In Concert - Favourite Gigs of Ireland's Music Community - Part 3

In Concert - Favourite Gigs of Ireland's Music Community - Part 3

These posts are becoming like a trip through my memory designed by Escher. Once again I finished with the eighties only to be tripped up by further memories as I tried to make my way into the nineties...

The Fall - Sadler's Wells Theatre, September 1988

This was my first time seeing The Fall and remains possibly the strangest 'rock gig' I ever attended. This is largely because it was NOT a rock gig but a ballet, with The Fall playing live while the Michael Clarke dancers performed a ballet.
A choreographed dance representing a football match between Rangers and Celtic; Brix being wheeled around on a giant hamburger and Mark E. walking forwards and backwards declaiming as if there were no distractions.
The scene where the dancers 'played' a football match was the visual highlight and New Big Prinz and Dead Beat Descendant the remembered aural ones.
I would see more Fall gigs, some better, some worse, but none quite as memorable as this one. Perhaps you can see why in these photos - http://thefall.org/news/pics/88oct08_photos.html

Top 102 Albums⁺ No 13 Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express

Top 102 Albums⁺ No 13 
Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express - The Go-Betweens

No band seems to exist in such a haze of wistful nostalgia as The Go-Betweens. Even at the time, the conversations about them seemed to revolve around the wonder that they hadn't yet cracked the charts and been swept into the hearts of millions on a wave of success. Perhaps its that sense of nostalgia that I now feel even more strongly in the music itself. This is a band that always seemed to be harking back to a garden somewhere, a garden they had to leave. They tried the apples but never made a deal with the snake. Or maybe they did.  For whatever about hits, The Go-Betweens seem to have bled pop. They just forgot the u, l, a and r.

til the money runs out

You just can't seem to get away from the rumblings of national bankruptcy these days and some songs suggest themselves as a soundtrack.

Falling just like (Spring Rain)

Original Post - Wednesday, May 10, 2006

On a spring day in the early Nineteen Eighties I saw them play Spring Rain to a crowd on the cricket field in Trinity College. Their performance was interrupted by showers in the sunlight. There were fears of electrocution and there was certainly electricity in the air. I could feel it all along my spine. They were one of the major claimants to the throne of the perfect pop band.

That they didn't have showers of No 1's was a great injustice and a loss to popular consciousness. The afternoon of that transcendent performance I sat at a pub table beside half the band and mumbled echoes of my admiration.

Once again I mumble my admiration but through the echoes of tears. A little paragraph in todays paper placed a final full stop on the late renaissance of The Go Betweens with news of the death of Grant McLennan.  That No 1 will have to be No 1 in heaven. Lucky heaven. But we still have the music, Lucky us.