Jim McCarthy’s photograph on the front of ‘Exit Trashtown’ could have been taken in Cork at any point during the 1980s. In that snap, a lorry’s fog-lights pop the mist as it passes an abandoned fishing boat that’s run aground on the banks of The River Lee. Take your pick of the metaphors: you’re spoilt for choice.
Two months after Cypress, Mine ! released that record in May, 1988, Michael Jackson, then the undisputed heavyweight champion of popular music, performed two sold-out shows at Páirc Uí Chaoimh that briefly sprinkled Cork with glamour and razzle. He later departed Ireland on a private jet, accompanied by his companion, 10 year-old Jimmy Safechuck, and the place quickly returned to normal. From beneath the grey, it was left to the likes of Cypress, Mine ! to keep the flag flying and the tunes rolling.
The city and its people that surrounded and informed them had long been left behind. In Cork, the 1980s carried on where the previous decade left off and the back-drop to Cypress, Mine !’s tenure was pockmarked by social, moral and financial austerity. The industrial fumes that often carried up on the wind from the docks left the city centre with an unwelcome whiff: something was indeed very rotten.
Back in 1987, Charles Haughey was returned to power as head of a minority Irish government. While in Cork, one of its most talked-about politicians, Bernie Murphy, a local councillor who couldn’t read or write, travelled to San Francisco in 1986 as a civic guest and returned with a new set of false teeth. A man who, when asked on local radio for his view on a contraceptive bill that was then before parliament replied ;- “I think it should be paid”.
In Daunt Square, at the Northern end of Cork’s main drag, protesters routinely railed against nuclear power, in favour of divorce and opposed The Eighth Amendment of the Irish constitution which, in 1983, introduced a constitutional ban on abortion. And as ‘Exit Trashtown’ was still warm on the shelves of the handful of record shops around the city, a prominent voice – that of The Bishop Of Cork – denounced the screening of Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Last Temptation Of Christ’ during the Cork Film Festival as an act of blasphemy. Had it really been only three years since a statue of The Blessed Virgin was reported to have moved, twenty odd miles out the road in Ballinspittle ?
Little wonder, then, that Cypress, Mine ! could be so angry, moody and vocal. And all those years later, I’m still grateful that they stuck around to channel it all and helped to illuminate the pit.
FÓGRA :-
These notes were written for the inside sleeve of the 30th anniversary re-issue of ‘Exit Trashtown’, released today on Pretty Olivia Records. The package also includes many previously unavailable Cypress, Mine ! cuts, including most of what was originally intended as the band’s second album. And is, of course, heartily recommended.
http://prettyolivia.bigcartel.com/product/cypress-mine-exit-trashtown-2lp
The Blackpool Sentinel 
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