This weekend, The Hope Collective presents Punk Talks, an event celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the seminal Irish punk rock record, TV Tube Heart by The Radiators From Space. Michael Mary Murphy pays a loving tribute to the glory days of the Irish punk and D.I.Y. scene.
I wasn’t there when The Radiators from Space launched themselves on the decaying crypt of Dublin nightlife in 1976. So I missed their first gigs when they brought punk rock, creativity, colourful youthful counterculture and brilliant passionate music to darkened rooms in the city centre. I also missed the short career of Ireland’s only all-female punk group of the era, the brilliantly name, Boy Scoutz.
But I knew they mattered. I read about them. In fact, I read every single word I could find about them. If the NME and Hot Press and Joe Breen in the Irish Times wrote our bible, Ireland’s fanzines were our gnostic gospels. Mini-manifestos. Photocopied screeds of intense and personal and funny opinions. Tell-tale hearts pumping under-covered bands into the mainstream. Raw Power, Heat, Alternative Ulster and later Vox, Black and White, Neu Clear Carnage.
I was there in the Dublin clubs during the 1980s when I went to see every band, no matter how unknown, I possibly could. Bands that later basked in the glow of platinum and gold sales, bands that never even cast a shadow.
Niall McGuirk was at loads of those gigs too during the 1980s recession. Since we shared a mutual love of one of those lesser known bands, The Pleasure Cell, we got talking. We were there at many of Paranoid Visions' early gigs, along with Edwina Forkin who became the first Ents Officer in Trinity College and brought bands like Primal Scream to the hallowed halls.
I was really good at standing and looking at bands. But Niall did more than talk, he played the bass in a punk band, he issued his own fanzines, Whose Life is it Anyway? and React and he wondered why more bands didn’t come to play in Ireland. So did I. But Niall decided to do something about it. He persuaded acts like Quicksand, NoMeansNo, MDC and NOFX to play in Dublin. Most famously, he, along with his Hope Collective friends like Miriam and Clodagh and Dave, presented Fugazi and Chumbawamba at the St Francis Xavier hall, a sold-out gig to raise money for AIDS charities.
When I emigrated to London in 1989, I kept in touch with Dublin’s D.I.Y. punk scene via Niall. He told me about a band he was bringing over to play in the White Horse Inn, hardly Madison Square Gardens, but one of the few venues that would allow Niall and his punky friends to play. I was working for a record label and argued that we should sign the band. They were brilliant. My colleagues declined, the band was a bunch of scruffy punks they exclaimed! Maybe, but they were still brilliant.
And when Green Day returned to Dublin this summer to play in Marley Park they made a nostalgic pilgrimage to the site of their Dublin debut. For Niall and the Hope Collective in the White Horse Inn. He paid them £90. The band had happy memories of the gig. Hopefully, so did the twenty-six, yes, twenty-six, people who went to see them on the night by the Liffey in 1992.
And that’s why it’s important that we know about the people who made Ireland’s music scene vibrant and creative and fun. And that’s why we need to know their stories. Just as the Radiators with their Raw Power fanzine inspired Niall and the Hope Collective, maybe the next generation of DIY music promoters will be inspired by the tales of the Radiators and the Boy Scoutz, Rocky de Valera, Suzanne Rhatigan, Paranoid Visions, Caroline O’Sullivan and the DIY dance scene and Elvera Butler who brought the Stranglers, and others, to Cork.
Punk Talks, Sunday 1st October 2017, 5-9 pm, Grand Social, Dublin - the event will be followed by a Grant Hart/Hüsker Dü celebration. All proceeds from the event go to Aoibhneas Women’s Refuge and Crosscare homeless charity - go here for tickets.
