CultureShock:For millions of people, Dublin exists only as an excited atmosphere on live recordings by the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Kylie Minogue and André Rieu, writes Fintan O'Toole
Some years ago, I had to hire a driver to take me, from Alamagordo, a few hundred miles across the New Mexico desert. He was an air-force veteran called - of course - Bud, with snakeskin boots and good ol' boy affability. But he had trouble getting to grips with where I might be from. Ireland rang no bells, and Dublin was unknown territory. This bothered him. It was obviously, in his mind, bad manners not to be able to make something from the simple question "Where y'all from?". He searched his mind for some speck of knowledge, some connection. And eventually, after long contemplation, he gave a little yelp of delight. "Yeah, yeah, Dublin", he said. "Garth Brooks: Live From Dublin. So that's in Ireland. Must be a helluva happy place."
I thought of Bud last week when I was in New York and saw the ads for Bruce Springsteen's new double CD and DVD, Live in Dublin, plastered all over the place. When we think of the things that shape the image of a place for people who have never been there, one of the last things we consider is music that just happens to have been recorded there. But there will be people all over the US and the rest of the world whose notion of Dublin will now be formed by Springsteen's marvellous album.
It's very easy to look with patronising amusement on someone who knows nothing about our own place except the background noises of a live CD. But, when things work the other way around, it doesn't seem quite so odd. I have vague images of Seattle, for example, some concoction of Microsoft and Boeing and Starbucks, but the only concrete sense of the city I can actually muster is the ambience on Martin Hayes's Live In Seattle CD.
How many of us have any image of Budokan that is not formed by recordings of concerts by Bob Dylan, Ozzy Osbourne, Blur or Pearl Jam? I've actually never heard of the place in any other context, yet it seems to be by far the most common exotic venue for live albums by western performers. For tens of millions of people, it exists only as a series of cheers and roars and a vague, excited atmosphere. And after Budokan, what's the most favoured exotic venue (in the sense of not being a really big American or western European city) for live CDs and DVDs? At a rough guess, I'd say it just might be Dublin.
Our capital city exists, too, in this dreamy sonic hinterland. Leaving aside recordings by Irish artists, there are big-selling albums or DVDs out there in the audiosphere by Kylie Minogue, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Glen Campbell, Garth Brooks, Pearl Jam, John Williams and the pop-classical violinist André Rieu. It is an interesting spectrum - whether the market is pop, rock, country, folk or pop-classical, the Dublin label clearly has some marketable cachet. The appeal must have something to do with notions of conviviality, musicality, authenticity.
It sure as hell has little to do with actual concert halls. Dublin has a notoriously bad range of venues, and it's safe to say that no one records a live album at the Point or in Croke Park for the acoustics. There is in fact a weird disjunction between live recordings from Dublin and live concerts in Dublin, with the actual experience generally much worse in musical terms than its digital record. The packaging of Rieu's Live in Dublin hints at the existence of this lacuna. It is said to be "recorded at . . . Dublin's famous downtown train terminal". If you were imagining this place in the US, you would probably think of a great building like Grand Central Station, and in Europe of something with the elegant splendour of the Gare d'Orsay. Only if you'd actually been to the Point would you know that it is just a big shed.
And yet, at least on the new Springsteen album, Dublin really does sound wonderful. Audiences on live records always sound great, of course, because their responses can be edited and manipulated like laughter tracks on comedies. But you can still hear the reasons why Springsteen chose this audience to play the part. Both the band and a majority of the songs on the album are from The Seeger Sessions recordings. Those songs are drawn from the eclectic source of American music: gospel, ballads, hymns, work and protest songs. The playing is a stunning fusion of folk, jazz, blues, country, rock'n'roll and gospel. But it does have an Irish tinge and two of the songs - Mrs McGrath and Old Dan Tucker (the latter probably written by the Irish-American vaudeville performer Dan Emmett) - have some kind of Irish origin. There are times on the live album, especially on Springsteen's own song American Land, when you could be listening to the Pogues.
You can hear this connection on the record. There is enough of a memory of sing-songs and sessions for the audience to join in, not with the false, embarrassed heartiness that you so often hear, but with a genuine, ecstatic relish. And enough of a feel for the nature of this music that the joining-in actually adds to its texture. Unusually, Live in Dublin suggest that there is actually something still alive in Dublin.