GET THAT MONSTER OFF THE STAGE: THE MOVIE

In this guest post, writer, broadcaster and lecturer Paul McDermott explains the background to his documentary, Get That Monster Off the Stage, which has now been given a full visual treatment.

Ciarán Ó Tuama has turned Get That Monster Off the Stage, my old radio documentary about Finbarr Donnelly and his bands Nun Attax, Five Go Down to the Sea? and Beethoven, into a film.

Before Ciarán tread the boards as frontman with Cork’s Cypress, Mine! he spent his teenage years hanging out at the Downtown Kampus at Cork’s Arcadia Ballroom – the Arc – taking photographs of all the bands.

Ciarán has utilised photographs from his extensive archive to create a beautiful visual accompaniment to my documentary. Some of the visual techniques are reminiscent of the way Moholy-Nagy, the great Hungarian photographer, played with light. A load of these photographs have never been seen before. I recognise some of the posed band shots, but the candid images from the same contact sheets offer the subjects a real-life authenticity.      

To best explain how Ciarán came to make this film, I’ll go back to the start…

In December 1999 Cork’s Triskel Arts Centre hosted “Cork Arc 1979–1999”. At the time I was working on a radio documentary about Finbarr Donnelly for Cork Campus Radio. The Triskel’s Gary Sheehan and Conor O’Toole wanted to play a rough edit of the documentary in one of the galleries as part of their weekend festival. Ciarán gave me a selection of his photographs and my old friend Johnny Richardson sequenced them into a rough film.  

Over the course of the weekend an hour long edit of Get That Monster Off the Stage played on a loop in one of the galleries accompanied by Ciarán’s photographs. It was a great weekend. Sean O’Hagan, Iarla Ó Lionáird and John Spillane all performed. I have a vague recollection of Stump’s Kev Hopper playing a saw with a violin bow. Kev’s former bandmate, Mick Lynch, in his Don For Chickens guise, banged on his stringless guitar and we all joined in on the chorus of ‘Cardigan’, his ode to shopping in charity shops.

“Old gold, borrowed and blue

sold cold, shattered and breakable”

People wandered from the theatre into the gallery space where the documentary played. Old Downtown Kampus regulars stopped in their tracks when they heard the voices of Cathal Coughlan, Sean O’Hagan, Giordaí Ua Laoghaire, Conal Creedon and others talking about the Arc. This was ten years on from Donnelly’s passing, there were smiles and a few tears as people remembered their old friend.

Get That Monster Off the Stage was produced with the help of Conor O’Toole and Campus Radio’s Kieran Hurley and was originally broadcast on the station (now UCC 98.3FM) in July 2001. It won “Radio Production of the Year” at an award ceremony; Myles Dungan, chairman of the judging panel, called it “unobtrusively informative.”

Its unobtrusiveness wasn’t deliberate; I didn’t want to use narration because I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to control my stammer. I can remember arguing with Kieran because I refused to introduce all the contributors: “Nobody knows who these people are anyway so why introduce any of them?”

Conor, Kieran and I would all go on to produce much better radio documentaries but there’s something about Get That Monster Off the Stage: it’s rough, it’s rudimentary, there’s a naivety about it, an innocence. We were making it up as we went along.

“Get That Monster Off the Stage was the big one, Paul McDermott and myself,” Kieran told Dave Hackett on his Keeping Track podcast last year. “I can remember making that with three Mini-Disc machines, two playing and one recording. I don’t know how we got away with it. A brilliant documentary and it still stands the test of time.”

For years Get That Monster Off the Stage played on Cork Campus Radio. Kieran played it on a loop every weekend. To us this was pure punk-rock. To us this is what community radio was all about. To us this was public service broadcasting. Eventually all the original interviews were archived with The Cork Folklore Project – to me that was more important than any award.

Last year my good friend Jim Morrish located the original 1999 film. When Ciarán saw the footage he decided to start from scratch and use loads of photographs that had never been seen before.

I hope it introduces some people to Donnelly’s story and the amazing music made by Nun Attax, Five Go Down to the Sea? and Beethoven.

Cathal Coughlan and Mick Lynch, two of the original contributors to the documentary are sadly no longer with us. But three of the others – Sean O’Hagan, Liam Heffernan and Ricky Dineen – are still at it. Sean releases ‘Hey Panda’, the 11th High Llamas album in a few weeks’ time. Liam and Ricky are Big Boy Foolish and they’ve just released their debut album, ‘Stall the Ball’. Both are available on Bandcamp.