McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (48 page)

‘Ah, here he is now, with his mother.’

I smile weakly, happy to leave it at that.

‘Ah, Noel! Would you come over here! There’s a fella here dying to meet you!’

So I buy Noel a pint, and chat with him and his mum, a lovely, politely-spoken woman from Kent. She’s lived out here with him for many years now, which probably isn’t a scenario either of them had in mind around the time of the photo-shoot for the cover of the
Electric Ladyland
album. Noel says he plays at De Barra’s every Friday night, unless he’s out of the country. He’ll be there tomorrow. The symmetry of the journey demands that I go.

It’s a wonder I ever made it back to Cork. Donegal was a black hole into which I almost disappeared without trace. I entered a twilight world where breakfast was at half one in the afternoon, and you’d beg to be let out of the pub at four in the morning. Such are the consequences of accepting hospitality from a musician.

Paul is a guitarist and songwriter I knew in England who’s been living in Donegal for five years. He earns a living from live work and the royalties from songs he’s written for some well-known Irish acts. I decided to call on him the day I left Lough Derg. After stopping to finish
Father’s Music
in the square in the middle of Donegal town, where no one could turn the lights off, I reached his place about two in the afternoon, and assumed he was out when I got no answer. It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d been performing last night, and hadn’t woken up yet.

I was surprised, and rather delighted, to discover that the Lough Derg experience had left me feeling high and light and warm and positive, just as the girl on the ticket desk had promised; though by the time they let us out of Paul’s local in the early hours of the following morning, the effect had been somewhat dissipated. I am now in a position to confirm that, after fasting for three days, twelve hours of stout—with only a bowl of seafood chowder to help absorb it—quickly brings on the most violent symptoms of an amoebic and fatal tropical disease. Rising at two to cook bacon on a single man’s grillpan does nothing to improve the situation.

I carried on like this for four days, hopelessly jet-lagged from the sleepless night in Purgatory, and a timetable on which only musicians, owls and badgers could survive.

It was marvellous.

In the afternoons we explored the brutal mountains and windswept coastline of Donegal. It’s all but cut off from the rest of the Republic by the western end of County Fermanagh, and it felt curious to be this far north of Belfast, yet still in the Republic. Because we were close to the border with the UK, shops and garages were advertising that they were happy to accept British currency; in its soul, though, the place felt about as remote from England as you could get. I hadn’t been prepared for the combination of strong Northern Irish accent and widespread use of the Irish language, and I felt very foreign, though I couldn’t have been made more welcome.

‘Hello Peter!’ screamed an exuberant eighteen-year-old lad at two in the morning. ‘My name’s Sean, and I’m a feckin’ eejit!’ He vaulted the bar he’d been serving behind, punched that tune from
The Full Monty
on to the jukebox, and stripped, while his sister tried to mop the floor around him. I asked some of the other late-night flotsam about the flexible licensing laws.

‘There’s an ex-gard has opened a bar. They don’t bother him, so they can’t really mess with anyone else.’

‘Hey, it’s not just a bar. A social and cultural centre is what it’s called, and a hostel. En-suite bedrooms, and all kitted out in pine. Got a grant for the lot, so he did.’

‘So how did he manage that?’

‘Oh, nothing underhand about it.’Twas just corruption.’

Earlier in the evening Paul and his drummer had filled me in on who was who.

‘That fella there—best session trumpeter in the country. Christ, he could tell you some stories about Van Morrison.

‘See him? Played for Omagh in the benefit against Manchester United.

‘That guy in the corner. Never tells the truth, as a matter of principle. Why answer a question, he says, if you can tell a story instead?’

Lots of people seemed to have a French parent, or a Scottish grandparent, or a Spanish wife. ‘The only true Irish left,’ insisted the country’s top sound engineer one night, ‘are the travellers, and look how we treat them.’ Talk turned to religion. All shades of opinion were represented, but the mood was relaxed and uncontentious.

‘You know a few years ago, when all the statues of the Virgin up and down the country were moving, and people were turning up and seeing the miracles? Well, Donegal was the only place it never happened. We had a band up here at the time. The Stationary Statues.’

Even the dangerous combination of politics and strong drink couldn’t sour the mood.

‘See the Brits finally worked out how to sort things out? They heard Adams and Paisley had been having secret meetings. So the SAS send their top sniper along, and he’s waiting up on a roof at the back of this hotel. And sure enough, don’t Paisley and Adams come walking out the service door together at the appointed time. But walking right between them is Daniel O’Donnell.’

The nation’s top country-and-Oirish singer is a Donegal boy, and famously proud of it.

‘The thing is, the sniper’s only been given two silver-tipped bullets.’

A pause, and a sip of the drink.

‘So he shoots Daniel twice.’

The night before I left, Paul’s trio was playing. He has different bands for different types of music. The trio’s policy is to play no songs written after Elvis joined the army. At the bar I got talking to a guy who’d been married thirty years to a fortune-teller. Afterwards Paul and I sat up late in front of a fire in his ramshackle Georgian house. He said how unregulated life seems in comparison with England. Different rules of time apply. But the biggest change, he said, was people’s attitude to musicians.

‘In England everyone just thinks you’re a waster. Get a proper job, they think, you lazy bastard. Here, you’re a respected member of the community. You entertain them, and they honour you for it. Music’s at the centre of everything. I even get invited to dinner at the doctor’s house. That was never going to happen in Leeds.’

I told him I was going back to Cork while I still had the energy to get out of Donegal.

‘I was down in Cork last month. In Clonakilty. I did a gig with Noel Redding.’

I get to De Barra’s around eight, even though as far as anyone knows no one’s ever picked up an instrument in an Irish pub until at least half nine. On the wall next to my bar stool is a photo of Noel with one arm round Janis Joplin and the other round Bob Dylan, who’s wearing a zebra-print shirt, unbuttoned to the waist. Either it’s Woodstock, or Noel’s mum took the snap one year when Bob and Janis were in Clonakilty on their holidays.

‘So did you find your roots?’

The guy at the next bar stool is talking to me, and for a moment I can’t place him. Then I see the scar, and remember the rare steak with garlic butter. It’s the builder I met the day I arrived on the ferry, the one who sold the wood to Jeremy Irons, and thought the best thing about this feckin’ place was the rain. He buys me a drink.

‘So did ya get to any festivals? There’s a festival somewhere every feckin’ day during the summer, ya know.’

I realise I haven’t been to a single one. There didn’t seem much point. There was plenty going on without them, as far as I could make out.

‘The feckin’ Rose of Tralee. That was the place to be this year.’

The Rose of Tralee is a beauty contest that’s been going for aeons, with music and drinking also laid on to make sure all interests are catered for.

‘You know who played there this year?’

I look at the wall and hazard a guess. ‘Bob Dylan?’

‘No. James Brown! And a thirty-eight-piece feckin’ band. For free. In the street. In feckin’ Tralee.’

I’m mortified I wasn’t there. James Brown, the Godfather of Soul in, as the man said, feckin’ Tralee. Ole James was probably checkin’ out the family tree. A lot of people don’t realise that the Number One Soul Brother is another famous Irish American, but if you look closely, the haircut gives it away. Everyone remembers ‘Sex Machine’ and ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ sure enough, but people seem less familiar with James’s pioneering work as a founder member of the Chieftains. Next time you’re in Ireland, go into a record shop and ask for the early James Brown and the Chieftains recordings. They’ll be delighted. The poetry’s good, too; check out ‘Get on Up (in the Celtic Twilight)’, Brown’s celebrated collaboration with W. B. Yeats.

And Noel Redding? He’s Otis’s cousin, isn’t he?

The band go on at ten o’clock in a back room. There are nine people in the crowd, including me, but it fills up as the evening wears on. At one point an inquisitive and hopelessly pissed farmer comes in and takes a look. Suddenly he starts dancing wildly on the spot, then stops and goes out to the toilet. An hour later he comes back, says something to me I don’t understand, then lays his head on the bar. The overpowering fragrance of dairy products and dung, with a soundtrack of Noel Redding singing Dylan’s ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limits’, isn’t something you could forget in a hurry.

After the gig I ask Noel if he’d like a drink, but he has to be up early in the morning.

‘Sorry, man. I’m playing at a convention. Got to fly to San Francisco.’

Sometimes you just can’t imagine what other people’s lives must be like.

Next morning I drive into Cork city, park the Tank near where I’d parked the wretched repmobile on St Patrick’s Day, and take a stroll across the river to the English Market. I’ll be going back to England very soon, and it’d be a crime not to stock up with some decent olives. It’s not something they tell you about in the tourist guides, but Cork’s got the best olive stall this side of Casablanca.

There’s nothing English about the market, apart from the fact that it’s covered with a roof, which was a radical innovation from across the sea when it was built in the eighteenth century. At one end of the market a first-floor café and restaurant, enclosed by ornate wrought-iron, looks down over the stalls. The olives are on a corner as you go in, enormous barrels of the things, black, green, spiced, herbed, or chillied. A dozen different kinds of olive oil, from places like Sardinia and Kalamata, are for sale in hand-labelled pop bottles sealed with a cork. There’s a vat of pickled garlic, for people with damaged palates who’d like to taste again. After I’ve stocked up I take a stroll past the fantasy fish stalls, piled high with shark and John Dory, and huge scallops in enormous fan-shaped shells. I won’t be taking any fish back in case my bag gets lost and turns up five weeks later, but Karen from the Convent has given me her recipe for mackerel, so I head to the Weird Chutney and Bizarre Sauces stall for a cheap jar of tamarind paste. They may have put an end to duty free, but, trust me, English visitors with an eye for a bargain are coming to Ireland in ever-increasing numbers to stock up on tamarind. Pop over to Tralee to catch James Brown, and you’ll have had the perfect contemporary heritage weekend.