Jim Carroll: Whether or not they’re willing to admit it , all bands come from a “scene”

The history of Dublin music, like the history of any music city, is a story of scenes. Even the lads on the cover this week were once members of a scene as they came to prominence in the late 1970s and found their feet. U2 may have turned out to be the act with the longest legs from their particular musical melting pot, but it’s worth remembering that they weren’t the only ones setting out on a journey.

Musicians usually have mixed feelings about scenes. After all, they’re doing their own thing, so there’s natural pushback when fans, journalists or cultural historians lob them into a scene with other acts who were around at the same time. There are probably acts who were aghast at being included in the same sentence as U2 back in the day.

Hindsight, though, shows that different eras do bring together acts of a similar feather. It’s interesting to look back at Dublin’s singer-songwriter boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s and try to work out why the acoustic guitar was in such demand. My own theory has to do with gigonomics and the fact that it was cheaper to tour as a solo singer than as a band.

A few years earlier, when Hope Promotions were putting on huge numbers of visiting hardcore and punk-rock acts, the number of acts following a similar playbook in the city was at an all-time high and some exciting work was produced.

Scenes occasionally blend into each other and create something truly vital as a result. There’s an excellent piece on Cuepoint at the moment by Dante Ross about New York’s punk rock b-boys who came into being when hardcore and hip-hop collided and coalesced in the 1980s. Ross’ words recall the energy, spirit and thrills of an era when anything seemed possible as creative downtown doers came together.

A similar mixing of scenes is part of the attraction of the forthcoming We Shall Overcome night in Dublin’s Grand Social on October 4th. It’s being put on to coincide with a weekend-long event in the UK, where those who make music and culture are setting out to highlight the human cost to the politics of austerity in terms of homelessness, poverty and other hardships.

For the Dublin event, Hope Promotions have come together with State magazine to put on a bunch of really smart new Dublin punk and hip-hop acts including Dah Jevu, Fierce Mild, Damola, M(h)aol and Anti-One. All money raised on the night will go to Dublin Simon Community, Crosscare and Dublin Calais Refugee Solidarity.

There are precedents in the city’s back pages for both the punk and hip-hop scenes who will be on show on the night, especially the superb fired-up, righteous hardcore rock of Fierce Mild and M(h)aol. Putting them together, though, is a smart move. Who knows just what it could lead to beyond the immediate can-shaking for good causes?

YOU’VE GOT TO HEAR THIS

J Dilla - Donuts 

We’ve been on a journey around James Yancey’s world for the past few weeks and keep coming back to this album, which was released a few days before his death in 2006. Donuts oozes Dilla soul, from idiosyncratic euphoria to aching melancholia. The heavyweight sound of a genius at work.

ETC

We Are Your Friends may not be the only big-screen music flick turkey of 2015. Early reviews from the Toronto Film Festival of Kill Your Friends, the movie adaptation of John Niven’s novel about eminently quotable and psychotically violent A&R man Steven Stelfox, have not been kind, with “tiresome”, “exhausting”, “overkill” and “rancid” all featuring. The film opens here in November.