21 November 1999
Should Dublin people be barred from buying records, and even from making them? It’s all very well that every Dublin person loves the quintessentially stage Dub wit of Dustin, so much so that every native Dubliner household within the Pale owns a copy of his greatest hits: fact. Putting yet another Dustin single at the top of our national charts, though, is just the Dubs making a show of themselves, the same way they love staging huge Garth Brooks concerts in Croke Park, which is in Dublin.
Anyway, I don’t recall ’32 Counties’. As per my standard procedure, I will therefore listen to it for the first time LIVE as I write this. Going by the title, I expect it’s an outlash of Dublin insecurity at the rest of Ireland, combined with the classic Dustin humour of singing badly.
[One listen later]
Well, I suppose the stage Irish trad music pubs of Temple Bar are part of Dublin too. Dustin’s ’32 Counties’ is the ersatz diddly-eye sonic wallpaper of Friday night in the Oliver St John Gogarty and the Temple Bar, with Baz, Daz and Gaz from Essex roaring along drunkenly on their stag do while a tour-busload of bewildered middle-aged Americans try gamely to get with the famous Dublin “craic”. Not being from Dublin, I wonder yet again at the musical tastes of our metropolitan caste, who will later send Dustin to Eurovision to represent all of us, not just themselves. Dubs are weird.
