Dublin’s great in 88. That’s how the slogan went. Dowdy, dirty, recession-addled Dublin. And it was great. I was 17. The late Carmencita Hederman was our mayor, Frank Feely bestrode the Corpo like a colossus. We had these souvenir milk bottles and a 70-foot Gulliver, an actual colossus, lying down on Dollymount Strand.
I mean, looking back, the timing of these millennium celebrations was questionable. The date was even disputed. Dublin was supposed to have been founded by the Vikings in 841, according to my historian colleague Ronan McGreevy. But, sure, any excuse for a party. And the millennium was some hooley. That’s my memory of it anyway.
My fleeting career as a busker began in the summer of 1988. The Millennium Busking Competition had a prize of a music voucher for McCullough Piggot music shop and me and my friend Marie felt like having a go. She was a singer but neither of us had busked before. We had three songs: Ticket to Ride by the Beatles, 20 Flight Rock by Eddie Cochrane and another one lost to the mists of my cider-doused 80s brain. My mousy brown hair had been recently dyed white blond. I had an off-the-shoulder polka dot dress, a face full of Pale Biscuit Rimmel foundation and the kind of brass neck you only have at 17.
The Hothouse Flowers were out and about that year too, returning to their busking origins on Grafton Street to promote their new album People, a classic. It’s playing as I type this, blaring from a phone and a streaming platform my 17-year-old self with all her dreams and cassette tapes would think was some kind of voodoo magic.
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There’s a news report online from 1988 where an RTÉ reporter asks the crowd gathered outside HMV what they think of the Hothouse Flowers. “They’re different, they’re original, they dress well, they’re fantastic,” a red-haired young teenager who looks like someone I went to school with is saying. Two other school girls in uniform reckon “they’ve lovely clothes and they’re all gorgeous”. Another older woman is not impressed by Liam and Fiachna and friends. “They’re scruffy, dirty lookin’,” she says. Well, you can’t please everyone, especially not in Dublin, not in 88 or now, for that matter.
The cheek of us entering a busking competition the first day we ever busked. I can only imagine how irritating it must have been for everyone else, the seasoned buskers who knew way more than three songs, that we won. But that’s what happened by some kind of millennium miracle. I look back now, at my tambourine, my polka dot dress and I hardly recognise myself. But she’s in there somewhere, that 17-year-old. And in her head, she’s still got it.
She’s a 50-something, who still fancies herself as a musician. She’s got a ukulele and she’s not afraid to use it. And she is keen to pass on her wisdom to the next generation. In other words, she’s been badgering her teenage daughters about the possibility they might earn some summer cash by busking. It’s not been going down well.
They are 16. They can sing far better than I ever could. They harmonise like a dream. But as I have discovered, you can lead a couple of teenagers to Grafton Street, buy them a guitar, pay for lessons, sheet music, capos and plectrums but you cannot make them busk. Apparently, if you go busking in Dublin in 2025 you might see someone you know from school and life as you know it would cease and the world crumble into a bleak, black nothingness. There would be no survivors from this mortifapocalypse. Zero.
People by the Hothouse Flowers is playing from the magic machine. A song called The Older I Get. A much younger Liam is singing the truth that feels even more truthy now that we’re both that bit older. “The old they can’t reach us, their ways are not ours, though they furrowed our futures, our freedom they bore”.
Last week we went to Lahinch where the sea shines like a jewel and I tried to get them to busk on the promenade seeing as it was unlikely they’d bump into anyone from school there. No joy. None. I will never learn. Vicarious living through your children does not work. Cannot work. It is not supposed to work. Future furrowing is fruitless. Their ways are not ours. They will be moved or gravitate towards the things that make their own hearts sing. Not mine.
But that doesn’t have to stop myself and my brother Michael. Apologies to anyone who was passing by The Flaggy Shore last Sunday. My brother, who like me fancies himself as a bit of an undiscovered rock star, could be heard singing the whole of Romeo & Juliet by Dire Straits accompanied by my daughter on guitar. She had never heard the song before, so fair play. Is Romeo & Juliet hard to sing? Yes. Did that stop my brother? No.
Sitting out in the sunshine we also did Creep by Radiohead and Common People by Pulp and Rainy Night in Soho by The Pogues. Passersby occasionally stopped as if to while away a moment listening until they realised this was amateur night at the busking festival and moved quickly on. We didn’t care. We were singing for our past selves. We were singing like nobody was listening. Which nobody was. Just as well.
