The Dubliners
Spirit of the Irish
Sanctuary Records - TVSAN003;
67 minutes; 2003 compilation
Every year
seems to bring another Dubliners’ compilation and here we go again with this new
one claiming to be ‘The Ultimate Collection’ and heavily bolstered by a TV
advertising campaign to boot. ‘Ultimate’, of course, can mean ‘final’, but it’s
hard to imagine that songs such as Whiskey in the Jar and Seven
Drunken Nights won’t be unleashed yet again in future compilations. 
For those
who have so far managed to lead sheltered lives, The Dubliners have been
purveying their brand of raucous, rollicking good-time balladeering and
traditional musicianship for the last forty years, occasionally infiltrating
the charts and never really wavering from the path they first laid down in
Dublin’s O’Donoghue’s bar in the early 1960s. Two of the band’s singers (Luke
Kelly and Ciarán Bourke) died young yet, despite other more minor personnel
changes, The Dubliners remain prominent figures on Ireland’s musical landscape.
Anyone fond
of the band will already have most or all of the twenty songs and tunes on this
album and, for those tempted by its contents, it does supply a reasonable
introduction, although Castle Communications’ The Definitive Transatlantic
Collection (collating some of the best of their 1960s recordings) is a far
more preferable alternative.
Be warned,
however, if you’re tempted by Spirit of the Irish, that the sloppily written
liner notes do the band a major disservice. The track listings provide no
details of the relevant personnel (a major lapse considering the difference in
vocal styles between the group’s various singers) and, although their early
recording career is recounted in reasonable detail, their output since 1987 is
noted with desultory brevity. Band members are not identified in any of the
photographs and the liner notes are riddled with factual and typographical
errors and just plain old-fashioned cant, highlighted by the utterly
meaningless assertion that The Dubliners are “Irish Music’s Spiritual
Godfathers”.
This review by Geoff Wallis was originally written for Songlines
magazine – www.songlines.co.uk.
For more information
about Sanctuary Records visit www.sanctuaryrecordsgroup.co.uk.