Post by Pete Holidai on Oct 8, 2006 11:04:52 GMT
Let us praise great men again, and this time buy their records
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Sunday Independent, October 8, 2006
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THE strangest thing has happened: an Irish band has made a really fine album.
You know one of those albums with about 12 songs on them, and about five of them are pretty good, and three of them are not too bad, and the rest are just noise? Well, it's not one of them.
This one, called Trouble Pilgrim, has 14 tracks ranging in quality from the good to the very, very good. You have to ask yourself, how long is it since you heard one of them?
And stranger still, the band in question - the Radiators From Space - for the last 25 years, was presumed dead.
Indeed, the circumstances surrounding that death tell us much about how things were done in Ireland, a long time ago. It tells us about success, and about failure, and how our understanding of these twin impostors has changed over the years.
It involves in particular a full-page ad that was taken out in Hot Press magazine to promote the band's second album, the legendary Ghostown. The follow-up to the seminal Irish punk album TV Tube Heart, the glories of Ghostown were also its undoing. It crossed too many boundaries for some, not least the reviewer in the NME- who urinated all over it - at a time when an NME review could genuinely make or break a band.
Irish reviewers declared it a masterpiece - and, sure enough, the material which was mainly written by Pete Holidai and Philip Chevron was rich enough to be covered eventually by artistes as diverse as Agnes Bernelle and Christy Moore.
But sales were poor, and so the aforementioned full-page ad appeared in Hot Press, declaring that this masterpiece had sold a mere 455 copies.
There was an unspoken challenge . . . this album has sold 455 copies, and what are you going to do about it?
It was a brave try, I guess, appealing to the innate Irish virtues of fair play and common decency and good taste. A grave miscarriage of justice was taking place here, but now that the Irish people were made aware of the situation, they would surely respond. With their deep love of the arts in general, they would see that this was a defining moment, and they would buy Ghostown in large quantities, not just because it was great, but because it was the right thing to do.
Previous generations had seen the early struggles of commercially unsuccessful artists such as Joyce and Kavanagh, and not only had they done nothing to help them, at times they had gone to considerable lengths to hinder them.
Now, in 1979, it would surely be different?
Alas, it was not to be.
And in retrospect, the Radiators had done exactly the opposite to what so many of their successors would do. They had made an outstanding album, and publicly declared it a failure, at least in commercial terms. Further on up the road, men would make horrible albums, and declare themselves successful in every way.
Before the CDs had left the warehouse, these men of the 1990s would be on the Late Late congratulating themselves on another triumph. They'd be thinking that people like to buy into success, so you can't be telling them that the album sold 12 copies last week, and that was a relatively good week.
No, you have to come on like you're already a massive international superstar, even if, as they say in the trade, you can't get arrested. It's the same basic psychology which dictates that books are "bestsellers" before they've actually been written.
As the Radiators had demonstrated, in showbusiness the truth is a fine thing, but unfortunately it doesn't work. The Irish people had been invited to buy into failure, and they declined.
Failure, at least, in commercial terms. The fact that the album was an astounding artistic success made no difference at all.
And in the years that followed, these attitudes hardened among the Irish. While the ex-Radiators were making their way in the world, with Philip Chevron joining the Pogues, and Stephen Rapid designing for U2 (he also suggested that they call themselves U2) and Pete Holidai teaching in the rock school in Ballyfermot, increasingly the only form of success which got any respect was financial success.
Not that the boybands were going to have much in the way of artistic success anyway, but for a long time there you could have your head bitten off for even suggesting that there might be a distinction between the two concepts - that you could make a bad record, and still get rich.
THEN the other week Louis Walsh said something which might have sounded extraordinary a couple of years aso, though it was really nothing but the bleeding obvious. He said that Daniel O'Donnell is very successful, but you don't have to be that talented to be successful. Thank you, Louis.
As men like Ronan Collins and music lovers in general discovered to their cost, there was a time when that kind of talk could get you monstered. But those days are apparently coming to an end.
And in a strange echo of former days, the Radiators From Space emerge once more from the wilderness with a brilliant collection, a startling achievement, second time around.
The first time, Ireland was lurching towards the end of the showband era, a time when men rolled in money for singing the songs of other men . . . ah, the echoes are chilling, just chilling.
So perhaps we have finally come through another dark age in Irish pop, and we are ready once more to praise great men. And even, at a stretch, to buy their records.
'Trouble Pilgrim', by the Radiators From Space, is released on October 20
Declan Lynch
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Sunday Independent, October 8, 2006
-------------------------------------------
THE strangest thing has happened: an Irish band has made a really fine album.
You know one of those albums with about 12 songs on them, and about five of them are pretty good, and three of them are not too bad, and the rest are just noise? Well, it's not one of them.
This one, called Trouble Pilgrim, has 14 tracks ranging in quality from the good to the very, very good. You have to ask yourself, how long is it since you heard one of them?
And stranger still, the band in question - the Radiators From Space - for the last 25 years, was presumed dead.
Indeed, the circumstances surrounding that death tell us much about how things were done in Ireland, a long time ago. It tells us about success, and about failure, and how our understanding of these twin impostors has changed over the years.
It involves in particular a full-page ad that was taken out in Hot Press magazine to promote the band's second album, the legendary Ghostown. The follow-up to the seminal Irish punk album TV Tube Heart, the glories of Ghostown were also its undoing. It crossed too many boundaries for some, not least the reviewer in the NME- who urinated all over it - at a time when an NME review could genuinely make or break a band.
Irish reviewers declared it a masterpiece - and, sure enough, the material which was mainly written by Pete Holidai and Philip Chevron was rich enough to be covered eventually by artistes as diverse as Agnes Bernelle and Christy Moore.
But sales were poor, and so the aforementioned full-page ad appeared in Hot Press, declaring that this masterpiece had sold a mere 455 copies.
There was an unspoken challenge . . . this album has sold 455 copies, and what are you going to do about it?
It was a brave try, I guess, appealing to the innate Irish virtues of fair play and common decency and good taste. A grave miscarriage of justice was taking place here, but now that the Irish people were made aware of the situation, they would surely respond. With their deep love of the arts in general, they would see that this was a defining moment, and they would buy Ghostown in large quantities, not just because it was great, but because it was the right thing to do.
Previous generations had seen the early struggles of commercially unsuccessful artists such as Joyce and Kavanagh, and not only had they done nothing to help them, at times they had gone to considerable lengths to hinder them.
Now, in 1979, it would surely be different?
Alas, it was not to be.
And in retrospect, the Radiators had done exactly the opposite to what so many of their successors would do. They had made an outstanding album, and publicly declared it a failure, at least in commercial terms. Further on up the road, men would make horrible albums, and declare themselves successful in every way.
Before the CDs had left the warehouse, these men of the 1990s would be on the Late Late congratulating themselves on another triumph. They'd be thinking that people like to buy into success, so you can't be telling them that the album sold 12 copies last week, and that was a relatively good week.
No, you have to come on like you're already a massive international superstar, even if, as they say in the trade, you can't get arrested. It's the same basic psychology which dictates that books are "bestsellers" before they've actually been written.
As the Radiators had demonstrated, in showbusiness the truth is a fine thing, but unfortunately it doesn't work. The Irish people had been invited to buy into failure, and they declined.
Failure, at least, in commercial terms. The fact that the album was an astounding artistic success made no difference at all.
And in the years that followed, these attitudes hardened among the Irish. While the ex-Radiators were making their way in the world, with Philip Chevron joining the Pogues, and Stephen Rapid designing for U2 (he also suggested that they call themselves U2) and Pete Holidai teaching in the rock school in Ballyfermot, increasingly the only form of success which got any respect was financial success.
Not that the boybands were going to have much in the way of artistic success anyway, but for a long time there you could have your head bitten off for even suggesting that there might be a distinction between the two concepts - that you could make a bad record, and still get rich.
THEN the other week Louis Walsh said something which might have sounded extraordinary a couple of years aso, though it was really nothing but the bleeding obvious. He said that Daniel O'Donnell is very successful, but you don't have to be that talented to be successful. Thank you, Louis.
As men like Ronan Collins and music lovers in general discovered to their cost, there was a time when that kind of talk could get you monstered. But those days are apparently coming to an end.
And in a strange echo of former days, the Radiators From Space emerge once more from the wilderness with a brilliant collection, a startling achievement, second time around.
The first time, Ireland was lurching towards the end of the showband era, a time when men rolled in money for singing the songs of other men . . . ah, the echoes are chilling, just chilling.
So perhaps we have finally come through another dark age in Irish pop, and we are ready once more to praise great men. And even, at a stretch, to buy their records.
'Trouble Pilgrim', by the Radiators From Space, is released on October 20
Declan Lynch
