“I would like to recommend Paul McDermott’s excellent podcast on the Lights of the City album by Jubilee Allstars. It was great to hear Niall, Barry, Lee and Fergus talk about the history of the band and the making of the album. Paul brings a wealth of knowledge and is great at teasing out the social, musical and artistic scenes that give rise to so many great albums. I played on the album and learnt a load of new things from the podcast. There is a lot of laughs and quite a few barbed comments, they haven’t lost it. Check it out.”
John Hegarty

“I feel like we probably owe Paul money for PR services at this stage!”
Fergus McCormack (Jubilee Allstars)

Episode Notes

Episode 28 of To Here Knows When - Great Irish Albums Revisited focuses on Lights of the City by Jubilee Allstars.

Episode 27 featured The Shanks – a band intrinsically inspired by their North Cork geography and likewise Jubilee Allstars – the focus of this Episode, were a band – inspired by the history, culture and geography of their surroundings – in this case the city of Dublin and no more so than on their second album, Lights of the City released in 2000 on Independent Records.

There’s a link back to Episode 9 of the podcast. That episode featured Eamonn Crudden from Dead Elvis Records and producer Marc Carolan chatting to me with Graham and Anto from Wormhole all about Wormhole’s Chicks Dig Scars album.

In 1995 the third release by Dead Elvis (following that Wormhole album and In Motion’s The Language of Everyday Life) was the Jubilee 7” single – ‘Don’t Give Up On Me’, which Marc Carolan had recorded. This followed Jubilee’s debut 7” single – ‘Everyone’s Clown’ on their own Hi-Tone label.

Sometime after the Dead Elvis 7” the band of brothers Niall, Fergus and Barry McCormack along with Lee Casey added Allstars to their name and came to the attention of Lakota Records – a Sony-funded label started by Conor Brookes – who had earlier managed Puppy Love Bomb and Power of Dreams. A series of 3 EPs followed all once more recorded with Marc Carolan.

Whenever I think about Jubilee Allstars - I immediately think about the third of these Lakota EPs – Keep On Chewin’ and particularly I think of the video that accompanied its title track. That video hilariously featured a pastiche of JFK’s assignation and saw the band memorably driving around Dublin in a Yellow Cadillac. It seemed to be a regular fixture on No Disco around 1997.

The Melody Maker’s Mark Luffman described the Jubillee Allstars music as: “a defiantly fragile brand of lo-tone country-blue heartbreak”. Who better then to produce Sunday Miscellany, their first album, than Stan Erraught – from The Stars of Heaven, who featured on Episode 7 of the podcast. This made sense, Jubilee Allstars sounded like direct descendants of The Stars of Heaven. Indeed, Hot Press once described them, “as spiritual successors to such holy ghosts as The Stars of Heaven, The Sewing Room and even the Radiators.”

After Sunday Miscellany, the band started planning for a second Lakota album. Finding themselves stuck in demo hell they eventually negotiated their way out of the record deal. What came next was Lights of the City, an album recorded in a shed of a house in Windy Arbor, produced by Thom Monahan from The Pernice Brothers and released on Dublin label Independent Records in 2000. It’s a record about Dublin, about a pre-Celtic Tiger Dublin, a Dublin that was just on the cusp of change. It’s an incredible artistic achievement. Everything about it is just perfect.

For this episode I’m joined by all four members of the band: Lee Casey and brothers Niall, Fergus and Barry McCormack.

Thom Monahan

producer of Lights of the City

The recording process seemed normal to me at the time. Coming up in rehearsal spaces and cheap studios, I was used to making records in houses on whatever gear could be found at the moment. The Jubilee Allstars were a lovely bunch of my people, that obviously were ready to make a record. For such a ragtag crew they were focused, rehearsed and knew what they wanted. We were just trying to get something that felt true to them. It probably wouldn't have mattered where we were recording.

“the band was a visceral living organism”

They told me stories about the writing process, who the songs were about, the way Dublin was changing. I wish I could remember details, but it was overwhelming, trying to download and acknowledge everyone's lived experience up until that point. They were individual people but the band was a visceral living organism, conversations were all shorthand, old jokes, Brothers and Lee so tight you'd never get a knife in between them. I was just holding on trying to move the gear from spot to spot and just make sure we were getting it all down and staying on schedule. It got more daunting as we went along, but no good record is made without strife and stress of some sort.

I remember that I had sprained my arm and wound up with a little bit of an addiction issue mid-recording because I was gobbling Nurofen Plus and had no idea about the codeine involved until we were at Niall's apartment doing vocals. I had to take a half day off to get focused on the withdrawal and felt guilty because we were on a tight deadline. We always managed to get through, the band always dug in and delivered.

We worked hard to be creative with our overdubs and edits because we knew the mix would be no frills and fast. After the final lists were checked off, the mix was a tight two days tops and then I had to fly back. Not a real studio or mix room, we spent a day getting situated at the UltraMack House and I got only one song mixed. The next day everyone left me alone because Alan from Decal was getting married and everyone was busy with preparations and everyone knew I just needed to work. The Band and Decal/UltraMack told me to come by the reception if I finished up early.

“Early? There's twelve more songs!”

Miracle upon miracle, I remember pushing through on Day 2 and thinking, “I might make it.” The songs just fell together, the storytelling, the love, it was all there in the tracks. I didn’t have to do much except get out of the way. I think Fergus or Lee came and checked in, and I was nearly done. They took me over to the reception, I walked into the hall/pub full of mainly strangers, but a resounding victory cheer came up from the back bar, that musical family arrayed like a painting. I got looks of confusion and some consternation, as most there appropriately had no idea who the fuck I was.

But the Jubilee Allstars and extended crew were all whoops and screaming, fucking up a wedding. Yes son, it was done. The image of them all there, every step I took towards the bar is still there in my mind. Sometimes you can see the Universe delivering the true Archetypal forms, everything is just that clear.

I was greeted by hugs and backslapping and celebration. But I knew then that the Jubilee Allstars, like the best of all bands, were probably not going to go much further. It was clear to me at the time as an outsider who can’t tell themselves stories to hold onto the past, some profound Rubicon had been crossed. Me just making it to the bar had brought this chapter to an end. The band was one unit, but brothers were drifting apart, UltraMack was closing up doors, everything changing. I sat with everyone, in the glow and hope of just completed nuptials, the bond of families, the blood ones and the ones you make. And knew with certainty it was the ending of an Era. I was an outsider, no one saw me crying in my Guinness. They had a story to tell, that last burst of youth harvested before all turns in different directions to the road before them. I was pretty sure I had been there to bear witness, do my duty and turn off the lights on the way out.

“I know bands and momentum, hopes and desires and truth spat at microphones”

I didn't know anything about Dublin then and know less now, but I know bands and momentum, hopes and desires and truth spat at microphones, a life lived ringing through amplifiers. The Jubilee Allstars were the most pure group of musicians, songwriters, gentlemen and scoundrels I have ever had the pleasure to get addicted to over the counter pain relievers with. Forever hopeful, forever doomed, all heart, all balls, and glorious. Forever glorious. Forever Dublin.

I tend to never listen to a record again once it's done. It’s for everyone else. I went looking online for it and it was nowhere to be found. The shame of these things.

by Thom Monahan

For Further Listening/Reading:

Lights of the City and The Struggle Continues are both available to purchase here.

Barry McCormack has released seven superb albums, all are available here. Five of the seven albums are also available on Spotify.

Mean Time (2019), Barry’s most recent album is below:

Lee Casey is in Soft on Crime with Dylan Phillips and Padraig O’Reilly. Their debut album New Suite is below:

For the Irish Examiner’s Ireland in 50 Albums series I’ve written about Lights of the City…