Martin Bridgeman

Mancini have fashioned a collection of fine music here, a fecund memory vault, a soundtrack to a reverie, dark with a hint of sky, nudging at the fringes of memory.

The songs hit hard, or simmer, layers underpinning the vocal, washes of instruments bringing forth strong lyrics, some breathing, taking their time, some a short sharp shock. And then there’s the title: a seemingly nondescript place that hasn’t the significance of Picadilly Circus, 5th Avenue, Ventura Boulevard or O’Connell Street, but one which has, with subtle resonance for some of us, woven in to the tangled memory of our early lives. Stanford Green has none of that supposed grandeur, but for those who lived near it, it’s a potent as any big city landmark.

There’s a phrase in the Irish language “ar bothirín na smoainte”, which is sometimes translated as “on the back roads of memory”. Something sets you on these roads. As so it was with just a title, a powerful example of the power of words and unintended meaning.

Let me try to explain…how a street name can mine memories.

Nowadays it seems as if we ignore townlands for naming purposes and often defer to naming estates after trees, usually the ones torn down to build the houses, which is deeply ironic. From the 1930s until the 1960s, huge numbers of housing estates were built throughout the Dublin 12 area. With so many streets to name, the planners took names from interesting places.

Many roads in neighbouring Drimnagh were named after Irish mountain ranges. In Greenhills, most took their names from saints and in Kimmage, some from medieval monasteries. Perrystown was the exception locally, but in Crumlin, all roads are named after monastic settlements, and laid out in such a way as to look like Celtic shapes from the air. In Walkinstown, as well as the usual collection of avenues, parks and roads, the network that bounded Cromwellsfort Road and Drimnagh Road was named after composers and musicians. We would later refer to them collectively as ‘The Musical Roads’, and they were built on a former dairy farm around the 1940s. Up until the 1960’s we were at one edge of the city, before the villages of Tallaght and Clondalkin sprawled over and back, combining across the M50, dwarfing cities outside the Pale.

Some of us were supposedly at the posh end of Drimnagh, the Associated Properties being the landlords (as opposed to the Corporation) from whom we we eventually bought our houses, our extra box rooms setting us up for reverse snobbery. That was adult stuff then, and arbitrary housing distinctions held little interest or influence for on us then, and now. We crossed the Drimnagh Road, one side being in Drimnagh, the other in Walkinstown, another arbitrary distinction.
The main boys’ school was built around Drimnagh Castle, an actual and still moated mediaeval castle. The last owners, the Barnewalls were long gone, only the moat and the resident kestrels remaining. We trudged along the Long Mile Road, separated from the girl by the wide road and by their being let out of school earlier than us, a futile attempt to thwart ‘company keeping’.

So much for the facts, what about the non-fiction? Why is it that Stanford Green looms? Why has it caused a flow of memories, although flood might be a more accurate word. I know I said I’d try explain, but it’s almost inexplicable. Once I started on the road, there was almost no stopping.

We had several main roads that acted as boundaries, that we passed along and crossed occasionally, and we shaped our young world by them. Sometimes ,the decision to go somewhere was determined by which gang held court and dominion, or so we thought.

We were kids, strutting, older in our own heads as we played, growing up in our way and developing different reasons to hang around.

Stanford Green was not at the centre of the roads in Walkinstown, but it did feature often in my ways across it, around it, on it or past it. On a recent drive around, it did seem smaller, as many revisited memories often feel to an adult, but as a child, our horizons were smaller. It seemed to be always on my route.

Why did I choose to spend so much time away from my supposed home place? I can’t say for definite. School friends determined, primarily, I suppose. Most seemed to live around the musical roads, but the hormones came later, when a different motivation took over.

Drawn across the Drimnagh Road, school pals congregated for company, learned the art of fitting in and opting out on our own paths. My own road held fewer attractions, perhaps my being set apart as an only child was a thing: younger than most and adopted, something that was blurted out by a kid trying to be cruel. I felt ‘marked’ in that way that means little or nothing now, but I found more friends across the divide.

Taking a drive around the roads once again, the main memories are now mostly a playlist or soundtrack, snatches of songs, ironic, given the road names. Not wanting to slow down for fear of being misunderstood, I didn’t drive along the back lane off Drimnagh road, but I remember it grew from pitted bike hazards to the stories of first fumbles and boasted sexual encounters.

Back in the day, we took our metal bins in and out of our houses. Now, I noticed the larger plastic bins sitting outside houses like sullen teenagers, not wanting to be there but having no choice. We were the generation that was sent out to the road or street, to return for meals or sundown, the flickering light our cue to leave.

Most of my reasons to venture across were musical, in retrospect: friendships were founded and maintained by albums and copies of the New Musical Express, sport not holding any interest. Fledgling bands were formed, rose and fell. But the music pulsed on and on.

John Barry’s legendary James Bond theme roared at me from speakers, as Dr. No beamed out on a sunny Saturday afternoon at the Apollo Cinema on Harty Avenue. It made sense at the time, how music can suggest a mood, put it in your head and do it without seeming to do so. The childhood routine back then was to act out the fight scenes on Hardeback Avenue before filing home along Thomas Moore Road, turning right to Stanford Green for more carry on or left for home, crossing at the bank to get the lights and home to the mountain roads. Looking at that film again many years later, I wondered why Ursula Andress emerging from the water had no effect on me then, but perhaps the sap wasn’t there just yet.

I remember jumping the bonfire in Field Avenue, having wandered around Stanford Green on Halloween. Summer days usually found a gang of us spreadeagled on the grass there, looking down on the sky, clouds upended…Mostly, hours were spent wandering or cycling around the roads.

My first proper scar was made on John McCormack Avenue in a gig accident, back before a gig became the musical variety and was our word then for a home made cart, or fixed axle death trap. I got my second on Bunting Road field, courtesy of a goalpost that doubled as a spear.

I heard a lot of music on Hughes Road North, courtesy of BASF cassette tapes and barely portable tape machines, usually with the BBC top thirty recorded, before Larry Gogan and the pirates got to play what we wanted to hear. We paused until the links finished and hoped they didn’t talk over the outros. We heated up batteries to preserve them when outside and finished most evenings hearing the songs slow down. Off home then to the transistor under the pillow, the ritual for many of us.

I got my first record player on Stanford Green, as it happens, advertised on the board in The Abbey newsagents on Drimnagh Road. It had a handle but that did not make it portable and so, after much struggling home to set it up, I played Horslips and David Essex in quick succession. I wore it and the albums out.

I first heard and instantly hated the New York Dolls on Crotty Avenue. I heard the music of the hippies in smoke filled rooms across the field from Bunting Road in Somerville Avenue. Having heard their strident English racket on the BBC with John Peel, I really listened and was intrigued by the Sex Pistols without loving them, and then truly loving Public Image Limited, all witnessed from just into bandit country on Beechfield Avenue across Cromwellsfort Road. Joy Division startled me, intrigued me and seemed to connect musical lines from bands I had discovered at home, like Tangerine Dream, Mike Oldfield, Can and Faust. And then Steely Dan, a gang splitting choice, their American snark not being the same and not in tune with the studied sneer of the English punks.

The library on Percy French Avenue was my unexpected secret store of musical adventures, offering the chance to hear jazz like Dave Brubeck and classical music, safely tucked in a bag to avoid judgement. Back then in plain sight, the opaque plastic record store bags from Golden Discs were often an invitation to ridicule, usually a matter of intrigue and occasional pride, if ‘cool’ was the prize. Dandelion Market and Stephen’s Green record stores had their own cachet, design being king.

From the blue of the Assumption to the green of St Paul’s, girls uniforms became more and more visible, my own shyness shielded by the imperfect arrogance of the pre-teen and then the unfolding awkwardness as secondary school was endured.

In my mid teens, the most memorable object of my tongue tied affections was a vision in a Holy Faith uniform, a stunning Bowie cut to her hair and an equal shyness that meant that it never went anywhere. Half day Wednesdays were often spent gazing from a shop window in speechless devotion when the bus that passed her school stopped outside. Eye contact was at a premium and avoided equally.

On occasional Friday nights, we moved in herds to the Assumption School discos, leaving room for the Holy Ghost but letting the devil do the moving. Renewal and Abstinence? That would be a no. More often than not, our blood, sweat and tears was thrown in to the dancing, the lurch and the so called thrill of the ‘chase’. Like most, I was as elegant as a dog chasing a car, finding some courage to speak during the songs, mostly about music. Mainstream 70’s music was cheesy even then, glam to punk, to new wave and beyond, while personal tastes blended along pop anthems that still give a little smile. Nowadays they tend to be heard in supermarkets, but the memories transport back to the musical roads and the occasional spark of happier, perhaps more innocent times.

The Police loomed large for a time, Walking On The Moon reminding me of my regular visits across Cromwellsfort Road with my immature love, drawn by the flash of a pair of deep brown eyes under a duffel hood, the knowing smile, still unknown to me…relationships back then were bounded by circumstance but also coincidentally by geography, so fast walks home to meet curfew were often soundtracked as I passed Stanford Green. 

Often, there was a whistle on the road outside my house, reminding me that the late night musician had a later curfew, my lifting of the venetian blind an acknowledgement of another closing day.

Steely Dan, the Man Band, Joni Mitchell, some well-hidden Prog and then the divergences as each movement became fad and subdivided. Always and ever, a song to accompany then, now, as I drive past to evoke, remind, remember, smile and an elicit an occasional wince. Later, more intense music filled the space, Nick Drake, Kate Bush and Japan, the Blue Nile, venturing out to new places with us in tow and in thrall.

These memories floated freely past as the songs on this beautiful EP eased their way in. Once started, they wove themselves in to a disjointed narrative. Each listen found another cross link, a weave of memory, a time, a place, a face, a mirror. Like a conversation where a choice phrase stops the flow, the songs and their powerful lines would provide a pause, a smile, an occasional tear of wistful remembrance.

One song immediately brought a day walking the empty roads on the day of the Pope’s visit to my brown eyed girl: another, an early morning returning from a Debs ball, full of toast, tea and the memory of gentlemanly conduct, meeting the school principal: he in his garb, me in mine, a rented tuxedo: another, in its stark brevity, what might be called today a mic drop. Another, from a road name, a long forgotten encounter with a drunken girlfriend, pleading for forgiveness from Jesus for her state. Mention in another song of a road in Greenhills reminded me of another girlfriend and the network of friends that sundered at the break up (not the first and not the last).

As I sat down to reflect on this fine piece of work, I remember a teacher’s suggestion to ‘marshal your thoughts’. While helpful in an exam context, perhaps not so much here as I waded happily through wave after wave of reminiscence. To coin a phrase, I could go on. The music did the heavy lifting, I had to gather the memories and moments and make some sense of them.

This EP is a tribute to determined, hard work: to polish and to refining, the impulse to shine, but not too much: to embrace the silences, to leave them do the work and decide to leave things be. Here’s to ‘less is more’, letting the listener fill in the blanks, to letting the songs do the talking and to leaving conclusions to others. Any more discussion on the lyrics and music risks architectural dancing. To summarise (eventually), you must listen to this and their future music. While not deliberate acts of memory, they have in, their quiet power, a way of making you think, as good art should, without stating the obvious, pointing to a misty place where you need to get to, to feel again what was long submerged.

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https://mancini1.bandcamp.com/album/ghosts-of-stanford-green-ep