'Dublin soul': The Commitments and Irish youth culture

Analysis: The Commitments shows that youth culture and its musical identity is not inherently bound up with the new and readily embraces the retro

By Nessa Johnston, Edge Hill University

It's 30 years since The Commitments played to packed cinemas across Ireland. Based on Roddy Doyle's acclaimed novel, the film captured a spirit and energy of Dublin youth not previously committed to celluloid. This underdog story of a group of working class northsiders forming a soul covers band, on a mission to "bring soul back to Dublin", was a box office phenomenon in Ireland and remains one of the nation’s best-loved films. Its Hollywood-based British director Alan Parker, having previously helmed such classic music-driven films as Bugsy Malone, Pink Floyd: The Wall and Fame, helped to bring the effusive musical and comic energy of its young cast to the screen.

The relationship between music and youth culture is at the heart of the film, with music as a force through which young identities are shaped and defined in opposition to an older generation. Think of the recurrent verbal sparring between Jimmy Jnr (Robert Arkins) and Jimmy Snr (Colm Meaney) over the relative merits of Elvis Presley.

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From RTÉ Archives,Colm Connolly reports for RTÉ News from the premiere of The Commitments at Dublin's Savoy in 1991

Yet paradoxically, The Commitments' veneration of 1960s black American soul music gives the film an oddly retro feel. It is ironic that the soundtrack albums The Commitments and The Commitments Vol. II were amongst the most played and heard Irish albums of the 1990s, given their nostalgia for music of a previous generation.

The Commitments is, after all, a generation defining film. The sheer scale of the auditions, in which thousands of young hopefuls queued for hours to sing, play and improvise, meant that for a generation of Dubliners, it was if everyone auditioned or at least knew someone who did. Critics and academics of a more literary persuasion might refer to The Commitments film as a mere adaptation of Doyle’s novel. While the film might owe its existence to the book, a key difference is that the film allows us to hear with our own ears the musical world of the story.

From RTÉ Radio 1's Sunday Miscellany, Jackie Lynam's Our Very Own Commitmentette essay about the premiere of The Commitments in September 1991

Large scale open auditions at the Mansion House in the summer of 1990, and talent scouting at Dublin’s pubs and venues, meant that the film tapped into a vast reservoir of unknown musical talent. This became a significant marketing hook, with press and publicity celebrating a fairy tale narrative of ordinary young working class Dubliners plucked from obscurity, at times eliding the fact that both Glen Hansard (guitarist Outspan) and Maria Doyle Kennedy (vocalist Natalie) already had record deals with their respective groups The Frames and The Black Velvet Band.

Nevertheless, the variety and energy of Dublin’s live music scene at the time is there on the screen. It's reflected boisterously in the film’s extended audition sequence, which cast performers who had themselves auditioned. We watch dozens of young hopefuls display their musical chops to an increasingly unimpressed Jimmy Jnr, playing punk, indie, trad, metal, showtunes… but strangely no soul.

From RTÉ Archives, some of the cast of The Commitmemnts and director Alan Parker talk to Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show in 1991

All of which begs the question: why are The Commitments a soul band? Why not rock, punk, metal, or electronic music? Doyle’s explanation, that he wanted the dramatic potential of having girls in the band, with the soul band format allowing for female backing singers, does not tell the whole story. Neither does Jimmy’s oft-quoted "the Irish are the blacks of Europe" speech, which dates the film now that Ireland is more multicultural and diverse than ever and ‘black’ and ‘Irish’ are no longer assumed to be mutually exclusive categories. Furthermore, Dean and Outspan’s looks of bafflement build a comic critique of Jimmy’s speech into the film itself.

In an interview for my book The Commitments: Youth, Music and Authenticity in 1990s Ireland, Doyle said that soul was "not huge" with the teenagers he taught in the 1980s at Greendale Community School in Kilbarrack. They were music obsessed – announcing their tastes with badges on their bags and jumpers – and metal, punk, rock and ska featured.

From Lyric FM's Culture File, how the D8 Soul Club is a magnet for the island's dancing soul fans - and the odd mature mod

One of his students was a Mod, and Dublin's small but dedicated Mod scene could provide the real-life basis of a fictional soul band. Alongside some small dedicated nights in the upstairs rooms of pubs, the now legendary Bubbles club was a long running home to that scene. However, it revolved around DJs and records rather than live performance and The Commitments is committed to live music, with no acknowledgement of DJ culture.

Ironically, the Mansion House, where auditions were held, was also home in 1990 to Ireland’s first ever raves. Rave culture, then a truly new youth culture, was having its momentl, but there's no trace of it in The Commitments. Indeed, it wasn’t until 25 years later that an Irish film depicted club cultures with Dublin Oldschool, a film which also has a retro feel and is more evocative of the late 1990s than the present day in which it is purportedly set.

Given these connections, the soul sound of The Commitments seems less of an odd choice despite the lack of a soul scene in Dublin

To make sense of The Commitments as a soul band then, it is worth considering the nature of Ireland’s popular musical success on the global stage, rather than the local scenes and subcultures of Dublin in the 1980s and 1990s. Ireland is known for Van Morrison, Thin Lizzy and Rory Gallagher, some of the greatest proponents of blues and R‘n’B. U2’s The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum shifted their sound away from the more British influenced post punk of their earlier work to a transnational Americana. In the same year that The Commitments linked black 1960s soul with the working-class Irish experience, Sinéad Ó Connor had a global megahit with her remarkable version of Prince's ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, making a black American pop song her own.

Given these connections, the soul sound of The Commitments seems less of an odd choice despite the lack of a soul scene in Dublin. Even if "Dublin soul" is pure fiction, its cultural success in The Commitments suggests that youth culture and its musical identity is not inherently bound up with the new, and readily embraces the retro.

Dr Nessa Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Film and Television in the Department of Creative Arts at Edge Hill University. She is the author of The Commitments: Youth, Music and Authenticity in 1990s Ireland (Routledge).

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ

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