We hear a lot about the decline of civility in public discourse. That may be true in some walks of life, but one place it certainly is not is in the worlds of culture and entertainment, where artists’ public utterances are now policed by PR goons with the rigidity of a particularly disapproving Victorian chaperone. Heaven forfend anyone should utter even a slightly disparaging comment about the work of their peers. In my previous life as an arts editor, I have had music-biz minions in tears on the phone, begging me to delete some mildly disobliging comment their client had made about the competition.
What a joy, then, to observe this week’s intergenerational flare-up between, on the one hand, the Derry faux-anthem composer Phil Coulter and the last surviving Dubliner – the beardy group, not the city dwellers – John Sheahan, and on the other the drone-folk maestros Lankum and the bouncy balladeers The Mary Wallopers.
It all kicked off, appropriately enough, in the snug of O’Donoghue’s pub on Merrion Row in Dublin, where Sheahan, who is 85, and Coulter, who is 82, were being interviewed by the Sunday Independent to plug their new tribute show, The Dubliners Encore.
Asked his opinion of contemporary folk artists such as Lankum and The Mary Wallopers, Coulter responded: “I don’t think any of them are as good as The Dubliners. I don’t. Because they don’t have that range of instrumental dexterity. But having said that, I rejoice in the fact that there is that renewal of Irish music.”
Catherine Martin has been the most consequential minister for culture since Michael D Higgins
Beneath the vote for stability and small-c conservatism, darker currents are stirring
America’s system of checks and balances will be severely tested by Trump’s presidency
Cillian Murphy’s Small Things Like These has become a cause celebre of the Make Ireland Great Again brigade
That wasn’t all. Sheahan described The Mary Wallopers as mediocre musicians and singers. “I am not too impressed by The Mary Wallopers,” he told the Sindo. “I played with them on the Heart of Saturday Night series on RTÉ. I was invited to join them, and we played a few songs together. They wouldn’t be my first choice of a guest on a solo show of mine.”
Coulter added for good measure that “Lankum remind me of following on not so much from The Dubliners as from Planxty, a band that I produced. Planxty’s approach would have been more chamber music when they did arrangements – and that tradition I see in Lankum.”
I’d love to tell you what Lankum said about Coulter in their response on X, but we don’t have enough asterisks, and in any case the lawyers probably wouldn’t let me. We’ll have to make do with the reaction of the former Pogue Spider Stacy: “Phil Coulter is an old fool who means nothing and clearly has no ears left. But I expected more from John [Sheahan]. What the hell did he think of us if he thinks the Wallopers are ‘mediocre musicians’? Makes you wonder. I’m a bit gutted to be honest.”
[ The Mary Wallopers: ‘Folk was never supposed to be safe’Opens in new window ]
[ Phil Coulter: ‘Music saved my sanity... and my life’Opens in new window ]
Others weighed in. The Dublin historian and podcaster Donal Fallon thought the comments were “a real pity”. But were they really? As Stacy implies, The Pogues when they started were animated both by a love of the Irish ballad tradition and by the DIY ethos of punk. In truth, the two were never that far apart, whatever Coulter and Sheahan may think. And neither was overly concerned about musical purity – or indeed of getting into a brawl. Sure, in Stacy’s tweet you can hear the horrible dawning suspicion that Ronnie Drew and the lads were sneering at them behind their backs during all those Pogues-Dubliners collaborations in the 1980s and 1990s.
That seems unlikely. But should it really come as a surprise that two octogenarians promoting their nostalgia tour should be out of sympathy with a younger generation who venerate them (or venerate Sheahan, at least)? They’re too loud. They can’t play their instruments. They’re not as good as the old-timers. We have heard these complaints many times before. Perhaps they sting more in the world of traditional music, where cross-generational respect is a help rather than a hindrance.
Some hackles were particularly raised by Coulter’s reference to Planxty. Members of that 1970s folk supergroup have spoken acidly (and on the record) about Coulter’s role in their career. It’s not a happy tale. No matter what the PR flacks try to pretend, there is no hatred as deep, searing and bitter as a music-industry hatred. It throbs on for decades, barely below the surface of all that enforced politeness. Long may it last.
