

Yes, I was alright. That was the very odd thing.

It took a while — years — for the reconciliation to be complete. I finally travelled back to Ireland in about 1998, and have been back several times since.  Ireland and I have been like a father and son reconciled later in life, when neither had really been aware of the existence of the other. We have a lot to catch up on.

Last night, about 17 years after that evening in Huddersfield, it was time to catch the Dubliners again, this time at the Hexagon in Reading.

The original line-up has dwindled further since I saw them. Strictly speaking, they have only one stalwart left, Barney McKenna. Now partially sighted and unsteady on his feet, he still manages to strike up a couple of rousing sea shanties in a solo spot. A case could be made for counting John Sheahan as an original too. The band were formed in 1962, and he joined two years later. Maybe we’ll allow him that.

But that’s it. All the other members of the current line-up are replacements, with some of them replacements for earlier replacements. Without wanting to sound unkind, it has to be said that the band have not been improved by the turnover of staff. The three members who have died during the band’s history, include two major musical figures. Their passing was a loss not just to the band but to the Irish folk music tradition, and no one would argue that the Dubliners weren’t diminished by their disappearance.

Ronnie Drew was the guy with the extraordinarily gravelly voice and the Exocet gaze. Half angel, half mass-murderer. The wild beard. Mind you, the wild beard could belong to most of them most of the time. Vagabond chic seems to be their thing.

Drew the Younger: The Old Alarm Clock

Drew the Elder: Dublin In The Rare Old Times“

When Ronnie Drew died in 2008, Dublin was brought to a standstill by his funeral cortege. The city had lost an icon.

Arguably, an even greater figure in Irish music was Luke Kelly. He died from a brain tumour in 1980, but in that time had created dozens of definitive versions of great Irish ballads. I never saw him perform live, but YouTube has plenty of splendid footage preserving his characteristically energetic singing style. You can just imagine him in the corner of some back street boozer in Dublin, leaning back, pint of Guinness in one hand, bellowing out one of a thousand classics to order, like some hairy, sentient jukebox.

Luke Kelly was the voice of the early Dubliners. most famously on their best known hit, Black Velvet Band.

Here he is with Ronnie Drew on Wild Rover.

But for me, his greatest performance was declaiming the great Ewan McColl song, variously called I’m a Freeborn Man, or The Travelling People. You’d be forgiven for thinking this was an ancient rustic Irish song, so firmly has it become cemented to the memory of Luke Kelly. But this lament of the travelling community was written by an urban Englishman. McColl, probably England’s greatest traditional singer, certainly of the recorded age, was born and lived all his life in inner-city Manchester, in Salford, but seemed to understand country ways as well as anyone.

If I survive, or rather, if my companions survive, our forthcoming Connemarathon trip, without at some point staggering to my Guinness-weighted feet and bawling out this song, it will be a miracle. Please, someone stop me.

Sadly, I can find no video, but here’s the audio: The Travelling People.

Without Kelly and Drew, the Dubliners have become a sort of tribute band. This is conceded in the title of their current tour, “A Time To Remember”. The evening is essentially a homage to departed friends, and an acknowledgement that without these unique figures, they would be little more than a standard semi-professional Irish showband, playing the working men’s clubs on a Saturday night. A screen behind the band projects a succession of images of the two men, and the banter between songs is nearly all anecdote revolving around them.

But it’s a gentle, good-natured evening. They know what the punters want: a mixture of good tunes, sentimentality, and traditional Irish self-deprecation: “If you’ve not heard this song before, then this will be the first time”; I’m going to sing this one on me own, with just Eamonn playing along in the background. Just the two of us. It’s what we call an Irish solo”.

There were no tears this time. Or not many. I defy even the stoniest heart to sit through The Town I Loved So Well without being overwhelmed. But there was no explosion of emotion this time. I’ve crossed the cultural Rubicon, and that’s that.

These days, hardly a year goes by without me getting over to Ireland. If I could afford it, I would happily retire there, though I believe M has a non-negotiable alternative scheme which involves somewhere called Sussex.