Master class in how to give 60,000 paying customers their money’s worth
Young Persephone commandeered the stereo the other day, filling the kitchen at Medders Manor with the sound of modern pop. The songs were pleasant enough, though invested with the samey sheen created by technology which ensures that vocalists are always unwaveringly on the note. The singers, to my jaded ear, sound as though they are being squeezed from a tube, their voices like so much aural toothpaste.
Ah, yes, I do love being a grumpy old man, not that anyone takes any notice of my chuntering. Sandy Shaw never needed to have her vocals tweaked, I muttered. Mary Black certainly did not rise to prominence on the back of such trickery, I rumbled. Bob Dylan seems to have done well enough for himself without ever being within an ass’s roar of pitch perfect, I opined. Indeed, some might say that an ass’s roar has finer melodic qualities that Dylan in full flight. Ha!
And then, in amongst all the up-to-date stuff, our daughter lobbed in some Madness. ‘Our house, in the middle of our street.’ Joyous, simple, mischievous, with real voices, with real brass licks, and with real strokes on a real drum kit.
Hold on, I actually saw Madness perform live, on stage, in Dublin, in or around 1980. The venue, if memory serves, was a tiny and hastily converted former cinema. My ears are still ringing. ‘Our house, in the middle of our street,’ over and over again. The Madness stage act, as recalled decades later, verged on the primitive. Front man Suggs wore a funny hat and danced around to provide a few ditsy visual effects. That was the sum total of their theatrical effort. Otherwise the band members simply played the songs. They looked as though they were enjoying themselves, inviting the audience to do the same.
Our moment of Madness in the kitchen came to mind a few days later as the family sat in the North Stand at Pairc Uí Caoimh to witness the Ed Sheeran phenomenon. Like Madness, Ed is English. Like Madness, Ed has had commercial success. Like Madness – actually I cannot think of any other obvious points in common.
Sheeran did not bother with silly hats. He emerged dressed in ill-fitting jeans and the sort of sloppy check shirt I favour while gardening to face 60,000 people. His famously ginger hair showed no sign of having been groomed any time recently. Just one man with a guitar. We had done the maths on our way to Cork, reckoning that this one man with his guitar had sold around €36 million worth of tickets for the Irish leg of his globe-trotting itinerary. We calculated that maybe one in every ten people on this island would attend his concerts.
One man alone on stage with his guitar, Ed Sheeran told us casually that we were part of the biggest ever music tour to visit Ireland. The tone in which he said it was anything but boastful and he rounded off the announcement with his reaction to such record breaking, a two word aside: ‘It’s bonkers.’
To be honest, I feared for his safety. How on earth could one man and a guitar keep such a huge crowd happy? No backing band. No dancing girls. And for most of those present, he was little more than a speck in the distance. It truly was bonkers.
But Ed Sheeran is blessed with an ability to amuse, to amaze, to entertain. Like the Late Late, he offers something to everyone in the audience. New songs for youngsters. Irish songs for the Irish. And even a Nina Simone song (‘You Know How I Feel’) for the curmudgeon in the North Stand. I almost swooned.
Still, it requires more than a few catchy numbers and a likeable personality to give 60,000 paying customers their money’s worth with a set that could be presented by a busker on any street corner. The charm and the tunes needed heavyweight technical back-up, which was delivered with eye-popping sophistication.
The distant face was magnified a thousand-fold and the image was then posted on a score of screens in endless variation. Ed through red filter, Ed through monochrome filter. Ed from every conceivable angle. Ed with a cartoon of a koala bear and a cascade of abstract art. And as the crowd sang along with his hits, the face on all those giant screens showed a musician enjoying himself. Just like Madness.