For The Script and Imelda May the pieties of the "credible" music press are fading whispers, writes BRIAN BOYD
WHEN U2 appeared on the cover of Timemagazine in 1987, acclaimed in big, bold print as Rock's Hottest Ticket, it precipitated a musical Klondike in Dublin.
Scores of record company executives travelled to the city intent on hunting down the “new U2”. This was “the City of 1,000 bands” and who cared that 998 of them were awful so long as expense account credit cards were being maxed out in The Pink Elephant. Suburban garages were scouted, the Baggot Inn was rigorously policed for any band that could make it to the fourth chord without falling over and an awful lot of money was thrown at an awful lot of mediocrity. It was possible in those days to be in a pub with someone you knew who had signed on the dole that morning, flown to London to sign a five-album deal and returned – after a bit of blarney and “yeah, Bono’s my best friend” – with a £50,000 advance burning a hole in their ripped jeans. That these days they pull pints in the same pub is neither here nor there.
Numerous bands were signed to big-money deals, and numerous singles and albums by the “new U2s” were released to an underwhelmed public. The new dawn was as false as a record company promise. Trendy Dublin went back to sleep and when the next multimillion Irish acts presented themselves many years later they were from two places Dubliners would regard as terminally unfashionable: Limerick (The Cranberries) and Dundalk (The Corrs).
But 23 years later, the city is finally cashing the cheque that its mouth once wrote. In a few weeks time there will be, based on advance sale orders, two Dublin bands in album charts all around Europe, and possibly even the US. Remarkably, the two bands come from neighbouring streets in the Liberties area of the city.
The Script release their second album on September 3rd. Formed out of a poky backyard shed on James’s Street, their first album sold more than two million copies and established them as international players. Imelda May, from a flat in the Liberties, releases her second album on September 10th. Her previous album was a number one hit in this country and earlier this year she became one of the few Irish artists to appear at the US Grammy Awards.
There is nothing remotely Irish (or Dublin, or the Liberties) about how The Script or May look and sound. The former look like cast members of Beverly Hills 90210, the latter like a Tennessee cocktail waitress.
Listen to The Script and you’ll hear a slick, modern r’n’b sound, leavened with touches of hip-hop and blue-eyed soul. Listen to Imelda May and you’ll hear a classic mid-1950s rockabilly sound. No Christy Moore or Luke Kelly here; you won’t hear a fiddle or the hint of a “Celtic” sounding synth swirl. The influences are more Jay-Z and Carl Perkins.
That they both come from inner-city Dublin is significant. While the rock wannabes who came in U2’s wake were all leather jackets/designer angst and of suburban middle-class provenance, The Script and Imelda May aren’t tortured by music press concepts of “credibility” and “coolness”. There is little postgraduate-style ennui on display in their lyrics; they (I’m guessing) probably don’t have Joy Division posters on their bedroom walls and they probably look at the likes of Pete Doherty and think: “eejit”.
The “scene that celebrates itself” in Dublin music circles has little time for either act. The indie music bloggers find The Script repellent – no better than a boyband. As for May – well, she’s hardly Joanna Newsom, is she? (cult US indie harpist).
Neither act though, unlike the tragi-comic wannabes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, seeks critical endorsement. They are as oblivious to their scorn as they are unencumbered by Ireland’s musical history.
For both acts, who are going from the Liberties to the world’s biggest stages, the pieties of the “credible” music press are fading whispers on a faraway breeze.
Brian Boyd's Revolver column appears in The Ticketeach week