Maybe You'll Never Go Away - Guernica's Great Irish Album To Finally See The Light Of Day
More than 30 years ago Irish band Guernica ripped up the script in a short, glorious career that ended without their best music ever seeing the light of day. That is about to change.
Who says dreams don’t come true on Instagram?
This morning I was idly scrolling when a post from Joe Rooney made me sit bolt upright as he announced that an album made by Guernica, a band he fronted more than three decades ago, is finally about to be released.
This is not just any album.
This was not just any band.
You will likely know Joe as one of Ireland’s best and busiest stand-up comedians and as a star of “Father Ted”, where his iconic performance of Father Damo has earned him catcalls about Blur and Oasis no matter where he goes in the world.
Not to be all hipster about it, but I knew him before then - that sentence is usually the preamble to a tale of burgeoning cool, but in my case it is anything but.
Back when Joe was a lead singer in a band that had only recently abandoned a fixation with New Order and obscure indie-pop, trading it in for something altogether more spiky and energetic, I was a 16-year-old Dublin boy who loved music and was about to enter into the no-mans-land between bedroom listening and a voyage of discovery in Dublin’s seedier venues.
My guide on that journey was Darragh Broe, a regular in the pub I worked in and a few years older than me, and one of the most skilled and talented drummers I have ever seen.
Darragh started out with the usual parade-ground drumming of accents and paradiddles, but he had the heart of a lion and the soul of a punk, and he soon broke out of the stiff mould.
He told me one weekend he was playing a gig the following Tuesday in the Baggot Inn and asked if I’d like to come along and help him lug stuff around.
It was a night that changed my life.
To grow up in Ireland is to do so with a constant soundtrack of music and language and swearing, but in the Baggot Inn that night it was different - it was the first time I’d really experienced home-grown Irish music live, rather than on Top Of The Pops or RTE.
It was incredible.
The smell of beer and cigarettes mingled with the perfumes of impossibly cool young women the like of which I’d never seen before. The lads had haircuts straight out of a Marlon Brando movie, and they had an air of menace and musicality that was both frightening and immeasurably attractive.
At that time in late 1980s Dublin the city was awash with A&R men looking for the “next U2” and many’s the lad with a floppy fringe and a Fender rip-off who was only too happy to oblige, but Guernica were not like that.
The gig I saw was the first of a residency, and on the way home I was consumed by two things - how to get back into my parents’ house unnoticed, and how I would get to the other three gigs, because this was something I was never going to miss.
What stood out most was the songwriting. While other bands at the time were aping U2 and REM, Guernica veered sharply in another direction. There was keyboards and rockabilly guitar and rock-solid bass, all underpinned by Darragh’s incredible drumming.
Though I would learn years later that Joe suffered terribly with anxiety around this time, they all appeared to be so cool and effortless to me, from how they played onstage to how funny and engaging they were off.
Singles came and went (Orange And Red and Deep Sea Diving) without making too much of an impressions, but then came Humming Of The Engine, a song with a drive and rhythm that suggested a band going places.
But like going bankrupt, bands rise and fall first slowly, then very quickly.
Guernica adjourned to the studio to record a mini-album - I recall it as being six songs, but I stand to be corrected.
When Darragh first played the rough mix of a song called Duke Street to me, I was stunned - this was a pop song as perfect as anything I’d ever heard from any indie band, anywhere in the world. I thought that this song alone would elevate them to the status of gods, if it only managed to make it to the racks of the record stores we spent our free hours perusing.
Then they split up.
I’m sure over the coming months the various members will explain why - all I recall is Derek Turner forming a band called The Honey Thieves, and although they were brilliant, I could not bring myself to like them, as their existence had meant the end of the Guernica that I loved and believed in so much.
I’ve spoken to Joe many times since - he played a superb comedy set in a deeply unsuitable venue in Stockholm a few years back - and when in October 2020 he told me that the music Guernica made might finally see the light of day, I was thrilled.
More than anything else I want to see if Duke Street has the same effect on everyone else as it did on me - a perfect few minutes of pop that tells a universal little story that, if I close my eyes, I can still hear note for note in my own head.
A man as troubled as he was talented, my friend and drumming idol Darragh ended his own life a number of years ago, but his son whom I remember as a baby has since become a drummer too, and what I wouldn’t give to see the band one last time, playing these songs that those of us who were around at the time have held in our hearts ever since.
Come February of 2025 we will be able to hold them in our hands as the vinyl version of Auditorium, the album featuring Guernica’s finest hours, hits the shelves. I wrote some sleeve notes for it, but I have no idea if they made the cut. It doesn’t matter - all that matters is the music.
I’ve ordered my copy now and look forward ot it arriving in the spring, but in truth I’ve never needed it - those songs etched themselves on my young, impressionable mind many years ago, as did the guys in the band, and nothing will ever take that away.
Holding the album in my hands will simply be a concrete reminder that I am still here, even if Darragh is not, and that his music lives on through those who loved him.
To hear my October 2020 chat with Joe Rooney about the band, click on the link below: