First off, this short list is not made up of typically Irish-sounding albums to shake your shillelagh to for the day that's in it. Instead, here are some classic Irish records you may have overlooked the first time around or which are well worth a listen now.
In Towers and Clouds - The Immediate
If ever an album hit the lofty heights of its title, it’s this 2006 debut from short-lived Dublin act The Immediate. Crisp, kinetic, and urgent, In Towers and Clouds embraced post-rock, pure pop, and art rock on a set of superb guitar songs.
The Immediate are exhilarating on Don’t You Ever, and magnificently moody on A Ghost in This House, and with future Villagers man Conor O’Brien among the line-up, there is no shortage of intriguing lyrics and darting wordplay.
We’ll give it you to straight - this is among the greatest Irish debut albums ever. Naturally, this artily overwrought lot split suddenly in May 2007, with David Hedderman, Conor O'Brien, Peter Toomey, and Barra Heavey citing "existential differences". But of course!
Veedon Fleece - Van Morrison
Van Morrison’s astonishing 1968 album Astral Weeks is often and quite rightly called his greatest work but could 1974’s Veedon Fleece be his second-best set of songs? It certainly shares Astral Weeks fevered stream of consciousness but on tracks like the superb Streets of Arklow and nine-minute centrepiece You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River, he’s immersed in pure Celticism.
Big claim this, but Veedon, largely written as Van holidayed in Ireland following his divorce from Janet Planet, could be Morrison’s most Irish album. The winking and playful opener Fair Play and the stately Linden Arden Stole the Highlights capture a still youthful Van dwelling on the threshold before he went fully into the mystic. Not that Veedon Fleece is short on awed spiritualism.
This is Morrison’s forgotten masterpiece and it still has scholars of the Belfast man guessing nearly half a century later.
Viva Dead Ponies - Fatima Mansions
If Cork contrarian Cathal Coughlan filleted his prey with a smirk and a scalpel with his first band Microdisney, he used a sledgehammer with the gloriously riotous Fatima Mansions.
1990’s Viva Dead Ponies was their boot-to-the-face second album. It ranged from full on rock assault on tracks like You’re a Rose and Chemical Cosh to sad electro balladry on The Door-to-Door Inspector as Coughlan, a man possessed of one of pop’s great baritone voices and a scabrous wit that Shaw would be proud of, surveyed the fag-end of post-Thatcher Britain. Coughlan is still turning out great work and releases his new album Song of Co-Aklan next week.
Magico Magico! - Lir
Back in the early to mid-nineties, this proudly retro five piece were "the hottest band in Dublin" - fans queued to see their gigs while music critics queued up to deliver withering dismissals of their deeply unfashionable but deeply funky sound.
Lir, of course, became one of the many nearly-men of Irish music but their second album, 1993’s Magico Magico! retains a refreshingly audacious appeal. It fused funky progressive rock, folky mysticism, and savvy pop where melodies and meaning ruled.
Back in 2011, filmmaker Shimmy Marcus’ film Good Cake, Bad Cake brilliantly captured the sights, sounds and smells of the capital’s incestuous '90s scene in this perfectly-formed film about Lir's struggle for world domination, and the band still pack Dublin venues for their occasional reunion shows.
You want bonus points for Paddy’s Day? Lir’s stage gear included white flares embroidered with Celtic filigree.
TV Tube Heart - The Radiators from Space
44 years ago, trailblazers The Radiators from Space put Dublin on the punk rock map with their debut album.
Sure, a few others followed their lead, but while London was burning to the Sex Pistols, Clash et al, the Irish capital was a pretty solitary place for teenagers looking for some sharp, short and exciting music before and during the summer of '77.
TV Tube Heart is basically the studio version of the Rads' live set back then, ranging from the sublime pop of Enemies and Prison Bars to the media assault of Sunday World and Press Gang, the theatrical Electric Shares ('I'm gonna pull that switch - fry that son of a bitch'), to a radical reworking of their debut single, Television Screen, that signalled the band's future intent with Ghostown.
It's a bit rough around the edges and has a real Nuggets feel to it, which only add to its charm. This is one of Ireland's greatest and most significant bands just as they'd burst out of their creative cocoon. John Byrne
