seemed immensely reassuring to me, a sign that even the young Irish remained steeped in the tragic poetry of their past.
On this gentle afternoon, the band, called Natural Gas, had no intention of dwelling on a mordant note. Their next offering concerned the universal pub musicians’ impatience with donkey-eared listeners, and it started with a refrain epitomizing the disrespectful “foostering,” or fool’s play, of loudmouthed drinkers.
“Hey you with the head! Put down your bloody bohdran ! Pick up your pint instead!” the number begins, referring to the tambourine-like skin drum (pronounced BOW-ron) used by Irish traditional bands. “Say two acts of contrition for the poor pub musician. If I had a son, that’s not what he’d be, for they have to put up with hooflers and tricksters and chancers dropping ten quid in their fee.”
This flourish coaxed forth a peculiar dark-eyed man with a loud red-and-white-striped shirt, enormous yellow tie, and brace suspenders holding up a pair of floppy vaudevillian trousers. Transported by some private reverie, he butterflied his arms forward as if swimming through waves of incoming visions. Fish-mouthing all the while, he laboriously worked his legs in various directions as if his pants contained stilts. For reasons known only to Clonakilty, this impromptu entertainer, whose face was as rigidly unchanging as a Noh actor’s, is called Chicken George. When not performing, he’s said to be a great conversationalist. But head-scrambling contradictions are the rule in modern Ireland, for De Barra’s has also served as a favored venue for David Bowie and Paul McCartney. How could one not love the place?
Joining the crowd outside was a coven of barefoot individuals in brown sackcloth topped by mangy rats’ nests of hair. The women, with blackened teeth and blue whorls and lines smeared across their faces, looked like hundred-year-old hags and cackled accordingly. The even wilder-haired and possibly uglier men sported ten-foot pikes.
“These festivals get over the top,” I whispered to my wife, for in Ireland festivals break out in dizzying variety. Every town withenough children to fill a school can muster a pair of August festivals without a second thought, and the bigger localities keep it up for nine months – folk, food, fiddle, and farm festivals, dance, jazz, film, choral, art, literary, heritage, matchmaking, midsummer, spring, and autumn festivals keep coming at you and one sometimes imagines hordes of festival merrymakers changing their costumes behind the next ridge and descending like a thousand Comanches on every unsuspecting crossroads that has not fenced them out.
“They’re a bunch of crusties,” Jamie said, using the Irish term for a certain wave of recent New Age immigrants who are alleged to be soap shy. “Festival crusties.”
There was no doubt about it. Not long ago, the west of Ireland was full of native Gaelic speakers who lived in a timeless world into which the Creator seemed to breathe an inordinate share of the world’s dreams. The waves moaned on briny rocks and old women heard the terrible cry of the banshees; a mouse moved in a hayrick and the fairies were heard to be back at their mischief; a woman died young and her suitor saw her image in the moonlight for the rest of his forlorn years. In modern Ireland, loads of New Age people still see, or try to see, such visions, often sitting cross-legged before the few remaining stone hovels buried in the depths of some hollow or bramble-ridden boreen – which means a little lane, though a Cork City avenue is called Boreenmanna Road, which translates into “Little Big Lane Road.”
These pike-wielding cacklers were indeed crusties, or in other words hippies yearning for a return to the land. The crusties moved in droves to the secret spaces of Ireland’s west in the 1970s and 1980s to forge more spiritually rooted lives than they believed possible in the mass population centers of Britain,
On this gentle afternoon, the band, called Natural Gas, had no intention of dwelling on a mordant note. Their next offering concerned the universal pub musicians’ impatience with donkey-eared listeners, and it started with a refrain epitomizing the disrespectful “foostering,” or fool’s play, of loudmouthed drinkers.
“Hey you with the head! Put down your bloody bohdran ! Pick up your pint instead!” the number begins, referring to the tambourine-like skin drum (pronounced BOW-ron) used by Irish traditional bands. “Say two acts of contrition for the poor pub musician. If I had a son, that’s not what he’d be, for they have to put up with hooflers and tricksters and chancers dropping ten quid in their fee.”
This flourish coaxed forth a peculiar dark-eyed man with a loud red-and-white-striped shirt, enormous yellow tie, and brace suspenders holding up a pair of floppy vaudevillian trousers. Transported by some private reverie, he butterflied his arms forward as if swimming through waves of incoming visions. Fish-mouthing all the while, he laboriously worked his legs in various directions as if his pants contained stilts. For reasons known only to Clonakilty, this impromptu entertainer, whose face was as rigidly unchanging as a Noh actor’s, is called Chicken George. When not performing, he’s said to be a great conversationalist. But head-scrambling contradictions are the rule in modern Ireland, for De Barra’s has also served as a favored venue for David Bowie and Paul McCartney. How could one not love the place?
Joining the crowd outside was a coven of barefoot individuals in brown sackcloth topped by mangy rats’ nests of hair. The women, with blackened teeth and blue whorls and lines smeared across their faces, looked like hundred-year-old hags and cackled accordingly. The even wilder-haired and possibly uglier men sported ten-foot pikes.
“These festivals get over the top,” I whispered to my wife, for in Ireland festivals break out in dizzying variety. Every town withenough children to fill a school can muster a pair of August festivals without a second thought, and the bigger localities keep it up for nine months – folk, food, fiddle, and farm festivals, dance, jazz, film, choral, art, literary, heritage, matchmaking, midsummer, spring, and autumn festivals keep coming at you and one sometimes imagines hordes of festival merrymakers changing their costumes behind the next ridge and descending like a thousand Comanches on every unsuspecting crossroads that has not fenced them out.
“They’re a bunch of crusties,” Jamie said, using the Irish term for a certain wave of recent New Age immigrants who are alleged to be soap shy. “Festival crusties.”
There was no doubt about it. Not long ago, the west of Ireland was full of native Gaelic speakers who lived in a timeless world into which the Creator seemed to breathe an inordinate share of the world’s dreams. The waves moaned on briny rocks and old women heard the terrible cry of the banshees; a mouse moved in a hayrick and the fairies were heard to be back at their mischief; a woman died young and her suitor saw her image in the moonlight for the rest of his forlorn years. In modern Ireland, loads of New Age people still see, or try to see, such visions, often sitting cross-legged before the few remaining stone hovels buried in the depths of some hollow or bramble-ridden boreen – which means a little lane, though a Cork City avenue is called Boreenmanna Road, which translates into “Little Big Lane Road.”
These pike-wielding cacklers were indeed crusties, or in other words hippies yearning for a return to the land. The crusties moved in droves to the secret spaces of Ireland’s west in the 1970s and 1980s to forge more spiritually rooted lives than they believed possible in the mass population centers of Britain,
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