It was Ewan MacColl’s least favourite version.
And Dirty Old Town is about Salford
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I stand corrected, although I will maintain that the Irish have well appropriated it.
It was a nice surprise to learn he wrote this as well. Quite the life he lived.
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While it’s hard to disagree with a man that towards the end of his life said the reason they no longer cared for the USSR is because it was “not communist or socialist enough,” I’m gonna hold fast on this one.
That’s a gem tho. From now on any time someone tells me ObamaCare is socialism…
Was going to point this out. To be fair the workers movements between the countries have always been close allies and there was a lot of cross fertilisation in the folk scene.
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I thought that was a viola joke?
Sky Law. It’s when I put on the ”Fasten Seat Belt” sign and no one’s allowed to move until we’ve had 10 minutes of accordion music. Well, I made the whole thing up, but, you know, people are stupid, so they don’t question it.”
I fly a lot, mainly transpacific or other long haul transcontinental. Sometimes, the for the final leg, I end up on some little single aisle plane with tiny little overhead bins that do not fit my designed-as-cabin-luggage carry-on bag, which had fit with ease on the big plane and had been checked and approved as carry on.
Perhaps that’s what happened with this fellow.
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Well, one of the guards said that he needed to play it before flying on an irish plane…this is actually sound security, as with electronics, the device must be demonstrated to be operational.
Yes, they were a little confrontational, but in the end were so very glad it all turned out right.
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“They think that because they paid 300 bucks for a ticket they get to fly through the air like the legendary owls of gahool!?!?”
The flight attendants were kind of being assholes. If they wanted the passenger to play his accordion, they could simply have asked him to – it wouldn’t be the first time a musician was asked to provide a bit of entertainment. He just so happens to be a real musician, which is why no one minded him playing. I think the musician was RELIEVED not to have his fragile instrument taken away (which is why he didn’t check it in as baggage in the first place…as other musicians will testify as being a necessity, unless they purchase some kind of well-insulated case that resists damage, even when thrown or dropped hard). He looked very concerned, when they were bullying him about his accordion, based on the way he was protectively hugging it.
He already knows he’s got musical chops. I don’t think he needed the validation of these idiot attendants.
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That seems about right. I’ve only been to Ireland once, but I never sang so much in my life. And when I returned to the states, Dirty Old Town came back with me as one of my favorite Irish tunes. It doesn’t take a lot of cider to get me to play it on the piano and sing along, which is why I’m no longer allowed cider at home.
A lot of situations get more bearable with a little impromptu live music. This is one of them.
To put it bluntly, if I had been somewhere on that plane, I just wouldn’t have cared whether you wanted to hear it or not.
Rules are made to be bent when necessary. That’s a cultural matter, and the question of who gets to bend which rule and when is different from culture to culture. It’s a trade-off between predictability and flexibility. My impression is that American culture is very much on the strict-rules end of the global scale.
They weren’t. At first, they were simply asking about that big peace of carry-on luggage that the passenger failed to stow away properly. They got an answer and then switched to a harmless joke. The joke threatens to fall flat because of language problems, but they manage to clear it up.
And the whole thing is in a place where there is not (yet) a no-humor zone between flight attendants on passengers. I can understand if the situation on United flights has deteriorated to the point where a joke by a flight attendant is seen as a prelude to throwing the passenger off the plane in mid-flight, and where passengers don’t dare to joke because it will lead to being kicked off the plane. But this is not United.
That seems excessive.
I flew from Austria to London with Ryanair once; I only paid about 100€ total, but the official ticket price there was in the single-digit range. Not sold separately, unfortunately.
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i’m not sure he succeded.
BTW i love Guy Klucevsek
We’re overbooked. Send in the accordion player.
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It’s the official musical instrument of San Francisco, just one more reason for people to hate us.
Once, a few years ago, I was WFH with the windows open to the yard and heard someone fire up their accordion (which is what I think you call it when someone warms up an accordion?), and I was prepared to be enraged. Until they began to play the Imperial March/Vader’s Theme from Star Wars. Well-played, neighbor. (And well-played.)
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Seriously. These aren’t tears in my eyes. It’s just all the damn rain leaking in here.
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"
In Germany everything which is not permitted is forbidden.
In England everything which is not forbidden is permitted.
In France everything is forbidden and everything is possible.
In Ireland everything is possible unless the priest gets to hear about it.
"
My view of the US is that it has an English Constitution and a German bureaucracy.
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Irish tune?
“The song was written about Salford, Greater Manchester, England, the city where Ewan MacColl was born and brought up. It was originally composed for an interlude to cover an awkward scene change in his 1949 play Landscape with Chimneys, set in a North of England industrial town,[1] but with the growing popularity of folk music the song became a standard.”
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Actually a Ewan McColl song, though the Pogues covered it. Dirty Old Town was Salford
SO not even an Irish song but English, but hey better being asked to play than to put it away.
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