In Concert - Favourite Gigs of Ireland's Music Community

In Concert - Favourite Gigs of Ireland's Music Community

This book came out last year and I've been meaning to get it ever since. I finally got around to buying it this week and am enjoying dipping into it.

I remember when I was younger there were many conversations about who would win if Ali fought Dempsey, or if Superman fought Batman... The very fact that these were unanswerable questions was what made them interesting.

Best gig is one of those questions. I can't really answer it for myself let alone hope to come to a consensus with any group of people. The other question is what gig would I go to if I could travel through time? This book asks people to name their favourite gigs and provides ample material for me to consider when I think upon these things.

I know some of the contributors and was at some of the gigs. The book is probably mostly of interest to people who have some familiarity with the Irish rock scene of the seventies, eighties and nineties. It brings up feelings of envy, nostalgia and sometimes, bafflement. Rather than try to review it in any objective way I am going to spend some time reminiscing about some of my favourite gigs. A infamous pub bore like myself doesn't do one favourite, this will be many favourites.

Resurrected

Resurrected.

For me this is proving a year of resurrections, musically at least.  The musical highlight of the year has been an album and gigs from The Drays, led by one time Star of Heaven and Revenant Stephen Ryan. I have written about that album Look Away Down Collins Avenue at some length and am still listening to it months after its release. I have only managed to see them twice but hope to do so again next week. That would be more gigs than I went to in some recent years.

Probably the gigs I have enjoyed most over the last few years have been those of the revivified Blades, who I have also written about here. They also feature Conor Brady, a mainstay of The Drays. Jesus only brought one man back from the dead!

The (Grey) Blades

The (Grey) Blades

On Friday the 13th, last Friday, I attended a gig.  I hadn't seen the band in question play a gig since 1986, indeed no-one had. I hadn't been as excited about a gig for many years. At the time they were 'current' I saw them a few times, once in a small room in O'Sheas hotel in Bray and finally in the fading splendour of The Olympic Ballroom in Dublin, playing their last ever gig. I often wished I had taken more opportunities to see them - some things get taken for granted. No danger of that now. The band were The Blades, and when I wrote THIS earlier in the year I had little idea or hope of ever seeing them play again, let alone with such passion and power and to such an ecstatic reception.

Top 102 Albums⁺ No 29 Raytown Revisited.

Top 102 Albums⁺ No 29
Raytown Revisited - The Blades.

It's probably fair to say that this album and band will be very unfamiliar to most who didn't spend the early eighties in Ireland as their wonderful run of classic singles didn't crack the charts outside their home country. They didn't rise too high in Ireland, either, but they got in deep. Lead singer Paul Cleary says in the short potted history of the band below that the records didn't really capture how good the songs were. He might be right but they are still great records.

 But the band was even better live, as demonstrated here. I remember seeing them (or not) in an L shaped room in O'Shea's hotel on the Bray seafront. I couldn't get as far as the bend in the L so had to make do with audio alone. It was still great - sweating, pumping, ecstatic soul. There was a real sense of amazement that this band was just ours. It seemed impossible that they wouldn't crack the big wide world but it was never to be. They weren't edgy or avant grade, they were passionate and direct and they had great pop songs. The world of music can be very unfair.