13 May 1967
Who’s the most prudish and squeamish about sex: RTÉ for banning ‘Seven Drunken Nights’, The Dubliners for not singing the final two verses, or the narrator for going out and getting drunk every night instead of tending to the marital bed? This isn’t only an Irish trait. Carry On films from the same era, for instance, made great hay from depicting English discomfort around sex, and enabling English audiences to purge that same unease in themselves, through leery banter, boorish guffaws, and male characters just as sexually immature and inept as our drunken Irishman.
‘Seven Drunken Nights’ was The Dubliners’ biggest chart hit, plus it confers on them the outlaw glamour of Ireland’s first banned number one single, but it’s hardly one of their finer moments. After all, it’s a comic song, and Ronnie Drew sings it in the wheedling, affected voice of a cabaret comedian. Okay, the jokey pay-off in each verse is mildly amusing, and at least the joke is on the hapless drunken male; his wife is almost Chaucerian in her earthy appetites and quick wit wasted on her useless husband. Otherwise, The Dubliners here are merely hawking the tired yuks of a bawdy barroom ballad. Carry On Drinking.
