CHAPTER 38

 

 

#63: BILL WHELAN and ANÚNA featuring The RTÉ CONCERT ORCHESTRA:

"Riverdance"

from the album: Riverdance: Music From The Show

Released: March 1995

 

 

(N.B.: For those striving to compile a playlist of songs from this blog, this particular one has subsequently vanished from Spotify, to be replaced by the 25th Anniversary Edition of the same show; that's pleasant enough but it's the original that's the more potent.)

 

I listen to this piece of music relatively frequently - I mean, that's why it's here - but am never able to do so without visualising it. In terms of pop music to be found in the British charts of 1995 it's as important as anything more fashionable. I don't imagine anyone has ever sat through its five minutes and forty-three seconds and not had the visuals automatically pop up in their mind.

Perhaps, as a piece of venturing popular music, it would have been equally at home in the 1968 charts next to "Classical Gas" and "MacArthur Park." But this was a studio re-recording of something done live, at Dublin's Point Theatre, on 30 April 1994, as a Eurovision Song Contest interval filler. That year the competition was won by Ireland for the third straight year, with "Rock n' Roll Kids" by Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan, at that time the least typical victor. The British entry was a nice "Unfinished Sympathy" knock-off called "We Will Be Free (Lonely Symphony)" and sung by West End stage star Frances Ruffelle (who is also the mother of the singer Eliza Doolittle); it finished tenth.

No one outside of Eurovision fans and experts remembers anything else about the competition. Except for the interval filler, which had it been an entry (it couldn't have been; far too long) would have scored a thousand points. Eurovision fans and experts would most likely have experienced a flashback to the 1981 Contest, held at the RDS Simmonscourt Pavilion in Dublin, where the interval piece was performed by an augmented Planxty (featuring the greatest man alive, Christy Moore) and dancers from Dublin City Ballet, and was entitled "Timedance." That year the skirt-ripping Bucks Fizz won for Britain.

Those fully awake in the early eighties would also have recalled EastWind, an arousing 1982 fusion of traditional Irish music and folk dances from Bulgaria and Macedonia, by Andy Irvine and Davy Spillane. The album was produced by Bill Whelan, who in the mid-nineties I principally knew from appearing on Mary Margaret O'Hara's brilliant Miss America.

Some of that influence inevitably seeped into "Riverdance" itself, as well as,, I would argue, sources ranging from Ravel's "Boléro" - the patiently-increasing rhythmic dominance which could represent either consummation or endgame - to Olé Coltrane (Kenneth Edge's soprano saxophone introducing the thematic climax). Certainly the opening hymnal quietude of the Anúna choir suggests the promise of something beyond the suffocating proud-parishioner politesse that its society typically demanded from one might call Irish dancing.

Then comes the gradual build-up, the massed drums, and the final ascent to glory, and it is here that the listener realises that they must see and feel this music. At Eurovision, Anúna ethereally looked like they'd been beamed down from another planet. Then Butler, and then Flatley - and the recording misses the trading-fours between Flatley's taps and the drumming.

Moreover, it also misses the massed feet, legs and boots of the dozens of supporting dancers. This is why you have to watch the original 1994 Eurovision performance - something which people, at the time, had not seen before - and gasp at some of the most coordinated action you have ever seen emanating from human beings. The mass, unified, united stomping is imposing, actively cathartic and, in the best possible sense, intimidating - in that it makes the spectator want to be more than themselves, to exceed themselves. This immense message to humanity was that we could all work together and not merely settle for happiness but dare to express the ecstatic. It was one of the highlights of civilisation and perhaps should have been performed only once. Which I why I still endeavour to listen to this as often as sanity allows, and watch it even more frequently. It reminds me that once we were here, and this, once upon a time, was what we were capable of achieving. As you are now, so once were we, as Joyce continues to remind us.