Saint Patrick's Day (17/3/21) : Part 2 by Mr A.N.Muggins

     We have been playing Irish music all week! Not just the folksy stuff Mrs Muggins has been finding very soothing and enjoyable. Alfred played her an Andy Irvine selection of Folk Music the other day, and she really loved it. An old friend was a big fan and they had listened to it quite a lot in the late eighties and early nineties. (We’re more Irish than you might think! Culturally speaking!)

     Alfred watched some of the programmes about the big Irish musicians of the sixties, seventies and eighties, and immersed himself once again in all that Irish Rock and Pop culture. Van Morrison’s group Them, and of course his solo career were just so poetic and so mesmerising. Alfred remembered seeing blues guitarist Rory Gallagher ‘Chuck Berrying’ across the stage when he saw him at the local City Hall (in England) at the beginning of the eighties.

     He watched as Phil Lynott, the famous Black Irishman, and his great band Thin Lizzy were featured, and of course the Boomtown Rats! (Muggins too ‘Never Liked Mondays’, because it always represented the start of the working week to him (and doubtless to many people across all nations, whether Catholic, Protestant, English Scottish, Irish, and even Welsh. It was something they all had in common, whether Americans, Europeans, Russians, and even the Chinese, Indians and Africans; a truly International Feeling!)

     Truly Bob Geldof did a great job for Ethiopia with Band Aid and then Live Aid! The selfless effort, all with the best of intentions, surely saved many lives, with the assistance given to the starving people in that famine. Truly Ireland and the whole Western World gave generously, to the benefit of those in dire need. Whatever those clever clogs who don’t really know what they were talking about might have said about him in the years since, Alfred was certainly not one of those. Great job Bob!

     U2 were great too, of course! He also remembered Bono diving dangerously on top of a crowd of fans from the stage, with complete confidence that he would not be dropped, in the early eighties. They were famous, at one time, for finding evocative one word names for their albums, such as October, War, and Boy (which should make us scratch our heads, wondering what they were all about?) They definitely had the Edge on most of the punk and post punk groups around at the time!

     The Undertones and Stiff Little Fingers, were both rather electric, injecting a certain youthful bounce and excitement into the new rock culture in which it no longer seemed to matter completely whether young people were Protestant or Catholic, and the old prejudices could be left behind!