The legacy we leave

Conmen or contenders? The band Illywhacker circa 1993, Left to right, Brian Hogan, Alan Kelly, myself and the one ‘fan’ we had (that day). 

At this stage in my life I am starting to obsess a bit over what modest legacy I can leave behind. Some sort of artistic footprint. This week I decided to listen back to a treasure trove of music I recorded with friends in Kerry in the mid 90’s with a view to making it available to listen to. The band was called Illywhacker (named after a Peter Carey novel about a 139 year old conman who was on the run and wanted to die but couldn’t!). We had great adventures and worked on the European festival circuit (including Glastonbury) with the Pyrotechnical Theatre Company called ‘Theatre Of Fire’, run by my sister Maria Hingerty and her partner Miklos. Alan Kelly, who emigrated to Australia, was one of the singers in this creative, experimental, highly melodic band, and he has been mastering the dusty old tapes and sending them on to the band recently. We sounded somewhere between (acoustic) Led Zeppelin, Velvet Underground, the incredible Irish band Rollerskate Skinny and David Bowie. I am so proud of this music, the four of us had this amazing ability to start playing an idea from scratch and a fully formed song would often just materialise immediately. And we often wouldn’t touch it then! Pure music really. We once did a gig in the Rock Garden in the mid 90's where we improvised and wrote 8 songs on the spot without any pre conceived ideas or melodies or lyrics. We took turns on starting each song and just went for it. JP in particular was brilliant at improvising lyrics and phonetics and melodies on the spot. How rare would it be to release music like that these days? Well, we will be very soon, so watch this space!  

We survived the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune over the long ‘live in’ recording sessions and gruelling skinflint tours we did in our orange 1974 Ford Camper Van. That van would often only go 50 KPH on the autobahn and other European motorways and was forever breaking down. One time, the whole side of it fell off and we had to run back and put the debris into the back of it. We got to travel around Eastern Europe at a time when places like Leipzig, Berlin, Dresden, Erfurt, Jena, Budapest, Prague and České Budějovice had a dark underground mysteriousness to them. And beautiful frothy draft beer! We even supported The Frames in Prague one night as our stars collided. I remember it was Halloween 1995 and I ended up pouring beer down the back of some really drunken blokes jeans at the end of the night for a bit of devilment. He probably would have killed me if he was sober.  There were some really hurtful arguments but there was also a great chemistry and ‘chain reaction creativity’ that was the flip side of some of the resentment and frustration we had with each other at times. There was a lot of love for each other too. This is what it’s like to be in a band I suppose. One big Rollercoaster! An old wooden rickety rollercoaster without sides or a structure that you can depend on. That’s why some of us crash out quickly or are left with bad emotional scars and get very down, but why some of us also reach great empirical and transcendental heights. For me it’s been so worth it!