GIVE ME A BREAK:'IT'S A PRETTY long midlife crisis – a pretty public one as well." That's my eldest talking.
“Stop while you’re behind, Dad. You’re calling out for help with a guitar and a strong bass line and a black bra-patch over one eye.” That’s my middle child.
We've been watching Mr Holmquist's latest contribution on YouTube. It's the closest my daughters come to seeing their Dad and his band in public performance, since he only plays in pubs where they don't allow children. My youngest has managed to see the band in his role as rehearsal roadie, but when he saw Baby Don't You Worry About a Thingon YouTube he doubled over laughing.
Mr Holmquist defends his music video, pointing out that it was, after all, shot by Tim Fleming, cinematographer on Once and that it stars two up-and-coming young actors from Seacht, the Irish-language drama – Aoife nic Ardghail and Diarmaid Murtagh. Everybody gave their time and talents free of charge, which is ideally what YouTube is all about.
Since it was launched last Thursday Baby Don't You Worry About a Thingby Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers has had 129 hits (friends and family, we reckon), while Rocky Balboa has had something like 12 million.
As I write on Sunday morning, Mr Holmquist is asleep on the sofa, his joints aching after last night’s gig in town. (I think he needs one of those joint-care supplements advertised for dogs and humans who listen to weekend radio.) A midlife crisis can be very tiring, especially when it started at the age of 20.
The Gravediggers have been going for 32 years, longer than I’ve been Mrs Rocky De Valera, which brings me to my next point. When you commit yourself to a band as loyal as the Gravediggers are to one another, you marry the band. When I became Mrs De Valera, I didn’t realise that my groom was already married to the band and that I would forever be married to a bigamist. But I’m starting to get it now, 25 years later. I imagine that Ali Hewson has long been aware of the same phenomenon.
Well, we haven't got a yacht, or tax-exile status in Amsterdam or incredible apartments in New York or houses in the south of France, but we do have – how do I put this? Laughter, I suppose, is why we put up with him. Mr Holmquist makes us laugh here in the De Valera household and you can't put a price on that. I also think – despite the band widow resentments that arise from having a husband with far better things to do on a Saturday night than massage my feet – that Baby Don't You Worry About a Thingis romantic and sexy and sweet and gives the reassuring message that so many of us want to hear right now, which is that someone who loves us is telling us not to worry about a thing because it'll be all right. Eventually. Perhaps. Maybe.
That said, when you are married to an artist or performer – musician, poet, novelist, actor, and so on – you have to accept that there is a big part of them that you will never know, the ego that comes alive in performance. That’s the part that’s married to the band, or married to the audience, or married to the reader even. You readers share intimacies with me by e-mail that I bet you don’t share with anyone but your best friends and maybe not even them, and that’s good, just as I talk to you readers in a way that I can’t articulate over coffee with my best friends because writing is the best way I know to communicate.
We all need spaces in our lives for self-expression. And that’s what creative people do – they create spaces where they risk ridicule by being themselves, thereby giving others permission to let go and be themselves or even to reflect. To risk being an idiot – as Mr Holmquist does on a daily basis due to his incapacity in many areas such as cooking and recycling to name two, and as Mrs De Valera risks every Sunday morning when she sits down to write this column in the midst of domestic chaos because she is congenitally disorganised – is to have an ego certainly, but also to be humble and human. When you put yourself out there, some people are going to think you’re a loser (I’m just vain enough to occasionally read what bloggers have said about my columns on Salon.com and Jezebel.com), but there are others who are going to be cheered by the fact that somebody somewhere somehow managed to channel exactly what they were thinking in a world turned upside down.
As I say to my eldest, who is in the pre-Leaving phase of agonising over a career choice, sometimes life isn’t about a career. It’s about turning up and putting yourself out there and giving it your best shot, even though you risk derision and will never own a yacht on the proceeds. You give a little bit of yourself away and hope that something sweet will come flying back in your direction. You will eventually find your place in the world. Life isn’t predictable and it’s not about point-scoring and investments, as those who have played by the economic rules for the past 25 years surely know by now. By being yourself, at least you have your self intact at the end of it, even at the cost of occasionally looking like an idiot. As in, did I really just write that? And what will you think?
kholmquist@irishtimes.com
