Mark Cunningham: "Horslips: Tall Tales": Book Review

At last, musicians played traditional tunes in a lively, innovative way that made an Irish boy feel "proud" rather than "pathetic". So Maurice Linnane recalls when he heard Horslips as a boy on the radio, in this large-format biography of this pioneering 1970s Celtic rock band. Mark Cunningham, himself a musician and producer, integrates reminiscences from each of the five members, along with archival material from photos and media. This handsome design intersperses thoughtful analyses and entertaining stories into editorial commentary on gigs, albums, critical reception, and career moves. 

Having grown up with Beatlemania, as well as an eclectic exposure to Irish music and culture, four of the five musicians first met in 1970 to mime a "suitably hairy" band for a Harp commercial. Three of them worked in advertising and promotion; the real band they then formed was determined to remain in Ireland and to retain control of not only its music but marketing and presentation. Bassist Barry Devlin defines this "funky ceilidhe" approach to "deconstruct tunes and use them as the basis for new material"; Violinist, guitarist, and concertina player Charles O'Connor agrees that the band would "transfer melodies" from traditional sources. By the end of 1971, they electrified dancehalls in more ways than one. Appealing to the emerging glam rock movement, they dressed in leather, snakeskin, and even curtains from Clery's. Suitably, they also blended a bold visual look with fresh sounds.

Horslips may have confessed no "cultural responsibility to incorporate the traditional context; it just evolved" as keyboardist, piper, and flautist Jim Lockhart avers. But it captured attention soon, as the band knew not only how to work the media but to work themselves in an intelligent, disciplined fashion. By 1972, their self-released debut, Happy to Meet, Sorry to Part made them Ireland's first home-grown rock success. Follow-up The Táin mingled Yeats' treatment of Cú Chulainn with Old Irish sources, bypassing Thomas Kinsella's translation as "too recent" for lyricist and percussionist Éamon Carr. These "indigenous" inspirations mingled with superheroes and Marvel Comics for Carr, a poet who also began to sprinkle into songs his verse patterns filtering both the Beats and Basho.

Turlough O'Carolan's life story flowed into their third album, Dancehall Sweethearts, but that and its overproduced, more mainstream if lackluster follow-up loosened the intricate fit of rock with folk which had made their first pair of LPs critically and popularly successful. An acoustic Christmas-themed album mid-decade revived their spirit, enthusiastic reception on tours at home and overseas increased, and by 1976, their arguably most consistent and most powerful record emerged. A teenaged guitarist, soon to be known as The Edge, attended his first rock concert at Skerries. He was so impressed by Horslips that he resolved to join classmates who became U2. A triple-movement "Celtic symphony", the Book of Invasions managed to slip a stanza stolen from Swinburne and what Carr calls a "Bowie-esque whiff of alienation" into a confident examination of origin myths.

The Famine and immigration continued as themes in Exiles (1977) and The Man Who Built America (1978). The latter used Mici Mac Gabhann's memoir Rotha Mór an tSaoil to ground its narrative. Reflecting this novel mix of Irish heritage and American reinvention, Devlin and O'Connor appear to have sought a polished, slick  musical delivery, in an era when arena rock and punk competed for loyalty among fans split over the merits of progressive rock's concept albums and mythic lore. The other three musicians preferred to ground a "stadium rock sheen," as guitarist Johnny Fean puts it, within a firm foundation balancing an accessible radio-friendly sound with their obvious strength, as shown best in Táin and Book, of a carefully constructed interplay of Irish narrative and trad tunes.

Devlin reminds readers of the band's lucky inheritance. They grew up exposed to both rock and Irish music, and they learned as they grew older from traditional players. Unlike their English peers, Horslips had no need to create a song-cycle about elves: "We're pinching from a culture that's alive."

Cunningham's book understandably relies on storytellers who regale us with life on the road as well as in the studio. While cultural examination is unsurprisingly understated compared to tall tales (with their Irish license plates and accents, they get mistaken for subversives in a jittery Troubles-era London and Wales, as well as for the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany), a reader nonetheless gains some sense of how Irish identity infused their music and lyrics, and their concerted effort to retain an image that would appeal to all in their divided homeland as well as far afield, during a tumultuous era. One senses that, as Devlin produced some of U2's early demos, those four Dubliners learned some crucial lessons about a similar ambition to stand for an island which united disparate factions.

This underlying legacy endures. Despite the band's weariness by their last studio album 1979 to reconcile its image as "conceptual rockers" into a "post-punk landscape" U2 would capitalise upon, their live act ensured their enthusiastic reception past their breakup in 1980. Cunningham documents the subsequent careers of the five men in a variety of the fine arts, their legal battle over reclaiming rights to their songs, the remasters and reissues of their twelve albums, museum exhibitions on their Irish impact, and their eventual reunions from 2009 on.

A couple of slips show: a transcription has Devlin remarking on an "alter" boy and elsewhere crediting the short story "The Trusting and the Maimed" to "Flannery O'Brien" rather than O'Connor, which nonetheless might have made Myles na gCopaleen chortle. But overall, research results in a welcome survey of the band's Irish impact. A thorough discography is appended; supplemental sources are listed (including my Estudios Irlandeses 3 [2008]: 132-142 article). The band's genial discussion, enriched by those who join them here, creates an enduring appeal. This recommends Tall Tales: The Official Biography to those who will be quite happy to meet them, and surely sorry to part.
[Estudios Irlandeses 10 (2015): 160-161] (Also on Amazon US 3-15-15)

Éamon Carr's "Deirdre Unforgiven": Book Review

As a musician and poet, Éamon Carr came to prominence in the Irish counterculture in the late 1960s, and as drummer for Horslips, he memorably created lyrics blending the Ulster Cycle and other Celtic tales into hard-charging or softly lilting music. Now, he returns to these inspirations, but, in the intervening decades, the impacts of Northern violence, itself recapitulated, mythologised, and raw, darken this play, subtitled "a journal of sorrows".  For, during the 1990s, Carr as a journalist revisited places he had toured as a musician, and he heard new stories of strife, vengeance and suffering again.

In a spare but eloquent style, Deirdre Unforgiven by its title conflates the tragic protagonist, enslaved and compelled to wed lusting, selfish usurping King of Ulster Conor, with what I sense as an echo of Clint Eastwood's compellingly and similarly haunted anti-hero, himself unhinged by lost love and simmering sorrow. As Professor Shannon McRae's preface and Carr's introduction explain, these verses adapt Yeats' Japanese Noh ritual to drama. Enhanced by John Devlin's drawings, this is a pairing well suited for Carr (see his 2008 poetry collection and homage to Basho, The Origami Crow [my review]); here he conveys through the stripped-down incantatory recitals of ancient Greek tragedy the structure for his bleak ritual scenario.

Taking place in the "uncertain time" just before dawn (itself redolent of suggestion in charged Irish rhetoric) a triple Chorus precedes a Young Man, a reporter, fresh from an eerie conversation with a crow-like figure on the Shankill. The Chorus and the Old Woman, the Celtic goddess of war the Morrigan, fill out Deirdre's backstory "of yesterday's news that is heard too soon". Meanwhile, the reporter recalls as of 1999 yet "another bad day at Drumcree" between marchers and protesters.

The ghosts of Deirdre and of the unforgiving ruler over Ulster, Conor, masked as is the Old Woman, tell their side of the saga. They reveal Conor's thwarted frustration and Deirdre's desperate elopement with Naoise. Deirdre arises to warn: "There will not be enough mourners to lament/ those who fall" but as the Chorus speaks for so many witnesses: "They listened/ and dismissed her concerns".

Opening the second scene, the Young Man recounts more victims: footballers caught in a blast, a grave for one who died too young, three boys at home as they slept blown up by a petrol bomb. Deirdre bewails her passion for Naoise, for it blinded the pair: "we didn't see the blight".  She tells of her doom after that of Naoise and his brothers, and as she collapses, the Old Woman continues her tale. The Chorus repeats the triple spiral of lore: "Pure black banner/ Pure blue sky/ Pure red blood". Conor's desolation and the reporter's despair combine, for both lack words to assuage their torment.

The Young Man, in a very Yeatsian image of how the off-kilter past whirls into the present, sums up their predicament: "Somewhere, whip in hand, a laughing child/ sets a wooden-top spinning./ Now ask,/ for this world to keep turning/ must we all,/ each one,/ hear the lash sing?" Silence follows.

Deirdre chose to fling herself on a rock, to dash out her life rather than submit to Conor. Her defiance, commemorated by a memorial tree "that when the wind blows/ sings of infinite sadness", represents the capitulation of the female to the male, the injustice perpetuated by the cocky and headstrong over those perceived or outfoxed to remain weak. The Old Woman, no stranger to this anguish for she herself embodies its mythic atavistic force, concludes: "For wherever there are dead men/ that's where you'll find me./ My wings forever wrap the fallen/ who so wanted to be free".

Carr's play invites no easy resolution. As Yeats did, so does he. Deirdre Unforgiven presents a stark reminder of the brutality behind the cant, and the cost incurred by too glib a chant or rousing ballad.
(Slugger O'Toole 11-15-13. British Amazon 11-15-13 and Amazon US 11-14-13 all without OC link)

Rob Young's "Electric Eden": Book Review

What Becomes of the Oaken Hearted? Rob Young’s quest spans the last century’s search for pastoral evocations and folk recreations of a British quest to summon its lingering “ghost memories”. Over 600 pages, narrated with verve and ease, this editor at The Wire music magazine conjures up the contradictions of sound technology harnessed to rural moods, and an urban audience longing for antiquarian lore. In a nation built along Roman roads, the lure of open space limits the adventurer. In a land so long civilized among landscapes tamed, modern freedom seekers turn to the imaginary tale, the mythological ritual as liberating paths. For the British listener, nostalgia and fulfillment lurk in a golden age before machines, yet one which plugs into electricity, and exotic instruments and moods, to convey a retelling of the elusive past.

He begins with the “inward exodus” by singer Vashti Bunyan, whose 1968-69 trek away from London by horse-drawn caravan up finally into Gaelic-speaking Scotland symbolizes this era’s idealism. Young’s discography lengthens as hippies crowd out folksingers; Bunyan’s search brings her to Donovan, producer Joe Boyd, and his clients The Incredible String Band, who epitomize the fashions and styles she imagined but did not know. In “the dual landscape/ dreamscape of Britain’s interior”, rock met and blurred and blended with folk.

The preliminary section, “Music from Neverland”, efficiently explains the contexts for this Aquarian Age. Young charts the contributions of Cecil Sharp and Francis Child as song and ballad and dance collectors. Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams enriched classical forms with folk melodies drawn from the last remnants of the oral tradition, its untutored composers from the peasantry. Invented characters as composer Peter Warlock and bard Ewan MacColl enliven this stage. Tension arises between music of a people as Child and Sharp had compiled vs. music from the people as favored by interpreters of the proletariat, often Marxist and radical themselves, in the industrial, trade-unionized post-WWII decades.

This period ends as Bob Dylan enters. He preferred his own words to those in archives, field recordings, or transcribed lyrics. This Americanized approach clashed with MacColl’s class-conscious fidelity to the oral tradition. By the end of 1962, when Dylan visited England’s folkies, revolution looms. But, unlike the uprising predicted by 60 years of diligent researchers, leftist agitators, and earnest re-creators, British Eden would be electrified. The cultural rebellion “would take place not on the streets, but in the head.”

Dylan met fellow guitarist-singer Martin Carthy. Carthy’s renditions of “Lord Franklin” and “Scarborough Fair” impressed Dylan so much that he reworked them for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, as “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and “Girl from the North Country”.  In 1965, Simon & Garfunkel, after learning the song from Carthy, copyrighted their version (with no credit to Carthy) of what had been a tune nobody had taken credit for authoring, “Scarborough Fair”. Such American ambitions, clashing with the anonymity in which many folksongs had been passed down, reworked, and tinkered with, edged many British singers and songwriters away from jazz and the blues into a more indigenous, yet eclectic, compositional style.

As Dylan and the British Invasion emerged, beatniks returned from abroad with a North African oud or Balkan bouzouki. The DADGAD tuning of Davy Graham’s guitar, the modal music of Bert Jansch, and the coffeehouse stylings incorporating electrification entered folk. Early Music masters David Munrow and Christopher Hogwood revived old instruments that enriched what had been sparer tunes often passed down a capella. While “pop” derives from mass spectacles manufactured for the Roman urban populi, Young reminds us, volk derives from the Germanic peasantry, villagers and vagrants bearing songs from the wood, the forest, the barbaric heath where rituals endured and perplexed their heirs.

Shirley Collins defines for Young the essence of “an ideal folk voice, sounding as though it was grappling with the words for the very first time, and yet equally as though it was so inured to the pain and suffering so often portrayed in the songs that it had insulated itself from them”. Symbolically, Collins no longer worked with American folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax by the Summer of Love. Her new producer, via Elektra Records, arrived to run London’s UFO club. During 1967, Joe Boyd hosted Pink Floyd (producing their “Arnold Layne” single) and lysergic luminaries, accompanied by acid-rock lightshows. Nearby if not always blended into this heady milieu, folk-rock fermented.

Boyd had already produced The Incredible String Band. He continued with Fairport Convention, as jazz, jug-band, and rock-schooled rhythm sections joined with a sprightly sets of singers and guitarists. For Pentangle, their “aerated play of light” fragmented into “a sonic mirage” with “a curly line between a courtly medievalism and the enlightened foolery of Haight-Ashbury”.  Vocalist Jacqui McShee, acoustic guitarists Jansch and John Renbourn created above Danny Thompson’s string bass and Terry Cox’s brushed drums a typical tune which patters “like butterflies trapped in a balsa-wood box”.

Boyd’s Fairport played their first gig in May 1967 and two months later opened for Pink Floyd at UFO, before cutting the first of four increasingly daring records. They often covered Dylan and followed an eerie parallel. After Dylan’s motorcycle accident required The Band to retreat to Big Pink and regroup as a rooted ensemble, so Fairport faced a fatal van crash. Survivors recouped to refine their sound.

They departed from their genial West Coast harmonies. “A Sailor’s Life” from Unhalfbricking featured the first recorded use of sticks with drums to back up a folk tune. Dave Mattacks earned percussive credits on countless sessions. His “funky plod” provided “the ideal foil for the mushy instrumental palette of English electric folk, propelling its accordions, fiddles, abrasive guitars and astringent harmonies forward without denying their bulk and grit”.

Liege and Lief, under the influence of venerable folk interpreter A. L. “Bert” Lloyd, transferred the century’s leftist, proletariat, song tradition to the flower children. While Pentangle’s members grew up with folk transmitted on the BBC and taught in classrooms, Fairport matured with skiffle and Elvis. Richard Thompson’s and Simon Nicol fuzzed their guitars, over Sandy Denny’s ethereal voice, Dave Swarbrick’s slashing fiddle and Ashley Hutchings’ thumping bass guitar. Fairport, at the center of this book and this tale, epitomized the late-60s evolution.

These musicians fueled the next decade of folk-rock. But their heyday rushed by. Advertising copy for 1969s Liege promoted it as “documenting a (very brief) era”. Even during “A Sailor’s Life”, Young asserts that Denny tired of folk’s limits; she went solo after Liege. Young explains her neediness and her search for companionship as she pursued a singer-songwriter pop-folk muse whose comforts eluded her.

Hutchings also left then, hastening backwards to ‘70s sonic fidelity, if that makes sense for his leadership—in its first and boldest two of many incarnations—of a plugged-in Steeleye Span, grounded in archived ballads and decked in burnished apparel.  Their first two albums “are textured with a loamy, atavistic grit.” Tellingly, while Mattacks played on their debut, their follow-up left out drums but added Martin Carthy’s power chords distorted across a “massive Fender amplifier”, to mesmerizing and exhilarating effect on Please to See the King. But, the fireworks dimmed. Hutchings left to revive with his new wife Shirley Collins and then The Albion Band an “English country music” reviving Morris dance and performance, delivered in acoustic intimacy as intricately plotted and researched presentations.

Another of Boyd’s protégés, Nick Drake, shared this gentler, erudite approach. Young takes us, as with Denny, cautiously along as we watch the demise of another talented troubadour, soon reduced to a “withdrawn, solipsistic, shrunken seer”.  John Martyn’s existential pain earns a chapter, as his Echoplexed guitar, full of distortion, adapts free-jazz and dub techniques to his “boiling electric lyre”.

West Coast psychedelia celebrated summer meadows, but for the British, this could be a brief picnic. “When Joni Mitchell sang of getting back to the garden, you felt she pictured a lot of naked longhairs disporting themselves in love games off the coast of Big Sur. For Brits, the image that springs to mind is a cheeky reefer in the potting shed before getting back to work on the allotment”.

The period 1967-71 earns the most entries in the appended discography arranged by timeline. Its highlights, as with Pentangle, Fairport, and Steeleye, flickered and flared rapidly. Pioneers of folk-rock expansion, Boyd’s first clients The Incredible String Band, concocted a “global village” world music sustaining an ecumenical if acid-driven vision quest. But their records, for all their “very cellular” song structures and shape-shifting scope, could not sustain a career, given the heady vistas and drug-driven nature of their ambitions. After the bonfires collapse, as Young asks: “What becomes of the oaken-hearted?”

The book’s cover shows a semi-acoustic band, Heron, in a Berkshire field the summer of 1970. A piano nestles in a meadow, as pastel-shirted, long-haired musicians sit and play. Pye Records miked them to “capture the ambiance of the great outdoors.”  Booms surround them. This depicts an “electric Eden” created by an idealistic, disenchanted middle-class whose dreams and (lack of) ambitions mirrored Withnail & I, Bruce Robinson’s 1986 film of two unemployed actors fleeing to the Lake District in 1969.

Weariness pervades the songs of Drake and Martyn. Folk’s early-‘70s singer-songwriters woke to a comedown. Tiring of their past, Young argues, glam emerged with David Bowie and Marc Bolan as these gnomic performers reinvented themselves for the future, turning away from “warped Victoriana”. The riots of 1968 followed “Strawberry Fields” and an endless summer filled with “vertiginous trippiness and crooked-mirror Anglicana”. Mr. Fox, trained folk archivists and musicians, briefly kept the firmest hold on electric pastoralia that followed Steeleye and Fairport’s ascent. 

Fittingly, all three were guided by the enduring “Bert” Lloyd, whose book Folk Song in England (1967) was the first commission for Hipgnosis. They gave Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin “classic” rock album covers, while Young excels at explaining how urban-pastoral sepia tension seeps into artwork gracing Fairport’s Unhalfbricking, Sandy Denny’s The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, and the album Denny sang on, Led Zeppelin’s fourth.

A Shattering of the Rosy Lens

Magic and the supernatural beckoned bands away from confessional ballads towards often twee and fey attempts (Young possesses admirable patience as he sums up their efforts) to channel invented forces. Young pinpoints currents joining Wicca and folk as artificial energies. This does not diminish their organic power. “The Cruel Mother” may be sung with different lyrics by various voices, but she “will continue to be haunted by the guilt-inducing spectre of her child, because, whether sung by a Highland crofter, an acoustic duo in a folk club, an electric rock band at an outdoor festival or in a home studio with an electronic ambient backing track, the song itself is undead, a ghost that refuses to be forgotten”.

Festivals link neatly with Young’s survey of the British inheritance of the commons; unlike Greil Marcus’ over-determined Lipstick Traces, Young constructs his argument modestly and carefully. He shows how anti-authoritarian responses transmitted over the centuries persisted in debates over access to land. The ecologically-aware Glastonbury Fayre and its charity donations outlived the massive freak-outs which doomed the Isle of Wight’s festival. Disenchanted city dwellers tried to create, if for a weekend, alternative communities. New Age and environmental causes benefited greatly from cross-promotion.

Diminishing returns meant folk fans met with caricature, all bearded, clogged boffins with pewter flagons desperately seeking real ale. The ‘70s bring economic recession and political gloom; later chapters convey this strain in the realm. Arthurian and medievalist films flourished in the first half of the decade. The Wicker Man (the original version) still haunts with its imperious pagan revival. But, as Monty Python’s Camelot collapsed into stage sets of canvas and plywood, the English fascination with a manufactured soft-focus past ended.

Musically and culturally, the rise to prominence lasted only a few years. After 1972, Steeleye Span in another incarnation had, as with similarly successful musicians, outgrown the small folk music circuit. They opted for glossier, amplified stadium rock, while Richard and Linda Thompson spent the decade struggling “with a sense of hard-won knowledge, a literal dis-illusionment, a shattering of the rosy lens. It was as if the music permitted a wallowing in an imaginative world of filth from which Sufism might elevate and insulate them”. The String Band departed for Scientology, while Young passes over intriguingly if quickly such micro-genres as the Jesus People’s incorporations of operatic or mystical folk.

Young delves into the underground, but when its musicians emerge to Top 40 success, they fade from view. As a boy, I first heard Sandy Denny as a guest on “The Battle of Evermore” on Led Zeppelin’s new, fourth LP. I discovered via a dim recollection of Denny her folk-rock lineage much later. I imagine for fans of Ireland’s Horslips (mentioned once), Scotland’s Runrig, or England’s The Oyster Band (both unmentioned) as these bands merged traditional folk into louder rock, the impulses to track back to British “visionary music” trickled down from the top of the charts rather than up through cult releases.

Similar shortcomings arise when The Kinks get one sentence for the title track from 1968’s concept album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. Surely this LP encapsulates the sylvan chronicling and macabre components of British invention that define Young’s project. Jethro Tull’s “kitchen prose and gutter rhymes” may earn contempt from folk purists, but their ditties opened ears to search out venerable melodies. Pink Floyd explored experimental pastoral electronics in their later-‘60s and early-‘70s albums, but Young understates their popular impact.

In this massive compendium, I found some slips. Donovan’s songs here and there are jumbled as to what appeared where. “A twelfth-century Saxon church” is a misnomer. Robert O’Flaherty’s documentary Man of Aran filmed fishermen off an Irish rather than a Scottish island. Marshall McLuhan, while he taught for a time in the US, should be identified as Canadian rather than American.  Irish-born Chicago police chief Francis O’Neill’s Music of Ireland “bible” contains 1,850 pieces of music but it was not published in 1850. It debuted in 1903. Young’s black-and-white illustrations (at least in the proof copy) often strain the eye; many telling details reduce to thumbnail-sized reproductions of LP covers.

One album cover for Young depicts the downward spiral of ‘70s folk-rock. Steeleye Span’s fortunes crashed in the year punk hit, 1976. Their Rocket Cottage in free fall (its hideous art as fatal portent) frames a quirky semi-fictionalized chapter where Young allows a skewed sensibility freer rein. Diminishing returns meant folk fans met with caricature, all bearded, clogged boffins with pewter flagons desperately seeking real ale. While Young ignores Robyn Hitchcock, who with and after The Soft Boys applied hallucinogenic, hyper-natural lyrics to rambling folk tunes wired with new-wave vibrations, he does champion admirably another survivor of these end of the ‘70s mash-ups, Julian Cope.

Cope’s The Modern Antiquarian gazetteer near the millennium surveys his native landscape aligned with soundscapes of “attritional and introspective rock.” Young tells how “Cope sings, speaks and writes in the voice of the heathen—the aboriginal ‘people of the heath’ who worshipped the earth as a mother goddess”. In this “alternative, humane heritage movement”, room for the dissenter must be built: “no poetry without heretics”. Cope and his monumental concerns seek to separate the pagan substrata from the non-Christian detritus. Delightful as the hobby-horse set can be, cobbling together patchworks of tunes and dress, Cope seeks what he hears as “mysterious and tortuous” beneath these motley fabrics.

Kate Bush floats past steampunk, David Sylvain into alchemy, while Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis finds solitude. Their connections appear tenuous. For all I know The Skids and Big Country merited worthy analysis. What goes missing is in-depth discussion of contemporary electric folk. Young never cites Britta Sweers’ 2005 study. He neglects Gaelic-influenced bands. Scotland fades early, while Ireland earns diminishing returns, typified by the odd absence of Mark J. Prendergast’s 1990 history of its folk and rock, The Isle of Noises.  Nic Jones and June Tabor, John Tams and Home Service, Fairport’s Cropredy reunions, fanzines and the Net, the Free Reed label, the revival of English dance bands: such topics may or may not earn but a sentence. Inclusions of bands and musicians add often only lists of names.

Later chapters, reflecting instead Young’s own tastes rather than providing a comprehensive survey of post-‘70s trends, may appeal to fans lured here by personalities from the video era. The sounds do not linger as long on the page, and readers who aren’t listeners may struggle to figure out the sonic appeal of the poetic songwriters profiled. Young displays the private, personal evolution of a few malcontents, as they drift away from the new-wave charts and MTV publicity to burrow into uneasy moods. These tunes seem to resist Young’s capture in print. The tradition of backwards sight as a forward direction for cultural and musical progression among these self-marginalized seers endures.

Martyn Bates exemplifies this complex contemporary stance, inheriting the legacy of those with whom this narrative commenced. After singing in the post-punk duo Eyeless in Gaza—which included avant-folk—he released in 1994 Murder Ballads (Drift). He paired with Mick Harris, drummer for thrash-metal exponents Napalm Death. Harris and Bates sought, as had earlier hippies and folksingers, a quieter if no less disturbing way to conjure darker tones. Bates later worked with Max Eastley, cohort of Pentangle’s John Renbourn and of Donovan. And, with the latter paisley pop star, we return to the destination Vashti Bunyan sought. Donovan had opened up his land bought in the Isle of Skye for artists and musicians to settle. By the time Bunyan reached Skye, traipsing north across Britain by horse-drawn caravan, a year and a half had passed. Donovan had long left what was now his half-deserted fiefdom, for Los Angeles.

Young concludes with a sobering message. Misfits and a few progressives still gravitate towards the volatility of unconventional folk. Its dream of rural self-sufficiency, for an overpopulated and suburbanized island nation, cannot sustain itself. Wilderness shrinks. Sixty million Britons may long for their national symbol, their own enclosed garden. Yet this collective dream must endure. Young proclaims that “to preserve the sense of enchantment with British landscape that is hard-wired into the nation’s psyche it will become even more important to screen out modernity, to not quite see what is actually there, but to distort through the antiquarian eye and the mental scrying glass”.

This enchanting and engaging, if uneven, contribution to cultural musical history deserves to grow dog-eared. It will be opened by a contemporary reader turned informed listener, rather than shut up by an antiquarian.

(PopMatters featured April 21, 2011; in shorter and altered form on Amazon US & Lunch.com)

No praise for St Patrick?

How do today's Irish pagans react to March 17th? If Native Americans lament Oct. 12th as a day of cultural genocide, might a post-Catholic nation and Celtic diaspora resent celebrating the legendary arrival of its first missionary? As the Irish increasingly opt out of ritual "faith of our fathers," is the hymn's wish for "All praise to St. Patrick" replaced by a less dogmatic feast (as with the solstice at Imbolc instead of the Sun God's birth moved to Dec. 25th or thereabouts)? Does my once-axiomatically Catholic tribe, as we disperse, still treat the day as a clannish rally against the Crown and for Rome? Craic, fun, indifference, resignation: do folks care one way or the other as long as a pint's raised and toast shouted?

Didactic palaver ahead. I wonder how the 1600th anniversary in 2032 of Patrick's supposed insular triumph will compare with the massive Eucharistic Congress convened for the 1500th celebration of Patrick in 1932. That was one of the island's biggest gatherings ever-- until the Pope's children assembled at Drogheda in '79. This seems like a last gasp rather than second wind for my generation, raised in a barely post-Vatican II mindset still inheriting pre-conciliar submission despite guitar masses and godawful "Godspell."

Or, might revelers of whatever persuasion or denomination or lack thereof simply drink up? Goths party at Halloween, even if they may sleep in for All Souls Day. What's the use of doctrine in an Ireland, as Malachi O'Doherty surveys in "Empty Pulpits," pivoting from church or chapel to mall and football? Witness the media blitz by Guinness, Jameson, Bushmills to fill Oirish pubs in tourist traps and shopping "destinations" from Derry to Dubai. Even in Ireland, where departed Yanks were long derided as plastic paddies full of green beer doing what the natives back home disdained-- parades and pubs perpetuate a marketing myth: that Patrick was the first Christian to arrive in Erin. How many holidays these days remain holy days?

I wondered about all this blather when corresponding with Irish colleagues who've personally distanced themselves from Catholic identity. I keep their names apart from my entry, for even now, some suspect their allegiances. My correspondents possess excellent educations and deep immersion in academic and popular treatments of this theme. They also grew up resisting the long pull from Rome and the close tug at Maynooth. They managed to distance themselves it seems far earlier and more successfully than I did from Irish Catholic guilt, mine transmitted by nurture as well as nature-- somehow exerted six thousand miles westward. One professor about my rumination that for some now, March 17th celebrates "intolerance," remarked in terms of a Buddhist gathering, wisely: "Some people love what they grew up with and have a hole shaped exactly like that, others absolutely reject anything which looks even remotely similar. Perhaps." 

The professor continued: "What we tend to see mostly in teaching (and I would imagine this is fairly
universal) is the effects of pre-1990s Irish upbringing on people's relationship to their own bodies. Again, how they deal with that and what their agenda for change is varies - but very few Irish people (of whatever nominal background) my age or older are unaffected by how they were taught to inhabit their bodies, and we need a very particular sensitivity when teaching bodyscans etc."

This resonated with a conversation I had last autumn with an Irish writer who works in art therapy. Both therapist and professor tilt a bit younger than me, so given the time-lag between when the liberal reactions to (and massive rejections of) Irish Catholicism increased in the early 1990s vs. when I supposed they began to gather momentum in my homeland, the slight gap between us may even out the transatlantic comparison.

I recall walking the ghostly corridors of Maynooth at Samhain '09 during a conference at which alternative spiritualities were discussed at the university next to the site of the national seminary. As I commented at that time at the Maynooth link here, the dwindling annual photos of ordinands marked a tidal ebb after 1500 years. Yet, unlike America, Ireland's clerical aspirants dwindled dramatically as shown by classes after 1990. Before then, more priests (taking into account ratios of Catholics here vs. there) were ordained than had been the case for at least fifteen years or so back in my city each spring. This chronological slippage appeared to align with the decline in piety amidst the sexual scandals and institutional abuses which began to be exposed fully later in Ireland, whereas the most of the West had seen dramatic drops in vocations as early as the late '60s. Slumps hit Ireland later, as the counterculture itself had appeared in but small numbers well into the '70s.

Well, this writer observed a similar disassociation between the body and the spirit in terms of comfort. In that writer's work, emphasis on overcoming this breakdown within the energies of the soul and their expression via the senses means that healing remains difficult for many in Ireland today, raised under such a regimen. For her own generation, a much freer engagement with social, avocational, sexual, and aesthetic possibilities draws in those in the cities today, the past twenty-odd years. These changes have rapidly entered Irish popular culture.

I reviewed Diarmaid Ferriter's "Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland" last year, and it documents well the shifts from strictures in place figuratively if not realistically imposed (if not from Patrick on so much as from the post-Famine "devotional revolution" and moral crackdowns by the curates and prelates) upon most of the Irish. And upon, I may add, those of us who grew up imprinted by its severity far away from the island. Those who emigrated as priests and parishioners carried the distrust of the body and the elevation of the soul. I grew up still under the transmitted habits and dogmatic proscriptions of its clergy, our families, and our once-removed but not quite distanced psychic impact amidst a doggedly taught regimen.

Bad Ass Bard holds that Lá Fhéile Pádraig represents "the anniversary of the death of an English-born, French-educated* former slave turned Catholic zealot that led a campaign of Xian conversion  throughout Ireland in the late fifth century." II2aTee at myLot weighs in, if with the disregard for grammatical niceties all too common on this medium: "So, as Irish as I am, I wear black on 'Saint' Patricks day, to mourne the loss uncounted druids and  mystics... whos homes, lives, and knowledge were lost forever to the crucible of Christianity."

Danu's Daughter at her own blog earnestly notes that the wearing of green, the date of March 17th (supposedly his death date in 460, but note how Patrick beat the Druids back in 433 near this spring equinox to light his own Paschal Fire on Tara's summit instead of the usual bonfire), shamrocks, leprechauns, banshees, that damned elusive pot o'gold at the end of the rainbow: all derive from paganism. And, until 16, Patrick himself was a pagan, likely a romanized Briton from the west coast of what was then still Celtic turf. Which may explain of course as with many converts his missionary zeal. 

I admit that Christianity did free Patrick's fellow slaves, eventually, and I don't romanticize any civilization ("What did the Romans ever do for us?"). Still, the aversion to the body as the spirit was elevated marked a severe shift for Irish mentalities. For all the era's innovations which incite my medievalist imagination, I've always longed for what preceded rather than followed that Latin hegemony, however Celticized and appropriated. The period which fascinates me most is the linguistic and social breakdown in Britain at this same period, as the imperium faded; for Ireland, concurrently, Rome neared rather than receded.

Another expert I asked, a participant-observer in Irish neo-Druidry, told me that "my feeling is that they just ignore it." I figure they may drink up along with everyone else, "offering it up" if for different intentions? "The Snakes' Farewell to the Emerald Isle" (a title I love, speaking of a counterculture mixing up the modern with the fabled, depicted cleverly on Horslips' cover art for "The Unfortunate Cup of Tea"--even if 1974 track and disc languish among their weaker moments) endures as far more fake than fact. 

Speaking of mixing it up, Sarra Barton at Yahoo responds to her question: Should Pagans Celebrate St Patrick's Day?

Today, St. Patrick's Day is mostly a celebration of Irish folklore and Irish beer, rather than the honoring of a Catholic Saint. Many pagans do observe the March 17th holiday. Some pagans celebrate out of spite; afterall, it is a celebration of St. Patrick's death. Other pagans choose to honor the Druid Celts by reliving the long-lost traditions of the Bards. Telling stories, playing music, and wearing early Celtic costumes are an excellent way to honor pre-Christian Ireland. Should pagans celebrate St. Patrick's Day? Every pagan must decide according to his or her own beliefs. Considering most of the Christian holidays were stolen from the Pagans, shouldn't pagans feel free to steal this Christian holiday?

Finally, the "modern pagan perspective" of Jason (a blogger at "The Wild Hunt") forgives Patrick. He reminds his readers that paganism persisted, that good cheer should reign, and he repeats a popular conception among neo-pagans that the snakes driven out are but a metaphor for the Druids as no serpents survived the Ice Age on the island of saints and scholars. Certainly a hideous statue erected of the island's croziered patron mars one ancient gathering place. The professor I cited earlier reminded me that when among confreres visiting the Hill of Tara-- perhaps on another Samhain than the All Saints Day  I climbed under considerable gustiness-- a snakeskin was planted within that holy ground.

"Requiems for the Departed": Book Review

Ancient Celtic myths tell of vengeful thieves, backstabbing comrades, inebriated thugs, and wicked women. This collection brings characters inspired by these dubious role models into (mostly) today’s Ireland. Their mobile phoning and pill-popping counterparts rely on criminal pursuits – and the pursuit of criminals. The beer, the wanton women, and the chemicals may be more exotic in the retellings, but the (mostly) grim tales of haunting, revenge, and payback capture the raw scenes of the original tales, full of passion, release, death, and vendettas.

Editors Gerard Brennan and Mike Stone arrange 17 entries. Stuart Neville opens the anthology with a lively take on his Armagh hometown’s Queen Macha. Her erstwhile latest paramour, as he approaches her modern incarnation, reflects: “Back then he’d have done anything for a taste of the Queen, but as she took the last of him, his fingers tangled in her dyed crimson hair, he noticed the blood congealing on her knuckles.” Sam Millar spins his shamus Karl Kane’s saga wittily. “If I’d been any more sociable, I’d have needed a condom.” Kane and colleagues investigate, of all places in Belfast, a Jewish abattoir. As with many authors here, Millar ingeniously arranges venerable symbols into surprising patterns.

T.A. Moore’s “Red Milk” in its mayhem reminds me of a savage screenplay. A wake may seem too familiar, but this scene gains sharpness: “They sat around a table in their black shabby plumage, drinking sweet tea and saying the faults of the dead like a rosary. Go in there, and they wouldn’t be backward about coming forward with the sins of the living either.” Later, one sinner warns another: “I will beat you ‘til both sides of your face match.” Moore renders her snarling, shouting characters vividly. As with other stories, hers takes place among stables and beasts. The ancient tales shared these scenes, but not as chronicles of the cooking of chemicals or the distribution of drugs.

Tony Bailie serves up druidry and reincarnation as revenge. Maxim Jakubowski follows the triple goddess the Morrigan through lowlife Dublin. Arlene Hunt regales us with horse trading. Ken Bruen in his characteristically staccato style conjures up the banshee. Three authors in their introductory notes credit the ‘70s electric folk-rock band Horslips for inspiration. I recommend their albums "The Táin" and "The Book of Invasions" (both reviewed by me on Amazon US) as a soundtrack to amplify these tales. These renditions of passions and betrayals of ancient Ireland filtered through traditional and rock music share the bloody, loud, and ornery nature of characters in these pages.

As the collection continues, stories start to echo one another. For instance, the tragic lovers Diarmuid and Gráinne earn a similarly sad version from Adrian McKinty.Then, Garbhan Downey revamps their tale into a lusty, silly send-up. Warrior clans evolve into Derry’s football rivals. Teams stock their ranks with immigrants from Chechnya, Russia, and Brazil. This comments cleverly on today’s cosmopolitan Irish society.

Two roughly paired stories at the center of this collection evoke poignantly another cultural transition. They are the only two stories not taking place in contemporary Ireland. John McAllister sketches how a rough justice emerged as Christianity loomed over 5th century pagan Ireland. Una McCormack shifts a few years back in this same setting. She imagines a confrontation between Celtic and Roman methods to correct injustice, through the arrival of the boy who will become Patrick. Both stories capture the uneasy atmosphere of an island filled with clans – loyal to pagan gods and brutal customs – who must soon face the coming of Christianity.

Neville Thompson’s “The Children of Gear” sets the story of The Children of Lír among the addicts and dealers plaguing today’s Dublin. This sparely told tale haunted me as much as the original, with its abandoned children, cruel stepmother, and trapped father. Dave Hutchinson, like Millar, puts an attenuated Jewish connection into his story; his opens as a reality show features “the last surviving and very aged member of U2.” One old woman has faint blue tattoos like many from the past (and our present) generations; another upright gent conceals in his trousers his risque piercing, a Prince Albert. Hutchinson directs us to look backward from the prospect of the near future. Today’s daring poses will turn frail and awkward soon enough.

In the closing story, “The Life Business”, the fantasy master who writes as John Grant draws upon his “real name” and real-life teenage stint as a British cadet. He integrates disturbing and emotional reveries into his shape-shifting characters. His story rattled me the most. Grant eerily channels otherworldly senses into a psychological study of identity.

I’d caution that if you lack familiarity with these Irish myths, some stories may elude your full grasp. All contributors give introductions, yet some gloss over their original inspirations. The stories fall into three sections paralleling standard classifications of the Ulster cycle, folk figures, and Fianna warriors, but the editors could have followed through on reminding readers of the context for this archaic arrangement. A couple of stories, very compressed, moved too swiftly for me to grasp them.

All the same, for those who wish to acquaint themselves with the original stories, sample Frank Delaney’s "Legends of the Celts" or Mary Heaney’s "Over Nine Waves." Or check out those two Horslips albums. With the combination of murder, mayhem, and madness on the page matched with what blasts from your speakers, this will transport you back to the spirit of a Celtic past, and the multicultural island’s present. This book’s full of entertaining slaughter, gory slug fests, and, being Irish, the lingering touch of inevitable longing, heartache, and loss.

[Posted to Amazon US 7-7-10; to British Amazon 7-12-10. Revised for PopMatters 8-2-10.]

John Waters' "Race of Angels: Ireland & the Genesis of U2": Book Review

An intellectual's heap of his highbrow reading, interviews with three of the band (where's Larry?), and big ideas on Irish identity in an alienated, globalized pop culture. It's a book that must have, when it came out in 1994 after "Zooropa," bewildered fans wanting another tell-all lightweight read about their idols.

I confess to a weakness for big ideas on Irish and musical and intellectual concepts. So, their combination here intrigued me. Waters, later known more for his socio-political journalism (and for his custody battle with Sinéad O'Connor over their son), brings his energy to the page. Looking back on this after 15 years, it may have worked better in the blog form not yet invented. It skips from a workmanlike term-paper feel citing Guy Debord and Jacques Attali, Daniel Corkery and Umberto Eco, Richard Kearney and Franz Fanon (source of the title, and if some or all of these names are obscure, it's indicative of the rarified audience for this work) to a chapter suddenly extolling the origins of "One Tree Hill." There's no chronological account of the band's formation or their discography; it starts rapturously recounting a Toronto Zoo TV concert that on the page left me nonplussed.

Waters may be at his best eking out connections between his own thinking and the band's own explanations of how they responded to the British punk movement as music meant "for," rather than "to" or "about" themselves. Waters labors to insist that the Irish punks out of which U2 formed their concepts, necessarily distanced from the rebellious stances more easily assumed by the masters in England rather than their colonized subjects in Ireland, could not have aped Johnny Rotten exactly. (It's a shame this came out the same year as John Lydon's "Rotten: No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish" as Waters' case might have been severely altered if he'd been able to read Rotten; he also skimps over Shane MacGowan's bicultural upbringing.)

He compares Fanon's three-stage trajectory out of colonial subjection to a provocative defense of the much-derided showbands of the 1950s-60s, and of the often also unfairly derided Horslips of the 1970s, as cultural predecessors for the breakthrough that U2 found itself able to make in late '70s-early '80s Ireland. Waters wonders if in Ireland, with its 70 million abroad claiming a share of the oul' sod's bloodlines, if its World Cup team's makeup might be more representative of the true lineage of today's nation. He finds in its "human incontinence," the way Ireland has dribbled away to other lands its best brains and deepest talent, however, a cautionary reminder of how it squanders its energy and heritage.

He cites Professor Mike Cooley, a technological philosopher, in the delusion of the West's assertion of "the One Best Reality" as our tower of Babel, and Waters suggests that Ireland may represent an alternative vision of meaning. He warns of diversion by emigration, attention, by the same media that Zoo TV celebrates and mocks and subverts. "The original form of colonisation simply told their victims that they were worthless, and would have to live with it. The modern form of colonisation tells us that we are only worthless if we remain where we are; it bombards us with images which devalue our own place, diminish our psychic gravity, and lure us away. We are all angels now, rootless, restless, horizonless, homeless." (277)

Waters wrote this a decade and a half before a more diverse Ireland emerged and U2 released "No Line on the Horizon." It'd be interesting to have him and the band reflect on what they've learned since then that supports or weakens Waters' arguments here. They may be difficult ones to parse and this book may lack its own center, but it does stretch towards intellectual horizons in innovative, if uneven and erratic ways. These may be Irish, for the spiral rather than the linear, the "both-and" rather than the binary "either-or," has been suggested often as a characteristic of the unpredictable, utopian, and philosophical Irish mind, here seen in its divergent directions on paper, as it tries to track a band's own sound. (Posted to Amazon US 11-22-09)

My review of Eamon Carr & Ben Howard's poetry

This appears in Estudios Irlandeses, Number 5, 2010, pp. 187-189. The pdf is on line at "Irish Studies around the World". I compare two new collections of poetry that emphasize Japanese, Zen, and cultural connections between that milieu and Ireland/ Irish America. And one expands into soccer the fated year of Roy Keane & Mick McCarthy, the other upstate New York academia. Not sure which arena of conflict is more harrowing for these two survivors, urbane, witty, wise.

In case you wish to track down them down: (1) The Origami Crow: Journey into Japan, World Cup Summer 2002 by Éamon Carr (Dublin: Seven Towers, 2008).ISBN 978-0-9555346-5-2 (case bound); 978-0-9555346-6-9 (perfect bound). 75 pp. (2) Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt by Ben Howard (Cliffs of Moher, Co Clare: Salmon Poetry, 2009) ISBN 978-1-907056-13-0 (paper). 69 pp.

I finished the review originally on Carr the day I found out about Howard's book, and I had to revise my article immediately after opening Howard's collection and hearing such resonance. Professor Howard also has a blog, The Practice of Zen: One Time, One Meeting. This is his sixth verse collection. Information from press: "Salmon Publishing"

As the blurb goes for "Origami Crow,"-- "Chronicling the wild World Cup Summer of 2002 in Japan, Carr follows the fellow spirit of medieval Japanese poet Basho on a journey that is both movingly personal and exceptionally universal.." These prose-poem reflections are Carr's first volume (unless you count his contributions to the pioneering late-'60s Tara Telephone collective and the broadsheet "The Book of Invasions." Perhaps that name, and his, sound familiar?

That album is one of the classics of modern Irish music. Carr was the drummer and lyricist for the 1970s electric folk band Horslips, Later, his sports commentary, and/or his journalism on the air and in print via Dublin has kept him in the media spotlight. More about his book can be found via the publisher: "Seven Towers". The image of Carr's from a video of his reading a selection from the collection, at "Eamon Carr@Balcony TV.ie"

Seán Dunne's "The Road to Silence": Book Review

The late poet Seán Dunne wrote this memoir of his ambivalence with Irish Catholicism in 1994, the year before his unexpected death at 39. As he was but five years older than me, I confess much identification with his struggles to recognize the spiritual quest that persists within one agnostically matured. He's very fair about the complex legacy of the Church for the Irish, the impact that the void within can leave that neither Marxism nor atheism can assuage, and the challenge of separating one's search for meaning-- perhaps within a Catholic framework-- from one's often absent, or departed, belief in its doctrines.

Reading his difficulties, they mirrored my own; so did his readings: Simone Weil, Francis Stuart, Wittgenstein, Carthusians, Fiona MacCarthy's biography of Eric Gill, his counterpart the London-Welsh poet-artist David Jones, and Thomas Merton. Dunne to his credit didn't favor the monk's earlier, more "triumphalist" writings; he first heard of Zen by way of Merton, as I suppose many of us brought up Catholic have. Intriguingly, he finds himself wandering closer to not the need for surety, but for silence, "the opposite of the sociological clamour." (54) Such a meeting may have dangers: "too much talk can be a form of evasion. Eloquence can hide more than it reveals. In such instances, silence is an unwanted form of confrontation." (55) He will eventually learn from the Rule of Benedict its first word, the command to "listen."

He turns from a 1970s student immersion with Marxists, who leave within for him only a void that all their theories cannot fill, and for a time sits silently at local Quaker services. Not as an adherent, but as an "attender." I've felt a similar admiration for these Protestants, whereas their more numerous factions, from my jaundiced if post-Vatican II upbringing, unreasonably leave me suspicious of the prejudices of their forebears against my own insular close-minded lot! The Society of Friends earned a sterling record early on among even such Catholics for their generosity during the Famine, and their pacifist conviction and moral courage do seem an acceptable exception to the historical and/or stereotypical rule! Their cousins, the Mennonites, similarly impressed Layne and me when we visited Canada.

At the Trappist monastery of Mount Mellaray, this aspiring journalist found himself going beyond the usual story when he returned to stay in what was a once barren landscape. Restless and edgy, he has a temperament that's long sought solace, that conveys "systems of thought that gave structure and sense to life." (21) Marxism satisfies the intellect but starves the soul; Humanism beckons, but can it alone fill the emptiness left by the ebbing of a childhood faith? His young self learned never to draw beyond clumsy figures and shapes; as a mature man, he sees that his inability to sketch nuanced, believable portrayals has its analogy in a faith that we keep the rest of our lives still locked "within a child's framework, lacking any trace of adult intellect." (19-20) He pushes aside his cradle Catholicism. But, what can replace it in a modern person's desperation to still place the need for guidance foremost, even after the explanations of religious dogma have been discarded?

At Melleray, these questions still raging for years, in 1984 he enters the once lunar atmosphere filled by a now nourishing ambiance, to understand, with maturity, what a thirty-year-old can learn from the monastically enriched landscape. "A rose does not preach. It simply spreads its fragrance"-- the guestmaster's words. Guests make the bed for the next visitor. No invoices; a guest pays anonymously in an envelope what he can, or thinks he should.

Earlier Dunne cites the myth that "monks sleep in their coffins" in the passage from Joyce's "The Dead" when Mrs Malins tells of her son's impending visit to Melleray; oddly, Dunne does not include the musings that precede this urban legend:

The table then spoke of Mount Melleray, how bracing the air was down there, how hospitable the monks were and how they never asked for a penny-piece from their guests.

"And do you mean to say," asked Mr. Browne incredulously, "that a chap can go down there and put up there as if it were a hotel and live on the fat of the land and then come away without paying anything?"

"O, most people give some donation to the monastery when they leave." said Mary Jane.

"I wish we had an institution like that in our Church," said Mr. Browne candidly.

Beyond such facile relegations of the spiritual quest by contemporaries (a century ago as now) as if but papal priestcraft, Dunne seeks a deeper meaning. Patiently, he comes into Melleray with his agnosticism sharpened. He does not try to mold what he sees into what he thinks he should see. He waits, and listens there to himself.

"At its deepest, it was far from my old arguments. It transcended my conflict with the institutional church. It was rooted in prayer and silence rather than in rules and strictures. Oddly, I had little trouble with the idea of prayer and a great deal of trouble with the intellectual idea of God. I still felt that in quiet prayer some resonant communication took place. As time went on, it moved beyond words and ended in the heart of silence." (47)

Those of his profession can resemble his hosts: "Like certain writers, the monks live at an angle to that world, but are not contemptuous of it." (53) As he stays there, he finds himself as a nervous man now unsettled: "my clichés of opposition were crumbling. At its mildest, this was uncomfortable since the aggressive mental framework of years was falling apart." (57) He recalls Simone Weil's differentiation between the Church as a "social structure" and its sacral core. This guides him into an agnostic's acceptance of the sacramentality, the change that the holy can exert upon the natural and the human realms both. "Ordinary time," as the Church calls the calendar most times, fuses the mundane with the mystical, and in the monastery this can be sensed with greater force and power.

Life is confronted rather than evaded under the strictures of silence and routine. Romantic illusions wither fast under the scrutiny of bare truth. Dunne cites Patrick Leigh Fermor's wonderful (also reviewed by me) "A Time to Keep Silence," that monasticism is only useless if one rejects the efficacy of prayer.

As with the Irish language, so with its Catholicism; Dunne compares their "extraordinary force that had been revived with enthusiasm and then murdered by narrow-mindedness as it became allied with negative forces." (63-64) Now, poets resurrected the savvy, the sapience, the sap within Irish, and Dunne urges the same rediscovery of the energy latent within Catholicism. He has found "quiet in myself. It was a long way from my anger with sermons on Sunday or my innumerable arguments with Catholicism." (64) Yet, I wondered as I read, such a retreat experience resembles the excited contentment of one when on vacation, or first in love: a feeling that one thinks finally, this time, will truly outlast monotony and habit.

Dunne returns to Melleray each year, but cannot give over to practice as a Catholic. His search continues. Working in Paris on a book set there, he finds the church of St. Gervais, in the old Jewish quarter behind Notre-Dame of the Marais. He attends a ceremony there. "One of the more exciting moments in making a poem occurs when dozens of words are hurled away and the correct one is suddenly found." (68) That resembled his experience at this church.

The church is run by an urban order founded in 1975 by a French hermit back from the Sahara, "Les Fraternités Monastiques de Jerusalem;" a spin-off of the Desert Fathers who return to rather than flee the city as the first monks had. They combine Byzantine and Judaic elements into the Roman mass. In such a community, Dunne learns that liturgical and monastic spaces can merge with social ones to revive a city. "The best of them begin in an interior space that has been shaped by silence and prayer." (69)

He learns to carry about his silent space within him as he lives in the heart of Paris. Contemplation marries activity: perhaps now he learns the lesson that Benedict's Rule sought to inculcate; the difference is that Dunne stays in the metropolis that Benedict and Anthony, Bruno and Bernard, deRance and Charles de Foucauld all had to flee for their own calling. His encounter "would remain in my memory with the force of an icon in a quiet room."

This brief, eighty-page, memoir carries with it considerable weight. As a poet working in prose, Dunne captures the simplicity of a complex subject accurately.He notes that as with politics, religion carries the deadness of jargon and the fervor of evangelists. Both weary him. He tires too of the countercultural cant that pushes religion into as a category as "predictable and dated as the agenda to which it is opposed." (70-71) Such a neurosis, Dunne reflects, opens when "childish involvement" breaks with "adult resentment": his gap was only closed after his visit to Melleray.

His temperament, like mine, cannot be long rule-driven. Dunne keeps his distance from practice, but he understands finally his interior experience that defies the "occasional absurdities of the church as a social entity," and in the Church he finds both dullness on its exterior at present and an appealing "mystery and love" that endure within its deeper core. He later visits the Dzogchen Beara Tibetan center in West Cork. "I drew a lot from the Buddhist idea of constant change and impermanence and saw the relevance of such a belief to the the changes in my own temperament and search." (71)

He likes factions that counter the norm. Contemplatives disdain money or status. They reduce the noise we live in daily. They may be more faithful to Marx's appeal to join the intellect's work with that of the body's demands. They try to step outside time. They make silence tactile. Their quiet does not create barriers or display disdain. "Monastic silence is closer to the quiet of lovers." (74)

Monks follow an ancient craft few men can master. Monotony wears most down. Yet, many on the outside of the cloister persist in an irrational attraction towards such a discipline. Their marginality, perhaps, keeps them iconically appealing, in a way that Merton near his death in '68 compared with hippies: "we are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being." (qtd. 76)

Dunne reflects how monks rise when day has not yet come; the hour when many people die. "The eternal silence of those infinite spaces" around and above us, as he recalls from Pascal, terrifies us. A few take on this space and force themselves to live within what the rest of us shout over or shut out. Perhaps those whom the world demeans find a better rhythm for the spirit within us all. [Review posted in edited form to Amazon US 5/1/09.]

P.S. I note that as he concludes in this short memoir, Dunne discusses the writings of 17 c. Matsuo Basho, who wandered across Japan. The poet compares Basho's residence bought in 1693 on Tokyo's edge with an imaginary cell at Timoleague's ruined abbey in Co. Cork-- a region that Dunne knew well in his verse and literary anthologies. He praises the "miracle of small, ordinary tasks and things" seen by Basho. Two pilgrims, separated over centuries and islands. Now, perhaps their journeys are extended between other pages, fifteen years after Dunne's account. The Horslips percussionist-poet-lyricist and himself journalist (and d.j.) Éamon Carr last year published "The Origami Crow," connecting his World Cup coverage in Japan 2002 with this poet's musings-- some say Basho invented haiku.

P.P.S. Having meant to read Dunne's account years ago and then having forgotten due to its scarcity in the U.S. (New Island Press, Dublin, 7 euro), I thank Professor Ben Howard for reminding me of the Dzogchen Beara passage. He discusses Basho in relation to Michael Longley and Ciaran Carson; his 2005 "An Sionnach" essay on recent Irish poets' Buddhist themes begins by citing Dunne's visit. That reflection may mesh well, one turn deserving another, with Mr. Carr's soccer quest that takes the Dublin-based sportswriter to a transformed yet perhaps resonant Basho-land.

Dr. Druid: Celtic Tibetan Buddhist Superhero!

No April Fool! Via my "Celtic Buddhist" research. Not even this tiny sect's practitioners of "Crazy Heart" dharma may've envisioned this fusion. "Religious Affiliations of Comic Book Characters" tells how Dr. Anthony Ludgate Druid, Harvard Med grad, psychiatrist, "minor telepath, and magician" after study with an ailing lama then emerged from seclusion. He unleashed his one-two punch of Tibetan arcana laced with Celtic lore.

Thus, mirabile dictu, by meditation and levitation he melds yogic mastery with shape-shifting and nature-transforming runic skills. "Possessing the racial memories of his Celtic ancestors, Doctor Druid employs the knowledge and skills of the ancient Druids after whom he was named." He's a pre-cog, employing astrology to suss out-- at least for four installments-- the powers that oppose him. Which are considerable, given that Hellstorm son of Satan's his foe. That green goddess you see here emblazoned may be Nekra, who may be his nemesis.

I enjoy the host site Adherents.com. I found there a well-annotated list a while back of SF & Fantasy-related titles dealing with Tibet. What a great conjunction of sheer fun and critical diligence.

Image: All four covers from Marvel's 2007 series suitable for framing. Here's #4 displayed for its lysergic luminosity, its tattooed colleen, and those swirling warp-spasms. Horslips would've loved this, especially Éamon Carr who sought this shotgun marriage (in the no-on-Prop 8 sense? Or highland fling?) between Captain America and Cúchullain, among a credal cast of ever expanding and exceedingly ecumenical characters. I recall their "Tracks from the Vaults" LP cover, too.

Essentially Welsh Pop Music?

Here's my latest contribution to the AmeriCymru discussion forum about Welsh Rock Music, or its lack. Dave Martin posted lamenting how derivative Welsh bands sound. I earlier commented asking if there's any way ultimately to make a Celtic-language sung pop-rock music true to its cultural roots, if so many groups parrot the latest sounds from Anglo-American centers of production.

Dave Martin, I know what you mean, even sober as I am (now!). What Sarah Hill in her book [ "Blerwytirhwng:" See my review on Amazon and this blog] struggles with and to me does not articulate fully is how you take reggae, post-punk, folk rock, or psychedelia and infuse them with an undeniably Welsh essence. That exists (I'd suggest tentatively as an outsider looking in hearing the music but without intimate connection with Cymru I confess-- that's why I am here to listen and learn) in snatches here and there when I hear in what's sung in Cymraeg a whiff of a deeper link to the land and mythos and hiraeth. But, I too am trapped as a faraway fan, like those art schoolers who founded folk rock bands in Britain in the later 60s; I am trying to romanticize gwerin from my urban perch.

Ireland has, if I may compare, a solid trad scene, of course, but they have failed to produce any musicians able to jump from the trad to the pop or rock while sticking to a Celtic language. I have a new wave record in Irish that's dreck. I think it was the only one of its genre ever made.

Horslips in the 70s went back and forth between electric folk, trad, and hard-rock but they emulated in the end the slick West Coast El Lay studio sound and their success foundered as they tried to match Jethro Tull's arena anthems. Liam Ó Maonlaí on "Rian" (Hothouse Flowers), Iarla Ó Líonaird (on Peter Gabriel's label, tellingly), and Peadar Ó Riada on his two records in the mid-90s to my limited knowledge came closest to integrating a complex world-music inspired approach into their trad, blended with an indie-label rockish eclecticism. This seemed the most promising direction, but this also can dissolve seductively into meaningful moans above mushy synths and flutes stacked atop didgeridoos and tribal drums. (See: Peter Gabriel.)

Sorry to sound like the wannabee rock critic, but I concur with Dave's complaint here: there's a persistent difficulty in locating a tangible substance in music from Wales as truly different. You can't stick lyrics in another language atop the same old pop or folk or rock groove from Anglo-American conventions, and claim some triumph for Celtic reclamation of culture. This remains the problem with asserting there's some essential (that adjective again) difference in Welsh-language music that follows London or LA-based trends. Not sure if this will ever happen for anybody in the Celtic lands making music in the wake of the domination of the international pop conglomerate that shapes and segregates and reproduces our market-tested tunes.

Yet, one last comment. Hill notes how long the Welsh-pop evolution took; there was not a professional rock-pop band able to survive on their music alone until well into the 70s, and as long for a full LP! The whole pop music scene took much longer to evolve in Wales, whether folk and pop in the 60s, rock in the 70s, or punk and reggae in the 80s. The organic sound of The Band that Dave admires itself took patience, years of roadhouse gigs, and smart guys' exposure to lots of earlier, diverse, obscure music before it melded at Big Pink. So, perhaps the blend we're denying may take longer still to percolate into a "truly" Welsh medium of expression?

This poster by Ankst head honcho Emyr Glyn Williams I found at the Ankst homepage, Cardiff's epicenter for Welsh-language indie rock. John Cale'd love this! Andy needs no intro. His rival Saunders Lewis may be regarded by lefties as a Catholic Action Française Plaid Cymru Cymraeg Don Quixote, but the more I read of/about him, the more I admire his principles. More on him? See my post a year back about his Penyberth 1936 protest with D.J. Williams & Lewis Valentine. (If I ever get that pending ILL loan for Dafydd Jenkins' "A Nation on Trial," I'll be able to tell you more about Lewis, especially his leading role in the real-life courtroom case after Tân yn Llŷn.)

Internet Irish Radio, Éamon Carr & "Breakfast on Pluto."

I received a note-- and spreadsheet-- of CDs that my friend up in San Francisco Lee Templeton's culling from her discs played on her Internet radio station on 365 live, "One Night at McSorley's". None that I needed, including one from some "Liverpool club band" named after a bug. Yet, her typical largess, for she has provided me with many examples of her expertise in matters related to music, Ireland, literature, and their happy overlaps, reminded me to do the same. So, a new year's resolution for you all to give her a listen.

I see in today's Los Angeles Times an item she and my wife would both like: a Sanyo R227 half the size of a breadloaf, but able to pull in Internet Radio without a computer. My wife's disheartened by the demise of her painstakingly prepared Yahoo Launchcast station, which will cease to exist. I recall Miss Templeton's comments last year about her own Come Back Horslips guestbook-site at Yahoo which I think found a similar fate. (My Yahoo groups too have either faded or gone one without me; I kept getting bounced off them by rogue e-mail glitches.) But, you can link at the right hand list here to both her CBH blog and her own logically titled "Templeton Chronicles" that have replaced the CBH archives on Blogger. Her reports from her visit to Ireland and Britain this past summer were particularly entertaining, and she's transferring them to her blog after regaling a few of us with them as e-mails earlier last year. She also has a Facebook and YouTube site. Layne tells me I need to promote myself on the former and I did not even know of the latter as an option for individuals. But, I am busy enough off-line-- and with reading enough to generated entries for this little blog and on Amazon.

The YouTube shout-out also spurs me to make room soon on my shelf of what to read next for the recent book (which I obtained via LT) by Horslips' percussionist (he's more than a drummer; check out his bodhran and bones!) Éamon Carr. You can see his videos of his recitals from it on YT. He could be said to have pioneered such presentations in his 1960s-era Beat travels and his innovative poetry-performance-musical revue that preceded Horslips, Dublin's countercultural hotline Tara Telephone. I wish I could have heard them. Visit her informative website: "Tara Telephone: An Archival History".

Carr's a longtime commentator on the radio and in print of sports, music, and culture. He possesses a wiry grace and a commanding presence. His command of an audience, although I've only witnessed it via video clips, must be memorable. His poetry collection, "Origami Crow," compares the poet Basho's periginations with Carr's visit to Japan during the 2004 ill-fated Irish team's World Cup debacle. Out of such collisions comes inspiration. This weekend, I finished (for a review to actually appear in print!) Michael Parker's two-volume "Northern Irish Literature" history-criticism, and when I found Derek Mahon's 1975 poem "The Snow Party" cited with its own treatment of Basho (1644-94) with an endnote about how he gave up his samurai court's charms for his own wandering, I remembered Carr and wondered if he knew of this Irish poetic champion composed. I'm practically certain that he does.

The juxtapositions of pop music and literature Carr himself delightedly charted on record and in concert also recall another connection. The other night, Layne brought home "Breakfast on Pluto." One of the two novels by Pat McCabe I like, despite LT's defense of "The Dead School" (in which the band appeared-- see my article here: "Horslips in Irish Literary and Musical Culture") as tied for a novel she'd rescue from a burning room. Funny enough, only my McCabe picks, "The Butcher Boy" and "BOP," made it to the screen. More black humor, my guess.

Gavin Friday appears in a great send-up of the glam scene as Billy Hatchett with his Mohawks. I won't give away Kitten's efforts to further the band's career in the dancehalls of Cavan, but the scene captures well the mix of panache and (lovable lack of?) flair that must have been part of many a rural night's meat-and-spuds early-70s rock once that preference finally replaced for the youngsters the showbands-- while continuing that genre's venerable if challenged on-stage theatrics. The episode made me think of Horslips, in their own van on dark and dangerously unapproved roads near the Border, trying to capture the likes of "The Táin" for punters in Clones or Termonfeckon. This reverie in turn prompted a mental note to ask Miss T. why Horslips had not been featured in the fine soundtrack, full of obscurities and hits from the mid-70s. Layne especially loved hearing Bobby Goldsboro's wretched "Honey" in key scenes.

Neil Jordan directed it efficiently. Despite the accents and mumbling obscuring a few subplot points regarding the gunrunning 'RA, it managed to wind up more life affirming than I'd expected. The aftermath of a pub bombing in London's filmed in a manner that summons up what a survivor might have felt rather than a bystander, and this distinction sharpens the shock. The movie might have benefitted from such brutality, or it may not. The tendency appears to be to hold back in the film, whereas I sensed the novel as more relentlessly grim.

Still, I don't think it did very well at the box office; I recall it barely showing in L.A. compared to the acclaim given "The Butcher Boy." Maybe we needed Sinéad O'Connor back for a reprise in her role as the Virgin? Again, if wearingly, the battering priests and the repressed males stalk and skulk reliably amidst the pubs and parlors. Still, the babies keep getting made, as Kitten does embody, if at first trapped in the wrong fashions.

After mulling albeit heterosexually a couple of weeks ago during "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" about how darn pretty Cillian Murphy is, his cross-dressing turn as Patrick "Kitten" Braden works well. He's a talent, no doubt. His voice soothes in the right tone for such a young man; it reminded me of similarly "at-risk youth" who worked the streets with whom I taught and listened to in Hollywood. The film captures the savagery of the Troubles perhaps too obliquely for an international audience, but Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea do their best in underwritten roles; I also liked, if that's the word, Bryan Ferry's sinister cameo although Brendan Gleeson's manic character out of a demented Wonderland seems to have been pared too closely down in the editing room.

Reviewed by me as a novel before my blog started on Amazon US, by the way, just when the film was slated to soon appear, the narrative's careening path between sanity and madness as a filmed exploration of loneliness and longing becomes somewhat less dismal, thankfully. As with BB, the narrative's familiar, perhaps too much so, as with all the McCabe I've read. He's determined to push to collapse fragile psyches under the assault of prejudiced market-town Ireland. I'm not sure, given the rapid collapse of Catholic mores there, how much longer he can keep up this motif; people younger than me, and me born but about seven years after him, will find this milieu as remote as we do Joyce's Dublin. Or, hippie Dublin.

Image: "A Tale of Love" by Éamon Carr & Two Bare Feet One foot must be Jim Fitzpatrick? Part of a Summer of Love exhibition at the Tate.

My Folk-Rock Shortlist

Fifth and for now the final installment of my recommendations, but with more concision, I (vainly) promise. I lack the wallet big enough to reward my curiosity. I'd place Fairport Convention first, since they grafted the British branch, much as The Byrds had the American varietal a few years before. I prefer Fairport and their own offshoot, Steeleye Span, to the Yankee sounds, since I gravitate to traditional Irish and English music rather than country, western, or bluegrass. So, this will be a perspective skewed across the Atlantic.

Fairport's June '68 début, more in line with Jefferson Airplane or even the Mamas & the Papas to some critics' ears, lacks what I sense as the flimsy, ditzy inattention of those West Coast lightweights. Judy Dyble, their first singer (later briefly with Trader Horne), provides a more understated, less dramatic voice than Sandy Denny would. However, this does not undermine the well-arranged softer tracks and it enhances the more serpentine, instrumentally complex tunes that hint at what Richard Thompson and his mates, barely out of their teens, improved upon with January 1969's "What We Did On Our Holidays," my favorite LP of this genre.

It's not quite folk-rock in the sense that July's "Unhalfbricking" and notably December's "Liege & Lief" would be, not as immersed into the Child ballads and longer epics that the band began to create, re-work, and energize. Imagine: one year, three LPs, a trajectory in a year and a half under producer Joe Boyd and engineer John Wood that astonishes me by its speed and flair, by kids probably averaging twenty years in age. As punk would do a half-dozen years later by other fresh-faced, if shorter-haired youths, so folk-rock sprouted like a flourescent weed through the greyness of what passed for the counterculture's commercialization into clunky satire, simpering singalongs, and pompous sentiment.

In contrast, "Holidays" possesses a wistful ambiance that lets you imagine how a batch of Muswell Hill (hello Kinks!) flatmates shared their youthful vision of an English indigenous music, amplified (see the chalk cover drawing), buzzing with intelligence, fun, and invention. It's a diverse assortment of tracks, yet, unlike many of the psychedelic LPs that I reviewed two days ago on that shortlist here, "Holidays" keeps a flow from initial songs ("Mr. Lacey" I tend to skip as too lightweight, but any song with a vacuum cleaner solo is worth hearing once) that address the cheekiness of their generation into deeper wanderings along shadier paths into melancholy-- where Denny, Thompson, and friends-- and the band, named after their house, generates their camaraderie into these warm grooves-- would collectively make in a couple of years three amazingly confident, yet somehow winningly casual, albums of folkish charm, traditionally infused structures, and rock enthusiasm. Like the Byrds, they cover Dylan well, and I prefer hearing these two groups interpret His Bobness to the master gnomic vatic oracle himself (same with Leonard Cohen covers, or the college rockers who take the Velvets and run with 'em endlessly in search of the perfect sound forever repeating its riffs.)

By "Unhalfbricking," you can see where the band's going. This album, usually ranked a notch above "Holidays," grabs me less tightly, but it's a better choice for beginners: more of Denny's full-on emotion, more of Simon Nicol and Richard Thompson's interwoven gnarled riffs. With "Liege," issued after tragedy struck and original drummer Martin Lamble's death, his replacement Dave Mattacks provided Ashley Hutchings' bass with a rhythm section to me rivalling Sly & Robbie for reggae fans, of which I am not, but I give credit where it's due for a tight pair able to play off endlessly what to the uninformed sounds like a rigid, formulaic, or repetitive song tradition. To me, that's the signature of musical genius, and for folk-rock, this band stumbled upon the key that unlocked the door to the treasures of the archives.

That fourth LP's lionized for its monolithic position. Not having the "Liege & Leif" remaster, perhaps it sounds to me still rather tentative in parts. But, "Matty Groves" finally shows the epic quality at its best, bettering for me "Genesis Hall" and "A Sailor's Life" on the previous LP as the folkier foundation gave way to a earthier British sensibility that electrifies this traditional tale. The "Medley" arranged by skilled fiddler Dave Swarbrick jolts you with its attack, and this remains for me the band's finest instrumental. Denny's voice grates and chafes rather than soothes when she takes command, and I find it intriguing that this would be her last record with the band.

At least until another one later in the '70s; the band suffered always from instability and sudden departures-- yet "Full House" with Thompson having to take on vocals, and the live "House Full" both hold up admirably-- and soon only one, and then none of the founders would remain in what became an institution, yet like old blues or jazz line-ups more of a way of making music than a stable of stalwarts. They still meet and re-unite annually at Cropredy, which emphasizes the fluidity and fellowship at the core, paradoxically, of this fluctuating array of the leaders of British electric folk. This term, used by Britta Sweers in her recent, Oxford U.P. study of the tradition, is one I prefer to folk-rock, which for me keeps the music too connected to the likes of Donovan, Dylan, or Loggins & Messina for that matter. Plugging in, as the cover of "Holidays" depicts, keeps this genre alive in ways that acoustic modes cannot sustain. It ramps up the sex, the bluster, the joy, and the rage of the lyrics, the long centuries of hatreds and exiles and defeats and embraces of the ballad tradition, and the communal release of such emotion felt in village pubs and on green commons thousands of times each season and feastday and market in Britain for so many years.

Steeleye Span broke off of Fairport. Denny left for a solo career-- her album as a sort-of leader of Fotheringay is worthwhile, although the title track for me is best heard as the poignant, forceful opening of "Holidays." Hutchings also departed, for a purer muse. His bandmates typically sent him up for this, as he was supposedly the most rock-n-roll of the line-up, although soon he scoured the Cecil Sharp Archives in search of traditional tunes to arrange. Before he too left the band he would found, Steeleye, he showed what those committed to a less pop-oriented, more electric-folk direction would leave behind as what for me represent the pinnacle of a less-heralded but more rewarding sight: what clever, restless rockers could do when left totally free to re-imagine how to arrange and expand traditional melodies.

Hutchings knew whom to recruit. Terry Woods, future Pogue, back in 1970 ex-Sweeney's Men, a short-lived supergroup of future members of Planxty and the then-birthing revival of the Irish trad scene, was more steeped in Appalachian and bluegrass styles. He and his then-wife, Gay, entered the line-up along with, or what turned out to be opposite, another prominent couple, the vocal duo of Maddy Prior and Tim Hart, who had already years of experience in the English folk clubs. Their rural stint while recording "Hark! The Village Wait" apparently led to those familiar tensions, but the less mellifluous, more raspy vocals of Terry make appealing contrasts with the smoother deliveries of the other three singers. The electronic mode of delivery somehow exaggerates the backwoods, half-hewn quality of the fiddles, drums (played by the then-current Mattacks and Fairport & Pentangle, Jethro Tull & Denny, Fotheringay's & ugh Cat Stevens' future percussionist Gerry Conway-- one example of the tightly-knit if often feuding, then reuniting clan of British folk-rockers-- guitars, and bass well.

With its title from the Wren Boys' St Stephen's Day tradition, itself a faint echo of paganism enduring into the island's Christianized era through our own secularizing centuries, "Please to See the King" lacks the drums but, with Hart & Prior's practiced pairing now enhanced by Peter Knight's fiddle and leading folk guitarist Martin Carthy's prowess with playing and singing, this album betters its predecessor. Partially due to this 1971 line-up, partially due to the experience perhaps in getting over the anxieties of the début, but Hutchings and his partners shine. This shows, as he intended, what a band like Fairport might have matured into if they had gone all-trad with their sources, and dropped Dylan, Joni, or the Byrds, for example, in pursuit of a more venerable muse, one step closer to the mother lode for any 60s folkie anyway.

The music also gains a purity for its separation, as has been commented perhaps not entirely accurately in Thompson's own guitar craft, from American blues. Hutchings reportedly found himself amused when his folkier (of course) bandmates recorded (you can find it on the remaster) Buddy Holly's "Rave On" a capella to needle their former rocker's earnest conversion to folk. "Tyger" Hutchings' determination, seen in his own countenance when you compare his photos on Steeleye albums to the earlier ones from Fairport, also illustrates his fashion sense, as this Londoner begins to dress as if he stepped out of Hardy's Wessex. A place too where the real, fading English ruralism could be returned to and enjoyed, even if hard to find on a real map of the realm's Southwest. This-- as with the back-to-nature movement increasing by 1969 among disillusioned or illusioned idealistic hippies and intellectuals-- highlights Steeleye's plan, to return to its own island's wellsprings to draw up new sparkling quaffs of danceable, rousing, and haunting reminders for toasts and hail-fellow-well mets. Longhairs need not turn away from the past when it came to celebrations or commemorations of lust, betrayal, protest, lore-- or inebriation.

Lots of albums followed for both Fairport and Steeleye. The former band never regained its peak, but coasts along respectably now into its fourth decade as a looser gathering of like-minded enthusiasts, a good position that joins fans with members, spinning off side projects and giving electric folkies a chance to split off and coalesce and regroup accordingly. Steeleye, on the other hand, lasted with the "Please" line-up only for the next year's "Ten Man Mop." The first three albums with a bonus track, all cleaned up impressively, can be procured nowadays as "The Lark in the Morning."

Individual songs on these albums, for me, blur together more. Instrumental medleys mingling with covers of original tunes at this stage, but they captivate you by the considerable power of Prior's range of characters in her articulation and coloration, sharpened by Hart and Carthy's own years of living lives as if lovers, truants, criminals, and wooers. The singers draw you in to witness the dramatic scenes that many of these traditional songs express, the soap operas and reality TV of their day, scripted as vividly three hundred years ago, off broadsheets declaimed by wandering buskers or hawked in lurid chapbooks peddled at the town(e) fair(e).

Compilations and live discs for Fairport and Steeleye threaten to outnumber studio releases, attesting to the faithful followers of both; Steeleye's mid-70s breakthrough onto the charts gave them a harder-rocking, more traditionally-inspired than inspired traditional set of tunes. Many of the albums during their hitmaking, such as it was, period stay listenable today, and particular selections can dazzle. Yet, they tended to veer too far, pushed by Bob Johnson's amps into posing as arena-rockers in a catch-up to Tull, or dangerous forays into cuteness such as Peter Sellers' guest turn on ukelele or overly-slick couplings of jinglesque knob-twiddling with fiddle-guitar assaults that threatened to weary rather than warm.

But they managed, despite marked excess in the steroid-pumped guitar by then in a line-up long absent of Carthy (who idiosyncratically returned at the end of the mid-70s track record of successes with accordionist John Kirkpatrick for the patchier "Storm Force Ten"), to maintain what I would argue an impressive, commercialized consistency until punk's media blitz did them in. Unfairly, but the band needed a break, it seemed, from touring. Therefore, by the end of the '70s, they faded themselves back to fewer gigs, and Fairport levels of post-Liege steadiness farther away from the arenas, which probably turned out for the better.

This brings me to Horslips, who began their career opening for Steeleye and closed their own 1970s career matching them with their own capitulation under the pressure of New Wave. Turn to Lee Templeton's Come Back Horslips for all you'd ever want to know. Or my own article if you want a more academic-meets-literary overview that incorporates many of the insights from CBH and related media links: Horslips in Irish Musical & Literary Culture. I've expounded in my Amazon US reviews, blog entries here, and on CBH about this group's records and their impact.

Suffice to say that this often-praised, often-flamboyant (and the band always winked its ten eyes at its own five-part blarney) band created for me some of the catchiest lyrical and musical moments of my young adulthood, when I finally heard the swirling music I'd only read about as it swept the charts over there, a bold concatenation of psychedelic hard rock, progressive folk, and traditional motifs. My three recommendations: 1972's début "Happy To Meet, Sorry To Part" starts it all, but it's more experimental and perhaps a bit hesitant compared to '73's ballsy follow-up, "The Táin". The concept album may be a dreaded identifier, but the unity of narrative and ideas on "The Book of Invasions: A Celtic Symphony" in 1976 speaks eloquently for a native Irish rock tradition akin to what Hutchings created for another island nearby.

What about other Irish groups worthy of the name, pre-Pogues and their London punk blend with the other island's legacies? There aren't any equals, far as I can tell. Pentangle, whose "Basket of Light" I've always trumpeted, is sometimes as close to acoustic jazz (and believe me, that noun's one I avoid about as often as "algebra" in my daily life) as it is to any rock methodology. This album can be moody, brooding, and insistent, yet it sounds distant from even Fairport, as if hermetically irrigated by its pre-Dylan, hushed 1962 coffeehouse milieu. The album unfolds removed from the moratoriums, the drug raids, the posturing of the Stones, the regrouping of the Beatles, and the passing freak shows on the streets of the capital. Like Denny and Thompson-- and with bassist Danny Thompson no less, Pentangle does not fit neatly into an electric folk tradition, being more loyal-- and this is not a negative judgment-- to its already matured singer-songwriters' own dignity and its session-man vibes. It fits cozy confines of a more conservatively carpentered niche within popular music.

Diving back into hazy English streets, the tribal ravings of early 70s Comus remain unheard by me; I do not know much about Lindisfarne, compared to the CBHers even. Welsh eclectics Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, with "The Blue Trees" and "Sleep/ Holiday" in their post-acid phase, typify what happened as bedroom-studio punks and smart misfits learned how to turn down the guitar and turn up the fiddle, to tuneful results, but I am not sure that this any more than what I admit's often an assured and nimble response to 1977 as "Songs From the Wood" from supposed dinosaurs Jethro Tull, can be reliably classified as electric-folk.

I'd add on a quick tangent: the intermittently (I'm a harsh critic) stunning "Stand Up" by an earlier, stalwart, and gifted line-up before Ian Anderson's ego ballooned so large-- you still have a band on the cover, for instance. Praised in the Irish collection of memoirs "My Generation" by Barry Devlin, bassist of Horslips, and seconded by me, this wanders still into the jazzier nature of their début, but it shows perhaps unwittingly how Martin Barre's searing guitar, Glenn Cornick's bass and Barriemore Barlow's drums locked into interweaving chords and knotted progressions that make prog-rock, when as concise and memorable as this, not only bearable but desirable. Delightful bits of hummable happiness lurk; far less bombast than what "Aqualung" engendered. There's also that innocence from 1969 that they share with Fairport: the discovery of wonder in song.

Later, Dave Pegg of post-Sandy Fairport would join Tull. It took nearly a decade after Tull's triumph for recorded proof that the younger crowd could match the stadium prog-folk-rockers when it came to Marshalls turned to eleven in the service of rebellion. Veteran punks in the Pogues decided to bridge this supposed gap between Rotten and Child, Captain O'Neill's collection of Irish song and whoever could not stand a system where popular entertainment meant turning on the radio to endure The Captain & Tennille. Shane MacGowan and his eager London-Irish pals were joined by veteran folkie Terry Woods. For me, album number two became their best moment. It's not for nothing that the "If I Should Fall From Grace With God" cover made room for James Joyce as the eighth member of the band.

While these hybrids earn their merit, their CDs may rest wobbily on any shelf bookended by long rows of Fairport and Steeleye. These two bands remain, far more centrally than in other styles of music I've been pontificating upon the last three days, central to their own genre. Lee Templeton of Come Back Horslips renown emphasized in conversation with me the other day that unlike punk and psych, folk falls back upon the repertoire, and as many fans keep the music faithful to its origins as those who wish to plug in electric bouzoukis. (I saw this Greek import to Celtic folk, thanks to Johnny Moynihan and then Andy Irvine, both once in Planxty and Sweeney's Men back in the mid-60s, credited the other day in a footnote as an "Irish" instrument. So have the accordion, guitar, fiddle in their own stead become hibernized.) Yet many audiences liberated by punk or psych to tear down convention cannot find as easy a break within a genre that finds nourishment from a return to and a renewal of its past centuries of lore whether memorialized in a local place name or a lurid tale.

The centrifugal pull of the archives lured Ashley Hutchings away from being taken by the sounds of Haight-Ashbury and the Sunset Strip into the Cecil Sharp manuscripts and Child ballads. As with the late 60s, so now. Folk-rock appears to keep the British branch of the genre gravitating back to their venerable and prolific and often nearly forgotten by now founders. Bands pursue this electric muse on a smaller scale, at festivals and in bars, but perhaps it inherits the folk scene's own intimacy. Audiences respond to this music in a more organic, less glitzy setting, after all. It's the place from where it emerges: geared more to pub than palace.

Folk-rock with a few exceptions sticks to the county fair, Renaissance Fair(e)TM, country festival, city basement itinerary. Certainly a humbler routine than the garish psychedelic or gobbing (post)punk and their respective sold-out international tours by heirs like Pink Floyd or The Cure. By its own modesty and small-scale pleasures, electric folk satisfies an audience happier-- as I am I realize typing this on a much-awaited vacation in a recliner in a cabin under the redwoods-- with what Fairport sang about, in a Richard Farina cover, as "The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood." And, notwithstanding the frequent causes for misogyny that permeate the repertoire of folkies, my fetching sisters.

Turning back to cities where folkies tend to sulk, the rowdier punks crowd the clubs and enter the studios. This can be heard within the protests of Oysterband, who began in the 1970s as far more purist in the Hutchings camp. Then, they abandoned dance tunes for a snappy political delivery of spirited folk-rock in an aggressive, literate style, show them perhaps closer to a less C&W, more pub-meets-soapbox shouting Mekons. The Mekons, throughout their endless career of thirty years, had early on, around 1980, tried out fiddles to good effect, and while they get too Americana-rootsy for me often mid-80s, they know how to leaven the hoedowns with the reels. Their most recent album to date, "Natural," displays them nosing about truffles more acoustic, chthonic (spell-check alert, but this derives from the fine Greek word favored I bet in crosswords, y'know). Doggedly anti-Establishment, socialist Morris meets Morris dance, they declaim raggedly alternative leftist utopian longings.

The whole punk-folk axis stretched this alteration of electric folk further, and by the early 80s, Boiled in Lead and Levellers (both of whom sort of bored me) for my postpunk generation (and today Dropkick Murphies and Flogging Molly) lead the way for a genre that I never have quite embraced. I like loud music, and I like folk music. But, when you stir them up, it's hard to "adjust for taste" this recipe.

It's similar to when, even as a rock-geek kid, I did not like the guitar Mass. Turn up the volume or hasten the choruses outside of the ceremony, I thought, and don't mix the worldly pleasures so indelibly into the sacred detachment. But, I was in the minority, alongside my mom who in 1970 wept when the parish was remodeled as a more "open" sanctuary devoid of statues and candles and when "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" replaced "Faith of our Fathers" as Sunday hymns.

Photo: Cover of "Unhalfbricking" featuring Neil & Edna, Sandy's parents. The band's neatly and suggestively framed at left in their Wimbledon garden. Great symbolism here that works on a variety of levels. See comments at Sour Duck