Beats, Bodhráns and Bloody Mayhem – the story of Scary Éire
Smoke fills the room, sweat drips from every forehead, stray bikers wonder what’s going on and Scary Éire rule everything in their sights. Get into it or make your way back outside into the pissing rain on Ca-pel Street. The concrete floor and indescribable sheeting used on the walls can barely be seen at the back end of Barnstormers; the regulars’ pints interrupted by this crowd of young yokes for the sixth week in a row. Meanwhile, A&R men, curious ex-punks and the rock hierarchy stand back from the crowd, taking it all in. “And I wish, and I wish, and I wish, and I wish, I wish I was out there listening to this,” shouts RíRá at the crowd, the Scary Éire MC holding the room in the palm of his hand with ease, while DJ Mek cuts a menacing beat on decks behind, tri-colour draped down upon the tools of his trade.
“They were fuckin’ amazing gigs,” remembers Kilkenny native Captain Moonlight of Scary Éire’s in-famous six-week residency at Barnstormers, a “bloody hardcore” bikers’ bar on Capel Street, known these days as Bleu Note. It was early 1992 and the men of Scary Éire (RíRá, Mek, DaDa Sloosh and Mr Browne) were on the cusp of something special. So went the feeling of everyone who was there anyway. Flyers were handed around the city streets in the run-up to the gigs featuring a Kalashnikov-shaped logo for the band. Word of mouth was spread through Mek’s demo tapes, handed from one taken soul to another. Those who heard the band loved them. Those who loved them needed to go to Barnstormers.
“Those gigs were arranged by our manager at the time, Collie Carty,” remembers Mek. “I think he was mates with one of the owners. It was a mad biker gang joint – a pub at the front with a live venue round the back. They were all really cool people, walkin’ round with their ‘Devil’s Disciples’ jackets and banda-nas and shit.”
RíRá takes up the story, “It was like playing in your own gaff with your mates around. I mean half the fuckers were on and off the stage with us. People would stroll on, skin up, and fuck off back to the bar. It was a fuckin’ madhouse. I remember one night the ceiling being torn, and they were jumping up grabbing at it until the fuckin’ thing was literally ripped down.
“There were punks, bikers, b-boys, ska heads, fuckin’ allsorts. Those gigs were like a release for eve-ryone in there, the band, the crowd, the bouncers. But through all the madness, nobody ever sustained an injury that hadn’t been self-inflicted. It was always positive and well meaning, and a fuckin’ great laugh. All that and the stink of stale beer.”
Many Tullamore natives, friends of Sloosh and RíRá’s, would also populate the crowd, along with Dublin’s nascent hip hop community as it was; most of whom had been drawn from around the country to find some sort of solace in the capital. Cormac Cullinan, formerly known as Cool C in his guise as Captain Moonlight’s DJ, was also present at the Barnstormers’ nights and says that he and Moonlight were “the only ones into hip hop in Kilkenny back then”, adding that even when he moved up to Dublin, there were “about 40 people in total into it: it’s hard to explain how odd it was at the time.
“I remember one night, going into the bar in Barnstormers and getting this look of death and thinking ‘right, in the wrong place then’ and headed into the venue. It was that type of place, a really hard bar.”
The timing and importance of the gigs are still fresh for those who were there. The late ‘80s and early ‘90s was an age when Public Enemy played the Trinity Ball while it was still light outside, when only a handful of the city’s clubs even played dance music, when the only exposure hip hop got on national airwaves was when Eamonn Carr would hijack Dave Fanning’s 2FM show while the latter was on holidays. Then Scary Éire “hit the nail on the head”, says Moonlight.
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