One for the Road: The ‘reel’ truth

In ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, Hunter S Thompson, as per the subtitle of the book, described a drug-twisted trip to the City of Sins as a “savage journey to the heart of the American dream”.

In the world’s gambling capital, Thompson, almost by accident, found himself stranded on the same depraved shoreline that the shipwreck of the Great American Experiment had washed up on by the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Upon returning home from his hysterical, orgiastic odyssey in Nevada, he sat down at his typewriter and wrote up a semi-fictionalised account of his nightmarish adventures, detailing the broken America he’d encountered.

What he then presented to the world was an anthropological masterpiece; a phantasmagoria of hedonism, hilarity, avarice, excess, authenticity and phoniness, that – despite, or maybe as a result of, its hallucinatory nature – revealed the decaying core of one of the world’s great cultures.

And right now, as I sit in my tent on day five of the Willie Clancy Festival, I feel like I am perched upon the same creative precipice that the godfather of gonzo journalism must have teetered on as he considered writing his cult classic. I have, so to speak, glimpsed the truth and thus find myself encumbered with the responsibility of relaying it to the world.

Believe me, ‘Pints and Tunes in Miltown Malbay: An Ecstatic Voyage to the Epicentre of the Irish Spirit’ is going to be a best-seller.

Here’s a few hype-building snippets.

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A group of three musicians explode into a mega-session of 20 players within five minutes. Jigs, reels, hornpipes, slip-jigs and polkas threaten to take the roof off the pub. An old man sits in the middle of it all, holding a tin whistle to his mouth. His cheeks don’t move. His fingers sit still over the holes. A river of saliva pours from the end of his instrument and a pool of slabbers accretes between his feet.

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A plate of chicken fried rice, cooked on a camping stove, is knocked from a cooler box and spills onto the groundsheet of my tent. Without speaking, using my hand I scoop the rice – plus lots of sticks and hairs – back onto the plate. Silently, I return to my seat and lift my fork. Dinner proceeds as planned.

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A German man struggles to carry four banjos up the street and is grateful when I offer him some assistance. He asks where I am from and I tell him Tyrone. “I don’t like the music in Ulster,” he tells me with Germanic directness. “Too much like Scottish ceilidh music.” I think about revoking my service but instead continue to help him carry his banjos to the shop, where he intends to sell them all.

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A man wearing a flatcap, dealer boots and bootcut jeans, which are pulled up so high that it looks medically unsafe, stands drinking a pint and chatting to a fella with dreadlocks and tattoos. The former farmer-type is in his late teens or early 20s, the latter hippie-guy is touching 70.

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I ask a Dubliner where the best music is at. He says, “I am only after playing in Clancy’s, but then the good musicians started arriving, so I thought I had better get off the seat before it burned the arse of me.”

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A man whom I am certain has taken quite a lot of ecstasy or some other illicit stimulant sees my bodhrán case and tells me that a drummer is urgently required at a session around the corner. I politely make an excuse as to why I can’t make it. Later that day I see the same guy volunteering as a very enthusiastic parking attendant in a busy car park. When I ask what he is doing, he tells me he has Asperger syndrome and, now pointing, that there is a free space just up past that there silver van. I say thanks, even though I am walking.

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A crowd of fellas are coming towards me, talking and gesturing frantically. I think they are from Kerry, but the closer they get I realise they are speaking some Slavic-sounding European language. Later that night I am talking to a drunk man at the bar, who, for a good 30 seconds, I think is foreign. It turns out he is from the depths of Kerry.

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We are on the beach eating sandwiches and drinking tea. A grotesquely well-groomed man in a suit comes strutting by, followed closely by three photographers.

After us quietly giving him reams of withering abuse for being the sort of person who would pay for a solo photoshoot on the beach, his bride appears wearing her wedding dress. I take back some, but not all, of the names I called him.

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A fortune telling lady is parked in the middle of the Main Street, offering her services to the gullible, desperate and curious. She is in a caravan, but not an old-school gypsy one; a modern four-berth. There’s money to be made being magic. Who knew.

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Anyway, the book – which will be a tale of trad music, commotion, romance, history, alcoholism, escape, unity, chaos, timelessness, myth, clarity, confusion and hope – will be available from next year in all disreputable bookstores, local, national and international.