Tag: Irish music

Oasis in Dublin and the Ghost of Brendan Behan


The Auld Triangle Comes Full-Circle

A few minutes before Oasis took the stage at Dublin’s Croke Park last Sunday, a curious thing happened. A solitary, unexpected voice issued from the PA and sounded over the stadium and rooftops of Drumcondra. It was not the Who, Beatles, or Bowie that heralded the band’s arrival that night — as has been the custom on previous dates this tour — but the voice of Luke Kelly and the Dubliners belting out a poignant a cappella rendition of “The Auld Triangle,” the song made famous in Brendan Behan’s 1954 breakout play The Quare Fellow and first performed by the playwright on a radio program in 1952.

A good contingent of the 82,000 in attendance that Sunday — most of them well-lubricated and braced for lift-off as 8:15PM ticked closer— sang along to the tune, their voices growing loudest when Kelly hit the lines “And the auld triangle went jingle jangle/ All along the banks of the Royal Canal.”

It was a seriously meta moment in Oasis world that, for many, shattered the fourth wall.

Behan, who grew up in a tenement house in 1930s North Dublin, said he learned the song from a tramp named Dick Shannon in Mountjoy Prison, where the writer was serving time in the ’40s for attempted murder for IRA-related activities. Mountjoy is less than two kilometers from the stadium, and one can imagine an inmate in the prison-yard hearing Kelly’s voice drift along the banks of the canal and humming along.

The Dublin gigs were considered a homecoming of sorts for the Gallagher brothers, and the fans knew it. Liam and Noel’s mother Peggy, who hails from Charlestown in County Mayo, where the Gallaghers spent many childhood summers and first cultivated that trademark spirit of lawlessness, was in attendance both nights and got a shout-out from Liam onstage. (The boys’ estranged father, Thomas, who came from County Meath, was not there.)

Noel Gallagher has said there would be no Oasis without his Irish roots, and for the entirety of this tour, he’s flown the Erin go Bragh flag from his speaker cabinet. “We are Irish, me and Liam, pretty much,” Noel once told a reporter. “There is no English blood in us. Oasis could never have existed, been as big, been as important, been as flawed, been as loved and loathed, if we weren’t all predominantly Irish.”

So many of the great English rock bands boast Irish heritage, with the Pogues being perhaps the most notable. Morrissey best encapsulated the Anglo-Irish dynamic with the song “Irish Blood, English Heart.” John Lydon of the Sex Pistols was certainly London Irish, and John Lennon famously embraced his Irish roots later in his career. All of the original members of Oasis had Irish roots, making them the last in a long line of great rock bands molded in the Anglo-Irish tradition.

Noel has said the brash, defiant swagger of Definitely Maybe stems from the Irish rebel songs the brothers were weaned on, for it is there where the edgy, pump-your-fist-in-air element of the music originates. Up to a week before the show rumors swirled that the Wolfe Tones, a group the Gallagher brothers saw as kids when the Irish folkies would stop in to play Manchester, might open the Dublin shows, with the Tones writing recently to Liam on X:  “Well lad, hope you’re excited for Croker this weekend, any idea what time our sound check is at?”

But it was no dice, and one laments missing the chance to hear the Tones deliver the rousing “Come Out Ye Black and Tans,” a song written by Behan’s brother Dominic, delivered to the fiery hordes at Croker.

As “The Auld Triangle” drew to an end at 8:15 and the band came onstage to “F***in’ in the Bushes,” with the words “THIS IS NOT A DRILL” flashing in red letters on an 80-plus-meter screen, one could not help think of the ghost of Brendan Behan sipping champagne and sherry from somewhere in the catacombs, or glugging whiskey on a stool at The Gravediggers, and smiling. 

Illustration: Study from life of Brendan Behan by Reginald Gray, 1953. Public domain.

Review of Shane MacGowan Biography, “A Furious Devotion” (Rolling Stone)

Writing the biography of the man best known for marrying traditional Irish music with British punk — a sound once described by concertina player Noel Hill of the band Planxty as a “terrible abortion” of Irish music — was never going to be easy. To further complicate the matter, Shane MacGowan’s hatred of interviews is almost as notorious as his long and sophisticated affair with drugs and alcohol. Such is punk.

When it comes to the story of MacGowan’s life, it has never been about “just the facts.” However, an attempt has now been made. A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan by British journalist Richard Balls serves up the most thorough account of the man — and myth — to date. In a nearly 400-page biography, out Nov. 18 in the U.S., Balls has attempted through extensive interviews and research to do what has proved so difficult through the years — to parse where the facts end and the myth begins. “Some of these never get resolved and probably never will be, but I am determined not to give up in my quest to sort the myths from the truths and better understand this shy and complex man,” Balls writes.

The son of Irish émigré parents, MacGowan was born and raised in England and spent childhood summers and holidays in rural County Tipperary, Ireland, with his mother’s extended family of staunch Irish republicans. Now residing in Dublin, he still speaks with an English accent, but maintains that he is Irish, for it was those experiences in Ireland that MacGowan says formed his musical and spiritual core. Some of the first traditionalists to hear the Pogues amalgamations might have been shocked, even appalled, but other icons of traditional Irish music such as the Dubliners and Christy Moore understood the power of MacGowan’s writing early on.

Read more at Rolling Stone.