Singsongs and noble calls will rarely hit the right key

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It’s great to hear Finbar Furey back at the top of the charts – because a new song from the oul’ warbler gives the inebriated entertainers of Ireland a new tune to murder during the dregs of a Saturday night session.

That’s no disrespect to Finbar, who is – to use that oft-abused phrase – a living legend. And his chosen song from the surprisingly addictive RTE series, the Hit, is a classic in the making.

He took a song written twenty years ago by a fellow Dub, Gerry Fleming, and polished it into a work of art that, despite the same words and lyrics, sounded completely different in his inimitable hands.

The Last Great Love Song, which hit the top of the Irish charts at the weekend, instantly sounded like it had been around for a hundred years and it may well be around for another hundred – which is to Finbar’s credit.

He is a unique talent, and there is a legion of folk legends who list him as one of the great influences and originators of the genre as we know it – but even Finbar himself would never claim that he had the musical range of more than one key.

Which is one of the many reasons that his repertoire has endured through the decades – because songs like the Green Fields of France or even the Fields of Athenry or Raglan Road or Dublin in the Rare Oul’ Times (I know the Fureys can’t be held responsible for most of those) don’t require a huge vocal range to batter to death in a singsong.

All it takes is an ability to shout with feeling – a talent that most of us find comes naturally to us after a couple of pints.

If you can’t even manage that, then choose a song that everyone can shout at the same time – any rebel song that mentions Black and Tans is always good and late at night anything that calls for a united Ireland is a sure-fire winner every time.

So the secret for bad singers is to pick a song you can shout – and if your own shouting is not enough, pick one that everyone else can shout along to with you.

That said, this is infinitely better than the alternative…..karaoke, and in particular that old staple that so many women in particular seem to think should be their party piece – the Wind Beneath My Wings.

Experience will teach you that this can often seem palatable – almost tuneful – until it gets to the point where Bette Midler moved into a different gear with that elongated ‘Fly’ part of the song….a wonderful evocative moment when it’s sung by a professional.

But placed in the hands of a pub singer with a misguided sense of their own ability, it’s as deadly as a grenade with the pin out in the hands of a mad Mullah from the Middle East.

It can have all the tunefulness of a canine mating call that will summon dogs for miles around, while leaving the audience itself with the sort of recurring tinnitus that once earned our UN veterans a small fortune in compensation for army deafness.

Pub talent competitions should carry a health warning – or at least offer plugs for your ears – because rarely in any other aspect of life will you get that level of delusion.

I can still hear one woman who sang the Roberta Flack classic Killing Me Softly without realising for a minute how apt the tite was – although one could dispute that killing was a soft one, from the audience’s perspective.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.