There’s no fool like an old fool, they say, so what happens when a bunch of oul’ coots gather together to make music? The next bunch of posts may enlighten you as to the question just posed and may also, perhaps, enrage or entertain. Anything’s better than a yawn, I guess. These songs were the result of a few sessions around a table laden with alcoholic beverages of various kinds. Plonked in the centre of the table was a laptop with built-in mic that somehow survived the knocks and spillages that were part and parcel of the sessions.
Song 1: The Spanish Cloak– Also known as The Munster Cloak, this is a tune I first played with Seannachie in the 1970s. It’s amazing how the tides of time delivers strange configurations on the shore of the present: a chance meeting at a concert last year has led to a reunion of Seannachie for an upcoming weekend in Wollongong, with players coming from Queensland, the Northern Territory and Sydney- I’ll update the post when it’s all
over! But back to now. When Banter formed in the 90s it quickly became a favourite with the group. It’s short but, I think, majestically sweet.
sailor gives to the maid is likely syphilis, for which there was no cure in the 17th Century where the song, most likely, originates. Banter have sung this song for decades now, and really don’t care where the song came from. And, anyway, the English have stolen plenty from us, so…
here the persona reflects upon the landscape, regrets and longings in a uniquely antipodean way. Written by Hugh McDonald who performed and recorded with the Bushwackers
as Oberon and Michelle Pheiffer as Titania springs to mind when I hear the titles of the tunes now. Anyway, I have always disliked the greeting-card imagery of fairies and angels as cute-as-buttons homoculi cavorting around petal-strewn gardens or fluffy white cotton-wool clouds.
called upon to do it as it is longer that the usual three minutes or so our songs typically occupy. The song, written for The Dubliners by Phil Coulter, one of the great musical talents to come out of Northern Ireland, has, as its narrator, another Old Man of the Sea. The singer notwithstanding, the rest of the group likes the song, so- democracy rules…or is it, rather, another example of the tyrannising of minorities which seems so in vogue in dictatorships, and in recent times, even such shining examples of democracy as the USA?
impending storm and shipwreck. I have read, somewhere, that Boy Scouts in America sing song this around their campfires (which is no stranger than, say, a bunch of superannuated musos singing it around their grog-laden table…)
there took it up, but fancied it up with minors and such-like. I enjoyed their more sophisticated version, too, but have stuck to the more primitive version here, which I still sing from time to time. It was written by travelling songwriter and storyteller Pecker Dunne, pictured here.
endurance and stoicism was one of our most requested songs when we were playing on a semi-regular basis in the late 1990s. Back in the mid- 1970s, we began to listen to a great new writer named Eric Bogle. In the 80s, back in Ireland, my hair stood on end when I heard, for the first time, No Man’s Land. In the early 90s, in North Queensland, I attended a memorable concert by Bogle at the Burdekin Theatre. Long may he continue to write and sing.