{"id":12926,"date":"2021-12-07T11:04:20","date_gmt":"2021-12-07T11:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=12926"},"modified":"2021-12-07T11:04:20","modified_gmt":"2021-12-07T11:04:20","slug":"the-giant-hare-of-cloondarone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2021\/12\/07\/the-giant-hare-of-cloondarone\/","title":{"rendered":"The Giant Hare of Cloondarone"},"content":{"rendered":"

I felt myself still reliving a past that was no longer anything more than the history of anther person. <\/em>Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It got to a point that whenever I searched through a friend\u2019s record collection when staying with them it stared right back at me: The Waterboys\u2019 Fisherman\u2019s Blues<\/em>. Whether in Dublin or London, Berlin or Oslo, it was stood out like a sore thumb.<\/p>\n

The weird thing is we never professed much gr\u00e1 for the album when it came out in the 1980s. We were coming of age teens when news filtered through that the older crowd were out jamming with The Waterboys<\/em> in Spiddal. At the time \u2018The Whole of The Moon<\/a><\/span>\u2019 bookended teenage discos across the West; a cue for a crowd to go off on one.<\/p>\n

The Waterboys were solid purveyors of \u2018big music,\u2019 a band destined to play stadia across Europe; a band critics tipped to be the next U2.<\/p>\n

So why the decamp to Spiddal of all places? We couldn\u2019t get our heads around it. We were happily pushing our high-minded ideas into the world but it seemed like a step into an abyss. Some called it career suicide and we nodded in agreement. One minute the band was on Top of the Pops, the next they were playing sessions in a Spiddal pub. No sooner had Fisherman\u2019s Blues<\/em> come out, then the songs filled the airwaves. We had to engage with the music that was all around us. But we never professed to like any of the songs.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Pointing the Needle<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Thirty years later I peered into the record collection of one of those former teens and Fisherman\u2019s Blues<\/em> was there looking out at me. It was the morning after a cold and wet November night spent sleeping on a couch, as my friend left for work.<\/p>\n

I made a coffee and rummaged through his record collection. There it was: a vinyl copy of Fisherman\u2019s Blues<\/em> in its striking green jacket. I pointed the needle, lay back on the couch and listened to it straight through. It was a bewildering experience; the object of what I had rebelled against as a teen so defining of those same years.<\/p>\n

Those days when noses were turned up at rock stars decamping to the West of Ireland to play trad had passed, and the singles \u2018Fisherman\u2019s Blues<\/a><\/span>\u2019 and \u2018A Bang on the Ear<\/a><\/span>\u2019 became anthems.<\/p>\n

Fisherman\u2019s Blues<\/em> came out when the West was a still a relatively unscathed tourist destination. It was a time when you could park a caravan on the side of pretty much any Connemara<\/span><\/a> road.<\/p>\n

Years passed, the tourist industry got its claws into the West, and in the interim the legend of Fisherman\u2019s Blues<\/em> grew. The album is talked about today in the same breath as Bob Dylan<\/a><\/span> and the Band\u2019s The<\/em> Basement Tapes<\/em>; another ramshackle of songs that just work. It isn\u2019t so much 80s rock in dialogue with folk trad, but big music in touch with all the folk of the Western world.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Ireland\u2019s Sonic Answer<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Dylan recorded The Basement Tapes<\/em> in a Woodstock home, adding mystique to the outpost of his Bethel Township. For a time Spiddal was Ireland\u2019s sonic answer to New York\u2019s Bethel: an outpost that could bring sustenance to a once distant metropolis.<\/p>\n

Musicians travelled in and out; from Tuam, Gort to a village integral to the West yet cast off from the innards of urban life. By turning to Spiddal, The Waterboys\u2019 leader singer Mike Scott could tap into the pulses of the West of Ireland, yet still remain in close proximity to the hustle and bustle of Galway city.<\/p>\n

Hemmed in, cabin fevered, he could head to the docks, in the hope of chancing on new musicians. Maybe he stumbled to the docks one day and met the Tuam lads I knew, and word began to sift back to the others that myth was forming on the Western seaboard.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Mike Scott in 2012.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A Time Before the Internet<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I got back home from Dublin to Murroe, having listened to Fisherman\u2019s Blues<\/em> on the bus, the music birthing memories of a time before the Internet began its colonization of the imagination.<\/p>\n

Listening to the album that day brought me back to a decade when whispers carried from one end of the county to the next, and those awaiting dole day with penniless pockets were served tea free of charge by sympathetic publicans. Tuam, an unemployment black spot, was a place to escape from, and music was the escape before that escape.<\/p>\n

The young were looking out towards London or America, with nothing but burned ambition close at hand. The actual song \u2018Fisherman\u2019s Blues\u2019 captured the desire to hold on to the older ways of life at a time when Ireland was opening up to the wider world. Oh to be a fisherman, tumbling on the seas, taken in by the sole task of feeding a village back on land. No wonder we disregarded the song: it was a paean to a distant past, nostalgia for a world we were trying to escape.<\/p>\n