Tower of Song – Frank McNally on the Joycenights Festival, rude hand gestures, and improving Patrick Kavanagh

Long a museum, the Martello Tower in Sandycove became a concert venue last week for the inaugural Joycenights Festival, named for the writer whose brief stay there in 1904 made the place famous.

It is not a voluminous venue, by any standards. Arriving late for a show by Camille O’Sullivan and Noel O’Grady, I had to watch the first half from the top step of the turret stairs, peering through the glass door and a cameraman who had set up his tripod there.

But I got in eventually, and then somehow found a free corner (not easy in a round tower) among the capacity attendance of 30-odd.

The evening’s many highlights included O’Sullivan’s reprise of “In These Shoes?”, a Kirsty MacColl classic about the misadventures of a fashion victim.

General selection – Frank McNally on national stereotypes, Greek (and table quiz) heroes, and a stamp of greatness

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Blood brothers – Frank McNally on the deaths of two young men, one Irish, in the Korean War

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Hard Border – Frank McNally on a visit to the Korean Demilitarised Zone

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Transmigration of Seoul – Frank McNally on a long-awaited trip to South Korea

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Fans of the Jools Holland show might remember – they could hardly forget – O’Sullivan’s 2009 performance of the same song in a tiny back number and red stilettos. When the TV series marked its 25th anniversary in 2017, that was named as one of the 25 greatest hits and included in an anniversary celebration at the Royal Albert Hall.

Here, exaggerating the passage of years, O’Sullivan played it for self-deprecatory laughs, mostly. Even so, it may still have been the most exciting thing to happen in the tower since the night an English visitor fired shots at an imagined black panther and scared the bejaysus out of the future author of Ulysses, who was sleeping nearby.

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The real-life “Haines” of Ulysses was poor Samuel Chenevix Trench (1881-1909), who must have been haunted by other demons too. A few years later, he took aim at his own head, and this time didn’t miss.

But apart from a dubious immortality in Joyce’s masterpiece, his monuments today included the model of a black panther, now a permanent fixture in the tower, with a front-row seat at concerts.

Joycenights will be an annual feature. In the meantime, Andrew Basquille tells me the tower will also host an Ivy Day commemoration on October 6th, when he and others mark the latest anniversary of Charles Stewart Parnell’s death with a rehearsed reading, in costume, of Ivy Day in the Committee Room.

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Among the things I learned at an All-Ireland Field Archery festival in Laois at the weekend is that the standard grip (or “draw”) on the bowstring uses three fingers: one above the arrow, typically, the others below.

This reminded me of a myth, popular in Britain, that a certain rude hand gesture involving the index and middle fingers has its origins in the Battle of Agincourt (1415), where longbows helped England to a surprise victory over the numerically superior French.

The story has it that the French, when taking enemy archers prisoner back then, were in the habit of decommissioning the said two fingers through amputation. Thus, when the unamputated English triumphed in the battle, they displayed their superior digital technology as a taunt.

It’s an attractive theory. Unfortunately, like so many folk etymologies, it has not a shred of evidence to support it.

The rude v-sign seems to have emerged only in the early 20th century. If it has older origins, they are more likely to be in a gesture, also involving two fingers in a horn shape, used in former times to suggest someone was a cuckold.

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On the subject of Raglan Road’s tragically flawed third verse (Diary, September 15th), Terry Moylan writes to remind me of a crucial amendment introduced by Luke Kelly to what became the classic version, now universally copied by singers.

Where Patrick Kavanagh split his lines as follows – “I gave her gifts of the mind, I gave her the secret sign that’s known/To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone” – Kelly instead ended the first line on “sign”, thereby sacrificing rhyme to clearer meaning.

As Terry explains: “Poets split clauses over the ends/beginnings of lines all the time, but songwriters don’t, and singers don’t like the effect of it.”

Which is fair enough. And yet, both versions retain their god-awful clunkiness, including that lame “known/known” repetition, that spoils the perfection of the opening verses.

While we’re at it, I hereby restate my aesthetic objections to the “tint/stint” bit too. This although, as recently as Friday night in Kehoe’s, Eoin O’Malley – a member of the illustrious family into which Hilda Moriarty married, and who needs little encouragement to sing the song himself – argued that that part was perfectly fine.

As with Robert Emmet’s epitaph, this may be unfinished business. Raglan Road is Ireland’s favourite ballad, after all. I believe there might even be a case for a national song-repair competition, in which lyricists would be invited to finally fix the problems with Kavanagh’s immortal but awkward original.