It’s Nicky’s week, but remember too Lemmy and Philo... stars who burned out too soon
WH AT a coup! Nicky Byrne, sonin-law of the exhausted ex-taoiseach, to sing for Ireland in the Eurovision Song Contest 2016. Nicky, who is always impeccably turned out, tells us he could have been a professional footballer. He is a handsome young man, he is making all the right moves but, sweet Lord, what a solution for RTÉ!
So Nicky, a former member of one-time world-beating boyband Westlife, is a good guy all around and a great mimer.
This year there is no National Song Contest and in its place we have one performer for all the songs.
Up to now when the National Song Contest rolled around, normally the process began with 400 entries. When a winner was chosen the producers tried to work on the song and the singer to get a better shape on the Irish entry.
We’ve tried Irish singing, Irish dancing and banging the drums to an impossibly stupid contestant – Dustin the Turkey.
Facebook, iCloud and thousands more channels are now diluting the social impact of Eurovision which once was a family event. This generation don’t watch TV any more anyway.
Unfortunately, overconfidence is a modern disease that taps into our failure to achieve. Eurovision is becoming a niche event; everybody wants to be a star.
The difficult part of entering Eurovision is the feeling that no matter how well we perform we don’t have good enough songs, or the performers are not sufficiently experienced to sing in front of a potential audience of 1,000million people. But a good song is always a good song, so rather than aiming to win Eurovision why not just enter a good song?
How many times did we (me and the other songwriters) try to tell RTÉ there was an easier way to do it? But with closed ears they manfully strove to become as low in the pecking order as possible.
THE producers have found half the solution but whoever the performer is has to withstand the pressure of representing our country and our entertainment reputation in the world of music.
IT has been a sad time with the passing of Lemmy. If Lemmy had got together for Phil Lynott’s 30th anniversary earlier this week, they might have been able to commiserate with one another.
Lemmy was ‘a caution’ as they say, and his band Motörhead were acknowledged as the greatest band in the world.
Lemmy began his ascent to the top as Jimi Hendrix’s guitar roadie. While everybody was indulging themselves with LSD, amphetamines were his favourite. He specialised in trying to lull the audience by using his ultra-low frequency sound in the PA which was perceived by the audience as a low source of musical energy.
Lemmy was no dope, though, even though his body was full of it. He was a young dude with acting ambitions, famous for abandoning music, he found himself that it wasn’t always quite how he expected it.
‘This is how my life was always meant to take place; in the back of a tour bus somewhere, with a girl I’ve never met before in my lap who will be gone by morning. It’s how I live. It suits me’. Lemmy and Phil were more joined at the hip than anyone expected.
Lemmy’s first connection with the music business brought him in touch with Hendrix, possibly the best rock player of all time.
Famed for his extraordinary playing and reaching an apogee at Woodstock, fate tripped him up, just as it did to poor Philo. By the time he died Jimi Hendrix had done it all.
He took it out as far as the edge but never really fully fulfilled his raging talent and unfortunately fell of the cliff when he learned he couldn’t fly.
Philo, on the other hand, wanted to emulate Hendrix but he was toying with fate.
The drugs and the alcohol began interfering with his day-to-day life. As his wife Caroline Crowther said, ‘Philip knew that he was a rock star when he was brushing his teeth’.
Meanwhile in 2002, back in the members’ rooms of the RDS, I observed Lemmy, a lone figure sitting by the window, head buried in a book.
I approached him warily as Lemmy gave off the vibe of an angry man.
‘Forgive my impertinence,’ I said, ‘but can I ask you what you are reading?’
Lemmy replied: ’Ello mate, I’m reading a great book by an Irish writer, Walter Macken, called The Burning Sands. I’ve read all his stuff. I love it!’