TheBrit and TheYank

Every year, millions of people grab whatever small sliver of Irish identity they have (or just simply fake it) to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. While the origins of the holiday have now been Hallmarked and Guinness’d¹ to death it is the biggest bar night (week, month) of the year with the national past-time of fending off drunken fake Irish girls with cheaply printed pins that say, “Kiss me! I’m Irish!” to crappy Celtic bands that think that by adding “Mc” to everything it’s suddenly Irish.

With that being said, when it became clear that our launch date was to be a week before St. Patrick’s Day, obviously the songs we picked must reflect that spirit and mood. At first we were going to attempt the idea of picking songs that were traditional Irish drinking songs sung by contemporary artists with the sub-rule that the band themselves had to be non-Irish AND were not Dropkick Murphy’s, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Flogging Molly or the like. Needle in a haystack people, needle in a haystack.

Thus, while TheBrit was getting lost in his cups over moody music (and yelling at me that I could not use Scottish-Celtic influenced bands, the bastard!), I took an alternate route – finding songs that celebrated the modern holiday spirit of St. Patrick’s Day – which of course, is drinking and more drinking, getting drunk and passing out. And with the following bands, everyday is St. Patrick’s Day – and you know what? I’m totally okay with that.

Dropkick Murphy’s – Dirty Glass

I broke my first rule, but you know what, so what? I love this song. I love the slow build up, the call and response between Murphy and Darcy. I love the fact that I want to either get up and start jigging on top of tables, drink whiskey and crash the empty shot glasses to the floor or just basically make a general fool of myself when this song comes on. I adore how the music crescendos back and forth and back again. It’s poppy, it’s fun, it’s light – you know, like the fake drunken Irish girls you’ll meet at the bar this weekend. Is the song about Murphy and Darcy’s relationship as lovers? As drunk and barmaid? Both? Neither? Do we care? Probably not, but one thing is for certain, put on this tune and you’ll want to jump into the fray.

Dirty Glass was not released as a single but it can be found on their album, Blackout, which was released in 2003. While it was their third studio album, it is the first one to chart at #83 on the U.S. charts and they would later have bigger success with later albums.

Dropkick Murphy’s - official website
Dropkick Murphy’s - Last.fm
Dropkick Murphy’s - Blackout (Amazon US, Amazon UK, iTunes)

The Mahones – Drunken, Lazy Bastard

CANADA’S PREMIER IRISH PUNK BAND! Why does it always make me giggle when one adds “Canada” in front of anything? And the worst part is – not only am I a Yank, but I’m also a Canuk!² Either way, fronted by a real Irishman (Drats! Broke another rule!), this self-penned song is styled in the way of traditional Irish drinking songs – man loves his pints, woman threatens to leave, man continues to go to the pub, woman leaves, man goes to the pub and finds his woman with his cousin! But it’s an upbeat tune complete with tin whistles and fiddles, so you know that in the end, everything will be fine (and as long as your having a pint, cheers to Finny!).

Drunken, Lazy Bastard was originally released on The Mahones first disk, Draggin’ The Days, which is now out of print. You can find the song on Irish Punk Collection, available via Interpunk or on Paint the Town Red, which is available on amazon.com and .co.uk as an import.

The Mahones - official website
The Mahones - MySpace
The Mahones - Last.fm
The Mahones - Paint The Town Red (Amazon US, Amazon UK, iTunes)

Bondo – Fuck You, I’m Drunk

The problem, admittedly with a lot of sub genres of music, is that if the lead singer sounds remotely at all like another lead singer, often there will mismatched and incorrect tagging of the initial band’s song. This is the problem with the song, Fuck You, I’m Drunk which is being purported to have been written and sung by a Chicago-based blues-Celtic band Bondo with apparent evidence going back to 1999 of them singing the song in a bar on their (I think?) website. I say purported and apparent because this IS the Internet and I could crock up a webpage declaring that I wrote War and Peace, but you know what? I want to believe that this little band that no one has really heard of outside of Chicago wrote a song memorable enough that it was apparently covered by bigger and more well-known bands. I like the idea this is the little song that could.

P.S. If anyone knows what happened to Bondo, can you let me know? The information on their garageband page is haphazard, at best.
P.P.S. While the player says “Dropkick Murphy’s,” it really is Bondo as confirmed by numerous people and the recording below is directly taken from their first album, Fistful of Biscuits.

Bondo - official website(?)
Bondo - GarageBand

The Tossers – No Loot, No Booze, No Fun

I’ll admit that I’m a lazy bastard (but unfortunately, not a drunken, lazy bastard at the moment) and when I chose this song, I based it on a quick listen and the title alone, thinking, “Hey! I can research this later!” Of course later, now that I have started writing everything out, I discover this is not a song about drinking and trollops, rather it’s a memorial to Dee Dee Ramone who died of a heroin overdose in 2002.
At first I thought it was a response to Adam Ant’s, “Goody Two-Shoes,” but you know maybe in a way it is; just 20 years down the road. For this song, pour a small bit of your Guinness on the ground for the dead Ramones and other homies.

The song appears on the band’s 2005 album, The Valley of the Shadow of Death. The Tossers are currently on tour.

The Tossers - official site
The Tossers - MySpace
The Tossers - Last.fm
The Tossers - The Valley of the Shadow of Death (Amazon US, Amazon UK, iTunes)

Jimmy George – Token Celtic Drinking Song

One of the reasons I like Los Campesinos! is that they don’t take themselves too seriously and how can you not love a band that has a song called ...And We Exhale and Roll Our Eyes in Unison? I bring this up because when searching the internets for material for this week’s column, the song Token Celtic Drinking Song kept popping up and attributed to various bands all over the place. Any band that uses the word “token” in their song title has sold me (much how LC! sold me on their elite titling powers). And even though 90% of the attribution went back to The Pogues, I decided that as long as it was not Fairytale of New York, I’m totally within my rights to use Token Celtic Drinking Song this week for the theme.

And yet, it turns out that in another case of mistaken identity, Token Celtic Drinking Song has been mistakenly appropriated to The Pogues even though when listening you can clearly tell that is not Shane MacGowan singing. The song, in fact, belongs to a long–defunct Canadian Celtic punk band³, Jimmy George. While the fans discussions over at The Pogue’s fan forums clarifies some of the misunderstandings and but yet, DAMN YOU INTERNETS! Start tagging shit correctly!

The lyrics, are definitely unintelligible (and from research, this is apparently the album version of the song by Jimmy George) and are also not cataloged. The song is fun to listen to and has all the elements of an Irish drinking song including (but not limited to from what I could figure out): the copious mention of whisky, drinking, working class, union cards, women, and I’m sure some fighting is going to happen at some point or another.

Jimmy George - Wikipedia

1. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Guinness.
2. Dual citizenship and two passports!
3. Mad love to my peeps!

It’s possible to trace the stereotyping of contemporary Irish music back to two sources. The first of these is the unexpected success of Clannad’s Theme from Harry’s Game, which became the reference point for all things “haunting” for the next decade. This led to Enya, one-time Clannad member, producing an inexplicably successful 1988 album Watermark, which served up the more understandable hit Orinoco Flow. At the time, much was made in the press of its use of multi-tracked vocals, conveniently overlooking Claire Hamill’s new age masterpiece Voices that predated it by two years and yet only used her voice.

The opposite of this sweetness comes in the form of The Pogues, whose commercial peak came around the same time as Enya’s with their album, If I Should Fall From Grace with God and which featured the UK’s #2 Christmas song, Fairytale of New York. The Pogues’ blend of traditional Irish music and punk rock has been influential across the world, seeded mainly through Irish communities (particularly in the US and Canada), and the genre which they founded remains extraordinarily popular today. For some bizarre reason, it’s this music which represents the drunken revelry involved in celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, rather than the tranquility of the former.

These five songs represent a snapshot of the diversity amongst this genre - the most interesting aspect of which is how local influences subtly shift musical emphasis and introduce new ideas.

Warblefly - Going Home

By their own admission, southern England denizens Warblefly formed in 1995 in order to “drink and play folk tunes,” which sounds good to me. But it wasn’t until they spent a week at the Cairo Hilton, Egypt as its St. Patrick’s house band that they evolved into the faster, more aggressive group that’s epitomised in Going Home. Taken from their 2004 album Crashing Through the Trees, this song surprises right from its beginning, with a lengthy bluegrass instrumental, but the vocals eventually arrive and the song kicks off to have a rollicking good time. And it’s in these vocals and the overall boisterousness of the song that you can hear their punk influences.

Despite this, anything that gets the folk-rock tag often finds itself losing the delicate touch of folk in pursuit of the more muscular rock angle. Warblefly subvert this outcome by bringing traditional instruments clearly to the forefront of their music and treasuring the value of instrumentals - especially useful since it affords live performances an opportunity to be more organic. Going Home throws its intro into a extended middle break before returning for the song’s final verse.

Warblefly - official website
Warblefly - Going Home (Last.fm)

Ahead to the Sea - Ahead to the Sea

If there’s one nation other than Ireland that should wholeheartedly embrace the spirit(s) of St. Patrick’s Day, it’s bound to be Germany. After all, Oktoberfest only comes round once a year, so having something six months’ earlier suits the drinking calendar nicely.

And you’d be right.

Ahead to the Sea, who sing mainly in English, call themselves “Riverdance on Speed,” which oversells the former, especially on their newer recordings. Frankly, their music strides so many genres that it makes it difficult to classify. So it’s best to choose something that at least has one foot in this week’s theme. And that’s their eponymous song, released on their 2005 album Urban Pirate Soundsystem. It’s significantly softer than Warblefly’s song, mainly because of the vocal harmonies - they’re one of the few bands of this genre that bring female vocals into the mix.

Ahead to the Sea is all about love, escape, getting high and having a good time. What impresses me about this song is not just the duelling vocals, but the way the electric guitars, drums and violin manage to lock their individual rhythms together, making it ideal moshing music. Probably.

Ahead to the Sea - official website (in German)
Ahead to the Sea - Ahead to the Sea (Last.fm)
Ahead to the Sea - Urban Pirate Soundsystem (Amazon UK, Amazon US, iTunes)

Natchez Shakers - Gretel

Sweeping across the Atlantic for our first visit to the US, Natchez Shakers bring Appalachian influences to punky Irish folk music. Or they did, because they’re now incarnated as “Revival Now.” So I have absolutely no more information about them other than that, although according to Last.fm the band “Tofu Love Frogs” is similar. You think I’m kidding?

Natchez Shakers do have several redeeming features: not least the ability of the lead singer to shamble his way through the vocals in a typically drunken fashion, occasionally hitting on the right note, if only temporarily.  This kind of performance is ideally suited for live situations where both the audience and the singer can fool themselves and each other that they can carry a tune.

But, Natchez Shakers can write songs, or this one anyhow: An accordion bears Gretel’s main melody (and that works better than it may appear to do on screen), then halfway through they slow the rhythm and go for one of those often used accelerating breaks, starting with just guitars and gradually re-introducing everything else. An old trick, but it’s executed brilliantly here.

Natchez Shakers - Gretel (Last.fm)
Natchez Shakers - Shaker Hymns (Amazon UK, Amazon US, iTunes)

The Skels - Pauper’s Grave

Thus far there has clearly not been enough drinking mentioned in these songs, for which, according to TheYank, we get extra points. This I’ll correct right now, for The Skels clearly seem bound to the joys of drinking to excess and playing music, because they write on their website: “if you plan on acting like a jerk during the month of March, why not do it with your old pals The Skels.” They originated as a house band for an Irish pub in Hoboken, New Jersey and the spirit of that setting lives on in their albums. In fact I’m pretty sure it’s all they sing about.

Pauper’s Grave appears on their 2003 album Any Port In A Storm, a collection of twelve original drinking songs. Scott Heath’s tin whistle is the standout instrument on this track, which begins the song deceptively sweetly before Chris Freid starts spitting out its lyrics. You can here this song in full on their MySpace page.

The Skels - official website
The Skels - MySpace
The Skels - Any Port In A Storm (Amazon UK, Amazon US, iTunes)

Fiddler’s Green - Bugger Off

While I’m on a roll, here are Fiddler’s Green, upping The Skels’ intensity and throwing in plenty of expletives for good measure(s). Fiddler’s Green formed in 1990, come from Erlangen in Germany and play Irish Speedfolk.

Bugger Off is a cover of an Irish drinking song written by Tony Miles. It ironically opens their new album Sports Day At Killaloe because it’s definitely suited to an end of the evening live setting, which is why I’ve placed it last. Bands such as The Real McKenzies and Kevin Barry Toye And Friends have recorded this song previously but their attempts are woefully soporific in comparison to this raucous version, because it demands vigourous audience participation throughout its chorus.

You’ll hear why and how when you listen to it.

Fiddler’s Green - official website (in German)
Fiddler’s Green - Bugger Off (Last.fm)
Fiddler’s Green - Sports Day At Killaloe (Amazon US, iTunes)

The above five songs are a whistle-stop tour around music that’s been born from, or blended with Irish traditional music. Some are more folky than others and some have been clearly influenced by their country or city of origin. It’s fair to conclude that the genre is much richer than its stereotypes predict.