Did someone mention my name?
For reasons of sanity I try to avoid message boards but someone alerted me to the fact that I was being savaged on here and my ever-fragile ego demands that I respond.
I will endeavour not to react to the gratuitous pleasantries of Dave Hanson - though it is a bit surreal to be called a "plonker" and a "wanker" by a complete stranger who has a strange memory if he thinks I was writing in the 1960s - and answer some of Dick's original criticisms, though mostly I'd refer you to the answers provided by Joan, who has offered a very concise and accurate case for the defence and I thank her for her support and understanding.
Sense of humour is, of course, highly subjective and Dick clearly doesn't appeciate mine. That's fine. I don't have a problem with that, but the "grouses" he refers to are all completely tongue in cheek, even - especially - the "breakfast incident". I love Ireland too much to "grouse" about any of it and, yes, I'm a terrible map-reader.
Re: the frequent references to Fields Of Athenry and Tommy Peoples, they were running jokes. Looking back on it now I don't think the Tommy Peoples bits completely worked, though I did want to make the point that this is one of my heroes, a man who should be a legendary figure in Ireland, yet most of his own countrypersons have never heard of him. I also wanted a long, slow build-up to the moment I finally catch up with him in Westport and that moment's importance to me.
I don't really understand criticisms of the title. I'd originally planned to call it "The Craic Was 90" after the Christy Moore track but that was a bit too oblique. I'm very aware "craic" isn't a proper word which has been adopted by the Irish tourist industry with a vengeance, yet it is one that was in common usage in Ireland in 2003 (and even more so now) and - given the Wexford barman's quote "there's no such thing as the craic" at the start of the book, it still seems a perfectly legitimate title. The amazing session I eventually discovered at Jim O'The Mill's farmhouse near Thurles on a Thursday night at the very end of the journey seemed to offer perfect symmetry.
My wife is called Val and she was very much a part of the journey and the whole creative process. The book wouldn't have been written without her input and, far from demeaning, the "Mrs Colin" persona was actually her idea as a VERY tongue-in-cheek artefact for her "character" I could bounce off in the narrative. I thought long and hard about using it, anticipating some of the deeply erroneous assumptions that have been made here, but it made me laugh every time I thought about referring to her as "Mrs Colin." It made her laugh too. And it made us both laugh when I started getting accused of sexism for using it. God help Geoff Wallis if she ever meets him.
I went to great pains in the introduction to emphasise this was in no way a serious, analytical examination of Irish music and pointed out that there are plenty of people far better qualified to write such a thing than me - and referenced some of those who have done. Last Night's Fun is an excellent book but it is a very different animal. I wanted to write a book that somehow told the story of the Planxty, De Dannan era but to put it in the context of geography and social environment, I decided it would work best in the form of a travelogue. It helped that the Tony Hawks book and McCarthy's Bar were doing so well, though I hadn't read McCarthy's Bar when I wrote mine. When I write magazine articles I try to avoid using the word "I" but once I'd decided on the format there was no way of avoiding putting myself at the centre of it, though I did take the piss out of myself on a regular basis (the map-reading thing for one, the Liam Clancy bit) to deflect accusations of an ego trip or that I wanted to name-drop my famous friends (of all the accusations about me in this thread about me that's the most ludicrous).
So my book is a rambling story of my journey round Ireland in 2003, the places I went to, the characters I met and some of the music I heard, with a bit of pontification and assorted anecdotes on the way. Everything I write in it happened, though not necessarily in the order it appears. In that sense yes, it is superficial - though I do include the stories of some of the great musicians of the past, including Michael Coleman, Joe Cooley, Micho Russell, Margaret Barry, etc. In reference to Joan's "gateway" comment, it is indeed largely aimed at real people in the real world and its greatest achievement for me was in persuading my dad's next door neighbour to go out and buy every Planxty album he could find. Margaret Barry and the Bothy Band got a few airplays on British radio as a result.
I now live in Ireland for part of the year and I'd write the book very differently now - parts of it do make me squirm - but then Ireland is a very different place now. Oddly enough I believe it has sold surprisingly well and a new updated edition is about to be published with a foreword by Moya Brennan.
Anyway, even I have lost the will to live now. Sorry if you didn't like the book and sorry for such a long reply.
There ends my first and last message board contribution.