Tru’penny Opera

Dreamers & Corner Boys

‘DREAMERS & Corner Boys’ features almost every band of note from Wexford’s rock and pop scene of the late seventies and eighties, and also some of the Wexford exports who achieved success abroad.

One obvious omission is three-piece Out Of Uniform who recorded one memorable twotrack tape (‘ Turning In Circles’/’primary Innocence’). Unfortunately, no copy could be unearthed, so if you have one it’s a real rarity…and the band probably want to buy it back.

‘Dreamers & Corner Boys’ could have been an eighties compilation, but that would have meant omitting The Roach Band and that was simply not an option.

Billy Roche and his band not only drew up the blueprint, but laid the foundations on which an entire Wexford music scene was built. In the final few years of the seventies they brought their brand of bluesy powerpop to venues all over Ireland, attracted an RTE TV crew to Wexford for a special feature (check it out on Youtube) and released two singles: ‘Shamrock Shuffle’ and ‘Italy’. Sadly, neither are included on this CD, but the song ‘Werewolf ‘ captures their sound.

The Roach Band had a group of disciples and a regular Sunday morning Imperial Bar support act in the near legendary ‘Black Arthur and the Undertakers’, the only band on this CD who never recorded in their brief career. Their inclusion is made possible through a new song, ‘Boppin Down The Bog Road’, written by original member Niall Lacey who performs it with former Black Arthur bandmates Mick O’brien and Pat Hayes. Tony Hall completed the original line-up. Post Black Arthur, Mick, Pat and Tony went on to form Cry Before Dawn with Brendan Wade. Niall Lacey would go on to play with Tru’penny Opera. After the demise of the aforementioned Out of Uniform, Vinnie Doyle went on to replace Mick O’brien as Cry Before Dawn bassist. CBD frontman Brendan Wade later teamed up with Paul Bell on the successful Wild Swans in the nineties but Bell, who first came to attention outside of Wexford as a founding member of the Lookalikes, is included on the CD fronting Zerra 1, his London-based band who released a number of singles and two albums in the eighties. Paul Bell’s brother Shay also features on ‘Dreamers…’ as part of The Beatless (who also included Out of Uniform’s Borris Carroll on drums). There are other examples of a tangled web of inter-band relationships. Mick Odlum and Des Gaffney of the Roach Band are also included as The Bantu Bottle Company whose first and only single ‘ Teach The Children’ was created using milk bottles and other everyday objects as musical instruments.

Many of the demos and singles featured on the CD were recorded at Odlum’s Cooleycall Studios in the idyllic setting of a farmhouse near Bridgetown where Paul Spencer, also of the Roach Band, was sound engineer. Spencer had a spell as guitarist with Cry Before Dawn after the departure of Tony Hall in the early nineties.

Ian ‘Mocha’ Moloney was consistently one of the best vocalists on Wexford’s rock scene in the eighties and he features on two bands here: Prime Suspect and Twilight Dreams. The bands also shared the same guitarist, David Vaughey, and drummer, Declan Roche.

There are also two entries for Niall Jordan and Mick Ringwood who, with Brian moore, delivered a compelling electronic sound on Elektron, and then formed The Third Mind as a duo.

Ger Byrne, one of the main movers behind the ‘Dreamers & Corner Boys’ compilation, played bass with Prime Suspect and later Dorchadas, the only folk/trad outfit to be included. Paul Molloy also played with Dorchadas and contributed to Tru’penny Opera.

One of the most fondly remembered bands of the era, Tru’penny Opera drew their ranks from Wexford and Enniscorthy and were fronted by Mick Egan who later released a wealth of original material as a solo artist.

Egan had the task of preparing much of the material for ‘ Dreamers & Corner Boys’ in his studio. He wrote the closing number ‘ Take Care Of Me’ especially for the project with former Tru’penny Opera bandmate Noel Quaid, and it’s performed by an ‘ Ensemble’ that includes Pat Hayes, Niall Lacey and Conor Kenny, as well as Egan and Quaid.

Pierce Turner and Laddy Kirwan, Wexford’s finest music exports, were signed to Polydor as a duo in the seventies, a time when few Irish acts had recording contracts. They left these shores for New York where they played as Turner and Kirwan of Wexford, before forming The Major Thinkers.

It’s a pity the Thinkers’ ‘Back In The Eighties’ single didn’t find its way on to this CD (for the name alone), but Turner and Kirwan are well represented, with key songs that reference Wexford, from their subsequent careers: ‘ Banks of the Hudson’, from Kirwan’s Celtic rockers Black 47, and Pierce’s ‘ Musha God Help Her’ which was later recorded by Christy Moore.