September 1990. A roar echoes down the Dublin dockland quays, still a jumble of dilapidated Victorian sheds and yards, over the heads of the cast and crew and the gawkers. “Stop f**king acting!”
Alan Parker has come to Dublin in search of something he had seen in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments; a raucous, funny, defiant life force in a battered, grimy old city that the wider world had mostly written off. He did not want performances. He wanted real people.
All film-making is artifice, and Parker’s Dublin was a heightened version. But his intuition was to populate it with real kids from real bands. One of them was Glen Hansard, who had arrived via an accidental audition with no particular interest in acting. Perfect. Parker never had to tell him to stop acting.
Whether the film’s success did most of its cast members any good in the long run is debatable. Some ended up in a live tribute act to the movie. Others drifted. The Commitmentettes, interestingly, went on to more solid entertainment careers. But Hansard, at 20, was the one who saw the whole thing as a distraction and kept his eyes firmly fixed on the prize: a major label contract; a hit album; the world at his feet. It was the dream of a thousand Irish acts swimming hopefully in the slipstream of U2.
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It didn’t happen. Island Records signed his band The Frames and then dropped them, while their Limerick label-mates The Cranberries went and conquered America. In 1992, that was the definition of failure.
We should be grateful to Island, because what happened then was more interesting than some moderately successful international career. A different sort of Irish music scene – lo-fi, pub-based, rooted in the traditions of busking and the session – sprang up in the space left behind by the majors as they tired of trying to find the next U2 and went looking for the next Nirvana or Oasis instead. It is not an accident that The Frames made their first post-Island record with financial backing from Whelan’s, the Wexford Street venue at the heart of the Dublin scene Hansard did more than anyone to birth. The music was warmer and more home-made than the stuff the majors were chasing, and it belonged in an Irish tradition of Americana-infused personal songwriting.
There is something odd, though, about a musician who never wanted to be an actor but who ends up being defined not just by his songs, but by his appearance in two films in which he essentially played himself. John Carney’s Dublin in Once is a rather different place from Alan Parker’s one 16 years previously. The city had changed, although Carney’s boho urban landscape was as much of an aesthetic choice as Parker’s gritty one. But the fixed point in both was the same: Glen Hansard, still the busker, still not acting. His relationship with costar Markéta Irglová also mirrored real life: despite an 18-year age gap, their relationship became romantic for two years, and they would continue to collaborate musically until this year.
He was an organiser as well as a performer, a man who could marshal disparate individuals into something coherent, and who would make things happen where others couldn’t or wouldn’t, which is why he ended up conducting proceedings at Shane MacGowan’s funeral.
Unlike MacGowan, or Sinéad O’Connor, or Dolores O’Riordan, Hansard’s was not a death foreshadowed, nor a life visibly damaged by trauma and the things people reach for to manage it. He was 56 and, by every account, in the middle of a good life.
In the years between The Commitments and Once, Ireland developed a self-image as a place where an international star could walk down the street unbothered, where nobody was too impressed by anybody and where the most complimentary adjective was “sound”. It was partly true and partly a flattering fiction, but the ideal it described was real enough. In the days before selfies and virality it had a kind of authenticity that is harder to come by now, when everyone is a curator of their own feed.
Hansard embodied that ideal more completely than anyone. In one of the most perceptive tributes paid after his death, Bono, who has spent a lifetime code-switching between multiple versions of himself, testified that his friend had no mask at all. “To be utterly yourself by being more interested in others – a clue for any of us trying out different personas,” wrote Bono. “He really was who you thought he was.”
There is a well-worn line in politics about sincerity being the one thing that, once you can fake it, you’ve got made. But nobody thinks Hansard was faking his social activism, and particularly his long-standing concerns about the plight of the homeless. The Christmas busk that raised money for the Simon Community really did begin on the street and stay there in spirit, and the Apollo House protest sprang from real outrage at homelessness spiralling.
It can be a hard thing to be a public figure in Ireland without the financial cushion of international success, as Hansard pointed out with disarming candour to Nadine O’Regan in this newspaper earlier this year. For all the acclaim and affection, the money was never simply there to be had. This country, like others, has become a colder house for the mid-level artist. The evisceration of the recorded music business has hollowed out the potential for the sort of unglamorous, locally scaled career that Hansard represented.
In that environment, the caricature of creative artists as a fragile or precious breed is laughable. To make a career like Hansard’s, to overcome multiple setbacks, find new and ingenious ways to keep working and hold an audience, you need to be tough, original and stubborn. His resilience across four decades and multiple collaborations looks less a survival strategy than a refusal to be silenced.
He carried others with him as he went, pulling younger musicians into the spotlight, keeping alive the songs of dead friends, turning his own visibility outward towards the homeless and the overlooked. The generosity and keen sense of social injustice were not a sideline.
There’s a video of Hansard singing, taken in The Wren’s Nest pub on the night he died. It is difficult to watch now. But it is also the simplest, truest thing. A man with a guitar sings a song. The people around him listen intently, then burst into applause. Nothing more needs saying.
