...someone asked me recently how I got
into liking jazz. While the conversation we had about it was short &
simple enough (Duke & Louis albums + getting older + living in a
huge apartment with no tv so lots of new music=jazz lover learning...!),
it left me thinking about not only jazz but music I love in general.
Music has been a huge part of my life. From my childhood years of "borrowing" my brothers tapes - Dead Can Dance, Tom Petty, War of the Worlds - sharing a room with Babs and her love of Michael Jackson, my teenage years of Metallica, Bell X1, Frank Sinatra, Faithless,(oh, and Scooter :D) to my Gran letting me have a key to her house for after school and being able to stick on whatever records I wanted (Hotel California nearly wore the needle out each week!) Then I got a guitar. Ocean Colour Scene, Oasis, U2, Manic Street Preachers were all butchered daily! My friends were all starting into music, either performing or listening and it was through them that I experienced some of my most favourite teenage moments, just sitting in McGarrigles watching bands play, week after week.
McGarrigles wasn't just a pub with live music. It was a home from home for us music lovers, a place to meet, chill, drink, smoke, talk, watch, listen and learn from everyone else. Many parents worry about their teenagers being out drinking every weekend-I was fortunate enough that mine understood I didn't want to go to the pub for pints, but for the bands. For Legacy, for Petronella, for Trial By Fire, for Indigo Fury, for Snow Patrol, for Turn, for whoever was gonna be setting up and playing that Friday or Saturday night. And on the rare occasions that there was no live music, the music that Mick/Ferghal or any of the gang behind the bar chose was just perfect. The Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Stone Roses, Jeff Buckley, Led Zepplin....if it was in any way alternative, you'd probably hear it there.
When I write alternative, I do so for those of you who don't like "that kind of music". I don't mean that in a disdainful way, but to me, those were bands I loved and I just saw them as the norm, not as alternatives. As a teenager, I was once given the moniker "grunger with the wrong boots", and back then, with my sporadic pink hair, my "grungey" boots, my silly tshirts, my gigantically baggy trousers (Madness would've been proud) and the many chains I wore around my waist, I pretty much fitted the stereotype of "alternative".....yet I never felt I, nor the company I was in was alternative, neither in school nor out of it-it was just normal.
What brought all this back, was reading this fantastic piece about Sir Henrys of Cork. As I read it, I felt like I'd been there, that I'd lived through all those experiences, just in a different venue in a different time. That is both a credit to the author, and to the shared experience of music and performance. Sometimes, it doesn't matter whose playing, it's the actual piece of music that hits hardest. Damien Rice singing "You know when you've found it, there's something I've learned, cos you feel it when they take it away" left an imprint on my young soul that I knew I wouldn't understand until I was much more experienced in the heartbreak life can bring. Wayne O'Connor's "Better Man" still echoes through my head years later,as does Bob Kelly's beautiful rendition of Josh Ritter's "Come and Find Me".
Yet for each beautiful piece that left us captivated (and you knew it was good when the silence from the front row spread to all the way back the room to bar as a song progressed), there were pieces that blew us all wide open with their raw, uncontrollable energy. (Was it Eanna who left a dent in McG's roof when moshing once?!) When a piece of music affects so many, so rapidly, it's like uncontrollable wildfire. Some tunes would start with energetic toe-tapping and head-nodding in amongst us, culminating in mad pogo-ing about the place, arms around each others shouting and headbanging along with the sudden realisation that the previously quiet-looking older dude in the corner is moshing just as hard along with the teenagers.
Live music is a uniquely personal experience shared. To paraphrase Linley Hamilton from last year's Sligo Jazz, music is our religion, the stage is our church and the performance our communion. So many things make a performance special and what's so wonderful is that you and I may sit beside each other in a pub watching the same musician and take something completely different away from it. I have been brought to tears by different performers-on the street, in a pub, in the o2, and in a friends living room. Irrespective of the performer, the location, the performance, live music is usually something special-and it can become more so when it's shared.
It's that something special which keeps me coming back for more, looking for new notes, new beats, new lyrics to fall in love with. Music at times seems to have a soul all of it's own, which is I often say life is nothing without music, and music is nothing without life. This piece does something inexplicable to me, managing to simultaneously break my heart whilst soothing my soul....
Music has been a huge part of my life. From my childhood years of "borrowing" my brothers tapes - Dead Can Dance, Tom Petty, War of the Worlds - sharing a room with Babs and her love of Michael Jackson, my teenage years of Metallica, Bell X1, Frank Sinatra, Faithless,(oh, and Scooter :D) to my Gran letting me have a key to her house for after school and being able to stick on whatever records I wanted (Hotel California nearly wore the needle out each week!) Then I got a guitar. Ocean Colour Scene, Oasis, U2, Manic Street Preachers were all butchered daily! My friends were all starting into music, either performing or listening and it was through them that I experienced some of my most favourite teenage moments, just sitting in McGarrigles watching bands play, week after week.
McGarrigles wasn't just a pub with live music. It was a home from home for us music lovers, a place to meet, chill, drink, smoke, talk, watch, listen and learn from everyone else. Many parents worry about their teenagers being out drinking every weekend-I was fortunate enough that mine understood I didn't want to go to the pub for pints, but for the bands. For Legacy, for Petronella, for Trial By Fire, for Indigo Fury, for Snow Patrol, for Turn, for whoever was gonna be setting up and playing that Friday or Saturday night. And on the rare occasions that there was no live music, the music that Mick/Ferghal or any of the gang behind the bar chose was just perfect. The Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Stone Roses, Jeff Buckley, Led Zepplin....if it was in any way alternative, you'd probably hear it there.
When I write alternative, I do so for those of you who don't like "that kind of music". I don't mean that in a disdainful way, but to me, those were bands I loved and I just saw them as the norm, not as alternatives. As a teenager, I was once given the moniker "grunger with the wrong boots", and back then, with my sporadic pink hair, my "grungey" boots, my silly tshirts, my gigantically baggy trousers (Madness would've been proud) and the many chains I wore around my waist, I pretty much fitted the stereotype of "alternative".....yet I never felt I, nor the company I was in was alternative, neither in school nor out of it-it was just normal.
What brought all this back, was reading this fantastic piece about Sir Henrys of Cork. As I read it, I felt like I'd been there, that I'd lived through all those experiences, just in a different venue in a different time. That is both a credit to the author, and to the shared experience of music and performance. Sometimes, it doesn't matter whose playing, it's the actual piece of music that hits hardest. Damien Rice singing "You know when you've found it, there's something I've learned, cos you feel it when they take it away" left an imprint on my young soul that I knew I wouldn't understand until I was much more experienced in the heartbreak life can bring. Wayne O'Connor's "Better Man" still echoes through my head years later,as does Bob Kelly's beautiful rendition of Josh Ritter's "Come and Find Me".
Yet for each beautiful piece that left us captivated (and you knew it was good when the silence from the front row spread to all the way back the room to bar as a song progressed), there were pieces that blew us all wide open with their raw, uncontrollable energy. (Was it Eanna who left a dent in McG's roof when moshing once?!) When a piece of music affects so many, so rapidly, it's like uncontrollable wildfire. Some tunes would start with energetic toe-tapping and head-nodding in amongst us, culminating in mad pogo-ing about the place, arms around each others shouting and headbanging along with the sudden realisation that the previously quiet-looking older dude in the corner is moshing just as hard along with the teenagers.
Live music is a uniquely personal experience shared. To paraphrase Linley Hamilton from last year's Sligo Jazz, music is our religion, the stage is our church and the performance our communion. So many things make a performance special and what's so wonderful is that you and I may sit beside each other in a pub watching the same musician and take something completely different away from it. I have been brought to tears by different performers-on the street, in a pub, in the o2, and in a friends living room. Irrespective of the performer, the location, the performance, live music is usually something special-and it can become more so when it's shared.
It's that something special which keeps me coming back for more, looking for new notes, new beats, new lyrics to fall in love with. Music at times seems to have a soul all of it's own, which is I often say life is nothing without music, and music is nothing without life. This piece does something inexplicable to me, managing to simultaneously break my heart whilst soothing my soul....
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