As we
arrive around 11 pm there is still some daylight in Moville. A yellow-grey
evening sky hangs above the town which is located on a small hill dropping away
to the sea. In the second half of the 19th century steamships of the British
shipping company Anchor Line were leaving from here, carrying thousands of emigrants into an uncertain future.
In 1981 Bob Dylan recorded his album Shot
of Love. In the same year seven IRA men hijacked a pilot boat with its
pilot at Moville harbour, weighed it with tons of explosives and pulled out to
the Nellie M, a trading vessel worth
a million with a cargo of coal of the same value on it that waited for the
flood to exit the Lough. They forced the crew into the lifeboats and planted
the times explosives in the engine room. It is reported that the explosion and
the fires could be seen from many miles around.
After we stowe
our instruments and stuff at the house of our landlady Catherine, we walk back onto
the street, only some minutes away from the darkness gaining hold over the
Lough. From where we are it looks like the Foyle Street is disappearing into
the sea. We decide to go to the Rosatos,
which is only two corners away. The pub’s crowded and the music duo we squeeze
past is playing It’s All Over Now, Baby
Blue. We order two pints of Guinness and sip by sip we deeply enjoy the
pleasant feeling of arrival.
Nearby stands Gerry McLaughlin, the organizer of the festival who invited us to
Moville. Beside him stands Brendan who came from Northern Ireland across the
Lough on his sailing ship and who’s here for the sixth time now. He says there
are rumors that Dylan himself and in person would emerge at his own festival
this year. Somebody touches my shoulder and as I turn around a thin elderly man
grabs my hand urgently, asking “Do you love Bob Dylan? Is there love in your
heart for him?” Looking straight into my eyes his look hitches with mine. ‘I
must be in a dream’, I think in spite of myself. What is the reply to such a
question? The duo takes a break. A great sturdy red-faced
man with white hair in his 70s walks by me and cuts his way through the crowd
to the small stage at the fireplace. Suddenly all eyes are on him. The thin man
releases my hand. As he stands there, with his arms calmly by his side, the
white-haired man instantly begins to sing Danny
Boy, maybe the best known Irish song in general. Everybody in the room stands
up with their glasses in their hands and sings, a fervent choir of different
female and male voices. The song is about farewell and recurrence, a reminder
of the times of the great famines, borrowing the melody from the Northern Irish
anthem A Londonderry Air. Somebody
close behind me says “You know who that is? That’s John Hume!”
In a
nationwide survey in 2010 the Irish people voted John Hume as Ireland’s
greatest person. The politician from Northern Ireland who was born in Derry won
the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 alongside the leader of the Ulster Unionist
Party, David Trimble. For many years he was working relentlessly on inducing
Sinn Féin and the IRA to armistice negotiations. The Good Friday Agreement from
1998 bears his signature. So, that was John Hume. Sitting in this small pub on
Inishowen during a Dylan festival, where maybe Dylan himself was present,
standing in a corner like many a time disguised, with a wig under his hood.
After he finishes a second song people are reverently cleaning the place for
him and Hume makes his way back to his table where a glass of red wine await
him. The two musicians grab their instruments ready to start the next Dylan
song.
“John is living in Moville now”, says McLaughlin afterwards. “He told me a great story about how, when Martin McGuinness, now Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, first joined the IRA, Martin's mother asked John to come over and talk him out of it. They both grew up in Derry. He said he went over but he couldn't talk him out of it. ‘You did eventually, John. You did eventually’” McLaughlin says he has replied. “It reminds me of the old James Cagney movie Angels With Dirty Faces”, he says, “where two young lads from New York who grew up together went in different directions, one to be a hoodlum who went to The Chair and one to be a priest but who still remained in touch. I think that would make a great movie with the two guys brought up in Derry going in different directions, one to violence and one to peace, ending up on the same side in the end”.
The Duo is
playing My Back Pages now. There’s an
oil painting hanging right behind Hume showing a fishing boat out on the sea.
On the left wall there are several more paintings hanging in the scattered
light, painted by the same brush in the same dark faint colors. They are impressive
and seem like they’ve been hanging a lifetime on those walls. At the bar I
inquire about the painter and learn that it is a certain Cathal Cavanagh. On
most of the paintings he painted himself as an old man, sometimes together with
his friends, portrayed as old men likewise, sitting at a table each one with a
glass of beer in front of them and a glance that doesn’t seem backward-looking,
somehow happy about the fact they arrived at their old age where one doesn’t
have to deal with plans, dreams and bygone loves anymore. A guest from Scotland
who attends the festival each year and who’s familiar with the local contexts
says that Cavanagh shows up at the pub each night right before closing time.
Later on that evening the time has come. A man in his thirties drops in. The
Scotsman gives me a nod and it looks like Cavanagh had made a stop at several
pubs before. He leans to the musicians and says “Can you play Oh Sister?”. Soon after he sits at a
table, right under the painting that shows him as an old man, wrapped in
thoughts.
On the next
morning we sit in the Victorian living room of our hostess, looking through the
set list and the arrangements. She says that in the last years there was more
going on at the festival, that it is due to the economic situation maybe, that
less people have come.
The word is that the Stuck Inside of
Moville on Inishowen at the edge of the old world is the biggest festival
where Dylan’s music is played. Only the annual Dylan-Fest in Hibbing, Minnesota
is bigger. It is held in the town where Dylan grew up and formed his first
electric band The Golden Chords at
high school, only a few years before he arrived in New York City on a bitterly
cold snowy winter’s day. Since seven years now Dylan’s music is being played by locals and international
musicians for four days in a row in Moville’s streets, pubs and hotels. But,
for the entire world, why Moville? Why Bob Dylan?
“I came to Moville in 2002”, says Gerry McLaughlin, who lived in London,
Hamburg, Paris and Amsterdam before. “I noticed that there were a lot of Dylan
fans in the town and Dylan got played a lot on jukeboxes and by a lot of the
acts that played around Moville.” It came out that the ground was prepared by a
now retired teacher called ‘Paddy the Shoe’ who himself performs at the
festival now. His real name is Paddy
McLaughlin and as a great admirer of Bob Dylan, having seen the singer more
than 40 times, he was very influential on bringing up generations of Dylan fans
in Moville. “So, I thought, why not
having a festival of Bob Dylan music.” Six weeks later it was on and there was
Dylan music on all weekend and a big crowd arrived after it got publicity on
quite a few radio stations including the famous Dave Fanning Show. Fanning is
Ireland's top DJ and a big Dylan fan himself. People came from far away, says
McLaughlin, even from Canada and San Francisco.
For the
people of Moville the Dylan festival is an important economic factor. In the
little town whose colorfully painted houses hark back to an old fishing
tradition the level of unemployment is nearly 30 %, a level of which McLaughlin
says is similar to the peak of unemployment rates during the Great Depression
in the United States. Today the salmon fishing industry is run from Greencastle.
In the nearby town there is a commercial fishing harbour. As a tourist town
Moville has been hit badly by the downturn. The visitors who come here for the
long Dylan-weekend are of great importance for the local pubs, bed and
breakfasts and hotels. Of such significance that McLaughlin established the
Beatles-Fest some years ago; this by tradition follows the Dylan event a week
later. As the most prominent guest he was able to win over Tony Bramwell,
author of the book ‘Magical Mystery Tours: My Life With The Beatles’, who
attends the festival annually. Bramwell, who was the Beatles road manager and
joint head of Apple Records, later head of Polydor, once told a journalist that
his favourite three places in the world were Nashville, Hawaii and – Moville.
The next
day we have a concert at the Sean Ti in Greencastle in front of an enthusiastic
crowd. Late that night we sit for last orders at a big table with a drop-light
above it. The other light in the room is dimmed. With us is Gerry McLaughlin,
the journalist Caoimhin Barr, who writes for the Inishowen
Independent and who interviewed me during a break of the set, the video-artist
Ciaran Keogh, a Scottish Dylan fan and two other last guests. We’re discussing
Bob Dylan and the influence his music has on so many things. “Art is dead”,
says McLaughlin at some point. “Nothing new comes up anymore”. And somehow he
may be right. Maybe something new only arises out of something that dies. Maybe
that at all times everybody took from one another, adopted it as their own and
passed it on. Maybe there has never been something new, just something that got popular at certain times. Anyway, art
is flourishing and hanging from the walls of Rosatos. It is ringing through the
streets of a little town on Inishowen, with its originals, reminiscent of the
figures that had flowed out of Dylan’s pen.
And one wouldn’t be surprised at all if all of a sudden somebody would peek
through the door of Rosatos, with his hood deep in his face, a flick of fake
hair looking out from under it, right now, while the barkeepers are about to
put the chairs on the tables and clean up the room for a new day of
Dylan-music. This certain person would surely belt out one of Blind Willie
McTell’s blues songs and buy a painting from Cavanagh right after - the one
that shows him as an old man.
© M. Moravek
Moville on Wikipedia
DylanFest on the Lough
The next Stuck Inside of Moville will take place from Aug 21nd to Aug 24th in 2014
