THE DEAD FRIENDS

DUNMANWAY

The party happened in a second floor bedsit in Dunmanway, West Cork, above a chipper on Castle Street, on a Friday night in October 1993, getting on for halloween but not quite.  This was four years since the Berlin Wall & the concurrent outbreak of hope all over Europe that led to a record vote for the parliamentary left in ireland, 30 seats for Dick Spring's labour – the red tide they called it in the mainstream media, believe it or not. It was four years after the Stone Roses eponymously titled first album had saved the pride of rock and roll & caused fifty billion orgasms across the world, four years since the 'second summer of love' brought on by house music, ecstasy pills & a generation of new age rave rebels had revolutionising youth culture from below & for the better. People my age – we still think of those few years of creative revolt as the Arcadia of our early lives. When we meet we can spend hours talking over each other about the 140 bpm music, the dayglo fashion, the three-day dancing jags, the overall exuberance we felt when sneaking out our windows in the middle of the night to meet our fellow-fugitive friends and cadge a lift to the illegal rave on Sherkin Island or the all-night-out-of-yer-tree-in-bits-in-the-morning xperience of Sir Henry's in Cork or The Asylum in Dublin – one club that definitely lived up to its name. Dancing in field or barn or warehouse or roofless big house alongside hundreds maybe thousands positively out of the gee like you, to be honest it felt like the young & untethered had taken over the world, & sure maybe we had, a little bit.

Yet when you switched on the TV – although to be fair none of us cared much for TV – it was Archbishop Childfuck, Jim'll Fake It, & Charlie Haughey's wardrobe all the way – the old world was shook but was very very far indeed from yet releasing its boney grip upon the youth.

It was barely a year since the decriminalisation of both suicide & homosexuality in Ireland. In January 1992 you could have been arrested & charged, three weeks after you had killed yourself, for French kissing a member of the same outward sex. It was like our own day so, like all time periods to some degree I guess, an era of absurd & troubling contradictions out there in the public world, of difficult distinctions between real & fake, lie & truth in the so-called main evening news, of shocks to the system & of the system double-shocking back. Walls were falling in Berlin, but bombs were falling in Baghdad. And both things, apparently, were happening for freedom's sake. It was a maze of time in which it was easy to get lost & never again be found if you ever tried or were ever forced to travel through it alone as so many were. We had a country full of battered wives, abused children, tens of thousands of lonely depressives crying to themselves, themselves alone, as unwell as they were untreated. It was a crazy time like any other crazy time, when you needed friends to confide in, friends to get by & get through & get out with – it was then a lucky time, a lucky time for me.

Five to one, baby
One in five
No one here gets out alive, now
You get yours, baby
I'll get mine
Gonna make it, baby
If we try

There were five us at the gathering in the little gaff above the chipper, the bedsit. The host & tenant's name was Timmy. The others were Ritchie, The Orange, Dan McCarthy & myself. We were all aged between 18 & 21. I was 18. We'd known each other all our lives & started hanging out in our teens, part of a larger group of non-conforming young people who made up the alternative youth culture of the town & townlands. It wasn't like in Cork or Dublin where there was one tribe each for ravers, punks, cureheads, crusties, ska-heads...... & they all had separate hangouts. In a small town all the subcultures hung-out together, protected each other. We weren't rivals, but allies against what we called 'the straights' – a term which didn't have any sexual orientation overtones for us, but referred to all those who lived rigidly, in a straight line, without any craic or spontaneity or independence of spirit & mind. Out of those there that night, Ritchie & The Orange were ravers, Dan McCarthy & Timmy were...well i suppose you'd call them late mods, I was a Curehead – more about that later on.