800 Voices
Timely rerelease of almost-lost Irish classic.
Niall Stokes, 31 Mar 2010
800 Voices was originally released last year to very positive reviews (including by Jackie Hayden in Hot Press), but little commercial action. It’s now been picked up by Dara Records and re-released – an inspired move, because the album was in danger of becoming one of the lost classics of contemporary Irish music. Written and performed by a man in his sixties, who sounds not dissimilar to Christy Hennessy at times, you could say that it is terminally unhip, the kind of thing that people who think they know it all dislike without ever listening to. Well fuck ‘em. I can imagine the very different, more contemporary sounding record it might have been, in terms of the arrangements and production but no matter: this is a great record that tells an extraordinary story and does so with heart-stopping honesty and emotion.
Danny Ellis was sent to Artane industrial school at the age of five. He spent eleven years there, and the songs on this album draw on that experience in rich colours and finely wrought detail. Terrible things happened in Artane, but that is not the immediate focus of this record. Because while he was there, in music Danny Ellis discovered the thing that enabled him to survive the loneliness, the poverty, the grief and the brutality of the impossibly harsh regime imposed by the Christian Brothers.
There are funny songs that evoke the madness of the place and time like ‘The Treasure of The Sons’, a brilliant sustained lyrical riff about the cheapjack toys that were borrowed, stolen and bartered among the boys; and, even better, the fantastically moving ‘Who Trew Da Boot’?’, which is up there with the great Pogues and Christy Moore yarns put to music: the second time I listened to it, the astonishing accuracy of the picture it painted had me in tears of both laughter and devastation.
‘Kelly’s Gone Missin’’ is about a boy who made good his escape, and the alarums it sets off in what was a kind of prison, as the Brothers “gathered a posse/ and off they went runnin’”. ‘Excuses’ captures perfectly the daft stuff dredged up by boys in fear of the lash, and their snarling dismissal by the Brothers. But in it, also, is a poignant evocation of the inner turmoil that speaks in ways that a child cannot control: ““There’s always another/ Is that what you gave/ To your father and mother/ Excuses/ As you empty your bladder/ At night in the bed/ And you lie in the wet of/ Excuses.”
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