15 November 1996
Ha ha ha! This is gas, right, because Dustin – get this – is a terrible singer! And he’s making a record! So it’s going to be this really terrible record, which is gas, right? Kinda like if a really terrible chef opened a restaurant and all the food was terrible, but you’d pay for the food and eat it anyway and that would be gas too, right? And the actual singer is on it too so that’s even gasser!
Look, I know that as a mere non-Dubliner I can’t possibly appreciate the sophisticated humour of the stage Dub idiom of this record and its peers like Mrs Brown’s Boys, Biddy Mulligan The Pride Of The Coombe, and Dublin taxi drivers. Bob Geldof was at this stage the employer of Dustin’s associates Zig and Zag, so there may have been some strategic corporate baksheesh going on here, but that could just be my bitter, humourless beyond-the-Pale mind at work. Also, far be it from me to give out about the Dublin meeja but Dustin was by now appearing on RTE news interviews, the Toy Show and probably also a spell as the independent observer from Stokes Kennedy Crowley: the full apparatus of the state media hegemony at flex. Anyway, we’re now all set for a good 12-year run-in to the world-conquering magnum opus of stage Dublinia, ‘Irelande Douze Points’. Ha ha ha!
