Spadgietown
A few words on: Nine Wassies From Bainne’s The Knock Bonya Express and “Spadgietown” - Cathal Coughlan’s short story about Five Go Down to the Sea’s Finbarr Donnelly.
One of the joys of putting Episode 44 - Ciddy Hall by Nine Wassies From Bainne of To Here Know When - Great Irish Albums Revisited together was finding that The Knock Bainne Express, the Wassies’ original website, was archived on the Wayback Machine. The Knock Bonya Express was a hyperlocal website (before hyperlocal websites existed) of a fictional newspaper for a fictional town: Knock Bonya, the Wassies’ spiritual home.
In 1998 The Irish Times published a feature about Irish bands who had websites. “A good rock Website should be fun and entertaining as well as informative” declares the article, before describing sites by such disparate acts as B*Witched, The Plague Monkeys, Pitchshifter and Nine Wassies From Bainne.
“Cork band Nine Wassies From Bainne are a pretty kooky lot, and their Website lives up to their image as acid-fried gaelgeoiri. It’s designed as a fictional local newspaper, The Knock Bonya Express, whose features include a hot debate between Irish language revivalists and “Cromwell-loving sleveens”, plus an adult-only “bovine line” where you can dial such hot numbers as ‘3 heifers in a bed’ or ‘hear me moo’. There’s also news of The Wassies’ gigs and record releases, but that’s just a sidebar to the big story about late milk deliveries to Knock Bonya.”
Rockin' all over the Web: It’s only HTML, but I like it
(The Irish Times, Jun 22 1998)
The Knock Bonya Express also featured poems, stories and recipes from a number of the Wassies’ friends. John Spillane, Manhole’s Pat Kelleher, Big Boy Foolish’s Liam Heffernan, playwright Roger Gregg and Cathal Coughlan all contributed to the Express. I’ve captured a few screenshots from the archived Express in the Episode Notes to Episode 44.
In my last blog post, I mentioned that Another Spark’s booklet contained an uncredited story entitled “The Pitiful Legend of Sam’s Banjo Urine” and how I’ve often wondered was it penned by the late Cathal Coughlan. Well here’s a short story, about Five Go Down to the Sea’s Finbarr Donnelly, from The Knock Bonya Express that definitely was written by Coughlan.
FICTION: A SHORT STORY BY CATHAL COUGHLAN
September Brings Springtime to Spadgietown
In the beginning , the word was “Spadgie”. A mirthful but ultimately ugly, self-hating little word, coined by the less sensitive-minded inhabitants of a market town and sometime port on the south coast of Ireland. It had originally been used to describe any person who had been born with a noticeable disability. However, times changed and, by 1980, its use could be prompted by any visual, behavioural or cultural manifestation of a person's awkwardness or of their unwillingness to conform to the anyhow unreachable “Consumer Society” idea of what was cool, elegant or sophisticated.
Hence, there were a great number of spadgies in Cork by 1980. There were native working-class Cork Northside spadgies, their humour and modes of everyday expression honed to utter absurdity by generations of toil in the marsh which lay at the heart of their birthplace, by alcohol and by many forms of glamour-free substance abuse. There were eclectic rural spadgies, whose vocation had somehow propelled them from the vaporous hollows surrounding Cork. Yes, and later, lower-middle-class art school and college dropout spadgies who incurred ostracisation from the scum to whom they had been kin, by throwing in their lot with the involuntary Pioneers of Spadgyism. Later still, there were the upper-middle-class dilettante spadgies, whose lack of commitment and initiative need hardly be described, and whose natural inclinations anyhow propelled them, soon enough, on to their destined Temples and Treasuries. By the end of the rainy summer of 1980, Ian Curtis was in his grave, the magic mushrooms were unnaturally abundant, oh, and joyous ‘twas to be a spadgie in the town of Cork.
It is late afternoon. The rain is holding off, but the clouds over the top of Patrick’s Hill have other ideas. A lone figure makes his way along the sparsely-populated end of the main shopping thoroughfare. He is, perhaps, nineteen years of age. His dark-coloured suit does not fit, having been built for someone shorter and stouter, who wore it a lot; and neither does his head, which is cropped and large, bearing a badger-like stripe down its middle. Nevertheless, he appears contented with life. He gazes intently at the pavement as his long legs rapidly propel him towards the bridge at the end of the street. The air is that of one who is rushing back to his place of business after a pleasurable break. However, it is more likely that he has simply left an Angelic Upstarts record roasting in the oven in his flat, and is returning there to see if it will play, and what it will sound like. He does such things each day.
He has mounted the hump-backed bridge, his home almost in sight, when, suddenly, his attention is distracted by a group of persons who are seated on the pavement ahead. They are ragged traveller-children, whom he has come to know as ‘paavies’, since he arrived in this town from his birthplace in Ulster, escaping the Orange pogroms of the late nineteen sixties. He ought to know better, he knows he should be kinder, but a sudden spadgie urge has taken hold of him....
The children are inhaling strongly from plastic bags which obviously contain glue.
He is aware of the effect which this has upon the person inhaling.
He approaches them. With a flourish, he snatches the bag from the foremost child, and exclaims “GIMME THAT I'M A GUARD!”
By this, meaning a member of the police constabulary of the Irish Republic.
The child is too addled to register much, except that his glue is gone.
The Impostor of Law Enforcement arches back his great badger-head toward the river and inhales copious amounts of the trapped gases within the bag, then exhales into it just as strongly, several times. The full array of refined, “cosmopolitan” Southern Irish life is passing by along the bridge, the petty Hitlers and Listers and J. Paul Gettys of this most deluded of provincial towns, people without a care because they want for nothing and care about no-one, adept at ignoring the extravagant decay right under their noses. There is no acknowledgement from any source that this epic performance is underway.
The thief of the glue releases the bag to its owner, laughing uproariously and unsteady on his feet. He feels that he has somehow met his match, a fact which he expresses thus: “Jesus ! Hurhurhurhur.....”
While he has been imbibing of the occult vapours of the paavies, a book by Philip K. Dick has worked its way out of his pocket. Stumbling over it, he gathers it up and is gone, towards the miracles of unlikely happiness which lie at the foot of the great hill ahead.
It is spadgie springtime. It can only be downhill, a struggle, from here.
‘Terelynn’ by Giordaí Ua Laoighaire agus Cathal Coughlan:
EP44 - Ciddy Hall by Nine Wassies From Bainne