Redbeard Rocks! St. Patrick’s Day Playlist

With so many St. Patrick’s Day parades returning this year from Dublin to Dallas, you probably will need a lengthy playlist of Irish rock more than ever to power up your party. My Spotify all-Irish playlist featuring Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy, Van Morrison, Gary Moore, U2, Cranberries. Click here Redbeard Rocks St. Patty’s Day playlist  on Spotify. ( From our Dublin Danny Boy, Captain Ken Aiken, originally from Ballymena N.Ireland, usually moored somewhere in the Caribbean aboard his 45-foot ocean-going sailboat Tintean, which is Gaelic for ” I paid that tab, I swear”.)

Well here we are celebrating another St Patrick’s Day smack in the middle of Lent and a Holy Day of Obligation. So the pubs should be closed and yes all should be climbing to the top of rocky rain-swept Irish mountains in your bare feet, but only if you think your auld knees couldn’t take the abuse. Definitely you should not be pouring green beer down your necks all day.
And who was St Patrick? Well he wasn’t Irish for a start. We Irish like to hope he was Welsh, but he may well have been( God help us all) English. His “da” was a deacon and his grand-father a priest (I kid you not!) He was captured in a slaving raid by some of the lads when he was a teenager, carted over Hell’s Ditch (aka The Irish Sea) and spent some really miserable years watching pigs on a mountain named Slemish. This was no “break year” foreign exchange program. Much later Patrick escaped and became a cleric. He may have been in France when God told him he should go back to Ireland. I could see Pat there, with a glass of red in one hand and a ham and cheese baguette in the other, thinking that this was singularly the worst idea he had ever heard in his entire life. But the decent man he was – off he went. The rest, as they say, is myth. And so  suitable to music as Pat had a fine tenor voice, it is said. BTW there’s a great tune called “St Patrick was a Gentleman” that The Wolfe Tones have a fine version of that closely follows this tradition. U2-prd_img_1125x_X_14b8d05c5b12429d958b77114252ba38

Patrick, towards the end of his life wrote his “Confession” – in fact it’s about the only thing relating to him that is verifiably genuine, well most of it anyways. So following in the big man’s sandals I must confess that I haven’t spent a SPD in Ireland in 25 years – but it was one epic day and a half ….Anyways
years ago in Ireland on SPD everything closed but the chapel doors – now it’s an international green kaleidoscope of variety and celebration. And it should be, as Irish music, arguably the easiest recognized part of our culture, is a wolf hound’s dinner of polkas, mazurkas, reels, jigs and set dances played on bouzoukis, accordions, timpan dulcimers, fiddles and bodhrans listened to at fleadh cheoil, in homes, bars , cèilidh and feis and in bars worldwide. You hum it.
thinLizzy2
Oh, rock music. Well the number one has to be “Whiskey in The Jar” by Thin Lizzy (note that Irish whiskey has an ‘e’ in it; the other stuff from Scotland is whisky). Also the band’s name was originally Tin Lizzy, like the old car, but on a phone call making a booking, with Phil Lynott’s Dublin thick accent, it came over as”Thin”… legendary stuff indeed. Oh, and the song was a folk number for years before this, and indeed still is.

van-morrison-7Van The Man Morrison up next with “Brown Eyed Girl”. It is a fact that if you sit in any bar in Ireland for more than one pint you will hear this song in one form or another. And if it ain’t Van that’s singing it then it most likely is getting musically murdered. And a little remembered treasure from Them called “Mystic Eyes” is a fair old belter worth a play even today.

And last and most least : “Danny Boy” …… it’s about as Irish as bagel lox and a smear. Words written by an English lawyer, to a tune he got from his American sister-in-law, and first recorded by an Austrian called Ernestine Schumann-Heink who never got closer to Ireland than sticking a fork into a spud. But many’s the tourist had bought me a pint just to listen to my rendition of the “polite” version of it.Oh – finally a word from El Papa: ” It is not necessary to believe in God to be a good person. In a way, the traditional notion of God is outdated. One can be spiritual but not religious. It is not necessary to go to church and give money — for many, nature can be a church. Some of the best people in history do not believe in God, while some of the worst deeds were done in His name.”
Don’t take anything too seriously as Pope Francis never actually said any such a thing – but St Pat would have blessed it, I’m sure. Slan Ken Aiken

10) Pogues  9) My Bloody Valentine    8) Horslips  7) Cranberries cranberries

6) Them

5) Bob Geldof’s Boomtown Rats

imagesBOBGELDOF

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4) Gary Moore   indexGARYMOORE1

3) Thin Lizzy   2) Rory Gallagher625453_10151273919611370_823209430_n

1) Van MorrisonLynott_384088t