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For Folk's sake it must be noted that The Dubliners were the bunch of bearded Irish ballad singers who spawned a world wide revival of interest in their songs in the sixties and their popularity continues up to the present day.
The definitive Dubliners song has to be "Seven Drunken Nights", which is one of 36 great tracks on this double CD set, featuring the five bearded boyos at their brilliant best. Luke Kelly, Ciaran Burke, Ronnie Drew, Barney McKenna and John Sheahan were Ireland's fab five of the ballad boom era, who even dared to challenge Britain's fab four (The Beatles) for chart placings with "Seven Drunken Nights", which zoomed up the British hit parade in the spring of 1967.
Here you are treated to a brilliant live version of the Dubliner's biggest hit, which captures all the concert hall atmosphere as the crowd roar their approval for Ronnie Drew's gravel ‘n' guts version of their Irish chart topping song. But it is not the only live track on this set, in fact this whole collection is a nice blend of studio recordings interspersed with live tracks from various concerts featuring The Dubliners. It opens with a live rendition of "Whiskey In the Jar" which was later to become a massive Rock hit for Thin Lizzy. Another outstanding concert track on this album is one of their biggest international hits, "Black Velvet Band".
Don't be fooled into thinking that the "Foggy Dew" track is the old Irish rebel ballad about the men of 1916, this one is in fact a lengthy love song (all 4 minutes 50 seconds of it!) and it is about how the singer "rolled his love all over the foggy dew" … Many music critics say that the late Luke Kelly of the Dubliners was responsible for introducing the songs of Ewan MacColl to much wider audiences in the 1960s and afterwards too. You will find one of MacColl's finest compositions "Schooldays Over" on this set, and it is about a young lad in one of England's mining districts being told it is time to put his pit boots on and learn the miners trade and earn a miner's pay. Luke Kelly and Ronnie Drew were among the first to give life to many of MacColl's songs in the pubs and clubs of Dublin and later with The Dubliners world-wide.
Apart from their unique singing voices, The Dubliners have always been recognised as brilliant musicians and the banjos of Barney McKenna and Ciaran Burke and the fiddle of John Sheahan are very much to the fore on "Donegal Danny". But even without instrumentation, The Dubliners still sound great as their voices rise in unison on the chorus of one of their all time classics "The Auld Triangle".
Today, the Dubliners continue to tour and indeed shortly before last Christmas they were entertaining the crowds at a series of live concerts in Germany where they have been popular since 1966. But sadly due to death some of the original members of the group, some of the voices and the pickers you will hear on this collection have been silenced for ever from the live scene. However, the original Dubliners have left us a rich legacy of Folk and Ballad music which can be enjoyed at it's best on this album. Songs such as "Thirty Foot Trailer" may be better known to you as "Farewell To The Life Of The Rover" and "Raglan Road" will be more familiar to some as "The Dawning of the Day" — but who cares what they call the songs, when The Dubliners are singing them. Irrespective of titles the tracks on this set of brilliant ballads, The Dubliners are simply irresistible.
Tom Gilmore (Music Journalist & Broadcaster)
Galway, Ireland, 2002.
