CHRISTY MOORE
‘As a singer you can’t compete with an open bar’
WE DON’T really do ‘national treasures’ here, there’s too much backbiting involved, so we’ll have to settle for ‘national conscience’.
Top of the list for nominations has to be Christy Moore, although he is, of course, much more than that.
For some people he can be a ‘cause too far’ but then he’ll reel you back with a song like Lisdoonvarna or Welcome to the Cabaret reminding you that at heart he’s a entertainer, a journeyman who has spent a lifetime on the road singing his songs and influencing a whole generation with a unique attitude that he brings to the job, whether it’s something he’s sung, written or collected along the way.
Christy Moore is a complex mix of campaigner and entertainer, a man who is passionate about his causes and his audience.
He knows that some of these songs are not destined for the iPod or the playlist, but that seems irrelevant to the singer and his band of musicians.
What you get on his new three-CD set Where I Come From is an autobiography of the Kildare ballad singer and writer, a social history of Ireland over the last 40 years and the unique Christy Moore humour and passion expressed in all sorts of ways.
But of course it is also about much more than Lisdoon, because Christy Moore has always been an entertainer, sometimes troubled, sometimes volatile, sometimes downright crusty, and that too comes through in this set of autobiographical songs.
He’s also a polemicist, he sees what others don’t want to see and goes for it, turning it into songs like the brilliantly conceived Arthur’s Day which opened up a national debate on alcohol and Ireland, a debate that won’t go away, much and all as drinks groups might like.
It is difficult to know how the running order was selected but there is a pattern right from the opening song Where I Come From and Moore chanting “I’m a bogman, I’m a bogman” and he must be, because apart from banking and ballads he knows the mechanics of the dying art of cutting turf with a slean, spreading over the bog and footing it to dry.
He then takes us on to a haunting version of Veronica his moving tribute to Veronica Guerin. Christy didn’t know her but he ‘gets’ what she was doing, and what was really going on; the same goes for Anne Lovett who died in childbirth in a grotto in Granard, Co Longford and Imelda Riney who was slain along with her little son Liam and buried in a deep and mysterious wood near the shores of Lough Derg at Mountshannon, Co Clare.
He sings about the lost generation of Stardust teenagers, the Birmingham Six, the soldiers who died fighting for the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and the strip-searching of women in Armagh Jail.
In his notes to the song Delerium Tremens he writes about the demon drink: “By 21 (years of age) I was flying and constantly fuelled for take off. At 23 I recognised all was not well and I began trying to stop. It took me 22 years to get the monkey off my back. I discovered that I could not do it alone.”
Like all great drinkers, a part of him is probably still in love with the booze, but while Delerium might get a laugh it’s not funny.
Neither is Riding the High Stool which is spoken not sung, but evokes the crazy world of those who love the smell of a bar and the bullshit that makes life bearable.
Lisdoonvarna and Joxer goes to Stuttgart and Me and the Rose evoke another era.
Then there’s Christy Moore the ballad singer with The Ballad of Ruby Walsh and Lovely Young One and the throwaway verse of The Wild Colonial Boy where he almost sounds like one of the Clancy Brothers.
But if he evokes another Ireland it’s also one that some of us have left behind. Where I Come From is a musing on a British commentator claiming Seamus Heaney as one of their own after he won the Nobel Prize for literature. Does it really matter? It’s a bit like the facile argument over whether Rory McIlroy should play golf for Britain or Ireland in the Olympics.
In the same vein we found the song Casey — which Christy Moore didn’t write but included in this collection — a bit like thumping an easy target. For all his faults Bishop Casey lifted many Irish people out of homelessness in London; a rage against the Christian Brothers also seems like clocking an easy target and again ignores the generations of Irish boys who would have gotten no education but for that much-maligned order.
But just as critics have to carp so Christy has to sing. Where I Come From is a celebration of the man in all his quirky glory.
Nobody could like it all, but when he launches into a live version of Arthur’s Day or ends the album with Where I Come From live from Knocknagoshel you know why we still listen.
He is our national conscience and maybe in a sneaky moment we’ll admit that he might also be a national treasure.
That said, we’ll still go out and celebrate, if not Arthur’s Day; then something, anything at all, a fine day or a fine singer like Christy. It’s what we do best.