From The Belfast Telegraph
Exploring amazing history of Ireland's music 'hits factory'
By Neil Johnston
23 August 2005
The infinite variety of music made in Ireland over the past half century or so has become an international phenomenon.
In terms of record sales, the success of its leading performers has been truly amazing.
For example, in 2001, Irish artists sold more than 56m albums, which represented 2.3% of world wide CD sales.
And it is now the fifth highest provider of international hit records on the international rock and pop market.
Contributing to this achievement have been such top acts as U2 - they are at the peak of the pyramid - Van Morrison, Sinead O'Connor, Enya and Chris de Burgh.
The story behind this remarkable aspect of Ireland's cultural and creative life, unlike that of its much celebrated poetry and prose, has never really been reliably told.
But now that gap has been filled with the publication of a scholarly new study entitled Noisy Island: A Short History Of Irish Popular Music.
Its author is Gerry Smyth, reader in cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University, who takes his pithy title for the book from Shakespeare's line in The Tempest "the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not".
The Bard's flight of fancy neatly sums up the entire Irish musical experience since the late 1950s, as Smyth traces and appraises the various musical movements which have emerged over the years and their significance in the overall scheme of things.
He guides the reader along a wide river with many tributaries - the ceili bands, the showbands, the early beat groups, the blues and R&B bands, the vibrant traditional and folk music sector, the punk phase and its aftermath, the new wave rock'n'roll.
On the journey, he analyses the artistic achievement of many of Ireland's leading performers and song writers, and the way in which they put their own distinctive shape on international rock music.
They include U2 and Van Morrison, as well as Paul Brady, Henry McCullough and the late Rory Gallagher.
In a thought-provoking and carefully written examination of Morrison's long musical odyssey, for example, Smyth describes how the "increasingly disillusioned" singer left his influential Belfast R&B band Them in the late '60s.
"His subsequent work is probably better described as 'soul' than as rhythm and blues, although neither term does justice to his restive musical imagination," he says.
"The body of work that made Morrison one of the most celebrated popular performers of the last 40 years is characterised by a profound sense of ambiguity towards his home place and the American culture to which he was drawn from such an early age.
"In Morrison's vision, both Ulster and the United States have their compensations and their drawbacks, their attractions and their limitations, and his music may be understood as an ongoing and evolving response to the paradoxical situation in which, as an Ulsterman with access to a particular African-American musical tradition, he found himself."
On a very different tack (although in his early days, Morrison himself paid some dues round the local "ballrooms of romance"), Smyth has some words in defence of that oft maligned and now extinct musical species, the Irish showbands.
They had, he said, "come to be regarded as representatives of a benighted past which modern Ireland in all its sophistication has happily left far behind.
"But the best showbands played your favourite songs, they played them well, and they played them on your own doorstep."
In putting his book together, Smyth set out to provide a role model and a base for future serious studies of this noisy island's musical diaspora and he has achieved his purpose. Thanks to his dedication, Irish rock'n'roll now has its first discussion document.
Noisy Island: A Short History of Irish Popular Music , is published by Cork University Press, £13:95/€19.95
