10 May 1990
Collective mania; divisive debate; World Cup dominating the front and back pages; everyone hating Eamon Dunphy… yes, the Saipan affair in 2002 was an incredible Irish socio-cultural experience. We’ll get to that here in due course, but for now we can marvel at how Saipan really was such an uncanny negative image of Ireland’s original World Cup-based mass hysteria: Italia ’90.
I loved the 1990 World Cup (a football tournament in Italy) but I hated Italia ’90 (a pop-cultural event in Ireland). It’s not that I was a football purist or a public killjoy, but I didn’t react well to everybody now bandwagoning a cheaper mainstream version of the thing I already loved, which I suppose is as good a foundation as any for writing about music. In fact, I could describe my experience of Italia ’90 as like being stuck in an Ireland-sized open-air Ed Sheeran concert where he sings a sickly, insipid cover of an obscure song by an obscure artist I love—’The Way It Is’ by Nicole Atkins, say—for the first time and his entire nation of fans join in and love “their” “new” “Ed Sheeran song”, oblivious to the original, leaving me raging at the injustice of it all. (In my nightmarish analogy, Ed doesn’t even release his version, so Nicole Atkins gets no benefit from it.) Revisiting Italia ’90 is revisiting a time when I was young, awkward and angry, but thankfully I’m over that now.
First out of the traps in the Italia ’90 chart cash-in sweepstakes was sports charity fundraiser ‘Give It A Lash Jack’, which I recall was a song selected by listeners to Gay Byrne’s radio show. Gay Byrne’s radio show wasn’t a pop music radio show, I hasten to add, so the level of expertise here was questionable. For all its gimcrack crumminess and performative Dubbalin eejitry (“Repubbalic of Ireland!”) that title genuinely stuck as a meme that summer. The song itself, though, is already struggling badly after the first chorus; among its weirder lyrics are that Packie Bonner should take up knitting and that we should stuff and mount the bodies of the Irish players. The longer this song goes on, the more Liam Harrison sounds like a Moore Street Norman Bates.
Nowadays ‘Give It A Lash Jack’ has its place in posterity assured by being at the start of the Italia ’90 sequence of Reeling In The Years: a fair indication of the national mood at the time but no reflection of any quality as a pop music record, or even any adequacy. I’d sooner sit though the Ireland – Egypt match again.
