In a flash of patriotism caused by my illness (If you look at the dates, you'll see that it's one of those diseases that works retrogressively though time. Eventually, the disease will de-age me and turn me into my father's sperm. If morbid had an antonym, I'd be using it about now.), I’ve decided to write a brief introduction to Irish folk music. When your plane lands amid the Celtic mists of the Emerald Isle, you’ll be well prepared for the rich, mentally ill, drinking culture of God’s own country.
A song about an axe-wielding pussy hound, who seems to be getting drunker as the song progresses. Having only procured a kiss from the object of his courtship, he grows angry and sexually frustrated, seeing sex everywhere across the grimy city. Eventually, he makes a pathetic threat to chop the whole town down with his axe (the one he’s yet to make).
Man goes on a bender from Galway to Dublin (which had three syllables back then). He gets so inebriated he ends up dancing with pigs on a boat to Liverpool.
A song about a man who witnessed the epic bravery of the 1916 Rising. Alas, he himself is a conversational bore and spends half the song talking about the weather.
Brendan Behan’s elongated, sneaky plea to be moved from the men’s to the women’s prison. If it weren’t for his writing skills, this would look as lame as those ‘Cover me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians’ t-shirt.
A creepy song about an old man who can’t stop thinking about a 16-year-old girl and implores her to enter his dreams (where nobody will ever catch them together).
You can knock Catholicism all you like, but if Patrick Kavanagh’s conscience hadn’t forbade him from masturbating, he would never have written this poem.
Set in the same red-light district as the hallucinogenic Circe chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, this irreverent ditty descends from trying to procure a prostitute to unbuckling one’s pants for Queen Victoria. Joyce would have been proud of such a garbled psychedelic misadventure.
A man’s gun malfunctions at the crucial moment. His long-term lover betrays him for another man. Need I say more?
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