TRASH: YOU AND ME

In this new piece, Colm responds to Ken Sweeney’s piece about Trashcan Sinatras. The two pieces were deliberately written as companions and are best read one after the other. Starting with Ken’s.

I’ve spent an awfully long time trying to make Trashcan Sinatras a better known band than they are, and to little effect. From the town of Irvine outside of Glasgow, the group continues to record and make magnificent music. And although they rarely tend to trouble those who compile sales charts, the band remains in rude good health. In the music, as in life, the small wins are often the big wins.

There are traces of them at every junction of my life. I’ve shamelessly proselytised on their behalf for decades – in print, on radio, television and on-line – and with no regrets. To use an old Churchillian line beloved of sportswriters: they’re an enigma wrapped inside a mystery. And I suspect they will always be so. The Scottish Government has never lauded me for my efforts, but I go on.

I know the writer – and the one-time songwriter, Ken Sweeney – for over three decades now. Our paths crossed first because of his music – he recorded under the band-name, Brian – and he later rescued me
from a squat in Peckham in the early 1990s. There’s more about Ken, his music and our relationship in a previous piece on the blog and that can be read here.

I’d walked away from a career as a secondary school teacher and would-be Roddy Doyle with notions. Much to the horror of my late mother, I eschewed a number of classroom jobs in Cork and instead
embarked on a path that led me eventually to where I am and what I do now. I’ve spent the bulk of my adult life working in the television industry.

I was diverted into production after a spell spent working in London with a fledgling Irish independent label, Setanta Records. I was there to work for and with a band from Cork, The Frank and Walters,
with whom I’ve had a long association. There are numerous pieces on the blog that cover this relationship.

Through Setanta Records and The Frank and Walters, I met Ken. He was a decent, sincere man, shy and modest who, with a day job on the go in the BBC Film Archives, was still trying to find his way. I don’t
think either of us were entirely comfortable living in London but we both maybe felt it something we needed to do, something to work through our systems.

And we had a shared love of music to keep us going. We liked the same groups and performers and knew some of the same people. Ken gave me shelter when he didn’t need to and he put himself out for me
at a time when I was drowning.

Among the groups we pored over was The Trash Can Sinatras, also known as The Trashcan Sinatras and now known, apparently, as Trashcan Sinatras. I’d first come across them through a couple of early reviews in the British music press in which they were compared favourably to some of my other favourite bands at the time, Aztec Camera, early-iteration Del Amitri and so forth.

My relationship with Ken mirrored another of my friendships. Years previously, Philip and I met in secondary school and obsessed over music to a ferocious extent. Music bonded us but that bond
also masked a multitude: we’d rather discuss a demo than a demon.

We were smitten by The Blue Nile. Joy Division and REM. And The Go-Betweens. And we’d blather on inanely about the power of music and the quality of the songwriting and the imminent release of a new
elpee and the tour and the live show and he was permanently in great form, hale.

Philip died at a very young age in 2006. He’d had serious issues with booze. He adored Trashcan Sinatras and I never think of them without thinking of the other: he found himself backstage with the band one time in Cork and I’d say he bamboozled them with his knowledge of their back catalogue.

But when I was under his coffin as he was carried out of The North Cathedral, it wasn’t The Blue Nile or REM or The Go-Betweens or Trashcan Sinatras I was thinking about. I was thinking instead about the conversations that we never had. I don’t remember much about that day but I can remember this much.

I started working on an RTÉ youth programme called Scratch Saturday in August 1990 and, through contacts in various record companies, I was able to source a couple of videos for the Trashcans’ first singles, ‘Obscurity Knocks’, ‘Only Tongue Can Tell’ and ‘Circling the Circumference’. Our courtship had started and we’d gone public.

Scratch Saturday was a Saturday morning television strand for young people that, under the baton of Philip Kampff, recently recruited from RTÉ Radio, was destined to make a reputation for itself. I
hosted a short slot every week from the studios in Father Mathew Street in Cork that dealt with new and emerging music and, in among the usual teen-skewed tropes, I was able to sneak in new music by
Pixies, Fishmonkeyman, The Floors, Toasted Heretic and whatever it was that ticked my fancy. It was all a bit lawless.

We once played REM’s video for ‘Losing My Religion’ while it was apparently banned by RTÉ. The Star newspaper knocked a couple of news stories out of that. It was great.

Not a huge amount of Scratch Saturday survives in the archives and what has survived hasn’t dated well. But without Scratch Saturday, No Disco wouldn’t have been possible. That long-running music series
was located in the same premises and based on the same principles and aired for the first time on what was then Network 2 in the autumn of 1993. One borrowed its form from the other.

And it goes on. I’ve now spent the bulk of my life working in television: from scuttery beginnings I’ve covered a lot of ground. In the meantime, Ken too returned home and embarked on a career in
journalism.

And we still have a shared love of music to keep us going. We still like the same groups and performers and now know far more of the same people. In the years since I learned to swim and to stay afloat but, out of the blue, Ken will re-appear and coax me into safe harbour.

I’ve heard all of Ken’s radio documentaries and I take my hat off to him. Knowing what I know and what I deal with through my work on a daily basis, he’s done really well to get this sort of stuff so prominently to air on such mainstream platforms. Michael Jackson’s Irish driver. REM. The Blue Nile. The Go-Betweens. And now Trashcan Sinatras. In a world long gone upside down and back to front, his work in this space is a testament to his own resilience and spirit as it is to the quality of the stories he tells. For a modest man,
he gives it out big. Getting this work to broadcast is no mean achievement.

He’s also met the Trashcans. The closest I ever got was when I conducted an early morning telephone interview with them from the media room at the offices of the Irish Farmer’s Association out in Bluebell one time. That exchange was facilitated by another deeply beloved friend of ours, Richie Flynn, another Trashcans fan lost overboard far too soon.

Those who work with me are aware of my passion for the material contained in the RTÉ television archives. As a history student with a special interest in popular culture in modern Ireland, it’s here that I can fuse my private and professional interests. I’m really obsessive when it comes to record keeping and the importance of detail and precision. I can barely remember my wife’s birthday or the date of our wedding anniversary but I’m good at recalling catalogue numbers and release dates.

Its somewhere on this spectrum that myself and Ken co-exist. We spend years out of touch but in the knowledge that we have a common ground onto which we can both collapse whenever the mood takes us. And that common ground is sound tracked still by those bands we were first so drawn to and that pulled us together in Ealing: The Blue Nile, The Go-Betweens, Into Paradise, REM and Trashcan Sinatras.

Radio is a powerful forum. Its where my friends and myself first started to engage properly with new and emerging music and where I still go to instinctively. I begin and end my days with the radio on
and I begin and end my days with music on the radio.

There was a time when, as the in-house plugger at Setanta Records, I was charged with getting Ken Sweeney’s music into more people’s ears. Radio was a key battleground for us back then.

But when I now hear Ken on the radio, it’s not his music they’re playing but his documentary work.

I’m not sure how – or even if – popular culture history regards Trashcan Sinatras. In an ideal world, the band is pulled into the popular consciousness at some point like Nick Drake and, decades later, it’s full catalogue of magic is put on public view.

And it may well happen yet because, you know, life. And at that stage Ken Sweeney will say: don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And if it doesn’t happen, you’ll still have his radio work and you can judge for yourselves.