I’m doing a gig. We’re not talking the 3Arena or the Olympia or Vicar Street or Whelan’s, but it might as well be five nights in Croker for the amount of stress it’s inducing. I’m doing a gig in my local library in North Strand. The capacity is 40, maybe 50 people at a push but that has not done anything to quell the pre-emptive stage fright. I’m currently trying to figure out why I agreed to the gig and, more urgently, how I might get out of the event without changing my identity and entering some kind of witness protection programme to avoid having to face the organisers for the rest of my life. But now it’s about to happen and it’s too late to have plastic surgery to render me unrecognisable and/or emigrate.
It’s a singing gig, I should clarify. I sing a lot behind closed doors in front of friends but I haven’t sung in public in an official capacity for a long time. My heyday for public singing was Dublin’s recession-era 1980s when I was a regular on the stages of various talent contests during Sandymount Community Week and dreamt of being the next Dana. I had no fear back then. I was 11, singing a deeply affecting version of Maybe from Annie the musical which resulted in a controversial second-place medal – I was robbed by some young fella from Ringsend on an accordion. I was 13, singing shamefully underappreciated Irish Eurovision entry Wait Until the Weekend Comes sung by bouffant-haired Maria Christian with poignant lyrics by Brendan J Graham: “Wait until the weekend comes, Sundays always change your mind.” I was 16 and in my pop-rock era in a polka dot dress and Doc Martens singing Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven Is a Place on Earth accompanied on electric guitar by Kevin Courtney of this parish, who was notorious for knowing every word of American Pie and used to sing it at us for hours in our kitchen when I was growing up.
There have been other public forays. In the late 1980s/early1990s I busked in London with my friend Marie, singing Ticket to Ride over and over again at the bottom of the escalators in Tottenham Court Road tube station. (If people are passing rapidly by then you only need one song – top tip there for aspiring buskers.)
But despite all of this past experience I am riddled with performance anxiety. The gig is part of the Big Scream festival which is happening all across Dublin’s North East Inner City this week for Halloween. There are scary film screenings, spooky storytelling sessions, ghost walks, a haunted hall of horrors and, on Wednesday night, in Charleville Mall Library, Dracula Revealed, a talk by Bram Stoker’s great-nephew Dacre Stoker.
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Most terrifying of all from my perspective is the event called Dracula After Dark, also at Charleville Mall Library, on Thursday night, where, in between talks about Bram’s finest creation, myself and musician Pádraig Dwyer are going to be singing murder ballads. I didn’t even know what a murder ballad was until a couple of weeks ago. Now I’m rehearsing a rendition of a tune called The Maid of Cabra West by the late, lamented songwriter and song collector Frank Harte, which is the funniest song about gratuitous murder on the streets of Dublin you’re ever likely to hear. As a bonus, it also features pints of Babycham sipped in the late, lamented drinking den Bartley Dunne’s.
Luckily, my fellow performer Pádraig has a lovely soft folk voice that makes mine sound much better. Ideally, we’d sing in harmony the whole time but he’s making me do some of the verses solo. He’s been coming to my kitchen for rehearsals where I provide giant mugs of coffee and he feeds me musical tidbits like the story of Pachelbel’s Canon in D from the 17th or 18th century and how the chords from that hugely popular tune played at weddings form the basis for hundreds of songs by everyone from Lady Gaga to Green Day. (For more on this, I recommend watching Pachelbel Rant on YouTube).
So, yeah, I’m doing a gig. I thought I might get braver as the big night approached. Wait until the weekend comes, I told myself, Sundays always change your mind. But no, the weekend came and went and I’m still here having palpitations. I’ve been looking up techniques to deal with stage fright. There’s the usual stuff – meditation, breathing exercises – and a lot about avoiding negative self-talk. “Don’t run around telling everyone how nervous you are,” the advice goes. A bit late for that.
On a positive note, the gig is free so at least there won’t be people asking for their money back. Another positive is that the Big Scream is a community festival with a tiny marketing budget so part of me is hoping nobody turns up and our event has to be cancelled. The better part of me feels that as a person with a bit of a platform I should be helping with the marketing and telling everyone I know about the gig, thereby leaning into the discomfort. So that’s what I’m doing here. Leaning in. Feeling the fear and singing anyway. Try the beef (or the plant-based alternative), I’ll be here all week, that is, for one night only in the North Strand.
Pray for me.
Róisín Ingle and Pádraig Dwyer will be singing murder ballads in the Charleville Library, North Strand, Dublin 3 on Thursday October 26th at 7pm. For more see bigscream.ie