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Irish-American Rocker’s New Album Recalls the Good and Bad Old Days
kh923@nyu.edu
Irish-American rocker Larry Kirwan’s main message is rooted in an immigrant working class experience he partly shared, after he arrived in New York in the 1970s as a young man looking for adventure.
Songs he would later write as the leader of Black 47, once one of America’s best-known Irish rock bands, recall those days. In “Orphan of the Storm,” he sings: “Get off the plane at Kennedy/ Got a dream in your heart though it’s down in your boots/ Got a hundred quid in your pocket/And a couple of addresses in Woodside and the Bronx.”
Kirwan recently sat down to discuss Black 47’s work, including the new retrospective album “Bittersweet Sixteen” to be released in time for St. Patrick’s Day. The album includes songs from the 1990s about Irish politics, along with new anti-Iraq war tracks.
“To me it’s all about saying what you think is going on,” said Kirwan, whose fading red hair stood in contrast to his black leather jacket and round black-rimmed glasses. “Some people are inherently political, and I am one of those.”
The music of Black 47 – which takes its name from 1847, the worst year of the Irish potato famine — reflects Kirwan’s left-leaning ethos.. “We have a point of view. It’s not just a punk attitude,” he said. The goal of the band, he said, is to get people thinking, and to “spice things up.”
The band mixes energetic rock and roll with traditional Celtic instrumentals and punk spirit. In “Downtown Baghdad Blues,” the message is anti-war, reflecting a soldier’s confusion over the Iraq invasion: “I’m tryin’ to keep this whole thing straight/But will someone tell me what I’m doing here in the first place?” “New York Town,” the title track of a 2004 release, asks tough questions about 9/11: “I been talkin’ to a man from the CIA/Hey we got you covered, kid, everything is okay/Then why the hell ain’t we had an investigation/ It’s just too complicated, ‘sides you just don’t get the political implications/And you sound like a commie from the United Nations.”
Kirwan says he wants to inspire people to stand up for themselves. “You’re only as good as the person below you,” he said.. “You have to raise people up a bit.”
The rocker progressed from playing small gigs at bars in the Bronx during the 1980s to regular ones at O’Connolly’s in Times Square. During the height of Black 47’s fame in the 1990s, the band appeared on MTV, Conan O’Brian, Jay Leno and David Letterman.
“I enjoyed the celebrity machine when I went through it,” he said. “I told the band, we don’t have just 15 minutes. We’re getting two, three years of this. But it’s gonna go. You know, it’s gonna go. But when it was gone it was great. It was like, great, now I don’t have to answer the phone.”
Today Black 47 remains financially successful, playing more than 150 shows a year around the United States and in Europe. Kirwan also writes plays, novels and poetry, and hosts a radio show that features Celtic music on Sirius Satellite Radio. And he’s at work on a new book, “Rockin’ the Bronx,” a novel about his early years playing around Bainbridge Avenue.
Last year he brought out “Green Suede Shoes: An Irish-American Odyssey,” a memoir of his rollicking career as a musician and writer, beginning with his Irish childhood working through the tumultuous punk rock days of CBGB and the East Village music and arts scene of the 1980s.
He has also written plays, including the hit “Liverpool Fantasy,” which imagines a world where the Beatles never got famous and had to confront middle age.
It’s almost as if Kirwan needs multiple mediums to get his point across. “You have to look behind the story and get the real story,” he says.
Kirwan is sure there will always be fans around to listen.
“That’s what Black 47 is all about, to make those stands, because we’re public,” he said. “In a capitalist society, there are always going to be people on the bottom…. So there’s always going to be a gig for Black 47.”
Black 47 will release a new retrospective album, "Bittersweet 16," just before St. Patrick's Day.
Photo Courtesy of Black 47