Was it for this that Butch Moore went walking the streets in the rain? For this that Linda Martin got to terminal 3 just in time? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, apparently. It’s with Shay Healy in the grave.
So one might have gathered from the wailing and gnashing of teeth in some quarters after Bambie Thug fairly and squarely won the right to represent Ireland at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, in Malmö. “What has become of our country?” asked some distressed souls. Memes contrasted the nonbinary electro-goth singer (unfavourably, obviously) with such titans of the past as Dana and Johnny Logan.
Many complaints ran along well-trodden lines. “That’s not a song,” they wrote, reprising a well-worn line of 1970s dads expectorating their digestives over their cardigans as David Bowie snogged Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops. “Rock’n’Roll Kids. That was a song. Why don’t they write songs any more?”
“How I long for a return to the simpler, halcyon days of snowdrops and daffodils,” sighed a letter-writer to this newspaper.
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Harmless stuff, but others had a nastier tinge. “Another nail in the coffin of Irish culture,” wrote someone who was clearly unaware that the coffin is partly constructed of It’s Nice to Be in Love Again by The Swarbriggs Plus Two (1977, 119 points, third place).
If you haven’t seen or heard it, Doomsday Blue is a catchy enough loud-quiet-loud mash-up delivered with some brio by the amiable and engaging Mx Thug. By the admittedly limited standards of recent Irish Eurovision entries, it’s a keeper. The dancing, lighting and staging on last week’s extraordinarily overextended Eurosong show – six songs over two hours! – were impressive, given that this was a Late Late production. With a couple of months’ polishing it should be possible to turn it into something quite Eurocredible by the time the contest rolls around, in May. Even on its current limited budget, it puts its five pallid competitors to shame. Had it not won, yet another RTÉ inquiry would have been required.
Yet one can’t help feeling a twinge of regret that the sort of makeup-caked, overcostumed, gender-subverting shouty racket that once defined pop’s provocative avant-garde now sits so happily within the light-entertainment mainstream. A clip on RTÉ’s rather excellent video archive features a 1979 Late Late Show performance from the Virgin Prunes during a discussion about Pope John Paul II’s impending visit to Ireland. There is nothing in Bambie Thug’s performance last week that would have seemed out of place alongside the antics of Gavin Friday, Guggi and company 45 years ago.
The difference, of course, is that the Prunes, sadly, never got to compete in Eurovision. (Ireland’s entry in 1979 was Happy Man, by the hairy-chested belter Cathal Dunne. He came fifth.) If you’ve been paying any attention to the contest’s mutations over the years, you’ll be aware that, from Lordi to Conchita Wurst, camp and absurdist spectacle have come to dominate. At this stage it’s even all become so codified they made a Will Ferrell movie about it.
So the negative reaction to Doomsday Blue might seem quite sweet, were it not for the fact that some of the attacks come from a much nastier place. These people have not led sheltered lives protected from the outrages of transgressive pop. Instead they’re searching for evidence to promote a narrative that “their” country is being taken from them. Unlike Bambie Thug, this is something quite new.
Some observers argue that a reason the extreme right has failed so far to gain much traction in Ireland is because political nostalgia doesn’t play well here. No sane person wants to make Ireland great again, or take back control; we know what the past was like, and most people have no desire to go back there.
That’s a problem for home-grown ethnonationalists, who are left with a ragbag of noxious cliches, most of them imported from the English far right. So a witchy nonbinary performer offers, they think, an opportunity. Where their American and British equivalents dream of Jim Crow or imperial glory, they offer Maxi and Red Hurley. It seems a long shot. But let’s get behind Bambie Thug just in case.
