A New Form of Beauty: Irish Postpunk and the Liberalization of Ireland, 1977–1991

Abstract

A New Form of Beauty: Irish Postpunk and the Liberalization of Ireland, 1977–1991 Kenneth L. Shonk (bio) the dark space festival was held on February 16–17, 1979, at the Project Arts Centre in the Temple Bar section of central Dublin.1 The multimedia event featured film, artwork, a striptease act, and live performances from a number of musical groups that eschewed tropes of rock and punk in favor of a new sound and aesthetic.2 The festival was to be headlined by John Lydon’s post–Sex Pistols group PiL (Public Image Limited) and English avant-garde troupe Throbbing Gristle. For reasons unknown the featured acts never made it to Ireland for the event. Nonetheless, Irish bands were able to fill in for the missing headliners, and those that did perform included the Virgin Prunes, the Modern Heirs, Berlin, the Atrix, Phantom Orchestra, Rocky de Valera and the Gravediggers, U2, and the New Versions.3 Noted British DJ John Peel was in attendance, and his presence—according to Irish Times journalist Joe Breen—may have “prompted the energetic performances [of the bands] and it is reasonable to assume he was [End Page 81] accordingly impressed.”4 Days before the event, festival organizer and center director Jim Sheridan said, “We think of it as a lovely hippy concept. . . . We think it’s gonna be total bleedin’ anarchy.”5 The event also included food. Tickets for the festival were £6—later reduced to £4 after the headliners dropped out— and could be purchased at various sites in Dublin, including upscale Grafton Street retailer Brown Thomas. Film, art, and food aside, the significance of this festival lay in the coalescing of groups central to a burgeoning Irish postpunk scene, where bands played a style of music that was a “particular kind of art rock” performed by “bohemian non-conformists” who wrote songs that “grappled with classic existentialist quandaries: the struggle and agony of having a ‘self’; love versus isolation; the absurdity of existence; the human capacity for perversity and spite; the perennial ‘suicide, why the hell not?’”6 More than a collection of transgressive and loud “new wave,” the Dark Space Festival was a moment of anarchic liberalization of Ireland—an early marker of a willingness by some in Ireland to shrug off the nation’s “culture of containment.” The Dark Space Festival marked a key watershed in not only the history of Irish popular music but also in Ireland’s social and cultural liberalization. That a youthful musical avant-garde was on display for a mere £4 speaks to an emergent and accessible space for a new musical aesthetic. The moment was not finite, however, as some of the bands that played the Dark Space Festival were featured in A Sense of Ireland, a government-sponsored showcase of Irishness where the cutting edge was situated alongside traditional arts. In short order, this localized music scene was elevated to a position where transgressive youth were part of the outward-facing Irish visage, marking a structural acceptance and promotion of countercultural alterity. The existence of an Irish variant of postpunk parallel to “scenes” in England and the United States presents an opportunity to examine a cultural moment when Irish musicians offered an explicit and thoughtful reaction to contemporary Ireland. The aesthetic of these bands—such as those featured at the Dark Space Festival and in A Sense of Ireland—conveyed a visual and aural transgression that was intent on identifying and rejecting the conservative elements [End Page 82] of Ireland’s culture of containment, in turn marking a particular moment in our growing understanding of Ireland’s transformation from “one of the most conservative places in Europe” to its “more socially liberal” status.7 The Dark Space Festival—and Irish postpunk writ large—shares some lineage with other Irish cultural watersheds, for it existed because of intrinsic and extrinsic forces rooted in Ireland’s history. Societal and demographic shifts in the 1960s and 1970s helped foster and define the Irish postpunk moment, and its form and function were undoubtedly Irish but not beholden to traditional Gaelic cultural tropes: there were little to no flourishes of Celtic themes or instrumentation, nor were there...