Content area
Full Text
Ireland has been enjoying a stirring surge of inventiveness among its guitar bands and a surge in post-punk urgency of late, forged in the tightly packed boulevards of its most sinful cities. There’s Fontaines DC, whose status as genuine worldbeaters has been solidified by a Grammy nomination to be settled next month. Critical darlings Girl Band and Murder Capital have also helped to put Irish post-punk on the map internationally, and there’s a clutch of young groups who are looking to follow the same path: Slow Riot, Robocobra Quartet, Silverbacks, the list is as long as the digits of pi.
Lesser known in this emerging story is the first wave of Irish post-punkers who emerged from the punk scene in the early 1980s. They, in many ways, have prefaced and predicted their modern successors. The Irish punk tradition is written into the nation’s musical legend, but the legacy of Irish post-punk hasn’t always been as respected. Thankfully, the global impact of its stylistic offspring breeds fresh curiosity.
Cult Irish musician Stano is revered throughout the Dublin underground as a one-time punk. He has spent four decades funnelling what he believes are the core tenets of the culture into making experimental, sometimes testing, post-punk music. His recent focus has been a reissue of his debut album Content To Write in I Dine Weathercraft, and last September, Anthology, an 18-track collection spanning 1982 to 1994.
While checking out the press coverage of his reissues, Stano has been fascinated to see his name connected to young Irish stars. “I was trying to think why is that being referenced,” Stano says of reading the names of new artists in reviews of his own work, “and I think it’s that they have the punk spirit. I spoke in my own Dublin accent and I was writing poems,” he says, echoing Fontaines DC’s approach. “I didn’t really know what I was doing in the music. For me it was just a big adventure.”
“My aesthetic is still going on,” says veteran performer Steve Averill of the punk band The Radiators From Space and post-punkers SM Corporation. “The spirit of [that] music is still very much alive in Ireland and a lot of the current bands like Fontaines DC are...