And discover bands from the day you’d never even heard of! I had what I thought was a pretty complete collection of the best records of the time (alternative-wise), but I only just recently discovered Asylum Party! I’d have fucking loved that shit back then but somehow I’d never heard them, mostly because back in the day if you didn’t read about a band in a fanzine (or in NME or The Face or Paper before you got kicked out of the newsstand for loitering without purchase), you wouldn’t know they existed - certainly not from the shit that played on the radio, at least in the American Deep South of the 1980’s. If you were lucky enough to have a cool record store in your town, their selection was still curated by some dude.
TL;DR - Kids these days don’t appreciate how good they have it, I had to walk a hundred miles in the snow just to get a taste of something decent. /s
I feel fortunate to have grown up here in Dublin in the '80s.
Dublin has a rich history of pirate radio stations, the most notable of which was Capital Radio. Capital was an alternative station run by some pretty dedicated amateurs and it played a rich diet of punk, post punk, alternative and weird music and provided an outlet for the disproportionately large number of homegrown Irish bands.
I don’t know why there were so many bands but there were and there are a number of websites dedicated to cataloging them all.
In addition to this there was Dave Fanning who hosted the Dave Fanning show every weekday evening, seemingly forever. Dave was essentially an Irish John Peel (I don’t mean to belittle either gentleman by that comparison). Like John Peel, Dave was a never ending source of new alternative music as well as introducing novice listeners to older alternative music.
So young Irish people made mix-tapes of this stuff and that was yet another source of great music.
Ireland in the '80s had no shortage of problems but a lack of musical stimulation wasn’t one of them. It was exciting to feel part of something like that.
Dublin still produces brilliant alternative bands like Fontaines DC and Sprints and I wonder if they feel like they’re operating in a vacuum, or do they realise that they’re at the pointy end of a tradition going back over four decades?
