Back at the end of the last century, I would regularly attend a star-studded gig on Sunday evenings with a group of college friends.
The line-up featured Glen Hansard, Mic Christopher, Karl and Dave Odlum, along with a rotating cast of talented singers and musicians. They were rousing, free-wheeling performances.
The venue was rather special too – the top of Grafton Street, by Dunnes Stores, a location later made famous by Hansard in Once, a film that depicted busking as the purest, most honest form of musicianship.
And Hansard is far from the only feted musician to cut his teeth on the capital’s streets – Rodrigo y Gabriela and the Riptide Movement are just some of the acts to hone their sound on Grafton Street and in Temple Bar.
My personal favourites these days are the six-piece multinational trad-folk-world act Mutefish – I can never resist stopping for some tunes when I see them raising a storm outside M&S.And that’s not to mention the myriad street performers who juggle, dance, unicycle and breathe fire, often all at the same time.
But the moves announced this week to sharply curtail the busking on the capital’s streets threatens to radically alter Dublin’s street-performance landscape.
The proposed bylaws will entirely ban street performers from Temple Bar and outside the GPO, limit busking in other areas to between 9am and 11pm, and introduce an annual permit costing €30, with an additional fee of €60 to use amplifiers.
They are being introduced largely at the behest of businesses, apparently, and follow the failure of a voluntary code of practice in recent years to curb overly loud performers attracting too-big crowds.
Mixed quality
Admittedly, not every busker has the talent of a Hansard or Rodrigo y Gabriela. Some of them are appallingly bad, but the same is true of acts who sell out the 3Arena.
Sure, the excruciating pan pipes and the bewildering Asian folk singer are a nuisance to some, but they are as much a part of our streetscape as the shops, bars and cafes that seem to claim dominion over street life in the capital.
There are parallels with street art, another form of artistic expression that can be deemed an irritant but ultimately contributes to the cultural fabric of urban life.
Ultimately, we need to decide if busking really is something that needs to be regulated in such granular fashion. By all means, place restrictions on volume – just as clubs and music venues have decibel limits – but imposing fees on performers and parameters on what they do seems like a heavy-handed approach.
And the measures highlight the lack of appreciation for how busking contributes to the vibrancy of our towns and cities. Certainly there is nothing like the amount or quality of busking in cities such as Paris or Berlin, and while no one can accuse those cities of lacking character, their street life is noticeably less dynamic than Dublin’s.
In response to the measures, a group called Save Busking in Temple Bar is holding a rally and “busk-off” outside Dublin City Council on Monday at 6pm.
But whatever your views on these bylaws, I’d encourage everyone to take a moment to appreciate the performers on our streets and put a few coins in their guitar case.
