Author Archives: Lisa McInerney

Aug 28 2012
3 Comments
Music

Garth Brooks: A Warning In Retrospect

In the way that mushroom clouds are a thing and gaping head injuries are a thing, Garth Brooks was once a thing in Ireland. For a period in the mid-nineties, he was probably the biggest thing of all the things: bigger than Dustin, bigger than Bishop Eamon Casey, bigger than Barry O’Hanlon’s bald spot. He swooped onto the world stage in a dusty haze of snappy, singalong country music, branded with innocuous moral code and sensitive cowboy shtick. Ould wans spoiled by Philomena Begley seized his coattails and hung on for dear life. Married couples took to their fringed boots and started spending every Saturday night clicking their heels in formation with their thumbs hooked into their belt loops. Teenagers – teenagers! – learned the words to Brooks’ ditties and belted them out of car windows and school auditoriums and youth disco dancefloors. No one was safe from Garth Brooks. No one.

Look at him there with the head on him.

And because no one was safe, I was no different. Like all inexplicable crazes, Garth Brooks ended as suddenly as he’d begun, but a couple of notes from ‘Friends In Low Places’ or ‘Standing Outside The Fire’ and still I burst into involuntary playback like a subject chewed up and spat out by Derren Brown.

In the mid-nineties, I was far too cool to ever go line dancing – I even refused to learn the Macarena – and I certainly eschewed such trappings as cowboy boots and tasselled blouses, but even an aesthetic forged in army navy surplus stores and by a weird attraction to Jarvis Cocker couldn’t save me from the magnetic wrench of Brooks’ melodies. It may be partly down to south county Galway society and the heady scent of silage in the air, but Garth Brooks felt like communal madness. I had a copy of his album The Hits – didn’t everyone? – and it nestled beside Pablo Honey and Music For The Jilted Generation on my dressing table. I have no idea where it is now. I can only assume I burnt it during my repatriation ceremony to the land of the living.

Oh, the horror!

It kind of makes sense when you examine the phenomenon with a forced level of detachment. Ireland has long been a slave to folk music and country is like folk music as understood by a Teletubby who fell out of a pickup truck straight onto his head. It’s folk music you don’t need a social conscience or patriotic pride to get in on. You just need to like easy little stories about rodeos and whiskey chasers and patriarchy, all told in metre-perfect rhymes.

What doesn’t make sense is that it wasn’t just Ireland that was enslaved by the honeyed twang of Mr. Brooks, but countries of varied cultures and levels of cop-on. Brazil loved him, as did Australia. The British media were sniffy, but the people were smitten. Garth Brooks was a one-man religion.

And we were, briefly but totally, disciples. What set the Garth Brooks craze apart from all of the other childhood crazes I’ve weathered was that unlike pogs, Saved By The Bell, and those stupid oversized beanies that East 17 used to wear, Garth Brooks was one you could get in on with your parents. Generations were united by a common adoration for the stetsoned one and his warbling tributes to unanswered prayers and sleeping loved ones and cougars he plumbed when he was a teenager. Which may have seemed all facets of creepy, but it is a credit to Mr. Brooks that every passion he ever sang about was declawed as soon as it left his throat. Never before has a singer turned so much everyday mundanity into so much anthemic yodelling into so much lyrical docility. It’s so straightforward it’s genius.

Like Mother Goose, Garth Brooks had universal appeal because there were no stipulations attached to enjoying his work, like the need to have a working brain or a basic understanding of metaphor. Mid-nineties Garth Brooks was as simple and as appealing and as bad for you as apple pie. Why, even Garth Brooks himself has taken great pains to limit the damage done by his perfect universal appeal, by making his music unavailable on most of the social media giants and burying – BURYING – the master for The Hits underneath his star on Hollywood boulevard.

Ponder all ye on what horrors lie beneath

It is my solemn conclusion – the only logical conclusion, really – that Garth Brooks took root because everyone has… a weak spot for country music.

Oh, you may think such aural failings don’t apply to you, pouting there in your biker jacket or skinny jeans, but it happened once, and it will happen again. Keep your eyes out, kids. And your ears closed.

(by Lisa McInerney)

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Jun 25 2012
2 Comments
Ice Cream, School

Scribble Your Name Across My Heart (a love story)

There was a boy, once. I was six and so was he. We were in First Class together, back in the days when First Class meant making your Holy Communion. With that massive ecclesiastical millstone around our necks, he’d be sent off to the Boys’ Academy of Learning and I’d be left behind in the Convent School for Premature Harlots. I suppose that was heavy on my mind. I did not want to be separated from him. He was a dashing little fellow.

Anyway, we were on our school tour and on the way back, the teacher allowed us to stop at a playground so we could stretch our legs and flake each other over the few available swings. We were each given an ice-pop as a treat. They were cheap, frozen splashes of chemicals that tasted fucking amazing but have probably since been outlawed. They were called Scribblers. They looked like pencils and so were better than the more economical Sparkles.

Behold the Scribbler, bottom row.

I loved Scribblers. Of course, I loved all of the HB ice-pops: Sparkles and Fat Frogs and Super Splits and Tangle Twisters and the Brunches I gorged on once a year when my uncle came back from the UK, laden down with disposable income and misty-eyed generosity. I loved the Loop The Loops, with their chocolate top, and the Maxi Twists, with their miserable sliver of sorbet tucked into the bone-white ice-cream, and the Calippos that came in a cardboard tube that went soggy and made your fingers sticky and your mother cross. But especially I loved Scribblers. Maybe my tongue knew I was going to be a writer before the rest of me figured it out.

The little boy that I had drawn designs on was on his own, going up and down one of the taller slides at the far end of the playground. It was as good a chance as any to ingratiate myself. We were in the same class, but we weren’t special friends, which must have stung something shocking because I’m nothing if not a stereotypical Leo. Even when I was six I expected everyone to be in love with me. I had long blonde hair and hazel eyes and I looked like I’d been gently rolled out of a Timotei ad for being too scruffy. I was the perfect best friend for a six-year-old boy.

He was going up and down on the slide and I wanted to join him.

But there was the Scribbler in my hand. I’d been savouring it. I never bit an ice-pop, whether I could help it or not (and I never have since, either. Sensitive teeth). Teacher had told us that we were to finish our pops before using the playground equipment, and I was no rebel. Nor was I used to choosing any treat over a Scribbler. But this was love.

I put the Scribbler very carefully on the grass, well out of the way of racing, kicking feet, and rushed to join the little fella on the tall slide.

He was inching himself down the chute, chubby little fingers clutching its sides. The steel had been smoothed to optimum launch speed by years of little arses speeding down onto the gravel and grass below, and I guess he wasn’t the most daring young man. Not so I. I climbed the slide behind him, sat at the top and slid down with the grace and speed of some sort of space-age angel, blonde tangle sailing out majestically behind me, head thrown back like the photogenic little astronaut I was. I hit him squarely in his reticent, blocky back with my patent Clarks’ best.

He went flying off the end of the slide and landed on his backside on the gravel. He got up and turned around and his lip was quivering like a maggot on a fishing line.

“I’m telling Teacher on you!” he said. “You’re bold. You hurt me. I’m telling.”

And off he went as fast as his plump six-year-old legs could carry him.

Well, I was heartbroken. You might as well have buried my She-Ra doll or unravelled my Read Along tape of A Little Princess or told me that The Phantom Menace would one day exist. It was a feeling so desperate and so deep and strong that I still remember it  and wince, twenty-four years later. Not only had I made the object of my affection cry, but now I was going to be in trouble with Teacher and I was never in trouble with Teacher. And what a fucking wimp. Not that I knew the word fucking back then, but it formed in bile in the back of my throat as a concept and I’ve not been able to dislodge it since. Miserable little… fucker. And hot tears blurred my vision and my nose went out in sympathy with it and it was the worst day of my little life.

The worst, worst day. Because when I went back over for my precious Scribbler, some other little fucker had nicked it.

I have never forgiven that little bastard. I hope he dies roaring.

(by Lisa McInerney)

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Jun 16 2012
3 Comments
Television

Finbar’s Class

Finbar’s Class. I remember but snatches from it. A rebellious earring here, some cheeky backchat there, valid teenage angst wrapped up in a threadbare blanket of bad rapping and someone’s hideous ‘90s puffa jacket. It was mid ’90s young adult fare from RTÉ and about as edgy as the channel ever got, outside of rounding on Annie Murphy of a Friday night.

The premise, if I remember it correctly, was that Michael Sheridan was teaching a load of tarmac terrorists in an inner city Dublin school, when, possibly inspired by Whoppi Goldberg in Sister Act 2, he realised the only way to reach them was through glibly modernised music therapy. Cue lots of East 17-style posturing and Carol from Fair City wearing a tracksuit, or something. I don’t really remember.

However, I did come across this recently.

I’d like to say it brought memories flooding back, but alas, my brain is a one-way street and Finbar’s Class, while clearly brilliant in its own scuzzy way, was not very memorable. I remember loving it, but I don’t remember why. And yet, the scenes depicted above would be controversial now – cartoonish moneylenders! Heroin! Bras! – so it genuinely rots my receptors that Finbar’s Class has since sunk into some sort of RTE netherworld: consigned to the vaults, forgotten. That looks like Fair City on GHB, for Christ’s sake! Surely such a show would have been right up the street of me and my teenage devotion to Melvin Burgess books. So why is it that the only thing I remember is bad singing in moody postures and Michael Sheridan’s mildly disapproving smile?

Can any of you other ‘90s kids dredge this up for me?

(by Lisa McInerney)

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May 28 2012
2 Comments
Music

History Is Written By The Singers

I can only assume that the stereo was broken the day I did the housework to the tune of my own soulful yodelling. I usually find it difficult to function without musical accompaniment, and ninety-nine times out of ninety-eight I’ll stick on a thoughtful, finely-tuned playlist and get busy to the lusty tones of some foppish chap with a guitar and a check shirt. But this one day, I went a bit mental and decided to provide my own soundtrack. I went through my entire repertoire – The Merry Ploughboy to My Heart Is In Ireland to The Fields Of Athenry to something vaguely sinister about British soldiers.

My better half interjected after about an hour of odes to emigration and immigration and deportation.

“Jesus wept… How – how the fuck – do you know all of those bloody songs?”

In fairness. I know them all because I’m Irish and Irishly impressionable. My better half is an odd fish in that sense. He was raised by enlightened parents who didn’t think it their patriotic duty to instil in him appreciation for rosy-cheeked racism. He learned a few Irish ballads when he took up guitar and check shirts, but jingoistically-speaking, he’s a bit of a fop. I don’t think he’s ever cried into a pint about Boolavogue, Slievenamon or inconsistent four-faced clocks. Which makes him a rather wondrous oddity, don’t you think? Rational, open-minded and patient…none of the qualities sung of in Irish rebel songs.

I don’t know what my first rebel song was, but I reckon God Save Ireland would be a safe bet. It’s a gory march with a tone of defiance so solid you could use it to take down an entire order of nuns. One listen to God Save Ireland, and you’re voting Sinn Féin. It’s a very dangerous ditty, and I thank providence that I was too young for the polling booth when it first battered me with its seditious charms.

Don’t listen to that if you’re not ready to fall in love with Gerry Adams. You have been warned.

For God Save Ireland triggers something deep within the Irish breast. Something ancient, something battle-born, something something delirium-of-the-brave something. Not quite innate, for nationalism was man-made to fill the gap left by Jesus when he rose from the dead, had a spot of lunch, and traipsed off the mortal coil again for some reason. But it’s a feeling that’s long-rooted and therefore profound and unfathomable, all the same. It’s like Fionn mac Cumhaill playing your heartstrings like a fucking fiddle while a bunch of 1980s London skinheads make fun of your freckles. You want to belong to something bigger than you. You want to feel like there’s someone to blame for your not being able to yammer as Gaeilge. You want to fight someone wearing a sneer and a monocle…not with you wearing the sneer and the monocle, obviously. I meant your enemy would wear the sneer and the monocle. Irish rebel songs don’t allow for sneering or pretentious eyewear.

They allow for enemies, though, and impressionable people (like wee Galway-bred cailíní hearing God Save Ireland for the first time) need enemies. Something to rail against like the proud badass you are. Listening to rebel songs is the Irish equivalent of reading Lord Of The Rings if you’re a yokel or listening to Faith Hill mangling the Spangled at the Super Bowl if you’re American. It makes you feel like you’re part of something, whilst at the same time instilling strange and exciting feelings of bottomless rage. Like you want to take your shirt off and punch a wall / kill a Nazgûl  / mutilate a herd of steer.

Knowing your Irish rebel songs really starts to pay dividends when you’re old enough to get served in pubs, and the whole blistering love affair with your own masked xenophobia begins anew. Except this time it’s bolstered by alcohol. Alcohol and pickled friends. Rebel songs make you want to be part of something, and for the entire length of a stanza, you are. You’re part of a swaying, weeping choir of stain-shirted supermen, each more moved by the misdeeds of the Black and Tans than the last.

Come out, ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man!

And without fail, some young fella, his face still in the throes of pubertal disharmony, will slap his fist down on a table and spill someone’s pint.

If you don’t know your Irish rebel songs by the time you start college, for example, your entire social worth will disintegrate as soon as someone chokes out the first few lines of Streets of New York. You’re nothing if you can’t howl back at them about Uncle Benjy and how he got shot down in an uptown foray (sure, even if you can get through the last four lines without your voice cracking, you’ll be thought of as highly suspicious and most likely taken out back and robbed). Irish rebel songs go with Irish drinking culture. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to determine which came first; the rebel songs, or the drinking culture. They sustain each other, a symbiotic muddle of blood, sweat, and needlessly sentimental tears. Kevin Barry died for Ireland. Ireland’s dying for a pint.

“Needlessly sentimental” is the key here. The denizens of modern Ireland have no real claim to the misery of our history; it doesn’t define us in any way but nostalgically. We don’t sing Sean Nós shopping in Brown Thomas and we don’t vow vengeance in the queue at Abrakebabra (unless it was the queue for refunds). I’ll make a concession to exception for the emigration songs, although it’s hard to sing plaintively about how tough it is to work in a dentist’s surgery off Bondi Beach. In general, you lead an Irishman to balladry, and you’ll open the floodgates of hyperbole and hazy threats of international payback. It’s boorish. It’s ignorant.

It’s glorious.

We are Irish and we are collectively excitable and more prone to reminiscence than a spinster with a sherry. Irish rebel songs provoke in us feelings of pride that we’re not entitled to and leanings towards martyrdom that we won’t be celebrated for. Their lyrics are cynically romantic, the flag-waving equivalent of Kim Kardashian’s arse trying to sell you cheap perfume. Sing them at a sober person, and you’ll look like an angry lemming. Sure I can’t sing the entirety of Only Our Rivers Run Free without having an inexplicable emotional meltdown. Honestly. Misdirected patriotism is my party piece. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s funny, because I listen to a lot of folk music now – hipster folk, the kind sung by foppish boys with guitars and check shirts – and I suspect the communal joy of singing evocative rebel songs is the cause of my current aural inclinations. And I’m not alone. Why else would Mumford and Sons – who mostly sing about God, with whom we fell out with in a big way – be so damn big in Ireland?

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

(by Lisa McInerney)

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Apr 27 2012
3 Comments
Galway, Television

Andy Ruane, Popped.

It was 1994, and our country’s hopes were as high as our waistbands.

We were pre gap year culture, pre Britney, pre duck-face profile photos. Miley Byrne was rearing a nation, Dustin the Turkey was landing number one hits, and Pat Kenny was but a vague noise sporadically emanating from the metropolis one’s aunts used solely for Christmas shopping. It was as good an era as any to be thirteen. It might yet prove to have been the best.

Thirteen’s a funny age. Your mind is still officiating games of House and Tip The Can, but your body is Judas, dragging you towards conscience and clumsiness and wanting to do funny things with the gawky dreamboat you found disgusting only five minutes before. On one hand, you still want to play with toys, and watch irony-free cartoons, and pretend to be Marty McFly. On the other hand… well, you don’t want to know what the other hand is doing.

Which is why thirteen-year-old ears are perfect for pop music. Pop music combines primary colours and primary urges better than any other mood-delivery system, and our mid-nineties RTÉ execs didn’t miss a trick. Saturday mornings meant eating Frosties in front of the television, from which blared an energetic ginger called Andy Ruane whose sole reason for being was to tell you which pop star was hottest in which provincial pockmark. His domain was The Fanta Roadshow, a travelling disco which uncovered the real issues of the day through the medium known as “rave dancing”.

Ruane was the thirteen-year-old’s civil servant. As the Roadshow’s master of ceremonies, he whipped local music tastes into Top 12 charts, coaxed schoolyard anecdotes out of floppy-haired wallflowers, and pitted uncoordinated hopefuls against each other in rave-dancing showdowns that must have reminded adults of marionettes in a washing machine. Meanwhile, sidekick Mary Kingston prowled the host town for gregarious kids with exhaustive local knowledge. It was like…bullets of wisdom and pertinence coming at you in seizure-tempting waves of ‘90s graphics. Like graffiti that sternly reminded you to Just Say No. Like Mr. T advising you to respect your mother.

This actually happened.

The best bit of the show was the Soap Box. A platform for kids to tell the truth about their towns without fear of reproach from parents, teachers, or the parish priest, it was raw and honest and gave me and my burgeoning social conscience hope for the future. A handful of young ‘uns, from 6th class whippersnappers to lofty second years, would tell the camera the best things about their community: “There’s lots to do!” “We have a great GAA club!” And then, defiantly, the worst things: “There’s nawthin’ to do!” “There’s far too much alcohol!”. Yes, rural thirteen-year-olds in the year 1994 were inordinately down on alcohol. Dismayed by it. Hurt by its very existence.

Anyway, Saturday mornings meant waking up to Andy Ruane and his deftly-controlled mayhem and haphazardly-tucked t-shirts. He was part of our lives, an adult who wasn’t really an adult, a rapscallion who’d definitely let you onto the lifeboat before him. Then one day, in my little south County Galway town, the news broke that the Fanta Roadshow was coming to us. It was coming to the local hotel “niteclub”. We were going to get our very own fifteen minutes, presided over by our very own Andy Ruane. Mary Kingston would stalk our highways and byways, and find prudent youngsters who’d tell her about our folklore and geological features. Our own ambassadors would tell the country exactly what the real issues were in south County Galway. That the GAA was great and there was too much alcohol.

We were in heaven.

Every tween and teenager turned up to the Fanta Roadshow when it set up shop. The “niteclub”, a massive function room that usually couldn’t reach capacity (and probably hasn’t since), was jammed. Girls swayed timidly in oversized synthetic shirts, whilst young bucks threw shapes of the most desperate flamboyance, attempting to rave-dance their way under said shirts. My friends and I secured a spot near the stage, so we might be broadcast screaming our approval when the camera did one of its many, many sweeps.

It was especially exciting for me, as my cousin, to whom I was very close, had been chosen as one of the town’s ambassadors for the Soap Box. He had recorded his spot earlier in the day, and I might have joined him now to pry into the experience, but I didn’t want to lose my premium dancing location.

The noise was immense. The tension, if harnessed, could have given Ardnacrusha a week off. Andy Ruane was preparing to take the stage.

And…

And…

And he wasn’t nice. Not even a little bit. He was shouty and bossy and stressed and not at all one of the gang. Years later, I understood. They tell you never to work with children or animals, and in a cast of teenagers, Andy Ruane had to work with both. But in 1994, it was a shock to discover he didn’t really care about our anecdotes, or our issues, or even our rave dancing. All he cared about was, unforgivably, doing his job.

“Move over there! You, stop that! Get down out of that, you little… Shut up! SHUT UP! Only scream when I tell you!”

We were stunned.

The illusion of the excitable, sensitive, trustworthy Andy Ruane had shattered, and we couldn’t rave dance the magic back. Sure, we screamed on cue for the camera. Sure, three intrepid show-offs took part in the rave dance competition. Sure, we helped count down the charts from twelve to one. But the whisper took off around the hall and nothing could stop it. From every downturned mouth, from every dismayed head, there came the hushed mantra…

“The ginger bastard.”

My cousin had reason to be the loudest of them all. His Soap Box contribution was a deadened reading from a prepared script. He said that the GAA facilities were top notch and that there was far too much alcohol in the town. The Fanta Roadshow didn’t particularly care whether he thought either true. When the show was broadcast, we were all mortified for him. His acting was atrocious, because, well, he wasn’t an actor. A drink might have loosened him up, and it wouldn’t have been out of character for him to have asked for one.

The Fanta Roadshow was never quite the same after that. I still watched, but I declined to attend the next time it swung into town, and I never trusted a TV personality again. When a friend told me, years later, that she met Ray D’Arcy and that he wasn’t dazzlingly pleasant, it ruffled nary a feather on my poor, plucked head. Well of course he wasn’t dazzlingly pleasant. Why would he be dazzlingly pleasant in a world where Andy Ruane could turn out to be a short-tempered, supercilious git?

Thing is, when I look back at old Fanta Roadshow clips with my jaded adult eyes, it’s obvious that Andy Ruane was dead right to have little interest in the featured teenagers’ anecdotes, because they were mind-numbingly shit. It’s a sad truth that teenagers very belatedly realise how boring they are. Thirteen years of self-centred helplessness, widened by hormones into a microcosm of similarly graceless eejits, is not fecund ground for growing great stories or shrewd ethics . No wonder Andy Ruane was so bad-tempered. Having to repeatedly broadcast the same feckin’ story of how some braying kid’s cake fell over in Home Economics class would make anyone depressed.

(by Lisa McInerney)

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