Ireland’s New Poets Of Rock Music

The Isle of Noises: Rock and Roll’s Roots in Ireland By Mark J. Prendergast St. Martin’s; 315 pages; $15.95

When The Joshua Tree, the album by the Irish rock phenomenon U2, hit the top of the international charts in 1987, it changed the popular misconception that had relegated the music of Ireland to reels, jigs and harp music.

Although Celtic folk music does play a major role in Ireland’s lush musical heritage, Irish author Mark J. Prendergast’s brilliantly researched The Isle of Noises shows us that the country’s musical lineage is as volatile, unpredictable and proud as its history and people.

Irish rock rose from the culturally bereft ashes of the “show bands” that monopolized Irish dance halls and clubs in the early 1960s. Show bands were groups of proficient musicians who flawlessly played the hits of the day. “Yet there was something missing,” Prendergast writes, “in a word, sophistication…Tom Jones and other solo artists in that vein were their role models.”

The Dublin beat scene eventually evolved into a virulent force of its own, gaining international recognition with “the ranting, stomping rage” of Van Morrison’s Them, the estranged poetry of Thin Lizzy and the Cream-like blues of Taste.

By the late ’60s and early ’70s, Prendergast says, Irish rock began to venture into the sacred folds of its Celtic ancestry, infusing folk’s strident form with a new energy, expanding the scope of both musical idioms. Groups such as Sweeney’s Men, Horslips and Clannad were in the vanguard of this new alchemy, creating what the author calls an “ethnic music with a rock and roll backing.”

Prendergast excels in his in-depth portraits of Van Morrison, Bob Geldof, U2 and the late Phil Lynott, and shows such a great love and respect for his subjects that their biographies teem with an enthusiasm that’s infinitely more telling of rock’s communicative power than any scholarly account.

Much attention is paid here to Sir Bob Geldof, knighted for his contributions to the Ethiopian famine relief movement (although, despite the good intentions of organizations such as the World Bank, the money raised reportedly bought more guns for oppressive Third World regimes than food, a fact missing from Prendergast’s book).

Geldof emerged from a particularly bleak time for Ireland, Prendergast says. In the mid-1970s, the visceral, gut-level music of his group, the Boomtown Rats, provided the sound track for an embittered youth steeped in recession and weary of “the self-indulgence of musicians who played fifteen-minute guitar solos.” The punk explosion gave a much needed slap in the face to the musical establishment, and Geldof became Ireland’s spokesman for the movement, espousing his radical opinions with a charm and intelligence sadly missing from the nihilistic acrimonies of the damaged demigod of punk, Johnny Rotten.

Isle of Noises concentrates too heavily on the much ballyhooed U2, who started more as an antidote to the daily nightmare of sectarian street violence than as a pioneering musical vehicle. Prendergast’s starry-eyed history of the group tends to eclipse other significant Irish bands of the era, such as Stiff Little Fingers and the Undertones, yet ultimately tells the tale of a band that seamlessly melds its introspection with a sweeping political conscience.

With the international eye on Ireland, thanks primarily to U2 and the acclaimed motion picture My Left Foot, such performers as the Pogues, Enya and the decade’s first big success story, Sinead O’Connor, are now reaping the rewards of their homeland’s newfound global recognition. Prendergast all too briefly mentions these artists, yet includes a touching remembrance of Phil Lynott, whose death in 1986 of apparent substance abuse is still shrouded in mystery.

Lynott’s life and death were obviously strong contributing factors to the compiling of Isle of Noises, which implores that “every person who reads this book or listens to his music should remember him forever as Ireland’s first great rock poet.”

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