A great read…

The Humours Of Planxty

By Leagues O’Toole

(Hodder Headline Ireland — 2006)

Leagues O’Toole’s book is a must-read for fans of this great Irish band, tracing the histories and musical roots of individual members Dónal Lunny, Andy Irvine, Liam Og O’Flynn and Christy Moore, and their coalescence in the early 1970s into a formidable unit that changed forever the face of Irish music. As is appropriate for its subject matter, this is a big-hearted, humorous, musically insightful biography that takes the reader through the early days of travelling Ireland and Britain in their famous white van, the critical acclaim, the break and the solo projects, the comeback, the next break and more solo projects, and finally, the glorious ‘third coming’ with the band’s triumphant reformation in 2004.

The book has compelled me to dig out the Live At Vicar Street 2004 live album, and I’ve listened to little else on my iPod for the past week. Among the treasure trove of highlights are album opener ‘The Starting Gate’.

This is a mouth-watering curtain raiser with more ideas within its four minutes than many bands could muster over an entire album; its delicate, intricate opening shifting gears two minutes in; Lunny figuratively cranking the propeller with his vigorously strummed bouzouki chords, and O’Flynn taking us skyward with his gloriously soaring uilleann pipes, and Moore hoisting the bodhrán to bring the whole thing home to a rousing conclusion. Brilliant performance, and a fantastic read. Get along to your library today.

Papal resignation

Is it just me, or did response to the recent resignation of Pope Benedict XVI amount to much more than a worldwide ‘meh’? Sure, there were front page stories the following day, but their content seemed dictated by protocol—it was as if this made the news because it should be the news, rather than exciting or remarkable news in and of itself.

Perhaps it was inevitable, given the steady unfolding of age-old scandals in the Catholic Church in Ireland and elsewhere, and publications of reports from independent investigations into these wrongdoings, since Benedict’s election in 2005. Although not directly implicated in any of these scandals, there seemed to be a ‘least said soonest mended’ political approach by the Pontiff, and the Vatican, to these harrowing issues that was never going to endear the head of the Church to the international community.

And perhaps too Benedict was simply lacking in the charisma that helps a public figure to command mass respect among followers, and even admiration among detractors, no matter how controversial their views, opinions or conduct may be.

The contrast with the global reaction to the death of Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, was striking. John Paul was widely regarded as the most right-wing Pontiff for generations, a man who ran the Vatican with an iron hand, who made no bones about his traditional views on homosexuality, clerical celibacy, and the role of women in the Church. And yet, compared with Benedict, John Paul II had an iconic status to his admirers and detractors alike.

I can recall working as a reporter in the Limerick Leader at the time of John Paul II’s death in April 2005, and how, even as a non-Catholic, I was moved by his passing, to the point of filing a story on my childhood memories about the Pope’s historic visit to Ireland in 1979.

While I remain unmoved by the Vatican’s minimalist approach to the revelations, and believe that John Paul and Benedict truly missed an opportunity to play a leading role in healing the damage done to their Church by wrong-doers and those who harboured them, I stand over what I wrote about John Paul here, and the message of peace and love he brought to communities divided by religious and tribal distrust and even hatred.

—–

‘A single sentence among the hate and I knew who had my vote’

From the Limerick Leader, Saturday, April 16, 2005

BEFORE 1978, the Pope was a mythical figure to me. I had no idea the Pope was even a man. As someone who grew up in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, “Pope”, for me, was merely a word, and one with utterly negative connotations.

It was a word that I first saw on graffiti slogans. “No Pope Here” was a typical one. I can remember it painted in white letters on a wall along the roadside near the housing estate where I lived. “Pope”, whoever he or it was, apparently wasn’t welcome in our school toilets either, someone having crudely scratched “No Pope Here” with the point of a compass into the partition wall of one of the cubicles.

The first time I became aware the Pope was “the” Pope, rather than an abstract concept, was when I saw a particularly nasty slogan, scrawled in permanent marker on a fence near the school I attended: “Fuck the Pope”.

In 1970s and 1980s Northern Ireland, there was little opportunity for an eight-year-old non-Catholic to find out anything about the Pope. among Protestant friends, the Pope was a Fenian, a Taig, and therefore not a subject for discussion. And among Catholic friends, there was a reticence that ensured few if any references to the Pope in conversation.

However, thanks to my parents, I didn’t join in the graffiti writing, or the twisted ceremony of burning an effigy of the Pope on the bonfires lit on the eve of July 12th every year.

My parents told me that the Pope was the head of the Catholic Church, and I was not to be writing graffiti or making life difficult for the few Catholic neighbours we had on the estate. And that was that.

But then, the Pope himself intervened, in a single utterance that I’ve never forgotten. One day in 1978, the television told us there was a new Pope, and showed pictures of white smoke wafting from a tall chimney in a place I’d never heard of called The Vatican.

The following year, Pope John Paul II visited Ireland. His itinerary didn’t include the North, but my parents, my sister and me sat and watched the whole shebang on television. We saw the Pope in all the places he visited, including Limerick, and we also watched his farewell to Ireland at Shannon Airport.

The one crystal clear memory I have of the actual visit is not the famous “Young people of Ireland, I love you…” speech, but rather the simple declaration, “Let no Irish Protestant think that the Pope is a danger, an enemy or a threat.”

It was like a depth charge. Balancing this statement from a man who spoke of little else except peace and love, against those “Fuck The Pope” slogans, I knew who had my vote. He even had a yoke called the Pope-Mobile for getting around, and flew from place to place in a helicopter, pure superhero stuff for a nine-year-old kid.

I now live in Limerick, far from the place of my birth, and in the past few days, it has occurred to me that Pope John Paul II, with his simple reaching out to a community who hated him, helped to ensure that I wouldn’t go down the same road travelled by many of the kids who were the same age as me.

Some of them joined or supported paramilitary groups, and as the Troubles simmered and boiled throughout the 1980s, others engaged in outright intimidation of their Catholic neighbours. It’s almost certain that these were the same kids who scraped those messages about the Pope on walls and fences all those years ago.

I know these are simple childhood memories. The Pope had his critics. He was a conservative, tough man who ruled his own Church with an iron hand. But for me, he’ll always be a holy man who reached out to others, simply and directly exposing irrational hatred for what it is, in a single sentence. [ENDS]

The return of My Bloody Valentine

Here’s a Valentine’s Day gift worth savouring—the latest recording by My Bloody Valentine, m b v, only their third in a 20-year career, and one that might well be the most satisfying and subtly ground-breaking collection of songs they’ve ever released. That’s probably heresy to fans of Loveless, the 1991 album that took a full two years of work and is rumoured (probably apocryphally, if we’re to believe MBV mastermind Kevin Shields) to have almost bankrupted Creation Records.

m b v is not a departure from Loveless in quite the same way that Loveless leapt forward from the band’s 1988 debut album Isn’t Anything? But the relief is that m b v is everything we’ve come to expect of Kevin Shields, Colm Ó Cíosóig, Debbie Googe and Bilinda Butcher collectively —the sonic extremities, the sighing melodies, the beautiful abyss of melancholy over which everything teeters—and more. At times, for instance on ‘Only Tomorrow’, the distortion is so extreme it almost cracks apart, and rarely have Shields and his bandmates sounded so abandoned as they do on ‘In Another Way’ and the closing ‘Wonder 2’. But then there is the unexpected electronica hymn of ‘Is This And Yes’, and ‘If I Am’ and ‘New You’ are, simply, pop songs. Altogether, My Bloody Valentine has never sound as wild, as calm; as fiery, as pretty; as they do on m b v.

From the aural acid shower of the opening chord of first track ‘She Found Now’, to the frenetic kaleidoscopic conclusion of ‘Wonder 2’, the band sigh and swoon through aural firestorms, twinkling like stars at one moment, hurtling into a black hole the next. After three listens, an obvious standout is ‘Who Sees You’, a great continental drift of a performance, with molten guitar and chord changes coming with the finesse of a card dealer, topped with one of the most gloriously sloppy guitar solos you could hear outside of a Neil Young and Crazy Horse bootleg. ‘Is This And Yes’ is another high point, with its simple, solemn Mo Tucker-like percussion underpinning a beautiful mesh of keyboards and harmony vocals. And ‘If I Am’ seems to be as poppy as My Bloody Valentine can get, that impression will last only for as long as it takes to listen to the next track, ‘New You’, with its skipping beat, fuzz bass, and doo-doo-doo-de-doo-doo scatting vocals.

At the other end of the sonic spectrum, ‘In Another Way’ opens with an electronica equivalent of Tarzan’s jungle war cry and into a frenetic collision of dance percussion, a spiralling melodic ascent with a tidal harmonic undertow, before crashing into an instrumental interlude in which everything seems to drop away save for a fanfare for guitar solo and keyboards. It’s like a less programmed version of the Loveless highlight ‘Soon’. Difficult listening, but ultimately rewarding. ‘Nothing Is’ is a three-minute pummelling instrumental, a savagely intense but rhythmically intricate track that inexorably tightens its grip throughout its 3.34 duration, before the euphoric release of album closer ‘Wonder 2’. With its propulsive, swooshing rhythm track and what sounds like a cut up and phased sample of a plane engine underpinning a dizzying vista of shifting chords and jet propelled rhthym guitar, keyboards, and a majestic vocal melody, listening to ‘Wonder 2’ is like being strapped into the cockpit of some supersonic aircraft that’s been pre-set to take you on the most exhilharating, white-knuckled ride of your life.

It’s everything we expect of My Bloody Valentine, and yet also entirely unexpected. And as such, it’s the perfect conclusion to a remarkable album. A mere 22 years on from the epochal Loveless, it’s as if My Bloody Valentine have never been away. And if that’s not worth waiting for, I don’t know what is. A happy Valentine’s day indeed.

Astral Weeks revisited

I love Van Morrison, but I have a confession to make. I don’t like Astral Weeks. I’ve always found it much easier to admire than to love, but that all changed this week on the daily roadtrip between Limerick and Cork…

I have been a Van Morrison fan for just about as long as I can remember. I remember being introduced to him in the mid 1980s. I was vaguely familiar with him as someone whose name was dropped frequently in conversations in our kitchen between my sister, Yvonne, and her ever so windswept and interesting friends from college (she’s seven years older than me, and when you’re a sixteen year old boy, a 23-year-old female sibling, that’s a bit of generation gap. Anyway.) as they used to go see him play back in the days when he was a regular fixture in performance at the Grand Opera House and The Ulster Hall.

It wasn’t until Yvonne took me along to The Ulster Hall to see Van Morrison play at The Ulster Hall for my birthday that I really understood that the reverential tones in which his name were uttered were entirely appropriate. That’s when I started to read about him, and become aware of the landmark Astral Weeks album. Naturally, I went  out and bought it, and… well, I was disappointed. All of the songs are brilliant (bar one; The Way Young Lovers Do is the turkey of this album), but I found the arrangements and instrumentation, while completely unique, shrill and headache inducing.

Hey, I was only 17, right? But my first impression was that the slower songs, mostly, worked best, and beautifully so. Madame George is gorgeous, uplifting and heartbreaking all at once. Slim Slow Slider is a beauty as well. Sweet Thing is a graceful performance indeed. But Cyprus Avenue and Ballerina, which move so deftly, seem by their conclusions to be swamped in an excess of strings, flute and keyboard flourishes; not lush like Mantovani, but something harsher. I also thought (still do) that The Way Young Lovers Do was a complete mess. And (sacrilege!) the title track starts brilliantly before Richard Davis moves up to the upper fretboard of his bass in a virtuoso display of musicianship that I just found unnecessarily fussy. I won’t even begin to describe how difficult I found it to listen to Beside You. And the lack of restraint in Van Morrison’s voice on this album didn’t for me, do it any favours on a first listening.

Times change. I’ve grown to respect and admire Astral Weeks a great deal. However, I’ve never really loved it. Until this week. This week it was the soundtrack for my daily commute to work between Limerick and Cork. Perhaps it was the weather, which created a lush green landscape of fields all misty wet with rain. But it’s more likely that I wasn’t listening to the original work, but rather the ’Astral Weeks Live At The Hollywood Bowl’ CD from a few years back, which I recently borrowed from the library.

Interestingly, it probably works so well because Van himself is less abandoned vocally, singing in a much chestier register than he was some 30 years earlier, but also, the musicians, while adhering to the unique Astral Weeks instrumental mesh of acoustic guitar, upright bass, drums, strings and flute, are more the servants of the songs, and the live mix is balanced without being slick. What’s lost—that edge of the seat sensation that Van and his musicians are going to take off and soar skyward—is compensated for by a hypnotic, pulsing groove, that seduces rather than shouts.

Seduction is probably a word most people would prefer not to associate with Van Morrison. But he’s finally managed to get this beautiful body of work across to this listener at least (not that my listening habits are causing him many sleepless nights), and made me see, finally, what motivated the great writer Lester Bangs to write his essay on ‘Astral Weeks’ in 1979, a piece of writing that I’ve always held in much higher regard than the album he is writing about. Until now that is.

“I believe I’ve transcended…” Van sings at the end of the live version of the title track. I believe he has. Absolutely brilliant. It may even prompt me to revisit the original album. Now where did I put those Nurofen…

“A dad’s thoughts on Father’s Day…”

My sister asked me to write something about our dad, Eric, for Father’s Day 2011, as she’s convinced her memory is shot. Her post (see link at the very end of this post) would suggest otherwise. Anyway, she was kind enough to use this rambling epistle inspired by and dedicated to my dad, and to my own sons Tom, Charlie and Joe…

The answers to some questions float just out of reach through and beyond childhood before parenthood shocks you into the necessity of sharpening up your act when an inquisitive toddler asks you, “Why/what/where/who is that, dad?”

Such questions can range from mildly curious inquiries into phenomena as the composition of rainbows, and the tendency of boats to float on water as against the inevitability of stones sinking—relatively easily explained; thank you, Wikipedia—up to more urgent demands for satisfaction on the stickier issues, of why you are working late (again), and why shops close down (a common one in Ireland, that, these days).

Then of course, there are those moments when you are asked to turn one single, jam-slicked block of Lego into a dinosaur; or draw a picture of Buzz Lightyear on a broken MagnaDoodle with a stylus a quarter-inch in diameter.

There is also the expectation that you can do anything. One of my eldest son Tom’s first almost coherent sentences was: “I break it; dad fix it.”

It’s particularly at moments like these that I think about my own dad, Eric. The remarkable thing about Eric Watterson is that he would be entirely unfazed by the challenge of constructing a Millennium Falcon, a Dalek, or some other space-age gizmo with which he had no familiarity whatsoever, out of the most basic and limited resources.

It’s something that he’s done throughout his life. Dad made a guitar, when he was little more than ten years old, for his little brother Ben, when Ben was a toddler. Ben still plays guitar and a variety of stringed instruments to this day.

Later in life, after he and mam bought their first house, dad pretty much gutted the ground floor of the building, knocking two rooms into one for an extensive kitchen/dining room, and at the rear of the house, built a shed, fully wired, with its own toilet and wash-hand basin, and plumbed it for a washing machine. He also constructed a permanent glasshouse in which he grew his own tomatoes, and provided it with a covered outdoor seating area, complete with an ornamental traditional fireplace that had a replica forged iron crane and pot. He decorated the outside of the glasshouse with dozens of scallop shells that he collected from a beach in County Donegal.

From mixing concrete to stripping apart a faulty iron to mend it and rebuild it again, it seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do.

Sadly I inherited none of his impressive skills in handiwork. However, I may have picked up some of his more artistic impulses. He’s one of those people who can sit down and pick out a tune on a piano, even though he has had no formal tuition, and I remember well the huge piano accordion that he used to pick up from time to time to pump out a melody.

Even though dad reads the newspaper every day, I’ve rarely seen his with a book in his hand. However, one of his party pieces when I was young was to recite ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ by Robert Service from memory. It was my introduction to iambic pentameter. Where he learnt those poems from I have no idea, but it’s probably my earliest memory of poetry. And listening to his fellow County Derry man Seamus Heaney reading his own poetry always connects me with those impromptu Service workshops from many years ago.

Sometimes all of these memories collide, as memories often will, in a sound or a sensation in an entirely unexpected context. I’ve tried in vain to persuade my sister of my, admittedly whimsical, view that Robbie Robertson of The Band somehow channeled the sound of my dad digging potato drills into what sounds like a tambourine shiver and tap in the chorus of ‘Tears of Rage’. Well, actually, it is a tambourine, but every time I hear the song, it stops me in my tracks, because somehow it is the sound of my dad slicing through the soil in the flowerbeds and gently shaking it out, before slicing into the earth again, in a steady rhythm.

I don’t really know what any of this tells you about my dad. There’s a great song by the Wexford artist Pierce Turner, called ‘You Can Never Know’, from his brilliant 1988 albumThe Sky And The Ground. The song is about how difficult it is to put another person in your shoes; to convey to another person the emotions you experience in particular situations. The song begins with the narrator driving along listening to Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ (“It felt so good to hear those coloured girls sing”) before he tells us how we can never know what it’s like to experience his childhood memories of standing in a church “full of boy sopranos singing ‘Faith of our Fathers’ at the top of our hearts” (“It felt so good to hear those choir voicings”, he sings, echoing the famous Reed lyrics); before the barriers to understanding melt away in a triumphant climax as he sings the hymn’s refrain straight: “Faith of our fathers! Holy faith! We will be true to thee til death.” For me—and I’ve had almost violent disagreements with people about this—it’s one of the most profoundly moving moments in late 20^th century popular music.

Seeing the man perform this song in Whelan’s in Dublin, solo, was simply amazing. In live performance, rather than the polished persuasion of the studio version, the closed door of the title was gleefully kicked open by Turner, as he jumped onto pint-strewn tables to belt out this 19^th century hymn, leading the dozens of people in the audience in euphoric accompaniment. In the live setting, it was as if Turner decided that if, indeed, we can never know what that childhood memory truly felt like, then so what? He would give us the next best thing, and make us feel it through music.

For me, the killer bit in that song is in the lead-up to the climax, when he talks about his father, standing in the church with him on that day. “My father’s hand on my shoulder, nicotine-stained index finger, big and rough, but love can’t always be articulate…”

I’ve shared many of those moments, what Van Morrison would refer to as the “inarticulate speech of the heart” times with my dad, especially in childhood, and unfortunately with much less frequency these days. He took me to my very first football match on a foggy St Stephen’s Day (I think it was at Glentoran, but it was an awfully long time ago); indulged my every request to make things; endured my complete and utter failure to grasp the principles of algebra, of which, naturally, he has an instinctive understanding to rival that of any mathematics teacher; taught me to drive; and he let me ride ‘shotgun’ with him every weekend and on school holidays on his rounds for the Mother’s Pride and then Golden Crust bakeries, for whom he was a delivery man for 10 years or so. He even helped me write a poem about my hometown, Antrim, for a homework exercise assigned by some sadist of a primary school teacher. Actually, he didn’t help me. He just wrote it. “Antrim was a little town, there wasn’t many stores; but many buildings have sprung up, the population’s soared,” went the opening. “The Bluebird Café in the Square, and Craig’s the cobblers, too / have vanished from the local scene; I don’t know what we’ll do,” was another couplet. Alas, the rest is lost in the mists of time.

He’s always been there for me, and has picked me up and dusted me down and set me off again, probably many more times than I’ve deserved.

And as I think of him on this Father’s Day, particularly now when I’ve had the pleasure of watching him get to know my own sons, Tom, and his little twin brothers Charlie and Joe, all I can say is that if they learn as half as much from me as I’ve learnt from him, I’ll be a happy man. And if they don’t, they have the fortunate consolation of a granddad who can actually turn a single block of Lego in something that might meet, or even exceed, their wildest imaginings.

Happy Father’s Day, dad.

None of this would have been written, if it weren’t for a succession of barely restrained reminders from my sister Yvonne, whose heavy use of the exclamation mark in her e-mail subject lines spoke volumes about how much this meant to her; so here is the post that inspired this.

http://timetoconsiderthelilies.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/inarticulate-speech-of-the-heart-happy-fathers-day/

“It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why…”

I wrote this for the Limerick Independent free weekly newspaper of which I was editor for five years until its sad demise towards the end of 2010. At least it hung in long enough to enable me to preview Bob Dylan’s show at Thomond Park, Limerick, on Independence Day that year…

FOR Bob Dylan’s Limerick fans, July 4 is the red-letter day of 2010. The prospect of seeing the man perform in their own backyard, in a world-class stadium, is mouth-watering indeed.

Dylan is an iconic figure, but he is also a unique breed of rock star, and those who have never seen him in performance, and have been encouraged to go on the basis of one of the many ‘best of’ compilations of his work, are advised to approach with caution.

Bob Dylan stands apart from his contemporaries. Unlike the Paul McCartneys or the Elton Johns, he does not offer note-perfect reproductions of his recorded work, and will not present the big visual spectacle of which veteran rock stars seem to be so fond.

His voice, worn and frayed from being pushed through over 100 shows annually for the last 22 years (not to mention the near fatal cardiac condition that almost claimed his life in the late 1990s) is far from pretty: a phlegmy, guttural bark on the uptempo numbers; a rusty croon on the ballads.

If David Bowie described Dylan as having a “voice of sand and glue” in the early 70s, God only knows how he would characterise the Dylan vocal chords of 2010.

So there will be no frills; no slavish reproductions of the classic songs; no video screens; no fireworks; and definitely no gymnastics. There is not even a nod to the classic notion of ‘frontman’, or any extensive use of the instrument with which he’s most associated; the guitar. These days, he plays electric keyboard for all but two to three songs of his set, and even then, he’s situated at stage left or right, not centre. And if you’re going along in the expectation of hearing the man chat, forget it. There will hardly be a word.

In recent years, there have been a couple of knowing, ironic, eyebrow-cocked nods to showbiz, and flashes of his often overlooked sense of humour.

Perched atop the amplifiers close to his electric keyboard, you will spot the Oscar that he won for his song ‘Things Have Changed’ in the 1999 movie The Wonder Boys. It is said that he won’t play a show without this prized ‘mascot’.

And his stage announcement will probably also prompt a knowing smile among anyone even vaguely familiar with his career trajectory:

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll. The voice of the promise of the 60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock. Who donned makeup in the 70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse. Who emerged to find Jesus. Who was written off as a has-been by the end of the ’80s, and who suddenly shifted gears releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late ’90s. Ladies and gentlemen: Columbia recording artist… Bob Dylan!!

It says a lot about Dylan’s sense of humour and willingness to undercut his own myth that he adapted this introduction from an article about him which appeared in The Buffalo News, in August 2002.

Apart from these concessions to the audience, though, you’re on your own. There is no handrail. So why would you even bother going?

Well, the opportunity of glimpsing magic is about as tantalising an invitation as can be extended. At his best, and even at his worst, he is the musical equivalent of an acrobat on a high-wire, with the only safety net provided by the always engaging arrangements of his backing band.

The current Dylan band can provide the springboard for some of his most inspirational and thrilling musical flights. Even on a night when he’s not firing on all cylinders, Dylan himself, and the audience, can take refuge in the band’s thrilling, versatile and ever evolving (re)arrangements of the man’s back catalogue.

Everything hanging on whether the boss is having a good or bad night has been the way of all things Dylan ever since June 7, 1988, when he set out on his so-called Never Ending Tour. This is a watershed date in Dylan’s career, a complete break with the past, especially with the then recent past, when touring with session musos and established bands had threatened to turn him into a parody of himself.

The then new-look Dylan did not provide easy ride for the audience. Instead of an elder statesman giving the folks what they wanted, fans were confronted with their hero and just three youthful cohorts, tearing through the hallowed back catalogue with the vigour of a teenage punk band, and with neither a keyboard, a backing singer, nor a video screen in sight, and scarcely a word of greeting or farewell from the man himself.

Since that time, there have been personnel changes and augmentations, and Dylan has steadily regained the respect of his devotees. But it has been a rollercoaster ride.

I’ve seen Dylan 10 times on the Neverending Tour. Most of it has been great. Some of it has been absolutely magical. Some of it has even been awful. But all of it has been invigorating. I’ve seen him veer between awfulness and transcendence in a single show, sometimes even in a single song.

His concert at Dundonald Ice Bowl, Belfast in 1991, was peculiar and unfocused, as if, just prior to curtain-up, someone had whispered in his ear that he had no right to be on stage. But even then, he performed the best version of ‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll’‚ that I’ve ever heard.

In 1993, in what was then the Point Depot in Dublin (now the O2), amid a generally high quality performance (including a spine-tingling ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ embellished with haunting howls of pedal-steel guitar) I recall a lumbering, sleep-walking ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ that suddenly roared into life when he got to the end of the second verse, and seemed to wake up, timing the lyric of “that way, down on Highway Sixty-One”‚ daringly; interminably stretching out the “sixxxxxxxxx” before snapping at the remaining syllables like the graceful crack of a ringmaster’s whip—the band responded by seemingly lifting the tune into the air in one of the most intense examples of a singer and band feeding off one another I’ve yet to witness.

My all time favourite Dylan concert moment occurred on July 30, 1988, in the intimate, open air setting of the Mesa Amphitheatre in Arizona. It was my first Dylan concert, and watching him do his thing with more focus and energy than I or anyone else had anticipated, was a true thrill. The real magic was dealt out during the acoustic set, and a beautiful ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. As he sang of dancing beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free‚ the desert horizon flickered and flashed with sheet lightning, and distant rumbles of thunder added a dramatic aural counterpoint to Dylan’s hymn to inspiration. God certainly was on his side that night.

This early three-piece Neverending Tour band made it to Irish shores the following year, with a two-nighter at the RDS Simmonscourt Arena. On the first night, Dylan, bizarrely, performed with his face almost entirely obscured (with the exception of that unmistakeable and magnificently iconic nose and mouth) by the sweatshirt hood and baseball cap he’d opted to wear for his first Irish show in almost five or six years. I missed that show, but saw the following night’s gig, another bracing, focused affair, graced with too many highlights to mention, but in particular the brooding, simmering, electric versions of ‘Masters Of War’ and ‘The Ballad Of Hollis Brown’, and a delicate rendition of ‘One Too Many Mornings’ that for me remains his definitive reading of this early, heartbreaking love song.

Leaping forward to 1995, back again in the Point Depot, there was another remarkable highpoint of the entire Neverending Tour. A hand injury had left Dylan unable to play the guitar, but this proved fortuitous. Unencumbered by instrumental duties, the man summoned up some of his most focused vocal performances ever. Out of the vast, almost incalculable number of unofficial Dylan recordings, the live bootlegs from this brief era are among the most sought after.

Ten years later at the same venue, and, this time playing keyboards, Dylan made time stand still during an indescribably lovely yet foreboding rendition of ‘Visions Of Johanna’. Visually enhanced by the Western suits and hats worn by the musicians, and a simple stage backdrop of pinpoints of white light, this ‘Visions…’ played like the lines and furrows in William Holden’s face during the campfire scene from Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’, set on the night before Holden and his cohorts mount their climatic, doomed rescue mission.

Back in 1998, there was a welcome bit of patter for the crowd to preface an entirely unexpected rendition of ‘The Newry Highwayman’: “I’m gonna play an old song, I learnt it a long time ago. But I believe the song came from around here, so I’m gonna do my best to sing it for ya…”

In 2009, he offered a ‘best of’ set-list that spanned just about every corner, certainly every decade, of his recording career, in a show that my long-suffering wife, having been unwillingly dragged to several shows prior to this, thought was one of the best concerts she had ever seen. By anyone, I hasten to add. But even on that occasion, much of the broadcast and print media reviews were more concerned with the fact that Dylan had not spoken to the audience, rather than the shows themselves.

As to what the uninitiated can expect from Bob Dylan at Thomond Park this Sunday evening, check out http://www.bobdylan.com for a glance at the set lists from his recent shows. There will be some playing around and substituting of numbers (as it’s a Sunday, there may even be one of his much reviled ‘religious’ songs), but basically, take a look at it and let your imagination take over, because the performances will almost certainly be nothing like the recorded versions of those songs. Dylan remains true to himself and true to the moment, and whatever comes out, that’s what you get. It’s as simple as that.

You’d wonder what Dylan, now pushing 70, makes of all this. I’d like to imagine that he is bemused. This man once had ‘JUDAS!!’ roared at him, for the crime of playing what were once acoustic guitar songs with a full blooded rock band. As for those who lament at the condition of his modern day voice… well, when did Dylan ever win awards for the technical proficiency of his singing?

Yes, you’d wonder, to quote one of his most popular choruses, “how does it feel?”

Well, for a clue you could look at Don’t Look Back‚ the legendary black-and-white documentary of his 1965 British tour, when he is filmed reading aloud a newspaper report that he smokes 80 cigarettes a day. “God,” Dylan wryly remarks, “I’m glad I’m not me.”

But perhaps there’s a more illuminating clue in the 2003 movie, Masked & Anonymous, in which he starred, and wrote a significant portion of the script.

As we consider the length of Dylan’s career, and the depth and width of his celebrity and notoriety, the parting shot of Dylan’s character, Jack Fate, related on voice-over over a shot of the star inscrutably gazing out of the window of a bus, speaks volumes.

“Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder,” he says, adding, “I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago.”

New adaptation of CS Lewis’s ‘grief journal’ strikes a cathartic chord

Ronan Dodd is an old friend and colleague from my days in the ‘Limerick Leader’ newspaper. Having enjoyed many hours of conversation with Ronan about his adaptation of CS Lewis‘s A Grief Observed, the 1961 collection of Lewis’s experience of bereavement following the death of his wife, Joy Gresham, it was a pleasure to be in the audience at the 2011 Dromineer Literary Festival last Sunday, October 2, to see Ronan stage this dramatic, powerful and thought-provoking 35-minute monologue. As far from popular notions of CS Lewis as you can get, the piece also resonates powerfully in modern Ireland, as hundreds of thousands of people come to terms with the heartbreak and anxiety of their own shattered realities amid the economic collapse of the country.

Ronan Dodd, as CS Lewis in 'A Grief Observed', the powerful closing performance at last weekend's Dromineer Literary Festival 2011. Picture by Gerardine Wisdom

THE broken-hearted author is alone in his study. We watch, we listen, as this literary giant, a prince of prose, an intellectual leviathan, struggles valiantly to construct order out of a wreckage of disconnected thoughts; to summon the energy to shake off grief and come to terms with the death of his wife.

Ronan Dodd’s adaptation and one-man performance of CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed (published in 1961 following the death of Lewis’s wife, Joy Gresham) was, for all the intensity of its forensic probing of a broken heart and a devastated intellect, a powerful and somehow hopeful conclusion to the 2011 Dromineer Literary Festival on October 2.

Anyone who has sobbed along to Shadowlands, the 1993 Richard Attenbrough movie starring Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as Joy Gresham, will have a flavour of the depth of the attachment between the pair. But the chords struck by the cinematic treatment are but an aperitif for the main course of raw emotions unleashed in A Grief Observed.

Lewis’s book was, during his lifetime, published under the pseudonym NW Clerk, and referred to his wife as ‘H’ (the initial of Joy Gresham’s first name, Helen, which she rarely used). The ‘H’ remains in the text, although since Lewis’s death, the work has been properly attributed. The anonymity Lewis insisted on while he was alive is understandable, given the psychic depths that he plumbs in the work.

Ronan Dodd’s adaptation of A Grief Observed distills Lewis’s 80-odd page book to its essence. With the blessing of the CS Lewis estate, the adaptation strips away Lewis’s more esoteric philosophical flights and retains the most compelling observations and most accessible strands of thought. The resulting 35-minute monologue presents Lewis ‘thinking out loud’ as he wanders from armchair to writing desk and back again; a lonely man, desperate for company, yet shunning the consolations of friends as he attempts to make sense of life in the absence of his beloved wife.

The audience at Dromineer was spellbound. Dodd’s portrayal of Lewis—testy, mournful, angry, and humorous—is probably much closer to how this difficult, eccentric, brilliant, troubled Northern Irish author truly was, than Anthony Hopkins’s celebrated portrayal in Shadowlands. Red-eyed, ashen-faced, Dodd restlessly paces the stage between writing desk and armchair in sporadic flurries, stopping momentarily, or sitting in the chair, to face the audience and expand upon a point, mirroring the book’s restless and relentless inquiries of various themes.

The atmosphere is intense but somehow accessible, and not without a vein of dark humour. Pondering on talking to God as a way of coping with his grief, the sardonic wisdom of his observation that “the phrase, ‘Let us have a good conversation’,will reduce us to silence”, prompted laughter from the audience.

The laughter—which murmured through the audience on more than once occasion—was surprising, given the simmering anger and passionate intensity of the script. Reflecting on how cancer has robbed him of his loved ones, he suddenly wheels to face the audience, stabbing the air in punctuation as he utters one of the most painful lines in the work: “Cancer, and cancer, and cancer. My mother, my father, my wife.”

He laments the brevity of memories of the “pre-her happiness” he had been experiencing, and then acknowledges the cruel realisation that even this happiness was “insipid”. As he thoughtfully handles a tumbler of whiskey, he speaks of the “laziness” of grief, of ceasing to care for himself and his appearance, and ponders how the many roads that led to his life have turned into cul de sacs, and how he has “no photograph of her that is any good”.

It’s easy to appreciate how A Grief Observed caused such consternation among Christians when it was published. This is an angry howl at God, which, in its day, was startling, given Lewis’s very public Christianity. Fifty years on, in this adaptation, the rigour of the author’s intellectual jousting with “the Cosmic Sadist” is no less disquieting.

“The condition that I dread,” he admits, “is not that there is no God, but that this is what God is like.”

As in the book, grief is not overcome, but Dodd’s adaptation retains the sense of closure; an acknowledgement that there may be purpose in the suffering. In the book, Lewis observes that his scrutiny of grief has made his wife less a void, and God less of a locked door. “Perhaps both changes were really not observable. There was no sudden striking and emotional transition. Like the warming of a room of the coming of daylight. When you first notice them they have already been going for some time.”

It is this passage that provides a clue as to the continuing relevance of A Grief Observed, and explains the enthusiastic reception for Ronan Dodd’s adaptation and performance at Dromineer last weekend.

Modern Ireland is in a state of transition, from a proud economic miracle to an embarrassing fiscal train-wreck, from a place of almost guaranteed employment, to a rickety shack with the wolf never far from the door; where livelihoods have crumbled, with an ever-swelling Live Register of unemployment, and peopled by a citizenry who, largely, are in a state of anxiety and, indeed, grief.

By lifting A Grief Observed from the dimmer recesses of an oeuvre that includes the celebrated and timelessly popular Narnia books, and pushing it into the spotlight, Ronan Dodd has not only demonstrated CS Lewis’s artistic and intellectual versatility; he has also used the material to craft a powerful lament for modern times, and one which helps to illuminate the darkness and show a way forward.