‘Corkchester’ and the sound of the ‘Lee beat’ in the city

Walking past Comet Records in Cork in the spring of 1992, a visitor might have paused to admire the striking window display. The city’s only independent record store was plastered with the latest release by an up-and-coming local band. The 12-inch single came in a red sleeve, framing an image of a boy with his hands over his ears. Underneath was the song’s name: Where’s Me Jumper?

The group were Sultans of Ping FC, a scruffy four-piece who, draped in feather boas, leather pants and soccer jerseys, looked like spare parts of several other bands thrown together. Their new song began with a brisk, frisky drum beat, followed by a leering vocal delivering devilishly nonsensical lyrics with the zeal of a street philosopher: “My brother knows Karl Marx/ He met him eating mushrooms in the people’s park…”

Where Me Jumper? and the accompanying album, Casual Sex in the Cineplex, which was released a year later, in February 1993, caused a sensation. The NME declared the Sultans “Cork’s finest exponents of looney tunes”. “Addled genius oozes from their every pore,” agreed Melody Maker. As the praise flowed, Sultans mania heralded the birth of something new and unexpected: a Cork music scene that gave Ireland its version of the hype that had descended on the kindred rainy outposts of Seattle and Manchester a few years earlier.

What a time to be a music fan. What a time to live in Cork. The Sultans, from middle-class Rochestown, were all over the radio. The Frank and Walters, who had grown up in less glitzy Bishopstown, made it to the BBC TV show Top of the Pops. There was a consensus that Cathal Coughlan, from Glounthaune in east Cork and formerly of Microdisney, was among the greatest songwriters of his generation. The only person who doubted this was Coughlan himself, whose latest project, Fatima Mansions, shackled pop melodies to bulldozing industrial rock.

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Suddenly, the British music press was dispatching journalists to Cork and record-company execs were on flights with orders to sign a Cork band, any Cork band. Open the NME and you might find yourself reading about the Liberty, on North Main Street, where they served cans at the bar and used recycled barrels for tables. The phrase “Corkchester” began to be thrown about – to the amusement of some, the horror of others.

“There was definitely a movement. You had a very good scene in Cork at the time. It was a good time with a lot of energy. I don’t think people were aware of it. When you look back at it, you had certain people of a certain age who had a certain opinion,” says the Sultans’ drummer, Morty McCarty, ahead of this weekend’s release of a long-awaited vinyl repressing of Casual Sex and, next spring, a show at Vicar Street in Dublin.

“Things had changed even in terms of emigration. That generation waited a little longer before they left. They were around Cork when they were 23, 24. Previously, they were 18 or 19 and getting the boat to London. The scene was dead before it even got going. It was different. There were a lot good things happening in Cork. And it was cheap to go out – I didn’t have any money. It was 20p for a glass of rasa” – raspberry cordial, a local delicacy – “and £1 to get into a club.”

A music scene is not built on one single alone – not even a classic such as Where’s Me Jumper? Just as successful as the Sultans were The Frank and Walters. Touting a more classic, Beatles-style sound, they created history as the first band from Leeside to appear on Top of the Pops, where they performed their single After All in January 1993.

Arriving at the BBC, they were delighted to discover their dressing room was next door to that of Paul McCartney, who posed for a photograph. Linda McCartney later drew the band aside and said her husband was a huge fan. Perhaps Macca even saw something of himself in the Franks frontman, a fellow bassist named Paul with a mop-top haircut and a gift for Technicolor melodies.

“It was exciting – jeepers, it was very exciting,” says that Paul, Paul Linehan, who continues to front the Franks and is working on material for their next LP. “When we were on Top of the Pops it became a bit overwhelming. We knew the Sultans. It was great that they had success as well. There was no rivalry. Our music was very different. There were a bit more punk. We were more indie pop. We were two different genres. If they had been like us maybe we would have been a bit more competitive. They did their thing and we did ours.”

“They were a number of key elements that happened to merge in early-1990s Cork,” says Paul McDermott, a music documentarian, lecturer and podcaster currently producing a radio show for RTÉ about The Frank and Walters. “The slow emergence from a stifling recession. A new promoter, Shane Fitzsimons, started promoting gigs in the Shelter, on Tuckey Street, and the Village, under Sir Henry’s, on South Main Street. He brought in exciting new bands that were getting written about in the NME and Melody Maker and gave support slots to new local bands. We all drank in the Liberty bar alongside these local bands. To there was no ‘us and them’. There can never be in a small city where everyone knows each other.”

The Franks actually missed the glory days of Corkchester: shortly before the scene took off they moved to London, where they signed to the London-Irish label Setanta. But they will have been aware just how much Cork was changing.

The 1980s had been a disaster for Ireland – but particularly for Cork, whose industrial heart was ripped out with the closure of the Ford autoworks and the Dunlop tyre factory. The city was in danger of turning into Ireland’s rust belt. Almost as bad, in 1987 the hurlers were finally dethroned from the Munster Championship by their ancient rivals Tipperary. The going was grim: Cork was forgetting how to be Cork.

[ ‘It’s pretty much my life savings’: A former punk, a Frank and Walter and a Ford factory musical ]

Fast-forward to early in the new decade, however, and things were improving. The Apple computer company, in Hollyhill, was expanding: other IT firms, such as Logitech and QC Data, were also replacing the old heavy industries, at a new IDA business park on Model Farm Road. In 1990, Teddy McCarthy created history by winning All-Ireland football and hurling medals within a fortnight as Cork claimed a unique double.

The following year Cork City clashed with Bayern Munich in the Uefa Cup at Musgrave Park. Stefan Effenberg, Bayern’s leonine holding midfielder, strutted around, apparently regarding tatty, tumbledown “Muzzer” beneath him. (He should have seen City’s actual home ground, Turner’s Cross.) Then Dave Barry, City’s box-to-box tyro, dropped his shoulder, swerved to the edge of the penalty area and put the ball in the net. Suddenly Effenberg wasn’t strutting any more.

That was just the start of City’s adventures: in 1993, in their swampy temporary home at Bishopstown, they almost knocked Galatasaray out of the European Cup. Having squeaked past City, Galatastary dumped Manchester United out of the competition. Within a few years the British team would claim the trophy – led by their gladiatorial Cork midfielder, Roy Keane.

In the arts, it was all happening too. Sir Henry’s and its Sweat club night had made Cork the capital of Irish clubbing: here was our Irish Detroit, the Celtic Hacienda. The novelist Kevin Barry, then a freelance journalist, was a face around town. In December 1994, the theatre company Corcadorca staged a version of Clockwork Orange in the steam-punk innards of Sir Henry’s; among those in attendance was a young law student named Cillian Murphy.

[ Cillian Murphy: ‘People in Ireland are kinder and more understanding and a bit more copped-on’ ]

Sir Henry’s, across from the old Beamish brewery on South Main Street, had already etched itself into the city’s cultural history – and not just because of its contribution to clubbing. In August 1991, Nirvana and Sonic Youth kicked off their European tour there. Nirvana had filmed the Smells Like Teen Spirit video just three days earlier. Cork and the soon-to-be biggest band in the world were beginning their journey at the same time and place.

“Nirvana were about to go on to about 500 or 600 people in Henry’s. Nobody was on the dance floor,” says John “Haggis” Hegarty of Emperor of Ice Cream, one of a generation of Cork bands – also including LMNO Pelican and Ruby Horse – to emerge in the immediate aftermath of the Sultans and the Franks.

“Just before they came on, Sonic Youth came out and stood in front of me. Their singer, Thurston, turned around and said, ‘Wait until you get a load of these lads.’ It was just so noisy and raucous. When they went off Dave Grohl kicked over the drum kit. Kurt was standing there with his radio pack and his guitar.

“He walked off the side – in the back into Chandras [a nightclub adjoining Sir Henry’s]. Morty from the Sultans was on the door; he said, ‘Come in quick.’ There was a circle around Kurt Cobain. Kurt was on the ground, driving his hand into the guitar, with blood spitting everywhere. Everyone was standing there going, ‘Yeaaah!’ Out front were 600 people getting ready for Sonic Youth. They could hear Kurt, but they couldn’t see him. I remember thinking, holy shit, this guy is plugged in.”

What set the Cork scene apart was that, if rooted in music, it was bigger than it, too. You could go to Sweat at Sir Henry’s at the weekend and spend the next day recovering in the Stygian bowels of the Liberty. And then, on Sunday, maybe you went to Turner’s Cross to stand in the old shed and cheer on Barry, Cork’s answer to Bobby Charlton (although Charlton never won an All-Ireland football medal and so isn’t in the same class).

“I don’t think Dublin had a terrace that had the same culture that the Shed had back then,” says Morty McCarthy, who, when not drumming with the Sultans, published a soccer fanzine, No More Plastic Pitches.

“Obviously, Rovers and Bohs had big support. I don’t remember they particularly had ‘ends’. Cork might have been the first with that terrace culture that was happening in the UK in the 1980s. There were a lot of good times. I remember Torpedo Moscow, when their directors arrived late for the European game. They were all holding Michael Guiney bags. The quality wasn’t great, but the banter was top notch. Cork’s a very funny place. I always say it’s like walking around in an open-air comedy show – you don’t have to pay to get in.”

“Without doubt the humour and surreality set the Franks and Sultans apart, but I think people forget that a lot of that was just surface,” says Paul McDermott. “The songs they wrote were just so good… The ‘Corkchester’ tag was infuriating, because these bands sounded nothing like each other. It was as ridiculous as the ‘Lee Beat’ tag that some music journalists coined during the Arcadia days” – when Microdisney had emerged, alongside the Sultans’ spiritual forerunners Five Go Down to the Sea?

Corkchester, to the extent it ever really existed, ended as quickly as it had manifested. The orgy of jingoism that was Britpop helped kill it off. But the bands were losing interest, too. The Sultans moved on from their comedy punk with two darker albums and, for many years, refused to play their old material. The Franks became bogged down in writer’s block and retreated to Cork to get their heads straight. They finally returned in 1997 with their masterpiece, Grand Parade, but by then the world had moved on.

Or maybe it hadn’t. The Franks have continued to record and tour. Noel Gallagher, who roadied briefly for them pre-Oasis, spoke of his admiration for the band this year. “They were really brilliantly melodically,” he told the Irish Examiner. “They were great.” And in 2020, amid lockdown, Emperor of Ice Cream re-formed and released their fantastic debut, No Sound Ever Dies.

The Sultans have endured, too, thanks to the ubiquity of Where’s Me Jumper?, which has featured on TV shows such as Moone Boy, on Sky, and Young Offenders, on the BBC and RTÉ.

[ Cathal Coughlan: ‘Microdisney ran its course. Let’s just leave it’ ]

“The internet has been especially kind to us. We always had good press in Ireland,” says Morty McCarthy. “We never had issues with the coverage there. In England, with the NME and Melody Maker when Britpop came in, we didn’t get much recognition. When the internet kicked in, it kept the band alive outside the British music press. Our London show sold out four months ago. We could probably have sold twice the amount of tickets. The British music press had too much power in the 1990s. It was difficult over there when they turned against us. But now here we are, 30 years on.”

The 30th-anniversary reissue of Casual Sex in the Cineplex is released on Music on Vinyl. Sultans of Ping play Vicar Street, Dublin, on March 9th, 2024