Dublin singer Barry McCormack offers up a rarely seen view of Dublin in the video for his new single, The Chinese Barman.
The promo clip for the song, lifted from his latest album The Tilt of the Earth, was filmed by wildlife cameraman Raymond Beggan over the course of two years and offers up a water edge’s view of the city during the Liffey swim.
“I wanted to make a video involving the swim because it’s mentioned in the song,” McCormack told Culture on RTÉ. “So I thought Raynond would go down and just film it from the quays but he’s a wildlife photographer and he has an inflatable dingy so he got into the river itself and filmed the swimmers. It took him two years to do it!”
It's a scene already immortalised by Jack Yeats in his famous 1923 painting. “If you see that painting, there are huge crowds on the quays so it was obviously a huge spectacle back in the day,” McCormack says.
“But these days, you wouldn’t even notice if it was on. it’s just a few stragglers watching from the side. In the song The Chinese Barman, the guy was a real Chinese barman in Nealons bar over on nearby Capel Street. Nealons was recently closed and sold by a US vulture fund.
“I teach Chinese people English here in Dublin and when they come here, they might as well be coming to Mars because Ireland is a completely different planet so the song has a guy in a pub talking to a Chinese barman but the people in the water might as well be from another planet - the idea that people would get in the river and risk all sorts of infections. I list a lot of ailments in the song but I think I invented some of them.”
During his research for the song, McCormack, who can’t swim himself, found an article on the Liffey swim on a Japanese website which said the river is actually flushed out from the reservoir down before the swim so the water is actually relatively clean. “It is tidal and it is a relatively clean river, from what I know but I’m not a fisherman - I can’t fish and I can’t swim.”
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So Bagatelle were wrong. This riverside view of Anna Livia Plurabelle is another way for the laconic and dry-witted McCormack to see his native city. A former member of Dublin lo-fi heroes The Jubilee Allstars, he has released five acclaimed solo albums that have won him comparisons with Brendan Behan, Leonard Cohen and Velvet Underground.
He has sung about boomtown to bust and back again and as a long-time resident of Dublin 7, he has observed the gentrification of areas formerly known for their characters and own neighbourhood rituals.
“I’m confused about whether I am in the middle of gentrification because I live beside a soup kitchen on Bow Street so it’s homeless people and then hipsters," he says.
"And now the area is also full of Brazilians, who I teach, so they’re pushing up the rents but employing me at the same time so it’s all very confusing. I’m torn about gentrification but I think most people who like a good selection of ales and good bread are happy about it.”
McCormack kicks off a double-header national tour with kindred spirit J. Cowhie, who formerly traded under the name Goodtime John, in Dublin’s Workman’s Club on Wednesday night, April 5 and the pair play dates in Limerick, Cork and Galway over the coming week.
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“Me and J, Cowhie were originally on the same label, Volta Sounds, about ten, 15 years ago,” McCormack says. “So we know each other from back then. He sent me his latest released, Veil, and it’s very Krautrock, more Krautrock than my new album.”
He’s still a teller of bittersweet tales of his beloved Dublin but The Tilt of Earth sees McCormack burst out of his trad and folk shell to embrace a greater range of influences and sounds with producer producer Stephen Shannon.
“He said to me let’s make a record that sounds like it was made now. I accidentally got into electronic music through listening to The Idiot by Iggy Pop and that brought me onto Low by David Bowie and that brought me onto Krautrock to minimalism," McCormack says. "The album has got trumpets and cellists but, like most songwriters, I’m quite conservative. I think don’t mess with the formula!”
You'll be glad he did.
Alan Corr @corralan
