For three weeks, Dingle was Ireland's rock'n'roll capital, where RTÉ shot the Other Voices series, writes Shane Hegarty
It's a few days before Christmas and Dingle, Co Kerry, is very quiet considering it is the rock'n'roll capital of the country. Drizzle blankets the town, occasionally lifting to be replaced by the mist plopping in off the mountains. It's got the sense of a tourist town on the edge of hibernation. Except, that is, for a rectangle of activity on the main street. Any rogue tourist might find themselves doing double-takes. I could have sworn I just spotted Steve Earle having soup and brown bread in the pub. Is that The Thrills in the post office? Is that really Neil Hannon going in and out of the church?
Other Voices was first filmed in Dingle two years ago, when the RTÉ music programme brought the country's finest to a crumbling St James's Church, filmed them performing to a tiny audience of locals and then broadcast it. It caught several of them as their careers were about to take off, but there are only so many singer-songwriters to film and it was only for so long that the whole "Whelan's on tour" thing could retain its hint of freshness. So, for its third year, the show drew up a list of names it wanted, and began calling them.
The result is a three-week spell in which a few square metres of Dingle play host to Earle, The Thrills, The Divine Comedy, Ocean Colour Scene, Gavin Friday, The Chalets, Cathy Davey and more than 30 other acts. A handful of tickets are sold locally, the vicar can plan a new roof, and RTÉ finds itself with a music programme that doubles as a mini-festival. And anyone who comes to see what's going on finds it difficult to leave.
There is a strange mix in the audience: kids, grannies, hippies and the local vicar who, seated in the front row at the Steve Earle show, has longer hair and a bigger beard than anyone else in the building. There are three acts a night, meaning a bit of a lucky bag of talent, and those who come for one act find themselves treated by others, although not always for purely artistic reasons. Seated in front of me at Steve Earle is a middle-aged couple, and the man is impatient for legend, keen to get through the bands he doesn't know. Then The Chalets come on to kick off the night, and the two female singers appear in dresses shorter than this guy's haircut. At which point he perks up, turns to his friend sitting behind me and gives him a thumbs up. Steve Earle can wait.
"I didn't agree to doing the series lightly," says John Kelly, who hosts the shows. "I wanted to know who was on the bill and who they were trying to get. And I added a few names to the list that I wanted to see and some were already playing; some were available, some weren't. I like all the bands and I'm particularly excited about some of them. I could see the series had developed a lot and it goes farther again this year and pushes even farther out. I think now at this stage it's created a platform for itself where anything can happen. And having sort of declared that you can do anything, there's no reason why Seamus Begley couldn't get up and do a tune on the box, or welcome a jazz sax player or whatever. That it could be more, I hate to use the word eclectic, but the more variety the better." The previous years had left him a little unmoved. It was a little too much of what he calls the "the bedsit, folk-singing, brown rice crowd".
"To be honest, a lot of the acts that would have been on in the past I wouldn't have come all the way to Dingle to see. I might have come for the craic but I was too busy working. I saw bits and pieces of it on the TV." So he's spending three weeks recording his radio show in Kerry and flying to Dublin every week to record The View, but otherwise indulging himself in a job in which the music kept going after the cameras had turned off. Much of the crew had a look about them that suggested they'd not gone to bed earlier than 5am any morning, and very few of those sober.
IS OTHER VOICES a television programme or a festival? "Well, it's self-contained in terms of the town. I meet a lot of the same people showing up for gigs each night. It's a limited constituency in a small place. It's not a festival in the sense that 10,000 people arrived last night because they knew The Thrills were here. People didn't even know The Thrills were here. It wouldn't be the same if it meant the whole town was swamped, because it also appeals to the bands themselves that they can wander down to the pub for their lunch or go for a walk. It's a regular local event, there's no pressure. Nobody's being stupid, nobody's being silly, nobody's being harassed. All the usual trappings are missing."
It certainly has a happy informality about it. Five minutes before taking to the stage, The Thrills are still across the road in Benner's Hotel signing autographs and talking to fans. For those who can't get a ticket for the shows, the gig is shown live on a television in the pub by the church. "It is a very laid-back scenario," adds Kelly. "The venue's across the road from the hotel, you get your lunch down in the pub, you get your tea in an other place. You walk 10 yards between each place.
"I'm on stage at eight. Five to eight I'm still in the shower, it's no problem. Normally with these things you tend to be hungry and uncomfortable. You're standing in your corridors, the band has the changing room and every one else has to wander around. But this is dead comfortable and dead easy."
Steve Earle uses it as a chance to see a part of the country he hadn't been to before, touring with his new girlfriend, Allison Moorer, after the two had got together while touring. "I've never been out here, so it was a chance to do that," says Earle, an hour after his acoustic gig. "I sort of fell in love almost on this tour. So it was a chance for us to come out here a few days before we go home. We spent all of our relationship so far on a bus with other people, so it was nice to get away from that for a while."
The set-up is to his liking. "It's much easier than doing it in a studio. In a studio there's a certain amount of distance between you and the audience because there's the camera floor. And it's a music audience. They know who they're coming to see so it's not like The Late Late Show where you're playing just to the people who show up to it."
FOR NEWER ACTS, it is either a step up or a step out of the hype. "It's completely different," says singer Cathy Davey. "You probably play this kind of place only once or twice in a lifetime." She's not exaggerating, given that she uses her dad Seáas a backing singer for the show - not so difficult, given that he lives up the road.
"I think it gives people a lot of confidence to carry on for another year," says Davey. "They do it and they feel very good about what they do. And that is as important, especially if they don't get tour support and if their company isn't giving them an incentive to feel good about what they're doing, this is why these things are so great. And they've treated us so well. Pampered us, fed us and put us on TV." It's all organised by Philip King's Hummingbird Productions, with Kelly describing King as a man with "startling energy. Whatever vibrations come off him, he could bring down a charging rhino at 60 paces." Perhaps, then, it is not so outlandish that it hopes its reputation will spread not just among television viewers, but among acts. This year's wish list began with Radiohead, and there is still hope that a Nick Cave or a PJ Harvey might be tempted to dip into this strange TV show-cum-private music festival.
But for this year, John Kelly's highlights include Gavin Friday, The Divine Comedy, American Music Club, Republic of Loose, Ameliana Torrini and The Thrills. An album is released this week, and how much television captures the magic dust sprinkling through the drizzle will become clear when it airs at the end of this month.