Love, booze and social justice

Love, booze and social justice

Upstairs @ Lamberti's
The Hooligans

Review by Barry Healy

The Irish folk tradition is a broad church. It includes everything from the respectable, squeaky-clean Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem through to the Guinness-soaked craic (fun) of the likes of the Dubliners, the Wolftones and the Pogues. The Hooligans come out of the hard-drinking wing of the movement and mix in a good dash of rollicking pub-rock just for the heck of it.

These Melbourne-based Irish transplants and their Australian comrades in wildness sound like an above-average, rough-as-guts bar band. What they lack as lyricists they make up in determination to let you know what is important to them — love, booze and social justice in equal measures.

One song, "Twice as Far", speaks directly of the migrant experience, the economic gains and security of Australia matched against the aching loss of homeland. "It's a long way from Belfast to peacetime", it says, "but twice as far to go back".

Other songs celebrate wild nights of playing in Irish pubs ("Back to the Boozer"), African music ("African Groove") and love found and lost ("Eyes Are Green" and "No Tomorrow").

"Crawl Below the Gunfire" warns British soldiers against going to Belfast: "Tommy don't you know the empire's dead/ There's no glory here, just Paddy's hot lead".

"Kakadu", the CD's most musically ambitious song, evokes Arnhem Land and condemns the Jabiluka mine development.

Traditional reels and the stalwart drinkers' sing-along song, "Come on Eileen" (made famous in the 1980s by Dexys Midnight Runners) round out the set.

If you like your whiskey straight and your music heartfelt rather than orderly, then the Hooligans have got the recording for you.

From GLW issue 337