Music: Beautiful Day: Forty Years of Irish Rock differs from other books on music because its authors are intent on telling us something about ourselves, writes Kevin Courtney.
Books on Irish rock have tended to veer between the painfully po-faced and the irritatingly jaunty, leaving the mildly interested reader little to choose between trainspottery thesis and puffed-up press release. Besides, what is Irish rock, and who wants to read about it, apart from Italian tourists and U2 completists? How does it differ from, say, Welsh rock, or Finnish rock, or Maltese rock? Is it just a convenient label, like Irish whiskey or Irish stout, which can excuse all manner of excessive prose and overblown exposition?
Someday, someone will write a book that deals with the inexplicable urge to write a book about Irish rock; what drives a writer to meticulously chronicle every detail of this minor branch of global rock, regardless of its significance (or lack of), or to frantically wave their pen in the air and shout, "Look at little us! Didn't we do well, what with U2, The Corrs and all?" Smyth, this book's co-author, has recently published his own dense, academic tome on the history of Irish popular music, Noisy Ireland, but here he joins forces with fellow academic Sean Campbell to write an altogether lighter set of essays covering 40 years of Irish rock's ragged glory.
What sets this book apart from others of its ilk is that the authors do not seem to be writing this for any imagined global audience, but are intent on telling us something about ourselves by examining the music we have been listening to for the past four decades.
Rather than exhaustively dig through the weeds of Irish rock in a fruitless search for an underlying unity, they've opted to cherry-pick a song from each year 1964-2004, and use that as the jumping off point for a journey of collective self-discovery.
Like archeologists piecing together the history of a lost civilisation through a handful of artefacts, the authors put each song under the microscope and try to determine the historical and social forces which prevailed at the time of its recording and release. Beginning with Them's Gloria and ending with Snow Patrol's Chocolate, Beautiful Day takes us on a rock 'n' roll mystery tour, sometimes leading up a cultural cul-de-sac, but often arriving at a crucial crossroads in Irish rock's road to self-realisation.
Taking the bad (Dickie Rock's Come Back to Stay) with the good (Ash's Burn Baby Burn) and the shallow (The Corrs' What Can I Do) with the sublime (The Pogues' Rainy Night in Soho), Campbell and Smyth draw up an itinerary that takes in Ballymun and Finglas (Aslan), Limerick (The Cranberries), Tuam (The Saw Doctors) and Derry (The Undertones), looking for clues along the way, sometimes coming to firm conclusions, but more often than not simply sitting back and enjoying the ride. Unusually for a book on Irish rock, the authors take time to actually listen to the songs, painting their tone, colour and tenor in vivid detail, till you can practically hear the songs playing loud and clear as you read.
In case you'd nearly forgotten how good The Fat Lady Sings' Arclight really was, why The Frames' Revelate is their finest moment, or what a sonic blast My Bloody Valentine's Soon used to be, the authors have enough musical knowledge and descriptive prowess on hand to remind you. For readers who want to hear the actual songs, the book provides a link to an iTunes playlist, in lieu of an accompanying CD.
It's a far-from-complete history of Irish rock (thank God - who really needs to know the full Paul Brady discography, or the b-sides of In Tua Nua's singles?), and the text is littered with spurious connections (what on Earth has minor psychedelic band Orange Machine got to do with the rise of the Orange Order?) and dotted with dangling participles ("Disbanding in 1983, Sharkey went on to experience mainstream pop fame . . .").
There's only one U2 song (the eponymous Beautiful Day), one Van Morrison solo song (Streets of Arklow) and nothing by Damien Dempsey, Stars of Heaven, Therapy?, Virgin Prunes, A House, Christy Moore or The Stunning, all of whom have put an indelible imprint on Ireland's music map. And yet, this little book tells us more about ourselves, our rock'n'roll dreams and the darker corners of our musical souls than any convoluted, self-congratulatory rock encyclopedia ever could.
Kevin Courtney is an Irish Times journalist.
Beautiful Day: Forty Years of Irish Rock. By Sean Campbell and Gerry Smyth Atrium, 194pp. €25