View from the Green Room: Recalling the Dubliners
Seven Drunken Nights: The Story of The Dubliners was performed at Theatre Royal on The Mall in Waterford city.
It’s a sepia night of nostalgia for a full house on the Mall that certainly enjoyed the craic that the original Dubliners forged for several decades with an audience that never tired of them.
The Seven Drunken Nights Tour works hard at entertaining and the bar room set is slick and well thought out.
Side flats of pub memorabilia and a mock-up bar complete with counter, stools, tables and chairs fill the stage and create the impression that a Donoghue’s Bar session is in… well… session.
Footage of Dublin in the somewhat rarer auld times floods across the rear screen and it all goes to create a feeling of nostalgia for what’s lost and gone.
It’s all butties and the craic, and the grinding poverty of the fifties when some 700,000 Paddies and Patricias fled Dev’s idyllic Irish Isle in search of a better life is only touched on in ballads like McAlpine’s Fusiliers.
The band, who are all talented musicians and fine singers, work really hard at engaging the audience and have the house singing, clapping and swaying along from the get go.
Much of the narration falls to 76-year-old Ged Graham, as well as playing five string banjo/guitar and featuring strong vocals. And wasn’t he just the cat with the cream when he introduced us all to his grandson Adam Evans (guitar/vocals), who, Ged boasts to the young ladies in the audience, is “still single and unattached”.
Ged told the story of the Dubliners with an affection that was as sincere as a friend’s love. All of the original members – Ronnie Drew, Luke Kelly, John Sheehan, Ciarán Bourke and Barney McKenna – are warmly remembered and their stories told.
Replacements for the band – Jim McCann, Seán Cannon, Eamonn Campbell, Paddy Reilly, Patsy Watchorn, Gerry O'Connor, amongst others.
Phil Coulter’s period with the band – he produced four albums and wrote a number of major songs that expanded the band’s repertoire – is also recalled.
The group play all the Dubliner hits: McAlpine’s Fusiliers, Black Velvet Band, Maids When You’re Young, Monto, Dirty Old Town, The Town I Love So Well, Wild Rover etc.
At one stage, the group released an album a year with Revolution the best of them.
“Seven Drunken Nights” reached No. 6 in the UK charts and was banned in Ireland. RTÉ placed an unofficial ban on their music from 1967 to 1971 at the very time when the band's popularity began to spread across mainland Europe and the United States after they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.
The Dubliners were raucous and larger than life and attracted a following that loved Irish ballads. They courted notoriety by appearing on stage with crates of large bottles to hand but, in reality, it was never more than a publicity gimmick. The Dubliners were talented musicians and singers and brilliant raconteurs.
The Seven Drunken Nights Tour is slick, professional and entertaining and the audience stood and cheered at the end of a good value night.
