Monday, February 7, 2011
Gary Moore Passes Away
Belfast blues legend Gary Moore was found dead in Spain yesterday, February 6th. Just wanted to note here that in addition to forming a blues band in his Dad's pub while barely a teenager, Moore played memorably with Thin Lizzy during the 1970s, and collaborated famously with Lynott on 'Black Rose' and 'Out in the Fields'; he also released 20 solo albums. As if that wasn't enough, he was an energetic and important member of the Dublin music scene in the mid to late sixties, playing and recording with Skid Row, and also with prog-folkers Dr Strangely Strange - that's his unbelievable guitar playing on their eponymous album. Moore also recorded with Granny's Intentions on their 'Honest Injun' LP, following the departure of Johnny Hockedy.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
A Family Affair? Lineage, Cultural Inheritance and Irish Rock Music
This paper was presented at the 'New Voices in Irish Criticism' Conference at University of Limerick in May 2010. I'd like to present it as free content information of Irish rock musicians which anyone can access. Post a comment if you wish. I'll add the bibliography and a few other technical details later.
A Family Affair? Lineage, Cultural Inheritance and Irish Rock Music
This paper focuses on Irish rock music and musicians, and critically examines issues relating to inheritance and the family in the development of their musical identities and performance practices. The admittedly derivative title references the Sly and the Family Stone composition ‘Family Affair’, which appeared on that group’s groundbreaking album There’s A Riot Goin’ On in 1971; that album is suggestive of the social, cultural and ideological shifts occurring across the Anglo-American cultural matrix, including Ireland, and involving the internationally prominent artists I refer to in this paper. In considering issues of lineage and ancestry, I examine three musicians from the ‘first wave’ of Irish rock, specifically the period 1968-1978: Phil Lynott, Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher. The analysis comments on these artists’ unique familial circumstances, establishing whether and how these positions challenge ‘Irish’ family structures problematically enshrined in dominant social and cultural discourses. The paper begins with a brief introduction to the three musicians in question. It then presents condensed critical discussions relevant to each musician, and will close by illustrating some conclusions regarding the significance of family and inheritance in first-wave Irish rock music.
Phil Lynott
Philip Parris Lynott was born in 1949 in Birmingham, England, of Brazilian and Irish parents. He was raised in a Crumlin, a predominantly working-class suburb of Dublin, primarily in his grandparents’ home on Leighlin Road. Supported by his mother Philomena, he began performing publicly in his teens in The Black Eagles, a locally-visible beat group which worked alongside the pop-oriented showbands in Dublin ballrooms. Lynott’s musical abilities soon developed a creative dimension: after a brief period performing as a vocalist with Skid Row, he formed Thin Lizzy with the drummer Brian Downey and guitarist Eric Bell. Lynott’s early compositions display a preoccupation with Celtic mythology, with the humourous, and the fantastic; Thin Lizzy’s early albums are characterised by complex rhythmic textures, and comparatively elaborate post-production. They were also the first highly visible Irish rock group to maintain an inter-racial public profile. In 1973, Lynott’s group recorded a rock arrangement of the traditional ballad ‘Whiskey in the Jar’; this single propelled Thin Lizzy to commercial success in the UK. Eric Bell’s subsequent departure prompted a change in the group’s musical direction; with Lynott acting as frontman and principal songwriter, the group began a steady climb to critical acclaim and commercial achievement. Their international success peaked with the studio album Jailbreak (1976) and the live double LP Live and Dangerous (1978). As interest in blues-rock waned in the late 1970s, Lynott’s artistic and personal affiliations with punk and new wave artists (Boomtown Rats, U2, Sex Pistols) kept him in the public imagination well into the 1980s. As biographer Mark Putterford (2002) details, the excesses of his hectic lifestyle and ongoing drug-use led to Lynott’s death in 1986.
Rory Gallagher
Rory Gallagher is a renowned Irish guitarist who rose to prominence in the 1970s. He recorded several blues and blues-rock albums, and gained an international reputation as a live performer of significant ability. Born in 1948 in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, Gallagher’s family moved initially to Derry, and later to Cork city. By the age of 16, Gallagher was working as a professional musician, and with the Fontana Showband, he performed the popular hits of the day in ballrooms across Cork city. Always seeking to expand his musical horizons, Gallagher encouraged his group (later renamed The Impact) to play more progressive material based on the evolving musical styles of rock and roll and rhythm and blues. Subsequently, Gallagher formed Taste, a blues-rock guitar trio, moving first to Belfast, and later to London. Under the management of Eddie Kennedy, Taste went through a line-up change and subsequently achieved critical and commercial success, appearing alongside Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, The Who, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970.
Following artistic and financial disagreements, Gallagher disbanded Taste, and the Rory Gallagher Band was formed. This band produced several studio albums and toured extensively throughout Ireland, Europe, Australia, Japan, the US and the UK. This group’s musical chemistry is evident on the albums Deuce and Calling Card, and the Irish Tour live album of 1974. A film documentary of this Irish tour shows Gallagher’s deep understanding of acoustic and electric blues forms, and his group’s ability to fuse various musical genres. The live concerts featured also showcases Gallagher’s awareness of current trends in traditional Irish music, as he performs ‘Going to My Hometown’ on mandolin, an Italian instrument popularised in Irish dance music by the folk musicians Andy Irvine and Johnny Moynihan. Throughout his career, Gallagher performed on a 1962 Fender Stratocaster. He is one of a limited group of musicians to have a ‘signature series’ guitar produced in limited numbers by the Fender Guitar company. Despite European commercial success and undertaking several American tours, Gallagher has remained an underappreciated figure in Irish popular music. His preoccupation with exploring the roots of blues music, along with his personal defiance concerning the exploitative excesses of rock culture, challenged the mythology of the rock star. Since Gallagher’s death in 1995, his contributions to rock and blues music in Ireland and internationally have been acknowledged, with high-calibre guitarists including The Edge, Slash and Andy Summers of The Police citing Gallagher’s musical style as influential on their developing sounds.
Van Morrison
Van Morrison is a key figure in contemporary Irish popular music, who achieved commercial success with Them (two British top ten singles in 1965) and critical acclaim as a solo artist albums. The scholar Mark Prendergast notes that Morrison’s was born in 1945 in east Belfast. His mother was a capable singer who performed jazz standards and introduced Van to Irish traditional music. Morrison’s father was a ‘staunch collector’ of blues and other African-American recordings (1987:113); this was the basis for Van’s exposure to gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, skiffle and rock and roll. In his showband days (with The Monarchs and The Olympics), Morrison performed in Ireland, the UK and Germany, and was a professional-level musician by the time of his celebrated residency at the Maritime Hotel, Belfast in the mid-1960s. Morrison’s exposure to the beat scene came when he and the group Them achieved Top Ten status in the UK with a cover of the blues composition ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’; Morrison’s composition ‘Gloria’ became something a rock standard.
His reportedly unhappy tenure with Them fuelled Morrison’s desire to record original material; with the support of producer Bert Berns, he was successful in the US with the single ‘Brown Eyed Girl’. With the American label Warner Brothers, Morrison achieved considerable critical success, fusing stream-of-consciousness lyricism with innovative musical arrangements which reflected his diverse musical roots. Albums of note from this period include Astral Weeks, Too Late to Stop Now, Moondance, and Veedon Fleece; Astral Weeks frequently appears of ‘greatest album’ lists. Morrison has been inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Developing long-standing musical associations with Robbie Robertson and The Band, Morrison famously performed at The Band’s Last Waltz at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco in 1976. Later, in collaboration with the Chieftains, Morrison would also look more closely at ‘traditional’ Irish sounds and instrumentation. Discussing Morrison’s musical identity, McLaughlin and McLoone state:
He [Morrison]… has maintained a strong sense of his roots while at the same time exploring – and extending considerably – the international rock idiom’.
Lineage and Cultural Inheritance - Some Instances
Regarding Phil Lynott, I want to interrogate the artist’s personal circumstances (born in the United Kingdom to Irish and Brazilian parents) and his subsequent socialization within a ‘traditional’ nuclear Irish family in Dublin. Lynott’s biographical intricacies confound received notions of Irishness, though for Lynott himself, Irish identity was a foundational aspect of personal subjectivity. Biographer Alan Byrne notes that Lynott’s mother, Philomena, was one of nine children born into a Catholic family in Crumlin. Philomena emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1947, in search of work in the aftermath of World War II. She began a relationship with Cecil Parris, a Brazilian ‘serviceman’ working in London (Byrne, 2006). The relationship led to pregnancy, and Philip was born at Halham Hospital, West Bromwich. Philomena Lynott’s biography details the substantial hardships she endured in trying to support her young son. As a consequence of ongoing persecution and the difficulties of working while looking after an infant, at the age of three, Philip was sent to live in Ireland with his mother’s parents. To avoid the stigmatisation associated with illegitimacy, Lynott was initially brought up regarding his uncles and aunts – Philomena’s brothers and sisters –as his siblings (Putterford, 2002:15). Lynott was sanguine about his familial situation, in stating that:
For a woman in Ireland in the 1950s, having a kid out of wedlock, and a black kid in particular, keeping it was hard.
[Phil Lynott quoted in Byrne, 2004:25]
The Lynott family in Dublin largely adhered to the nuclear pattern typical of Irish society of the time. Philip Lynott benefitted from the financial and emotional support of a nuclear family, which was enhanced by his mother’s seasonal visits to Ireland. His years in Leighlin Road introduced him to a range of musical cultures, as his uncle, Timothy, was an avid record collector. Lynott’s introduction to professional singing also came through neighbours in the Crumlin area, and he initially joined a group based around local musicians Frankie and Danny Smith. Local institutions, including youth clubs and St Anthony’s hall, provided performance spaces where Lynott began to develop his talents as a singer. Philip’s familial situation was noticeably atypical, however, in that, with the death of Philip’s grandfather in 1964, there was no authoritative father figure present in his life, on or against whom he could mould his personal subjectivity. In fact, Lynott’s identity was shaped by his exposure to masculine figures from popular culture – the cowboys he encountered in Dublin cinema, the fictional cartoon characters he absorbed from comics such as Beano and Dandy, the warriors and heroes of Irish mythology, and a range of authoritative musical figures emerging from the American rhythm and blues and rock scenes including Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles and Elvis Presley.
Lynott’s experiences, affected by his interracial birth and the circumstances of his socialization in Dublin, produced a noticeable ambivalence in his songwriting towards the nuclear family so deeply enshrined in the culture of Catholic Ireland. This is evident in the tensions around belonging in various Lynott’s compositions: representations of family, group belonging and insiderism compete with the solitary, unconnected hero typical of the wild west, as the ideal embodiment of personal subjectivity. Compositions in which family and inclusive relationships are foregrounded include ‘Philomena’, ‘Look What the Wind Just Blew In’, ‘Jailbreak’, ‘Little Girl in Bloom’ and ‘Return of the Farmer’s Son’. On the opposite extreme, Lynott embraced individualism, and a rejection of family finds expression in compositions such as ‘Cowboy Song’, ‘Don’t Believe A Word’, ‘Southbound’. The impulse to discard bonds to family and other inherited social ties is the ideological basis of Lynott’s famous identification of rock musicians as ‘a dying breed’. All we got is rock and roll and the road. We got no wives, no family, no homes, just this.’ [Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: 89]
By exploring Lynott’s compositions, we can determine that his works are defined by an ongoing opposition based on acceptance and rejection of the family structure so central to traditional narratives of Irish cultural identity. The ambivalence towards the nuclear family implicit in his work also shaped Lynott’s own life course, which embraced the extravagant, individualistic excesses of a permissive rock culture on the one hand, and reproduced the traditional values of Irish Catholicism (most especially through his marriage to Leslie Crowther and the birth and Catholic-oriented upbringing of his two daughters, Sarah and Cathleen) on the other.
Rory Gallagher
In the case of Rory Gallagher, I am interested to illustrate that Gallagher’s immediate family traversed political, sociological and cultural boundaries. Gallagher possessed both Irish and Northern Irish parentage. According to Gallagher’s brother and manager Donal, their father, Daniel Gallagher, was a Derry-born engineer who worked for the Irish Army during World War II. Following the war, Daniel Gallagher was re-assigned to the major hydroelectric construction project involving the damming of the river Erne at Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal. Gallagher’s mother, Monica Roche, was from County Cork, one of the island’s southernmost regions. Rory Gallagher (full name Liam Rory) was born during the couple’s time living in Ballyshannon. On the completion of Daniel Gallagher’s professional commitments, the family relocated first to Derry, where Rory’s brother Donal was born. The Gallagher family later moved to Cork; the boys went to school in the city, and made excursions to the coastal town of Cobh. While Gallagher’s socialization involved many quintessentially ‘Irish’ institutions and socio-cultural mechanisms – the cinema, Catholic schooling, the showbands, Irish traditions and superstitions – from an early age, he was, on the basis of his parents’ roots (or ‘routes’) in both of the island’s political jurisdictions, predisposed to a version of ‘Irishness’ typified by diversity, rather than singularity. I want to suggest that these biographical details are central in accounting for Gallagher’s later response to the Northern Irish political crisis. This response involved a rejection of the narratives of national and colonial exclusivity enshrined in the political doctrines of Unionism and Nationalism respectively.
Gallagher’s appeal to a cosmopolitan sense of ‘Irishness’ developed through his move from the Irish Republic to Belfast in 1966, where he worked as a professional musician in local clubs. Against the background of escalating political unrest, musicians of both Protestant and Catholic cultural heritage operated outside of the sectarian divide. Gallagher’s blues-rock group Taste was typical of this, in that the original line-up, formed in Cork, featured three Irish musicians: Gallagher, Norman Damery and Eric Kitteringham. Biographer Jean Noel Coghe states that both Damery and Kitteringham came from Protestant families, which means that the group’s earliest line-up bridged ethno-cultural divides obtaining in Ireland during the 1960s (Coghe nd: 74). When placed under the management of Eddie Kennedy, Taste re-located to London, and Damery and Kitteringham were replaced by John Wilson and Richard (Charlie) McCracken). Like Van Morrison, Wilson and McCracken were both Belfast musicians with Protestant backgrounds (in fact Wilson had performed with Morrison in Them prior to joining Taste). Once again, therefore, the second line-up of Taste included representatives of both of the Protestant and Catholic communities, a palpably progressive arrangement, given the scale of sectarian divisions developing in Ireland during the years of the Troubles (McAvoy, 2005; Rogan, 2004).
What is evident is that rock musicians such as Gallagher had, by the early 1970s, developed an approach to cultural production which challenged the exclusivist narratives of difference proposed by nationalist and unionist positions in Ireland. Gallagher had lived and performed in both the Republic and Northern Ireland, and this informed a cultural and political cosmopolitanism which enabled him to access and perform to rock audiences in both of the island’s political jurisdictions throughout The Troubles - a volatile time during which Ireland was bypassed by a majority of internationally touring rock acts. Gallagher’s decision to play Belfast, when the city was a recognised no-go area for major acts, needs to be read as a cosmopolitan proposition of some political significance. His performance proposed that rock culture could operate as a liminal space between warring ethnic groups: the Ulster Hall performance was one in which key cultural differences, central to narratives of ethnic exclusivity, were subsumed, as rock fans from both Catholic and Protestant communities attended together. Gallagher’s first performance was prefaced by a standing ovation, suggesting that the cultural implications of the concert resonated with the diverse audience present. Highlighting the intersection of politics and culture embodied in Gallagher’s appearance at the Ulster Hall, Roy Hollingworth’s Melody Maker report concluded that:
Without being silly, or over emotional…[i]t all meant something …two thousand people as one, with no minority, to troublemakers, no inhibitions. Lennon and McCartney were given a lot of headline space for their attempts to bring Ireland into rock ’n’ roll lyrics….Gallagher had done just the one thing a rock ‘n’ roller could do for Belfast. And that was play the damned place.
[Hollingworth, quoted in McAvoy and Chrisp, 2005: 107-8]
In addition, Gallagher provided a version of Irishness which challenged mainstream portrayals in the British press, heavily influenced by the IRA’s bombing campaign, and the escalation of attacks in Britian . To an international and largely Anglo-American audience, Gallagher’s success, demeanour and talent were a powerful antithesis to stereotypical representations imposed through residual imperial/colonial narratives, re-animated in the light of the Troubles. As programme announcements and advertisements relating to Taste, and Rory Gallagher’s interviews in the British music press demonstrate, Gallagher’s Irishness was highlighted, alongside his ‘considerable technique and tremendous personality’ (Coghe, nd: 43).
With respect to Van Morrison, I want to highlight aspects of Van Morrison’s unusual upbringing in a working class area of Protestant Belfast. Focusing on the key themes of religion and migration, it questions whether and how Morrison’s family experiences shaped the musical and social identities he adopted between 1968 and 1978 – a critical period in his career. Morrison grew up in the east of the city, in a traditionally Protestant area. However, his family remained distant from the excesses of cultural essentialism and from the sectarianism which gained an increasing hold on the city during the 1960s. In exploring Morrison’s diverse cultural influences, his principal biographers have noted that Morrison’s mother was involved with the Kingdom of Jehovah’s Witnesses, indicating that the young singer’s socialization involved an introduction to diverse religious traditions. In addition to the Protestantism which Morrison would have encountered through school in Orangefield and the presence of Orange Lodges and marching bands in Belfast, and to the faith of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Van Morrison’s exposure to religious culture had a third dimension, one received through the radio and via his father’s record collection. Morrison has repeatedly noted the influence of gospel music, and in particular that of Mahalia Jackson, on his musical style. Through such exposure, Morrison was able to absorb the principal features of the gospel vocal style which became a cornerstone of his own vocal delivery and has earned him justified acknowledgement as a vocalist of note. Morrison’s engagement with gospel music was one strand of a wider process of cultural inheritance and musical assimilation with which he engaged throughout his young life and formative years as a professional musician. Morrison’s father was an avid record collector, with a specialist’s interest in blues, jazz and African-American musics. Through his father, Morrison encountered several of the principal figures who shaped his musical identity. These included the rhythm and blues singers Jackie Wilson and Ray Charles, the jazz musician Charlie Parker, the blues artists Jimmy Witherspoon and Sonny Boy Williamson, the black folk blues performer Leadbelly, and Lonnie Donegan - the man largely responsible for the skiffle boom which brought British beat groups, including the Beatles, into music making. Through his father, Morrison could claim a working knowledge of African-American musical cultures several years before were popularised in Europe by the R&B, beat and rock groups.
Morrison was also able to draw on a specifically Irish cultural phenomenon, that of the showbands, in developing the professional dimensions of his musicianship. Morrison states that performing in a showband was the only avenue available to aspiring professionals in Ireland during the 1950s and 1960s:
Well, that’s how one got work, you know, at that point, if you were a professional musician....you had to work with somebody. The showbands were, you know, probably the only entity in Ireland that were getting work.
As a teenager, Morrison performed on saxophone and vocals in the Monarchs and the Olympics showbands. In Ireland, the majority of his musical experience with these groups was limited to country and western, Irish standards and other ‘light’ entertainment; however, Morrison was able to exploit this as an early opportunity for the development of his stagecraft. Interviewed for From A Whisper To A Scream, Morrison notes: (need quote here from Heylin, Rogan, about what Van was doing action-wise in showband performance). Morrison recalls that:
They [showbands] just weren’t doing covers: it was like a whole show. They did comedy, they did Top Ten...they did jazz, you know, they did impersonations. It was something that they could have done in Las Vegas. It was a very professional show. It wasn’t just a matter of, like, guys like doing steps and wearing suits. It was in a couple of levels above that.
Morrison completed a tour of Scotland and England with The Monarchs in 1962; his first experience as a recording artist occurred when the showbands recorded and released a single in Germany the following year. The Monarchs also acquired professional engagements in Heidelberg, Frankfurt and Cologne; these overseas experiences were formative, as an arduous schedule of nightly performances introduced Van Morrison to the rigours of professional musicianship. While the Monarchs’ R&B-based performances in Germany would have been musically derivative, while there, Morrison enjoyed first-hand access to the African-American musical cultures he had grown up listening to: jazz, blues and rhythm and blues. A fellow musician in the Monarchs, the guitarist George Jones reports that in Germany:
For the first time in his life, [Van] met American coloured GIs who dug soul, blues and all the music he was weaned on. Van drifted away every day to get near coloured guys who talked the same language as him – ‘Yeah, man, it’s crazy, let’s dig it – all that caper...Van really achieved a childhood ambition by playing for coloured guys. (Rogan, 2002:63)
Morrison biographer Johnny Rogan concludes that Morrison’s time in the showbands was a ‘tough but invaluable apprenticeship’, where, as a ‘valued but far from indispensable member’, he developed his musical personality and its attendant performance practices.
The paper has examined aspects of Irish rock musicians’ biography and professional lives in order to illustrate that the family, lineage and cultural inheritance are important structures for them. In Phil Lynott’s case, the nuclear family provided a sociological template which he embraced and rejected in turn throughout his career as a songwriter and performer. In Rory Gallagher’s circumstances, I wanted to illustrate that his family’s twin ‘routes’ in the republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland were instrumental in the later development of an inclusive political strategy that transcended bitter political divides. In Van Morrison’s case, the family provided the defining means by which Morrison could avoid the excesses of sectarianism; it also provided a protected and progressive world where the introspective and imaginative creativity which defined his best work developed. It enabled access to a wealth of musical recordings which were central to Morrison’s emerging musical identity; when fused with the professional sensibility he inherited principally from his experiences in the Irish showband tradition, it provided the syncretic disposition which has taken Morrison to the distinguished peak as a major international figure in Anglo American music culture.
A Family Affair? Lineage, Cultural Inheritance and Irish Rock Music
This paper focuses on Irish rock music and musicians, and critically examines issues relating to inheritance and the family in the development of their musical identities and performance practices. The admittedly derivative title references the Sly and the Family Stone composition ‘Family Affair’, which appeared on that group’s groundbreaking album There’s A Riot Goin’ On in 1971; that album is suggestive of the social, cultural and ideological shifts occurring across the Anglo-American cultural matrix, including Ireland, and involving the internationally prominent artists I refer to in this paper. In considering issues of lineage and ancestry, I examine three musicians from the ‘first wave’ of Irish rock, specifically the period 1968-1978: Phil Lynott, Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher. The analysis comments on these artists’ unique familial circumstances, establishing whether and how these positions challenge ‘Irish’ family structures problematically enshrined in dominant social and cultural discourses. The paper begins with a brief introduction to the three musicians in question. It then presents condensed critical discussions relevant to each musician, and will close by illustrating some conclusions regarding the significance of family and inheritance in first-wave Irish rock music.
Phil Lynott
Philip Parris Lynott was born in 1949 in Birmingham, England, of Brazilian and Irish parents. He was raised in a Crumlin, a predominantly working-class suburb of Dublin, primarily in his grandparents’ home on Leighlin Road. Supported by his mother Philomena, he began performing publicly in his teens in The Black Eagles, a locally-visible beat group which worked alongside the pop-oriented showbands in Dublin ballrooms. Lynott’s musical abilities soon developed a creative dimension: after a brief period performing as a vocalist with Skid Row, he formed Thin Lizzy with the drummer Brian Downey and guitarist Eric Bell. Lynott’s early compositions display a preoccupation with Celtic mythology, with the humourous, and the fantastic; Thin Lizzy’s early albums are characterised by complex rhythmic textures, and comparatively elaborate post-production. They were also the first highly visible Irish rock group to maintain an inter-racial public profile. In 1973, Lynott’s group recorded a rock arrangement of the traditional ballad ‘Whiskey in the Jar’; this single propelled Thin Lizzy to commercial success in the UK. Eric Bell’s subsequent departure prompted a change in the group’s musical direction; with Lynott acting as frontman and principal songwriter, the group began a steady climb to critical acclaim and commercial achievement. Their international success peaked with the studio album Jailbreak (1976) and the live double LP Live and Dangerous (1978). As interest in blues-rock waned in the late 1970s, Lynott’s artistic and personal affiliations with punk and new wave artists (Boomtown Rats, U2, Sex Pistols) kept him in the public imagination well into the 1980s. As biographer Mark Putterford (2002) details, the excesses of his hectic lifestyle and ongoing drug-use led to Lynott’s death in 1986.
Rory Gallagher
Rory Gallagher is a renowned Irish guitarist who rose to prominence in the 1970s. He recorded several blues and blues-rock albums, and gained an international reputation as a live performer of significant ability. Born in 1948 in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, Gallagher’s family moved initially to Derry, and later to Cork city. By the age of 16, Gallagher was working as a professional musician, and with the Fontana Showband, he performed the popular hits of the day in ballrooms across Cork city. Always seeking to expand his musical horizons, Gallagher encouraged his group (later renamed The Impact) to play more progressive material based on the evolving musical styles of rock and roll and rhythm and blues. Subsequently, Gallagher formed Taste, a blues-rock guitar trio, moving first to Belfast, and later to London. Under the management of Eddie Kennedy, Taste went through a line-up change and subsequently achieved critical and commercial success, appearing alongside Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, The Who, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970.
Following artistic and financial disagreements, Gallagher disbanded Taste, and the Rory Gallagher Band was formed. This band produced several studio albums and toured extensively throughout Ireland, Europe, Australia, Japan, the US and the UK. This group’s musical chemistry is evident on the albums Deuce and Calling Card, and the Irish Tour live album of 1974. A film documentary of this Irish tour shows Gallagher’s deep understanding of acoustic and electric blues forms, and his group’s ability to fuse various musical genres. The live concerts featured also showcases Gallagher’s awareness of current trends in traditional Irish music, as he performs ‘Going to My Hometown’ on mandolin, an Italian instrument popularised in Irish dance music by the folk musicians Andy Irvine and Johnny Moynihan. Throughout his career, Gallagher performed on a 1962 Fender Stratocaster. He is one of a limited group of musicians to have a ‘signature series’ guitar produced in limited numbers by the Fender Guitar company. Despite European commercial success and undertaking several American tours, Gallagher has remained an underappreciated figure in Irish popular music. His preoccupation with exploring the roots of blues music, along with his personal defiance concerning the exploitative excesses of rock culture, challenged the mythology of the rock star. Since Gallagher’s death in 1995, his contributions to rock and blues music in Ireland and internationally have been acknowledged, with high-calibre guitarists including The Edge, Slash and Andy Summers of The Police citing Gallagher’s musical style as influential on their developing sounds.
Van Morrison
Van Morrison is a key figure in contemporary Irish popular music, who achieved commercial success with Them (two British top ten singles in 1965) and critical acclaim as a solo artist albums. The scholar Mark Prendergast notes that Morrison’s was born in 1945 in east Belfast. His mother was a capable singer who performed jazz standards and introduced Van to Irish traditional music. Morrison’s father was a ‘staunch collector’ of blues and other African-American recordings (1987:113); this was the basis for Van’s exposure to gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, skiffle and rock and roll. In his showband days (with The Monarchs and The Olympics), Morrison performed in Ireland, the UK and Germany, and was a professional-level musician by the time of his celebrated residency at the Maritime Hotel, Belfast in the mid-1960s. Morrison’s exposure to the beat scene came when he and the group Them achieved Top Ten status in the UK with a cover of the blues composition ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’; Morrison’s composition ‘Gloria’ became something a rock standard.
His reportedly unhappy tenure with Them fuelled Morrison’s desire to record original material; with the support of producer Bert Berns, he was successful in the US with the single ‘Brown Eyed Girl’. With the American label Warner Brothers, Morrison achieved considerable critical success, fusing stream-of-consciousness lyricism with innovative musical arrangements which reflected his diverse musical roots. Albums of note from this period include Astral Weeks, Too Late to Stop Now, Moondance, and Veedon Fleece; Astral Weeks frequently appears of ‘greatest album’ lists. Morrison has been inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Developing long-standing musical associations with Robbie Robertson and The Band, Morrison famously performed at The Band’s Last Waltz at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco in 1976. Later, in collaboration with the Chieftains, Morrison would also look more closely at ‘traditional’ Irish sounds and instrumentation. Discussing Morrison’s musical identity, McLaughlin and McLoone state:
He [Morrison]… has maintained a strong sense of his roots while at the same time exploring – and extending considerably – the international rock idiom’.
Lineage and Cultural Inheritance - Some Instances
Regarding Phil Lynott, I want to interrogate the artist’s personal circumstances (born in the United Kingdom to Irish and Brazilian parents) and his subsequent socialization within a ‘traditional’ nuclear Irish family in Dublin. Lynott’s biographical intricacies confound received notions of Irishness, though for Lynott himself, Irish identity was a foundational aspect of personal subjectivity. Biographer Alan Byrne notes that Lynott’s mother, Philomena, was one of nine children born into a Catholic family in Crumlin. Philomena emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1947, in search of work in the aftermath of World War II. She began a relationship with Cecil Parris, a Brazilian ‘serviceman’ working in London (Byrne, 2006). The relationship led to pregnancy, and Philip was born at Halham Hospital, West Bromwich. Philomena Lynott’s biography details the substantial hardships she endured in trying to support her young son. As a consequence of ongoing persecution and the difficulties of working while looking after an infant, at the age of three, Philip was sent to live in Ireland with his mother’s parents. To avoid the stigmatisation associated with illegitimacy, Lynott was initially brought up regarding his uncles and aunts – Philomena’s brothers and sisters –as his siblings (Putterford, 2002:15). Lynott was sanguine about his familial situation, in stating that:
For a woman in Ireland in the 1950s, having a kid out of wedlock, and a black kid in particular, keeping it was hard.
[Phil Lynott quoted in Byrne, 2004:25]
The Lynott family in Dublin largely adhered to the nuclear pattern typical of Irish society of the time. Philip Lynott benefitted from the financial and emotional support of a nuclear family, which was enhanced by his mother’s seasonal visits to Ireland. His years in Leighlin Road introduced him to a range of musical cultures, as his uncle, Timothy, was an avid record collector. Lynott’s introduction to professional singing also came through neighbours in the Crumlin area, and he initially joined a group based around local musicians Frankie and Danny Smith. Local institutions, including youth clubs and St Anthony’s hall, provided performance spaces where Lynott began to develop his talents as a singer. Philip’s familial situation was noticeably atypical, however, in that, with the death of Philip’s grandfather in 1964, there was no authoritative father figure present in his life, on or against whom he could mould his personal subjectivity. In fact, Lynott’s identity was shaped by his exposure to masculine figures from popular culture – the cowboys he encountered in Dublin cinema, the fictional cartoon characters he absorbed from comics such as Beano and Dandy, the warriors and heroes of Irish mythology, and a range of authoritative musical figures emerging from the American rhythm and blues and rock scenes including Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles and Elvis Presley.
Lynott’s experiences, affected by his interracial birth and the circumstances of his socialization in Dublin, produced a noticeable ambivalence in his songwriting towards the nuclear family so deeply enshrined in the culture of Catholic Ireland. This is evident in the tensions around belonging in various Lynott’s compositions: representations of family, group belonging and insiderism compete with the solitary, unconnected hero typical of the wild west, as the ideal embodiment of personal subjectivity. Compositions in which family and inclusive relationships are foregrounded include ‘Philomena’, ‘Look What the Wind Just Blew In’, ‘Jailbreak’, ‘Little Girl in Bloom’ and ‘Return of the Farmer’s Son’. On the opposite extreme, Lynott embraced individualism, and a rejection of family finds expression in compositions such as ‘Cowboy Song’, ‘Don’t Believe A Word’, ‘Southbound’. The impulse to discard bonds to family and other inherited social ties is the ideological basis of Lynott’s famous identification of rock musicians as ‘a dying breed’. All we got is rock and roll and the road. We got no wives, no family, no homes, just this.’ [Leon Hunt, British Low Culture: 89]
By exploring Lynott’s compositions, we can determine that his works are defined by an ongoing opposition based on acceptance and rejection of the family structure so central to traditional narratives of Irish cultural identity. The ambivalence towards the nuclear family implicit in his work also shaped Lynott’s own life course, which embraced the extravagant, individualistic excesses of a permissive rock culture on the one hand, and reproduced the traditional values of Irish Catholicism (most especially through his marriage to Leslie Crowther and the birth and Catholic-oriented upbringing of his two daughters, Sarah and Cathleen) on the other.
Rory Gallagher
In the case of Rory Gallagher, I am interested to illustrate that Gallagher’s immediate family traversed political, sociological and cultural boundaries. Gallagher possessed both Irish and Northern Irish parentage. According to Gallagher’s brother and manager Donal, their father, Daniel Gallagher, was a Derry-born engineer who worked for the Irish Army during World War II. Following the war, Daniel Gallagher was re-assigned to the major hydroelectric construction project involving the damming of the river Erne at Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal. Gallagher’s mother, Monica Roche, was from County Cork, one of the island’s southernmost regions. Rory Gallagher (full name Liam Rory) was born during the couple’s time living in Ballyshannon. On the completion of Daniel Gallagher’s professional commitments, the family relocated first to Derry, where Rory’s brother Donal was born. The Gallagher family later moved to Cork; the boys went to school in the city, and made excursions to the coastal town of Cobh. While Gallagher’s socialization involved many quintessentially ‘Irish’ institutions and socio-cultural mechanisms – the cinema, Catholic schooling, the showbands, Irish traditions and superstitions – from an early age, he was, on the basis of his parents’ roots (or ‘routes’) in both of the island’s political jurisdictions, predisposed to a version of ‘Irishness’ typified by diversity, rather than singularity. I want to suggest that these biographical details are central in accounting for Gallagher’s later response to the Northern Irish political crisis. This response involved a rejection of the narratives of national and colonial exclusivity enshrined in the political doctrines of Unionism and Nationalism respectively.
Gallagher’s appeal to a cosmopolitan sense of ‘Irishness’ developed through his move from the Irish Republic to Belfast in 1966, where he worked as a professional musician in local clubs. Against the background of escalating political unrest, musicians of both Protestant and Catholic cultural heritage operated outside of the sectarian divide. Gallagher’s blues-rock group Taste was typical of this, in that the original line-up, formed in Cork, featured three Irish musicians: Gallagher, Norman Damery and Eric Kitteringham. Biographer Jean Noel Coghe states that both Damery and Kitteringham came from Protestant families, which means that the group’s earliest line-up bridged ethno-cultural divides obtaining in Ireland during the 1960s (Coghe nd: 74). When placed under the management of Eddie Kennedy, Taste re-located to London, and Damery and Kitteringham were replaced by John Wilson and Richard (Charlie) McCracken). Like Van Morrison, Wilson and McCracken were both Belfast musicians with Protestant backgrounds (in fact Wilson had performed with Morrison in Them prior to joining Taste). Once again, therefore, the second line-up of Taste included representatives of both of the Protestant and Catholic communities, a palpably progressive arrangement, given the scale of sectarian divisions developing in Ireland during the years of the Troubles (McAvoy, 2005; Rogan, 2004).
What is evident is that rock musicians such as Gallagher had, by the early 1970s, developed an approach to cultural production which challenged the exclusivist narratives of difference proposed by nationalist and unionist positions in Ireland. Gallagher had lived and performed in both the Republic and Northern Ireland, and this informed a cultural and political cosmopolitanism which enabled him to access and perform to rock audiences in both of the island’s political jurisdictions throughout The Troubles - a volatile time during which Ireland was bypassed by a majority of internationally touring rock acts. Gallagher’s decision to play Belfast, when the city was a recognised no-go area for major acts, needs to be read as a cosmopolitan proposition of some political significance. His performance proposed that rock culture could operate as a liminal space between warring ethnic groups: the Ulster Hall performance was one in which key cultural differences, central to narratives of ethnic exclusivity, were subsumed, as rock fans from both Catholic and Protestant communities attended together. Gallagher’s first performance was prefaced by a standing ovation, suggesting that the cultural implications of the concert resonated with the diverse audience present. Highlighting the intersection of politics and culture embodied in Gallagher’s appearance at the Ulster Hall, Roy Hollingworth’s Melody Maker report concluded that:
Without being silly, or over emotional…[i]t all meant something …two thousand people as one, with no minority, to troublemakers, no inhibitions. Lennon and McCartney were given a lot of headline space for their attempts to bring Ireland into rock ’n’ roll lyrics….Gallagher had done just the one thing a rock ‘n’ roller could do for Belfast. And that was play the damned place.
[Hollingworth, quoted in McAvoy and Chrisp, 2005: 107-8]
In addition, Gallagher provided a version of Irishness which challenged mainstream portrayals in the British press, heavily influenced by the IRA’s bombing campaign, and the escalation of attacks in Britian . To an international and largely Anglo-American audience, Gallagher’s success, demeanour and talent were a powerful antithesis to stereotypical representations imposed through residual imperial/colonial narratives, re-animated in the light of the Troubles. As programme announcements and advertisements relating to Taste, and Rory Gallagher’s interviews in the British music press demonstrate, Gallagher’s Irishness was highlighted, alongside his ‘considerable technique and tremendous personality’ (Coghe, nd: 43).
With respect to Van Morrison, I want to highlight aspects of Van Morrison’s unusual upbringing in a working class area of Protestant Belfast. Focusing on the key themes of religion and migration, it questions whether and how Morrison’s family experiences shaped the musical and social identities he adopted between 1968 and 1978 – a critical period in his career. Morrison grew up in the east of the city, in a traditionally Protestant area. However, his family remained distant from the excesses of cultural essentialism and from the sectarianism which gained an increasing hold on the city during the 1960s. In exploring Morrison’s diverse cultural influences, his principal biographers have noted that Morrison’s mother was involved with the Kingdom of Jehovah’s Witnesses, indicating that the young singer’s socialization involved an introduction to diverse religious traditions. In addition to the Protestantism which Morrison would have encountered through school in Orangefield and the presence of Orange Lodges and marching bands in Belfast, and to the faith of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Van Morrison’s exposure to religious culture had a third dimension, one received through the radio and via his father’s record collection. Morrison has repeatedly noted the influence of gospel music, and in particular that of Mahalia Jackson, on his musical style. Through such exposure, Morrison was able to absorb the principal features of the gospel vocal style which became a cornerstone of his own vocal delivery and has earned him justified acknowledgement as a vocalist of note. Morrison’s engagement with gospel music was one strand of a wider process of cultural inheritance and musical assimilation with which he engaged throughout his young life and formative years as a professional musician. Morrison’s father was an avid record collector, with a specialist’s interest in blues, jazz and African-American musics. Through his father, Morrison encountered several of the principal figures who shaped his musical identity. These included the rhythm and blues singers Jackie Wilson and Ray Charles, the jazz musician Charlie Parker, the blues artists Jimmy Witherspoon and Sonny Boy Williamson, the black folk blues performer Leadbelly, and Lonnie Donegan - the man largely responsible for the skiffle boom which brought British beat groups, including the Beatles, into music making. Through his father, Morrison could claim a working knowledge of African-American musical cultures several years before were popularised in Europe by the R&B, beat and rock groups.
Morrison was also able to draw on a specifically Irish cultural phenomenon, that of the showbands, in developing the professional dimensions of his musicianship. Morrison states that performing in a showband was the only avenue available to aspiring professionals in Ireland during the 1950s and 1960s:
Well, that’s how one got work, you know, at that point, if you were a professional musician....you had to work with somebody. The showbands were, you know, probably the only entity in Ireland that were getting work.
As a teenager, Morrison performed on saxophone and vocals in the Monarchs and the Olympics showbands. In Ireland, the majority of his musical experience with these groups was limited to country and western, Irish standards and other ‘light’ entertainment; however, Morrison was able to exploit this as an early opportunity for the development of his stagecraft. Interviewed for From A Whisper To A Scream, Morrison notes: (need quote here from Heylin, Rogan, about what Van was doing action-wise in showband performance). Morrison recalls that:
They [showbands] just weren’t doing covers: it was like a whole show. They did comedy, they did Top Ten...they did jazz, you know, they did impersonations. It was something that they could have done in Las Vegas. It was a very professional show. It wasn’t just a matter of, like, guys like doing steps and wearing suits. It was in a couple of levels above that.
Morrison completed a tour of Scotland and England with The Monarchs in 1962; his first experience as a recording artist occurred when the showbands recorded and released a single in Germany the following year. The Monarchs also acquired professional engagements in Heidelberg, Frankfurt and Cologne; these overseas experiences were formative, as an arduous schedule of nightly performances introduced Van Morrison to the rigours of professional musicianship. While the Monarchs’ R&B-based performances in Germany would have been musically derivative, while there, Morrison enjoyed first-hand access to the African-American musical cultures he had grown up listening to: jazz, blues and rhythm and blues. A fellow musician in the Monarchs, the guitarist George Jones reports that in Germany:
For the first time in his life, [Van] met American coloured GIs who dug soul, blues and all the music he was weaned on. Van drifted away every day to get near coloured guys who talked the same language as him – ‘Yeah, man, it’s crazy, let’s dig it – all that caper...Van really achieved a childhood ambition by playing for coloured guys. (Rogan, 2002:63)
Morrison biographer Johnny Rogan concludes that Morrison’s time in the showbands was a ‘tough but invaluable apprenticeship’, where, as a ‘valued but far from indispensable member’, he developed his musical personality and its attendant performance practices.
The paper has examined aspects of Irish rock musicians’ biography and professional lives in order to illustrate that the family, lineage and cultural inheritance are important structures for them. In Phil Lynott’s case, the nuclear family provided a sociological template which he embraced and rejected in turn throughout his career as a songwriter and performer. In Rory Gallagher’s circumstances, I wanted to illustrate that his family’s twin ‘routes’ in the republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland were instrumental in the later development of an inclusive political strategy that transcended bitter political divides. In Van Morrison’s case, the family provided the defining means by which Morrison could avoid the excesses of sectarianism; it also provided a protected and progressive world where the introspective and imaginative creativity which defined his best work developed. It enabled access to a wealth of musical recordings which were central to Morrison’s emerging musical identity; when fused with the professional sensibility he inherited principally from his experiences in the Irish showband tradition, it provided the syncretic disposition which has taken Morrison to the distinguished peak as a major international figure in Anglo American music culture.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Crest of A Wave? or, The Slaughter of Innocents ;)
Doing a PhD is definitely not for the faint-hearted. Have been chipping away for the last 6 months on various elements of the doctorate, and it is coming together. Still have some way to go to get it done and dealt with, and the road will not be easy. On the positive side, the structure is now definitely in place. Chapters are: general introduction and lit. review; definitions and historical survey; hybridity and Irish rock; space, place and Irish rock, identities, and a conclusion linking first wave and contemporary Irish rock music. It's been a rocky road paying for this thing myself, and it's hard to see how it's rewarding, to be honest. I suppose I haven't really thought about where to go with the qualification, but there is no point in thinking that far ahead. For now I just want to get it finished. I'm probably jumping the gun a bit - I should be trying to enjoy it more. The truth is that I do - and when the research is going well, the ideas are flowing and a leap is being made it can feel so rewarding. I'll stick with it and drive on!I've certainly expanded my knowledge of Irish rock, and a whole lot more besides, and I am grateful for that.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
A further leap
The project's main supervisor has declared himself happy with the second chapter, and the news that there are only minor edits to be made gladdens the heart. A bit weary at this point, so nothing major will be done for a few days. Having said that, have been indulging in some interesting scholarship edited by Richard Middleton. Sean Cubitt's reading of 'Maybellene' , the Chuck Berry song has excited my interest. I think his concept of challenging hegemonies through the lack of a central vocal line is critical. I am also excited by Peter Webb's analysis of the 'Bristol Sound' and the cultural politics of location embodied in it. Both are applicable to Irish rock. Was in Dublin meeting with the great Paddy Gibbons, studio engineer who worked with Phil Lynott in Skid Row and later in Orphanage. He was extremely helpful and contributed a massive interview regarding recording, technology and production of popular music in Ireland in the 1960s, plus a few gems about Phil Lynott himself. Cheers to Kevin the Biker, Bunse, Bairbre, Jean and The Bull Hannigan for making it a relaxing and enjoyable few days.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Right, more work done. Many thanks to Mr Barry Devlin and RTE for helping out in various ways. Have work done on contextual chapter, which needs to be revised again before submission. I took all Dr O'Brien's comments and changed the paper's structure accordingly. It's a lot better now. Getting time to do all the work necessary to make this project really work is a stress. Still, work continues apace. One the contextual chapter is done, I'll move on to the academic paper. No harm in writing a few short articles on various topics, as they come to mind.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Getting On With It
The next thing to be done is to rewrite the contextual chapter. I have two weeks to do it. Co-supervisor's comments very useful. The problem is that there is so much info out there, that it's hard to concentrate on drawing sound academic conclusions without referencing it all. Still, I will work away. I also want to write up the Cha Haran interview asap. Have gotten the go-ahead to stage a one-day academic conference at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, on May 19th. That will also take a bit of work. Have to organise flights for the San Diego conference, which I will do this week, and that paper will have to be written soon. Have compile d a list of journals for publications, but sent nothing out just yet. Also began editing the Rory Gallagher page over on Wikipedia. About 20 edits done.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Have been working hard in a few different directions. Firstly, have been putting the contextual chapter together, looking at various aspects of the Irish rock inustry circa 1960s and 1970s. Happy enough with aspects of pgoress, but it needs work before I can submit it to supervisor, and it's due in about a week. Have been accepted to give a paper in San Diego, and that's the next item on the agenda. Haven't had a chance to even think about it yet, but it will need to contain elements from various aspects of the research. I have gotten the go-ahead to plan a small conference in Mary I in late May, so that's some good news. Another one to work on in the coming weeks. Am trying to fit all this in on top of working and teaching piano and guitar. Enjoyed an artistic collaboration during the week, performing 'Walkin' Blues' down at the Westlands, Limerick for a multi-media work which is focusing on Irish musicians and the blues, and raising awareness about loneliness.
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