MORTYFIED

In their pomp – and they did have a regal period physically draped in ermine – The Sultans of Ping released three albums using three different versions of their handle. That aside, they’ve never had issues with the question of identity: they’ve long known what they are and, maybe more importantly, what they are not.

‘The Sultans of Ping celebrate 30 years of Casual Sex in the Cineplex’ ran the misleading tagline on the posters for the band’s recent lay-over in Cork and Dublin. Seeing that the debut album in question album was first issued in 1993, is it that the party has just dragged on after hours? Or that, decades on, the detail is irrelevant, and The Sultans are, in fact, just commemorating a good life led well? And that the band is actually marking 30 years of casual sex in the Cineplex. [Who knew?] Whatever way you spin it, it’s great to see one of Cork’s most impactful ever groups in such rude good health.

I first met Morty McCarthy, the Sultans’ drummer and Cork’s erstwhile Lord Mayor of alternative music, over 35 years ago. And although we’re divided now by lines of longitude, I’m comforted to know he’s still out there, rattling the biscuit tins and fighting the twin recurring causes: new music and his home county. He drops me the odd e-mail to check in, like a shepherd tending his flock remotely using modern technology and, in those random flurries of over-and-back, brings an assurance and balm that’s become all too rare.

Our paths crossed through friends of friends and was initially facilitated through the Mannix and Culhane clothes shop on Patrick Street in Cork. Which, when it wasn’t dressing Cork’s merchant princes and aspiring toffs, doubled up as the city’s most unlikely trading post for quality music. By the late 1980s, Morty was using his love of sport and music as drivers to connect those of a particular bent and hue. Teetotal then as now, in his Harrington jacket, check shirts and trainers, he was a full-time proselytizer. Who, through a regular supply of crafted compilation cassettes and fanzines – and ultimately a series of live shows with a number of emerging local groups – coaxed many of us into a shared space. In the spirit of Eamon De Valera, when Morty looked into his heart he saw Cork’s indie kids and determined what they wanted.   

He’ll not thank me for saying so, but he is, by any measure, a considerable figure in the history of contemporary culture in Cork. And when one talks about ‘the very best of Cork’s rich cultural tapestry’, his contribution to that design in a variety of guises cannot be under-estimated: he hand-knitted a huge portion of it. There is a strong case for him to be anointed as Cork Person of Forever.

I’m not sure if Morty ever actually formally joined The Sultans: in the great traditions of filthy rock music, he just seemed to fall in with what they were at. But it’s not as if he lacked for pedigree: I remember him slapping away with one group whose key selling point was that they played fifteen songs during a thirty minute slot in The Buckingham, every one of them a punk rock anthem.

But he was spiritually connected to The Sultans from the get-go and loudly hailed them from early. In that regard, he was an effective public relations foil long before they began to trouble what we then referred to as a ‘music industry’.   

I thought for ages that The Sultans were just chancers, a mildly diverting counterpoint to the more considered cutting of several other emerging local bands, The Frank and Walters most notably. And a distraction to the real work that was going on there. As an aside, it was Morty himself who first introduced me to The Franks, on whose summit I’d planted my flag.

And for my troubles, I’d get the odd belt from the crozier of Niall O’Flaherty, The Sultans’ singer, whenever he’d take to his various pulpits, either on-stage, at court in The Liberty Bar or in the pages of Morty’s fanzines. And this carry-on was par for the course during a magical time when, in the spirit of the period, it was possible – and expected – to take sides and mount an argument. It was only after we’d gotten over the wonder of ourselves that we were able to fully enjoy what was a thriving local enterprise. It took me longer than it should have done before I could listen to The Sultans without prejudice but it was terrific fun getting to that point.   

One doesn’t need a degree in forensics to understand the dynamic at the heart of The Sultans now. Morty is the guest who stayed forever and seems to have long assumed the ownership of the group. Not only does he drive them on from behind the traps but, you imagine, the band only ever marches to his drum. For sure, Niall still brings what my daughters refer to as ‘the rizz’, Pat is there forever at his elbow and Ian and Sam add the strength, conditioning and ballast. But it’s Morty who’s long been first everything and captain. And it’s a set-up that clearly works for them: rarely have I seen or heard The Sultans look or sound better.   

The live shows these days are redolent of those apprenticeship years that Morty spent in The Buckingham, only they’re specially adapted now for those of us minding our prostates. Twenty songs in eighty minutes, every one in the spirit of dirty-school rock and roll but with the odd comfort break along the road. And so, they rip through the very best of the best: ‘Mescaline’, ‘Kick Me with Your Leather Boots’, ‘Let’s Go Shopping’, ‘Turnip Fish’, ‘Riot at the Sheep Dog Trials’, ‘Wake Up and Scratch Me’, ‘I Said I Am I Said’ and ‘Teenage Drug’ are all present and correct, as is one of the band’s regular covers, ‘I’m Five Years Ahead of My Time’ by The Third Bardo. Their best song, ‘Michiko’, is prominent in the middle order and they have the good grace not to close out the night with ‘Where’s Me Jumper?’, the single from which it all caught fire.

Although The Sultans have long jettisoned the football club addendum from their name, the spectre of the beautiful and often not so beautiful game still hangs heavy around them. Apart entirely from ‘Give Him a Ball [And a Yard of Grass]’ – which sounds as urgent tonight as its done at any point in the last thirty years – there’s a variety of vintage Cork City tops on show around the venue. Indeed, Morty himself is turned out in a more recent, figure-hugging model, as per forever.

The band’s interface with association football ultimately became a noose on which to suspend them. But for a number of years, as can be seen in Siobhán Bardsley’s fine work curating the history of fanzine culture in Cork, you’ll find frequent listed crossovers from the noisy indoors to the noisy outdoors and back again. And no more so than in Morty’s own work in this area where, alongside his creative foil, Jim Morrish, he ran both Sunny Days – an out and out fanzine for the indie set – and No More Plastic Pitches, which chronicled the unrelenting despair of the Cork city supporter base. And which of course shares a title with one of the more celebrated Sultans cuts.

Indeed, at one point in the histories of The Sultans and The Frank and Walters, it felt as if it was as important to them to have their singles played over the P.A. system at Turner’s Cross – the home of association football in Cork – as it was to snaffle national radio airplay. What are one’s successes, without the imprimatur of one’s local football club and it’s perennially bewildered supporters? 

The Sultans’ debut album, ‘Casual Sex in the Cineplex’ was released on the Rhythm King label in February 1993. Months later, Cork City F.C. won the League of Ireland Division One title for the first time. This after a peculiar three-team play-off at season’s end during which all the remaining contenders tried their best to actually not win it. Under the management of the late Noel O’Mahony, a fine side based around the defensive axis of Declan Daly and Paul Bannon, peerless midfielder Dave Barry and the goal-scoring prowess of Pat Morley and John Caulfield, finally delivered what they’d threatened to do over previous seasons.

The Sultans and Cork City seemed to be in perfect synch with one another: their respective destinies, one could argue, were inter-twined. All-conquering local heroes who later went on to sparkle briefly on faraway fields, both the band and the football team were feted by a hardcore of doting supporters, those numbers swelled by the more exotic associations they enjoyed in the company of bigger and more glamourous names, however fleetingly. 

Morty’s devotion to Cork City – and the connection between the band and the team – formed the basis of an excellent ten-minute report about the 1993 title race broadcast on the BBC 2 television series, Standing Room Only. A quietly intelligent football magazine show, it fused the best aspects of the long-running Football Focus strand with the edgier end of the fanzine wedge.

As the League of Ireland’s1992/1993 season wound its way to a protracted conclusion, the producers fetched up in Cork and joined a bus of travelling supporters on their way to an away game against Bohemian FC at Dalymount Park in Dublin. With ‘Where’s Me Jumper’ having recently popped the British Top Forty and the band on an endless tour of Britain and Europe, Standing Room Only had a lovely left-field hook on which to mount their story. To capture it on film, the series enlisted the services of a Cork-based production company, Forefront, to shoot the insert for them.

Behind the camera and directing events was Joe McCarthy, a significant figure in Irish journalism and broadcasting and a fine footballer himself in his youth. A decorated photographer and cinematographer going right back to the earliest days of independent film in Ireland, he was assisted on the Cork City shoot by his son, Tony. No mean operator himself either on or off the field, Tony subsequently shot much of the No Disco canon after that series went to air later that same year. He had also produced and shot a short documentary about a bizarre pre-season trip to China undertaken by Cork City in the summer of 1991, that was broadcast on RTÉ’s Sports Stadium.  

The Standing Room Only clip is notable for several reasons.  Morty’s candor and modesty, Niall’s rig-out, the bleak street scenes around Cork and Dublin and the unremittingly grim spectacle that was the football fare at Dalymount Park during this period. A point not lost on the director, who closes with a desolate shot on the lichen-smeared away ‘terrace’ after a lumpy scoreless draw.

Thirty years on and Morty and myself are still sharing the same riffs. Our e-mails often veer from observations about the quest for Junior hurling honours in Cork, the penance that is life supporting inter-county Gaelic games to our shared obsession with Sindikat, that great lost Cork band from far too long ago. When he told me last year that he was staffing the merchandising stalls at the Garth Brooks live shows in Croke Park, it just felt like a natural extension of the long series of random conversations we’ve shared over the decades. Always different, always the same.

In that sense, he embodies the very best of The Sultans who, after so long at the crease, are still a welcome break from the grief and torpor of the daily news cycle. They had the decency to get out before they got bored and before they got boring, and that’s stood them well as they now negotiate the autumn of their career. Pop history recalls them – unfairly, I think – for ‘Where’s Me Jumper’ when, with a bit of deeper digging, its clear they got better and more ambitious over the course of three elpees. By which time, as happens, the moment had over-taken them.

But ‘Where’s Me Jumper?’ is one of the great modern pop songs and, if that’s what frames their legacy, then how bad?