 | | Reviews | | |  COLIN IRWIN
In Search Of The Craic
Andre Deutsch, Hardback
ISBN 0-233-00004-6
"Oh no," you cry, eyeing your McCarthy/Hawkes-laden bookshelves. "Do we need yet another Guinness-soaked-pub-crawl-around-Ireland-with-or-without-a-fridge-type-travelogue?!" Well, if it's this one, yes we do. And if we love a good laugh and want to learn a huge amount about Irish music and its gloriously eccentric parent country, we need it right now.
Twenty five years into a passionate affair with the music and the island, music journalist/presenter Irwin (Melody Maker, Mojo, fRoots, several broadsheets and the BBC) undertakes his umpteenth visit to Erin and this time he's on a mission: to see if the craic is still all it's cracked up to be under the reign of the Celtic Tiger and rampant tourism. His account of the colourful characters, surreal situations, wild landscapes and musical mayhem he meets along the way (no change there, then!) is interlarded with historical anecdotes and personal reminiscences about musicians past and present. Before you know it, somewhere between the quest to calculate occurrences of The Fields Of Athenry and the search for the elusive Tommy Peoples, a small encyclopedia's worth of fascinating information has logged itself in your brain.
Disregard Irwin's modest assertion in his intro: there may be people better qualified to give the history of Irish music but I bet they've not done it with as much humour and love and from a quarter of a century's front-line experience. It flies off the page - the legendary Keane sisters' lethal hot toddies; the Mary Coughlan Incident; the mighty Dublin lock-in with Altan, the Chieftains and half the Rolling Stones. The Rose of Tralee and the Dingle dolphin and the warm heart of Ireland bursting from once-a-week pubs and wee-hours wedding celebrations.
A man who can identify Tommy Peoples' daughter (whom he's never seen or heard play) from her fiddle style across a crowded bar knows his onions all right. Irwin has been there, done that and mislaid the t-shirt in a hooley. Pacey, conversational, essential reading.
Mel McClellan - March 2004
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Folk & Acoustic
