The merry ploughboys...

[I]

The Dubliners: The Dubliners

IT IS an irony that The Dubliners should have come to prominence with ‘Seven Drunken Nights’ in 1967, the same year that Dermot O’Brien’s IRA rallying call ‘The Merry Ploughboy’ topped the Irish charts for its length, and precisely when the festering politics of Northern Ireland finally and irrevocably erupted. Since then, the dilemma of Ulster has grown more clamorous as The Dubliners’ muted Republicanism has become ever more subdued.

I have lost count of the number of times that ‘Seven Drunken Nights’ and its fellow travellers ‘Black Velvet Band’, ‘I’m A Rover’, ‘The Galway Races’, ‘Dirty Old Town’ and the rest of the two dozen crowd pleasers assembled here have been compiled, though I notice that other old favourites with more of a whiff of Sackville Street such as ‘McCafferty’ and ‘The Old Alarm Clock’ have been quietly dropped in the interim.

What remains is sociable and sentimental, uplifting at its tuneful best on ‘The Travelling People’, elsewhere maudlin. The emphasis is upon the Dubliners as "seldom sober", which I suppose is fitting for a band who takes its name not so much from a city as from James Joyce’s stories about it. However, this is all fine music, melodically expressed for a simple though not unaccomplished sound.

Although if you prefer to see the direction The Dubliners might have taken had they not been feted on the mainland and subsequently become a national institution, let me be the first to point you in the rabble-rousing direction of the Dublin City Ramblers or the Wolfe Tones.

© Penny Reel, Select, September 1990

[gryffe]

my mate and i heckled the dublin city ramblers mercilessly one night down in kerry in 1990 due to the cabaret, supper in a basket type show they performed. we had went along to the hotel they were playing(which i guess should have set alarm bells ringing straight away, a hotel for fecks sake!)expecting to hear many rousing tunes akin to the ones that adorned fantastic albums like "irish republican jail songs", however we were faced with a motley crew performing tunes that val doonican or daniel o'donnell would have balked at for being too slushy. what a disappointment that was!
the wolfe tones used to be a different proposition altogether, although now i wouldnt cross the road to see them. between the early 80's and early 90's i saw them at least half a dozen times, either in ireland or in scotland. the first time i saw them was at the now sadly demolished glasgow apollo. the place was rammed and looked like the old terracing at celtic park due to a mass of bodies wearing celtic regalia. the tones in those days certainly knew how to please their audience and blitzed through an hour and mores worth of irish rebel tunes like men posessed, an incendiary gig up there with the clash,jam and stranglers shows at the same venue a few years previously.
the last i heard they were churning out albums full of insipid sentimental rubbish with strings, in fact flubba probably loves it

[I]

I've never seen the Ramblers. However, I attended a Wolfe Tones show at the George Robey pub in Finsbury Park around 1989. They were great. The crowd was Irish and republican, young men in shiny suits and with greased down hair. They all knew the songs and sung along: 'Some Say The Devil Is Dead'. 'On The One Road', 'Galtee Mountain Boy', 'James Connolly', 'The Men Behind The Wire', Admiral William Brown''.

It was 'The Merry Ploughboy' that introduced me to Irish songs and the whole concept of Irish republicanism. A couple of work colleagues, two Irishman and a Scotsman, played this song and Tom Jones' 'Green Grass Of Home' all night long at our firm's Christmas party in 1966 and then I got right into the genre after living briefly in Holloway and checking the Irish record shops there and in Camden Town. Back then, I was the only British writer to review or even discuss Irish nationalist songs. This was in the early 1980s before The Pogues had got going.

Reel

[dubbindub]

Those who follow/followed the Wolfe Tones in Ireland were instantly recognisable. Adorned in either Ireland or Celtic football tops, some adorned with IRA or Sinn féin regalia, loud, drunk and racist. The Tones songs were as much about the hatred of the Brits as the celebration of Republicanism. drunken sing-alongs, mob fury, an outlet for armchair republicans who would never be seen at the cutting edge of freedom fighting.

Musically the Tones are an embarrasment to the rich sounds that can be found within irish traditional genre. There were far more talented ensembles in the 60's and 70's. Planxty, De Dannan, Scullion, Stockton's Wing. The plight of the irishman and rebel songs were expressed by these bands but this is only a fraction of what Traditional Irish music is about. And Reel you were by no means the only British writer writing about Irish music. There were many others in the 70's, I just couldn't give you the names at present. Point is most Irish traditionalist efficionados despised the Tones who were taken to heart by the olé, olé crowd.

[gryffe]

christ flubba, a job at the daily mail beckons! and all this from a man who loves stiff little fingers