Irish aye.......

Last night I dragged my tired arse out to see Irish singer Damien Dempsey playing at the Knitting Factory bar. I really, really wanted to like this guy, and granted, I did like HIM, he's a good laugh and a great songwriter, but his voice... oh god, it's like a a man with three noses singing underwater! Sometimes, you really want to like someone's music and sometimes it just doesn't happen.

I've been through this a few times over the years - with music and books. I must have started the book "Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintenance" about 5 times, I really want to like and understand this book but the only zen-like state I get into after about 3 chapters is sleep. I could fall asleep standing on hot coals with a burning rolled-up newspaper stuck up my bum while reading this book!!

Same goes for "On The Road" by Kerouac, "The Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs and the follow up to "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller(probably one of my all time favorite books), which was so boring I can't even remember what it was called now!!!

All of these books have either been recommended to me by people with impeccable taste, or the authors have written other things I loved, and all of these books sit on my shelf taunting me year after year to pick them up and fail once again at chapter 5.

Musically it's the same story - Damien Dempsey is highly recommended by one of my musical heroes Christy Moore, and is also a mate of Shane McGowan from The Pogues, who, in my opinion, is the best songwriter since Bob Dylan. Damiem Dempsey plays Irish folk music with a social conscious, and usually I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff.

The crowd was filled with young, working class Irish New Yorkers, spilling into Manhattan from Yonkers, Riverdale, Bayridge and Woodside. All the Irish enclaves in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.

They were my kind of crowd - drunk and rowdy - so much so that the bar badly "misunderestimated" (to borrow a word from Dumbya) the amount of people who would be at this show and only had one barmaid working. Dempsey sells out 2000 seat venues in Ireland, yet here he was in a pub that held 200 tops. Needless to say those 200 seemed to be ordering pint upon pint of Guinness and all at the same time from the poor barmaid.

I stayed for about an hour of his set, got in my four pints, and headed home by 11. God, what a different life you lead after you have a baby! I've worked out that four pints is my "pint of no return". I can still go home and deal with crying Wee Yin reasonably well at that stage, anymore than four pints and I might as well stay out and get hammered (something I haven't done in months).

I think I am learning to reprogram myself and that's a good thing. Last week I went to see the great Canadian punk band "Nomeansno", a bunch of old farts who can still really kick up a helluva noise. Again I managed to limit myself to 4 pints then off home to bed.

This is all the more amazing for the fact that I ran into the two guitarists and the drummer from my all time favorite band Alice Donut at the show and we got talking about all sorts of shite but mainly babies. It was the day the punks rockers stopped taking acid and started talking about babies. Quite weird.