THE FRANKS AND DAMO: A TALE OF TWO CITIES

What’s rare is good. During the final weeks of last year, I managed a unique live coup: two Frank and Walters shows book-ended by a night in Damien Dempsey’s company in Dublin. With a side-stage view of the long-running live busk in the capital’s city centre on Christmas Eve thrown onto the pan for good measure, the good times were back. It’s been years since I’ve worked the live beat like this.

Age does awful things to a man’s capacity for many things, but new adventures after dark are considerably squeezed by the passing of the summers. There was a time when some of us would take in shows at four or five different Dublin venues on the same night, hoofing it around the city like champion racewalkers seeking personal bests. As the 80s were careering to a full stop, we were captivated routinely in that necklace of fine establishments housing the emerging new music around the city: life was good, we were young.

Weasel-thin and responsible – barely – for ourselves only, we were fuelled by the whiff of possibility and a sense that, somewhere in the city, something was about to go off. It did, and often.

Dublin rocked a far different complexion back then: for starters, people actually lived in and on the main drags and life tended to spurt out from there. Live venues were often improvised in the back rooms or in the attics and basements of old boozers and, as the newspaper archive of the period will attest, live music was available in multiple city locations on a nightly basis. One not only fed the other but was vital to its well-being.

But what’s going on right now in rehearsal rooms and bedrooms all over the city – and throughout the rest of the island – sounds just as bold, fresh and vital than ever. My regret is that I’m only ever catching slivers of what’s clearly a vibrant period for emerging music from a standing start.

It’s more exception than rule now when I make it out to thirty shows in a year: like an old hurler gone to fat, the ground I can adequately cover has long been compromised by age. The wrists might be willing but the white heat of championship is no place for those of us packing timber.

I wonder instead about what exactly we gave to the incoming breed by way of raw material. Did we hand on something that was better and fitter than it was when we first inherited it ourselves? How kindly will history judge us and how relevant now are the footprints we left behind us? Does anyone believe that we waged long-running battles for the territory? For rights to the line that connects, say, Cliffords and Cardinals, to their elders?

The first piece we published on The Blackpool Sentinel was about The Frank and Walters and I fully expect that the last piece we’ll ever carry will be about them too. New material on this blog is far less frequent now than it once was: the vagaries of the real world and the demands of life on the outside can sidetrack the best laid plans. It’s an equation familiar to The Franks too, I suspect: their last elpee, ‘Songs for the Walking Wounded’, was released a decade ago.

I’ve seen them play live more than any other group and I never tire of them: they just bring me incredible joy. They’ve sound-tracked all of my adult life and I can depend on them like I can do on few others. There’s a reliability to what they do that cannot be under-estimated and, from what I heard before Christmas, The Franks are positively re-invigorated. And when they’re that lively they just raise the spirit in all of us.

It’s mad to think that they’re still a going concern, never mind that they’re such a compelling draw. They seem to be permanently busy too, whether it’s the full-on band show or the Ozempic-powered version doing the rounds unplugged at home and away. They’ve been recording in studio, a radio documentary is in the pipeline and a series of anniversary shows are planned for later this year. They’re a gift and they keep on giving.

To those of us in exile in Dublin, the band’s end-of-year shows at Whelan’s have long been essential dates on our calendars: Christmas only really begins once The Franks have blitzed Camden Street. On a basic human level, those shows allow those of us of an age and a similar persuasion to gather, take stock and reflect and, the older all of us get, the more important that kind of carry-on becomes.

The Franks give us cause to connect and marvel at how, like the band itself, we’ve managed to stay the course. On that basis alone, they’re a public health tonic.

But the band are a different proposition entirely when they go home. Their audiences in Cork are always bigger, more boisterous and much more demanding – swelled by family, long-time friends and alickadoos – and that was certainly the case in The City Hall on the Saturday night just before last Christmas.

Back in the city’s most distinguished venue for the first time in over thirty years, that mythical fourth wall had been blown out spectacularly and, from the moment the band appears from the shadows, the stage is at one with the floor. An electricity courses through the hall from the ground up.

Playing to partisan audiences is often fraught: those in the crowd and on the stage often expect far too much and the music can often be sacrificed to the occasion. I’ve seen enough of U2 in Dublin and The Pogues in Brixton over the years to attest to this. But The Franks navigate this one simply: they play a long, considered, confident and well-measured set plucked from right across their catalogue. Helping them to keep it on the straight is the fact that all they’re selling is themselves.

The old reliables aside, they pull from both ‘Songs for the Walking Wounded’ [‘We Are the Young Men’, ‘Stages’, ‘The Goddess of Athena’ and ‘Somewhere in the City’] and a powerful trio from the album that pre-dated it, ‘Greenwich Mean Time’ [2012], a record of which they seem especially fond.

Franks die-hards make a consistent case for ‘The Clock’ – and why not because its imperious? – and it closes out tonight’s set in style. They got ‘After All’ away early too and, by so doing, are saying to the city that begot them that they’ll never be simply defined by just three magical minutes. When you’re that good, why wait?

With a smart, high-end video show back-dropping them, and with one of their old flames, Kian Walsh, inadvertently bolstering the line- up as a second guitarist, the bulked-up Franks put in a serious shift. Five go down to the river as uplifting, powerful and renewed as I’ve seen them.

It’s often lost on Cork people that Dublin city regularly celebrates its own too, and with the same degree of brio. Damien Dempsey, one of the more interesting writers to emerge from the capital during the last twenty-five years, enjoys a similar kind of fanatical home- town devotion that the likes of Aslan and The Brilliant Trees once did when they carried the flame for the northside suburbs back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

I’ve written previously about how both bands would regularly mobilise large crews into the city for what would often be as much defiant political rallying as they were glorious nights out. When simply being there was often enough.

As a live proposition, The Brilliant Trees – and I was lucky enough to see many of their shows – were often far more than the sum of their parts. They were a magnetic, guitar-driven outfit and masters of the statement by stealth. Beneath the bonnet they’d weave the plight of the forgotten – the homeless, disconnected and vulnerable – into their shimmery melodies, to regal effect.

And I think of them whenever I hear Damien because they’re there, it seems to me, in much of his weirdly compelling agit-folksy schtick. Himself a self-proclaimed voice for the voiceless, Dempsey live in Dublin – like The Franks in Cork – attracts a fiercely engaged crowd. His audiences look stagewards and, you’d think, regularly see themselves reflected. In this regard, he’s come a long way as a standard-bearer for on-the-nose social justice in the spirit of Luke Kelly.

Damien’s annual live shows at Vicar Street – stripped over multiple nights every December – have become as traditional now as battering the cooked ham after a feed of porter on Christmas Eve. And for the hometown crowds that flock to see him, he’s every bit as urgent and vital as what goes on whenever The Franks fetch up over on Camden Street. This too is fundamentalist devotion that brooks no questions: the Church of Damo.

In a world of artificial slop, he stands as an earnest, soul-soaked romantic, forever ready to go to battle, whether that’s with the niggles inside his own head or on behalf of the less fortunate in the world around him. He has a steely intent about him still and sounds as authentic – and naïve – now as he did when he first breezed out of a music course in Ballyfermot thirty years ago.

The former Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael, Garret Fitzgerald, was an academic and deep thinker often characterised by an obsession with equations and data. ‘That’s fine in practice, but will it work in theory’, he may or may not have once said. It’s a working maxim that we can also apply to Damien’s fine canon: it should never work in theory and yet those Christmas shows in Dublin are an unbridled joyride.

Similarities with The Franks abound. For starters, Damien’s work is littered with references to those he grew up with, the vagaries of whose lives he observed at close quarters and whose stories he’s now able to impart, often as parables. For every Andy James there’s a cohort seeking, for many reasons, to sing all their cares away because, simply, they have little else to cling to. For every love-struck John and Sue there’s a tortured Chris and Stevie, for every Tony Cochrane a Factory John and so on.

And there’s the setting for so many of his songs – disused railway lines, beaches, parks, council estates – and the way many of his characters are typically on the move and mobile. There’s the quiet quality of the live bands: drummer John Reynolds has long been a fixture with Damien, as has Claire Kenny, the bassist whose fine career has seen her do duty with many bands and who, were we to chase her professional genealogy, connects at several points to The Franks.

Eamon de Barra – an exceptional traditional musician in his own right – has long propelled Damien’s operation far beyond the ordinary in a manner that Ashley Keating has long been Paul Linehan’s quietly steadfast wingman. And so on and so on.

Beyond all else, though, The Franks and The Church of Damo deal in comfort and joy and, especially at Christmas, this stuff actually counts. In their respective ways they stand for reliability, charity and exuberance and enable a communion of what we’d like to think is maybe the best of us? In this regard, they maybe epitomise the spirit of the season as well as anything or anyone.