6 September 1996
Remember the ’00s TV ad where the ardent Galway supporter drives around to every record shop buying up copies of their county’s techno-banger single? Not that I’m suggesting some ride-or-die Wexford stalwart in 1996, hopped up on their long-awaited All Ireland victory, cleaned out M.J. Doran’s in Gorey of cassettes like the one in the picture above, thereby gaming the national singles chart. It’s just that, county loyalties and rivalries being what they are, it shouldn’t be a surprise that this is only our first-ever GAA-related Irish number one.
If you weren’t familiar with this 1996 record or its purple-and-gold gang colours, you might assume it was from Galway too, given how wild swans are most famously associated with the Coole Park estate of Lady Gregory that inspired W.B. Yeats’ poem about them. Also on a Galway theme, the success of The Saw Doctors and their brand of ’90s stage culchie pub-rock is probably relevant here too. (As usual at this stage, I point out that I am technically a culchie, though in real terms a townie.)
The lead Wild Swan was Brendan Wade, singer of ’80s rock band Cry Before Dawn who were closer in sound to War-era U2, so this EP was certainly a change in style. Do I like either of those styles? Well, no. ‘Dancing At The Crossroads’, the main airplay hit on this EP, is contrived trad-folk diddly-eye nostalgia with fiddle, accordion and mandolin, plus stage-elderly lyrics about poitín and porter and jigs and reels and clergy and JFK, all of which would sound more at home on Nationwide than Top Of The Pops. Give me Galway techno any day.
