http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/ ... 75,00.html
June 13, 2004
Pop: The Radiators
The band who brought Joyce into Irish rock, return to Dublin for a Bloomsday special, writes Mick Heaney
It was to be a landmark, a virtuoso performance by a band at the height of their powers. They had started life in 1976 as a punk rock band from Dublin, but by October 1978 the Radiators had transformed themselves beyond recognition. They had just finished recording their second album, Ghostown, which they were certain was to be their defining moment.
They had not played for nearly six months while they worked on the album, which was influenced by music hall and German cabaret as well as power pop and glam rock, and which bristled with allusions to Ireland's literary heritage. As they rolled out the new material at London's Electric Ballroom, the group felt this would be a pivotal moment in their career. It was.
"A disaster," says Philip Chevron, the group's singer, guitarist and main songwriter. "We'd built up quite a following with the punkier stuff from our first album, but much to our horror nobody wanted to hear the Ghostown stuff. The audience were shouting, 'This is crap, this isn't punk rock'.
"It was such a terrifyingly negative response that we just thought we couldn't do this again until the record was out and people would know what to expect. It forced us into a retreat, because there wasn't any point in fighting that particular battle. So it took us out of the picture."
The Radiators never got a look in again. The show effectively marked the end of the band. When Ghostown, one of Irish rock's most ambitious and fully realised albums, was released a year later, the band were already in terminal decline, wracked by the frustration and disillusionment that would lead to their split. Far from changing the face of Irish rock, Ghostown was relegated to the status of minor cult classic.
So it is perhaps fitting that, when Chevron and his fellow original Radiators, guitarist Pete Holidai and singer Steve Averill (aka Steve Rapid), decided to reform, they should have chosen Bloomsday for their first headline gig: both events may be slightly ersatz, but both celebrate authentic, original visions of Dublin.
The date is appropriate in other ways too. Chevron in particular always held Joycean ambitions for Ghostown, which did not include it being largely neglected in the band's native city: the album aspired to be a portrait of a Dublin haunted by its past and blighted by its present."Ghostown is not based on Ulysses," Chevron says, "but it definitely proceeds from it." The nascent ideas that would gel on Ghostown predated the Radiators: as a disaffected teen growing up in the north Dublin suburb of Santry, and coming to terms with his homosexuality, Chevron was drawn not only to the music of David Bowie, but also to the writing of Joyce and Sean O'Casey.
"It's the old cliche, but I felt like a stranger in my hometown," recalls Chevron. "The Dublin I spent hours walking around, trying to discover, was one that was always lurking in a shadow somewhere, hiding just around the corner. So I was mostly taken by writers who seemed to tap into what I felt. Some of the germs of those ideas were written about 1974 or 1975."
But Chevron was struggling to articulate his ideas with his band. The catalyst came when he answered an appeal in the Evening Herald from a pair of T-Rex and MC5 fans looking for like-minded musicians.
Averill and Holidai were already in their own glam rock band. When Chevron hooked up with them in early 1976, he brought with him bassist Mark Megaray and drummer Jimmy Crashe. "In a very short time we had this full band," says Averill. "Then progress happened quite quickly."
At that stage, any notions of a concept album about Dublin were put away, as the band were in the thrall of the burgeoning punk movement. Calling themselves the Radiators (From Space), within a few months the group had recorded a demo of garage rock songs and signed to London label Chiswick, all before they made their first live appearance. After some shaky early gigs, the band's first single, the anthemic Television Screen, was released in April 1977, putting them on the map as Ireland's first punk band and encouraging them to organise a punk festival in UCD, an event that ended in a fatal stabbing.
"It all went horribly wrong in a way that had nothing to do with punk rock at all," says Chevron. Holidai was questioned about his role in the initial stages of an altercation that quickly attracted others and eventually resulted in the stabbing. With Irish promoters nervous of them, the band moved to London and recorded their raucous but uneven debut album, TV Tube Heart.
"It was rushed out," says Holidai. "Because of the Belfield thing we wouldn't get any bookings, so we brought forward the recording. So we went in a little earlier than we would have liked."
The sessions were also marked by the departure of Averill, who left to pursue his graphic design career. As Chevron moved to vocals, the group started working on songs for their next album, consciously attempting to abandon the increasingly constrictive punk aesthetic. "We knew we had to move on quickly or we could end up being the UK Subs," says Holidai.
The group signalled their intent to move on by shortening their name and hiring producer Tony Visconti, who had worked with their heroes Bowie and Bolan. As the songs evolved in demo form, Chevron returned to his earlier ideas, and started to see the album in broader terms than their previous jibes at Irish television and tabloids.
"I thought there was plenty to be knocked in Ireland, it was a corrupt and rotten society," says Chevron. "But I understood you only earned the right to be critical when you have displayed an affection for it underlying that. The one thing we learnt from punk was that if you just go around swearing and shouting down with the government, you don't get very far. So we figured out the best way was to use literary allusions.
"Joyce and O'Casey brought to life the Dublin that I believed was lurking under the grilles. I could connect directly with the literature. I felt it was a living culture; I just had to find some way to tap into it and make it resonate for me in the 1970s."
While Chevron drew on his literary obsessions and his penchant for music hall on songs such as Kitty Ricketts and Song of the Faithful Departed, Holidai's power pop nous could be heard on songs such as Million Dollar Hero and They're Looting in the Town. Chiswick's financial problems, however, meant the album could not be released until the recording was paid for. The hostile live reception to the new material meant the band stopped performing in the long hiatus that followed. Frustrations boiled over. Megaray already had a tense relationship with Chevron and he departed. "We went into a period of despondency and started to drift apart," says Chevron.
When the album was eventually released, it picked up rave reviews here and, indeed, Holidai claims it sold better than legend at the time had it. But it was too little, too late.
"If it had been released on time it would have been the right album in the right place, in there with Elvis Costello and Blondie," says Holidai. "But by the time it was released it lost any potential impact."
The band made one last throw of the dice, hiring Buggles member Hans Zimmer to produce the ill-judged singles Stranger Than Fiction and The Dancing Years. Their swansong was an Irish tour at the end of 1980, on which they played to appreciative audiences for the first time. Even so, the band finally called it a day in early 1981.
"The real problem was that creatively we hadn't really progressed from Ghostown because we couldn't do it," says Chevron. "We couldn't move on in any way that felt other than contrived. What I didn't realise till years later was that nobody could follow Ghostown, not even the Radiators."
Since then, apart from a one-off reunion in 1987, the members have stuck to their separate paths, Averill doing graphic design for U2 and others, Holidai producing and teaching, Chevron playing with the Pogues. All that remained of the Radiators was Ghostown's waxing reputation.
"It got a weird retrospective respect in Britain," says Chevron. "Every time we reissued it the reviews were more glowing, as if they had always thought it was fantastic."
One may wonder whether reconvening the band, now rechristened the Radiators (Plan 9) and featuring ex-Pogue Cait O'Riordan on bass, will thrust Ghostown into the popular imagination.
"It seems like the right thing at the right time," says Chevron. "I think there's a legitimacy to it, because there is some sort of alternative narrative that the Radiators have tried to tell about Ireland that periodically perhaps needs to be added to. I'm really glad we made that record. Ghostown gave me a touchstone for the rest of my work, and at a certain point you come to a realisation within yourself of its value."
The Radiators play the Village on Wednesday and Oxegen on July 10
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/ ... 78,00.html
June 13, 2004
Comment: Michael Ross
There was a strange atmosphere around the gig. It was a cold night in November 1980; the venue was a fleapit on the north side, the Crofton Airport hotel. A significant portion of the crowd appeared to be there not for the main act, but rather their support, the Blades. When the Radiators took to the stage, they were greeted with enthusiasm and puzzlement.
For those who had bought their second album, Ghostown, when it was released the previous year, the gig was an unexpected thrill. Following Ghostown's protracted and difficult birth, the band were rumoured to be on the verge of splitting, bowing to the tide of indifference with which it had been greeted.
Nevertheless, they gave it socks that night in the Crofton, perhaps knowing it might be their last Dublin gig before they split, as indeed it proved. Yet when it finally came to what should have been the climax, the last, bitter verse of Song of the Faithful Departed, the gap between how they were appreciated and how they should have been was more than apparent.
Philip Chevron, the group's frontman, paused before delivering the final line, and in that moment a ripple of applause went around the ballroom. It suggested that many in the crowd did not seem to get what the band were on about, and were unfamiliar with what was the greatest Irish rock album up to that point (equalled only by Microdisney's The Clock Comes Down the Stairs and U2's Achtung Baby).
To those who were around to experience it at the time, the nostalgic glow that has latterly accumulated around that period of Irish rock is something of a surprise. Yes, there were some great bands, but the needless attrition was savage, the waste of talent was shocking, and memories of the general indifference — which at times seemed wilful — remain a counterpoint to the revisionism that has subsequently cast the period as a golden age.
Those who paid 50p to see U2 in the Dandelion market in 1979, for example — gigs that subsequently approached the status of the sermon on the mount — will recall that all but the farewell performance that Christmas were half-full at most. When they weren't being physically attacked at gigs because of their middle-class background, U2 were mostly sneered at in Dublin, until they got out of the place and returned as heroes.
There's a moment in the footage of the original Bloomsday celebrations that captures succinctly the way we treat artists — at least before they are canonised — a way that appears to have changed little in decades.
On that day in 1954, Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, Brian O'Nolan and others progressed from Sandycove to town in advancing stages of inebriation. O'Nolan, spraying spittle, praised Joyce's "mighty intellect" to the camera, albeit bitterly, as he felt overlooked by his contemporaries and neglected in the lengthening shadow of Joyce.
For all the worthwhile events that Bloomsday prompts, that remains the authentic nature of the day: an acknowledgement of the genius past and a celebration of Dublin after a fashion, but with a realisation of the city's ineluctable and enduring meanness of spirit.