12 September 1991
“Will Galway bate Mayo? / Not if they have Willie Joe!” I’ll say straight away that, even though I’m from outside Dublin and therefore technically a culchie, this clearly isn’t a song for me, if only because no Kerry person has ever fretted about beating Mayo.
Giving a voice to the west of Ireland experience, and getting Irish emigrants abroad sobbing with nostalgia into their bubbly Guinness, may well be a noble vocation. Doing it over a landfill-Madchester drumbeat, Galway busker mandolin-ing and dumb rock riffing, less so. Add a mid-section of ‘The West’s Awake’ and a literal diddly-aye coda, and now you just have rural pub rock played by stage culchies. Is this what Willie Joe Padden shed blood for?
