Archive News
‘Commitments’ show brings fans on a trip down memory lane
Date Published: {J}
There’s a lot of different music you can get off on but soul is more than that. It takes you somewhere else,” declared Jimmy Rabbitte in The Commitments. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the acclaimed film, the cast are embarking on a nationwide tour that comes to the Royal Theatre, Castlebar on Monday, March 14.
Andrew Strong, who played mouthy front man Deco in the movie, is in frank form as he gears up for the shows.
“If it had been left up to me it probably never would have happened,” he says. “I was just approached by our promoter who’s putting the shows together. He asked me was I interested in doing these gigs for the 20th anniversary of The Commitments. I thought about it and just went ‘if I don’t do it now I’ll never do it.
“Once he got me on board he was 50% there,” continues Strong. “Once the rest of the crew knew I was doing it there like ‘right, let’s go for it’. I’m not being pompous or anything like that, or big-headed, or saying anything like they can’t do it without me – not at all. But the reality is I am the singer in the band and if people are going to go out and spend €60 on it they want to get the real thing.”
Andrew was only 16 when he appeared in Alan Parker’s movie, but he didn’t exactly go banging on stardom’s door.
“Well I didn’t really audition for the movie,” he recalls. “Because my character was a tall, vain George Michael kind of lookalike. As you can see, I’m the complete opposite of that!
“What happened was at that time, Alan Parker needed to choose songs for the movie. Different singers would come in everyday and be given five songs. Parker would have 20 songs at the end of the day and he’d be listening to them all. These were old songs and he wanted to see what they sounded like.”
As soon as the English director heard Strong unleash his raw, soulful voice he knew he was listening to Deco.
“Things just snowballed, really, from there,” says Andrew. “And I was just fairly happy because I was on summer holidays out of boarding school and I was getting 300 quid a week to sing songs. I was over the moon!”
Two decades after the film was made, Strong reflects on the strange new world he found himself in.
“I was living in Jury’s Hotel, at 16 years of age,” he says. “I’m from Wicklow so it was a bit of a drag to get me in to the set every morning so they decided to put me into Jury’s. I was getting a per diem (expenses allowance) every day, so you can imagine – you’re in Ballsbridge, getting 50 quid a day to live there. It was just great.”
The cast of The Commitments had to wait a while before international fame was thrust upon them. When he finished filming, Andrew went back to school while Parker and his crew went into post-production.
“When the movie was finished they had to go off and edit it, so it was back to normal for the best part of a year,” he says. “None of us ever saw the film, we never saw any of the rough cuts or anything like that. The first time I saw it was on RTÉ; there was some documentary about it and I saw clips.”
The Commitments was a box-office smash, both in Ireland and internationally, changing Andrew Strong’s life forever. He was offered a solo recording contract and went on to tour with the likes of the Rolling Stones, Bryan Adams and Prince. The latter has something of a reputation as a diva– did Andrew get to see another side of his personality?
“No, absolutely no direct contact,” he says. “I didn’t even see him. Well, I saw him perform. It’s quite strange; I played with the Stones, Elton John, Bryan Adams – they’re all very, very down to earth people. You can sit down and have a chat before the gig. Prince just does his own thing.”
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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