Concert Review: With Gaelic Force and Fire: Black 47, at BergenPAC

Despite owning several of their CDs for nearly two decades, I had never gotten around to seeing Black 47.When I heard, then, that the Irish expatriate rock 'n' rollers would be coming to my hometown of Englewood, NJ, as part of their farewell tour, the opportunity to catch them was too much to resist.

Bergen Performing Arts Center (BergenPAC) is a larger venue than Connolly’s of Times Square, where, holding court when not on tour, Black 47 built a rabid following among the Irish community. But the band did its best to turn venerable BergenPAC into the rowdiest of arenas, with songs that mixed rock, reggae, hip-hop, New Orleans modern jazz—and, of course, traditional Irish melodies. In one of the great rock 'n' roll paradoxes I can think of, this group--which takes its name from the worst year of the catastrophic Irish Potato Famine of the mid-19th century--leaves its listeners joyfully spent.

In a roof-raising performance, these talented musicians brought a number of audience members to their feet, dancing in the aisles. They drew on a wealth of material—not just a quarter century of material, but two new CDs: Last Call and Rise Up! With a shaman’s mesmeric power, frontman and songwriter Larry Kirwan delivered his unusually literate lyrics on heroes of Irish history (James Joyce, James Connolly and Michael Collins, the “Big Fellah”) with songs on contemporary topics that proudly proclaimed their progressive politics.

Speaking of the angry, abandoned Irishwoman who’s the subject of their song that gave them their first significant exposure, “Funky Ceili,” Kirwan joked, “I hope Bridie’s nowhere near Englewood.” Yet this northern New Jersey town was more than happy to host Black 47 in one of the last dates on its raucous last hurrah (timed to coincide with the group's 25th anniversary).

After mid-November, you can continue to catch the band’s past performances on the likes of Letterman, Leno and Conan O’Brien on YouTube or on their 2007 DVD release, The Story So Far.

 But if you really want to hear them now, at the top of their game, with Gaelic force and fire, you owe it to yourself to consult their tour schedule and go now, before it all comes to an end in mid-November.

Quote of the Day (Larry Kirwan, on the late Irish Public Intellectual Conor Cruise O’Brien)

“He was a scholar, diplomat, educator, politician, author, memoirist and general agent of change. He may also have been just slightly off his rocker.”—“Black 47” frontman Larry Kirwan, “Cruiser Sank More Than Spoken Words,” The Irish Echo, January 14, 2009

Conor Cruise O’Brien—inevitably nicknamed “The Cruiser”—enjoyed a long and varied career before his death last month at the age of 91. The comment by historian Paul Johnson regarding O’Brien’s biography of Edmund Burke--"a book by the greatest living Irishman on the greatest Irishman who ever lived"—is the kind of blurb that authors would kill for. Unfortunately, the first part of the quote is, I’m sorry to say, not only exaggerated but foolish.

Somewhere along the way, O’Brien segued from an admirable historians’ tendency to look past patriotic myth about Ireland’s revolutionary origins to something closer to revisionism for its own sake. By the end of his career, he had not only become a Unionist Party member but had denounced the Good Friday agreement, the pact that enabled Ulster, at long last, to move out of the shadow of the gunman.

None of us can be right all the time. Particularly when it comes to Northern Ireland, quite a few bright people were wrong over the years. But at least some early critics of Bill Clinton’s decision to advance the peace process there by admitting Gerry Adams later owned up to their mistake, notably the late columnist Michael Kelly, one of the President’s fiercest critics.

What made O’Brien unique was not just that he was wrong nor even that he was consistently wrong, but that he was loudly, unrepentantly wrong.

O’Brien was concerned about the minority rights of Ulster Protestants in a united Ireland—an irony, given that that same group trampled on the rights of Catholics in the province for a half century after the Anglo-Irish Treaty that brought into being the Irish Free State as well as the fateful partition between North and south.

O’Brien himself infringed on the rights of citizens in the Irish Republic when he became Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, pushing to curtail open debate on Irish history and the fate of the North by more aggressively applying the ban on IRA appearances on the airwaves called for in Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act.

Kirwan’s column from the current issue of The Irish Echo rightly takes The Cruiser to task for this enforcement, which not only affected what citizens of the republic could see or hear from the Nationalist side in The Troubles but also limited exposure even to old folk songs that were heavily oriented for the republican cause and against British rule early in Ireland’s history.

Once he got a whiff of the urge to censor, O’Brien even thought of extending it outside the realm of the airwaves to print. The minister told a journalist friend of Irish Press editor Tim Pat Coogan that he was contemplating prosecuting the editor for printing pro-Nationalist letters in his paper.

It should also be mentioned that in 1994, O’Brien called for “more stringent security measures” for dealing with the rebels—ignoring a quarter-century of past experience in which that very approach had been tried by the British government, only to produce excesses that led to more sympathy for the IRA than might have existed otherwise.

A sympathetic obit of O’Brien in the British newspaper The Telegraph refers to the “many ways” in which he remained “profoundly Irish,” including “sometimes excessive conviviality.” Sounds like a euphemism for overindulgence in alcohol, does it not?

Well, if you ask me, O’Brien did far more damage to intellectual debate and the Irish constitution when he was sober than when he was under the influence.