THIS MUCH we know: Music will never, ever sound as good again as it did when you were 16. It will never be as powerful, moving, all-enveloping, or seem as important as it did when you were a prisoner of your parents and your own hormones.

But that’s not to say we can’t be reminded of those grand old days of acne and the Velvet Underground (I’m speaking for myself here) from time to time.

It’s been a while since a song took me back to my days beneath an Andy Warhol poster; maybe the last time was my first encounter with Crying In The Streets, by George Perkins and the Silver Stars. (Disclaimer: I had absolutely no involvement with the struggle for black civil rights in 1960s USA.) But All I Can, from the Sharon van Etten album Tramp, does the job. A song about the debris of a failed relationship, it makes me want to laugh, cry and possibly, in its latter stages, fight a chair.

Some people might note that the track bears certain hallmarks of calculated emotional impact. (The harmonies; the driving rhythm; the slow-burning start swelling to a crescendo.) But those people are loveless mechanoids into whose clanking hearts joy will never penetrate. It’s a great, powerful song that follows many others by transmuting loss into anthem, and it deserves to make people stop and reach out for their loved ones. After all, how do we know how conditional that love might be?

That feeling is the same one that makes teenagers turn their stereos up loud, and write out song lyrics on their school bags and bedroom walls. That half-pleasurable lump in the throat is the sense that, just for a moment, your perspective has been renewed. (The difference being that when you’re 16 and every little thing burns you up, you believe it’s permanent.) It makes you want to hear the song over, and over, and it’s surely to be treasured.

“But my memory steals every moment I can feel,” Sharon van Etten sings on All I Can. And here’s the thing: when we find a song that makes us feel changed, we know it won’t last. That throat-lump (yes, I compounded that noun. What about it?) won’t always appear on demand. I could count off on my fingers the songs that have done the same down the years: Radiohead’s Black Star; Cat Power’s version of Sweedeedee. I remember when cranking up Oh! Sweet Nuthin’ would reliably bring up emotions I didn’t quite know what to do with.

But my memory has stolen the moments I could feel. Now when I listen to those songs, they’re so familiar that I hardly hear them. Or rather, what I hear sounds like a tired retread of what I used to hear, an efficient cover version without the original’s spark. Just as the tics of a lover can lose their arrhythmia-inducing power and become everyday, so van Etten’s song will gradually slough its special status, until it’s just one of the dozen or so in its little corner of iTunes.

That’s no great tragedy, though. Loving music isn’t complicated, or difficult, like loving people; it’s free and easy, and you can have it all. You’ll never be left, like our Sharon, “beyond all sleep/and I can’t speak” when a tune loses its lustre; you don’t have to take down photos of the two of you together and remember who bought which books. In fact, you can just casually move on to whatever else takes your fancy, like the robe-wearing leader of one of those polygamous cults. Your old favourites will still be there – well-worn, maybe, but faithful – if you want to return to them. And some day, with half a beer in you and a hankering for old times, you just might.

DECLAN NERNEY IS a man who inspires devotion. A flick through the visitors’ book on his website reveals a degree of approval usually reserved for younger men. “Oh me o my u make me sigh!!!” is one entry. “I think your wonderful, love ur songs and i listen to them everyday, in my car, at home and even at work” is fairly typical. “Lots of hugs and kisses XXX”, “You have never forgot me”. Not bad for a man in his middle years whose own passion is for vintage agricultural tractors.

“These bands are making a comeback,” one middle-aged woman tells me at Taylor’s Three Rock Hotel. “They’re making a comeback because in the old days, if you were widowed, you stayed at home and wore black. Now, you go out.” She is sitting at a table with two other ladies of a similar vintage, who are anxious I should not use their names. “I’m divorced. She’s widowed,” one says, and turns to the last. “Are you divorced, or just separated?”

Nerney is a singer and bandleader, one of the chief practitioners of the musical style known as country and Irish. Country and Irish is like music’s invisible twin. Its artists – who are numerous – aren’t interviewed in newspaper supplements, or promoted by record labels, or written about on blogs. But they pack out venues across the country night after night, week after week, year in, year out. Their attendance figures would make most young promoters soil the sheets. And as if to prove the point, half an hour before the doors open for Nerney’s concert at Taylor’s Three Rock Hotel, a sizeable queue is already taking shape outside.

The three women are part of the genre’s heartland generation. “There’s a lot of people in Ireland,” says Les Vickers, former presenter of RTé’s solitary country and Irish radio show, “especially in the last 10 or 15 years, who are separated. There are people who are divorced. There are people who, their wives or husbands have passed away.” So, he says, they come to dances like this one. “They might meet a new partner, they may not.”

These men and women grew up dancing to the showbands of the ’60s and ’70s. They emerged from marriages decades later to discover they were still allowed a social life, and found country and Irish – American country music with an Irish boost – waiting for them. Consequently, perhaps, the scene has conventions somewhat different from the musical genres that claim most of our cultural attention. There is a fair contingent of couples in the crowd, but few mixed groups. The most prominent clusters are of single men and single women.

I ask my trio of female informants how the dancing works. They, it emerges, are veterans. “We come here on a Thursday,” says one of the trio. “Then there’s Dunboyne on a Friday. We’ve been up to Castleblayney, Bundoran for dances. If we don’t know who’s playing, we just ring the hotel.” And the actual mechanics, it seems, have changed only a little from the dancehalls of 30 years ago. “The men would ask us to dance,” says Number One – though she continues, with a mischievous smile: “And I would ask the men to dance too.” Her companion looks a little taken aback. “I wouldn’t,” she says.

Most of the ladies sit in groups at tables, sipping glasses of water, awaiting selection. The gentlemen line up in serried ranks around the bar, facing forward, talking little, parallel heads appraising the dancers for a desirable match. To a man, they sport their tidiest shirts and slacks. Some of the more daring have gelled their hair. And there is at least one toupée.

I meet Vincent. He is 65, and has been coming to dances since he was 15. “What’s life about?” he says. “Companionship. I’ve a set of 20 or 30 friends from these dances.” And does he come to meet women? “If you meet someone…” he says, with a smile that can only be described as roguish, “it’s a bonus. You have to go around, see if you see somebody you like the look of.”

You do come to meet the women. You do.

Another man standing nearby is less circumspect. “You do come to meet the women. You do. It’s part of it. You keep an open mind. And the women come to meet the men.” The first thing he says when I mention the Sunday Tribune is to warn me there are people in the room who may not want to be photographed. “They might have left somebody at home. You know?”

As he speaks, the warm-up DJ – a man in a pristine cowboy hat, known as Singing Tommy – cues up a version of Dire Straits’ ‘Walk of Life’ with an Irish accordion backing. Could this be a remix? “Oh yeah, the boy can play!” he barks into the microphone.

The ladies, meanwhile, are insisting they are not interested in romance. “We’re not looking for partners,” one says. “The dancing is the point.” But later in the evening I notice one of them cosying up to a dashing fellow in a sports jacket. Like a bold teenager at a disco, he is draping an arm ever-so-casually along the back of her chair.

Over and over again, people tell me these dances are a great place to meet others. Why? “We can’t compete with you young fellas at the disco,” says Vincent, grinning. But the real reason seems to be that the dancers feel comfortable here, in a way they wouldn’t elsewhere. “We wouldn’t go to the pubs,” says one of the women. “We hate the pubs.” Like the Cheers bar, a dance is a place where everyone knows your name. Nods and helloes are exchanged at every intersection.

“A lot of people would meet each other, and they’d know each other,” says Les Vickers. “So they feel comfortable. It’s like going in to your sitting room, if your family’s in there. But if a load of strangers are sitting in there, you don’t feel as comfortable, you know?” And there is a sense of the crowd making themselves at home. For eyes used to nightclubs, it is surprising to see dancers leaving handbags and purses on their tables, confident that they will still be there on their return.

He’s like a man that could bale hay on his own. Cut the twine and everything!

The musicians are part of this feeling, too. They butter their bread not by becoming remote idols – outlandish clothes, lavish lifestyles, tales of excess – but by getting as close to their fans as possible, personally and professionally. Take the matter of music videos. Nerney’s backing dancers are something to see. Wearing only swimsuits and smiling broadly, they mimic his every move as he sashays down a beach with his guitar in the video for his signature song, ‘Hooley in the Sun’.

But these ladies are not the lithe young things of MTV. Rather, their complexions are pale, their haircuts sensible, their figures settling into comfortable pear-shapes. They are, in fact, exactly like the people who are filling the dancefloor as, with little fanfare, he and his band arrive on stage, decked out in matching salmon-pink shirts and white ties. “Give a round of applause for your number one DJ, Singing Tommy,” says Nerney. “He does everything. He’s like a man that could bale hay on his own. Cut the twine and everything!” The crowd clap enthusiastically.

And then they dance. Extravagance of motion might wane a little as age advances, but high enthusiasm is general. Couples swing each other around the dancefloor, twirl their partners, and indulge in footwork that would put any nightclub-goer to shame. One song segues into another – the band leave no time for applause – and the dancers effortlessly switch styles.

According to Maurice McKiernan, a presenter on Country and Irish Music Radio, the songs follow an accepted progression. “There’s an old-time waltz. Then a jive. Then a slow foxtrot. Then a quickstep. And back to an old-time waltz.” The scene at the moment is “fantastic,” he says. “There’s three dances in Dublin on a Thursday night. There’s four on a Sunday night. Four on a Friday. People will go to the best band. Or if you go into the Hazel [Hotel] in Monasterevin, on a Sunday night… It’s packed to the rafters. In fact, there’s times when you can’t get in. And that venue holds 600 or 700 people.”

McKiernan, a sturdy fellow with greying hair, is also a dance regular. “I enjoy that,” he says. “I have a bad knee at the moment but I like to go pretty often. Declan Nerney is one of the better bands that we have, right? On a par with him would be Mick Flavin, Robert Mizell, the Country Kings, Jimmy Buckley. They’d be the top notch.” He is eager to tell me about the up-and-coming acts on the scene, too. “Martin Cuffe has a brilliant band. Called Off the Cuffe.”

But tonight belongs to Declan Nerney. He and his band play for almost two and a half hours, with barely a break. He talks to people in the audience, or makes acknowledgements during songs, pointing with an arm or the neck of his guitar. At moments of high climax there are hip thrusts and arm spins. And when it’s all over, his work done, rather than disappearing backstage he emerges into the crowd – shaking hands, exchanging pleasantries, catching up. This much is de rigueur in the country and Irish scene, where face time with the musicians whose CDs fill your glove compartment is part of the deal.

The man himself is highly likeable. “I could be sweating all night,” he acknowledges, “and the shirt would dry back into my body by the time I’d be finished talking to people at the end. People like to be able to feel and touch the whole thing. And that’s a great idea. You make yourself available for that. Plus the fact that I would be naturally interested in it anyway.” You build up real relationships with the concert-goers, he says. “I would know a lot of them personally. People relate little stories, funny incidents, things that happen to them. And then you mightn’t see them for six months again, but you’d be thinking about when you might see them.”

You’re singing the songs of their lives

So it’s about making the fans feel close to you. “They would. Because you’re singing the songs of their lives. You’re singing about their people. You’re singing about the boreens and the towns and you’re mentioning them. You’re mentioning their counties. In country and Irish music, the songs all tell a story that listeners are able to relate to. Merle Haggard had a song one time called ‘Someone Told My Story In A Song’. And it’s those songs that make the jukebox play.”

A lack of pretension also goes for the performers’ self-presentations. This is not a scene that prizes notions of cool. Nerney, who earlier in the night had appeared wearing a Massey Ferguson tractor tee-shirt, looks just how he is: middle-aged and Irish. In the aforementioned ‘Hooley in the Sun’ video, in which he appears to be having a wonderful time, he dances throughout in a pair of white socks neatly pulled up above practical shoes.

This proximity, cultural and physical, between artists and fans is taken to surprising distances. A number of the top players in country and Irish go so far as to mount yearly package holidays for their listeners, and Nerney is no exception. A banner behind the stage tonight reads: “The Hooley In The Sun Goes to Majorca, 2009.”

“I would bring 300 people with me there,” he says. “They would all go out, they’ll dance the night away. They’ll dance the whole week away, night and day.” That must be testament to how close you’re willing to get to your fans. “That’s right,” he says, with a laugh. “You’re under the one roof with them, and you’ve nowhere to escape then. Except into the swimming pool, and there’s half a dozen of them in there already.”

I am eager to learn more about these holidays. “Oh, they’re big,” Vincent tells me. “You get hundreds of people going to Croatia and places, paying a thousand euro. For the music. Buckley does it, Mizell does it – they all do it.” This must be the engine on the scene’s train: hundreds of people willing to pick their holiday for the sake of music. “Well, Ireland has a musical culture,” he continues. “We’re steeped in it. The showbands, rock and roll, country – it’s all good.”

And what lies in the future for country and Irish? Is it growing? “Let me tell you this,” he says. “You get the Sunday World any Sunday, there’s four pages of advertisements for dances. And that’s just the big venues. Oh, it’s big.” He nods in a satisfied way and greets a friend across the hall. Then he gets up from his chair, picks up his glass and moves slowly off to join the rows of men at the bar, not talking, looking out for his next dance.

Originally published in the Sunday Tribune.

THE ROAD LEADING up the hill to Desmond Wisley’s warehouse is fringed by the usual detritus of the recession. There are scrubby construction lots, and a cluster of unoccupied apartment complexes. The centre of the development is a big new supermarket with a cavernous underground car park, from which gleaming escalators hum emptily up to the store: at eleven o’clock on a Monday morning, there isn’t a single car.

But for Desmond, known to most as Dessie, business is good. He runs Wisley Ecclesiastical Supplies, a business that sells religious essentials to churches. Their biggest movers are prayer candles: the ones you light as you wish a trouble away. Sales of these have soared in the recession, he says, as money worries bite men and women across the country. The numbers tell a story: Wisley Ecclesiastical Supplies sold somewhere in the region of 17 million prayer candles last year.

“A lot of the priests would be saying that they were up” in financial terms since the recession began, says Dessie. “And it would be candle sales bringing them up.” One priest in Dublin was recently quoted as saying his ‘candle money’ was up €300 a week in the recession – candle sales are an important part of a church’s finances. “There was one church I was in, down in the south. They had a print-out of their accounts, and they were €2,500 in the black after all the bills were paid. But the candles had brought in €23,000.”

Where are you in Waterford exactly, Father?

So people really are turning to prayer? “They must be. There’s no other reason for it,” he says. “They must be worried. It could be people worried about other people. It could be a mother worried about her son getting a job.” Seventeen million candles makes for a lot of prayers.

Dessie grew up in the candle business. “We’ve been in it all our lives,” he says. His father Brendan, who founded the company, is past retirement age but still works for Wisley, taking the candles out on the road. (“I bought him an automatic van though”, says Dessie. “His hip was getting a bit, you know.”) Dessie’s wife Aileen cuts the deals with suppliers. Aunt Bernadette does the accounts, at the age of 84. “You’d be surprised at the age I went to do a computer course,” she says. “It’s the only thing nowadays.”

Brendan Wisley ran the business through the last economic slump. “We went through a recession in the ’80s,” he says. “Now, it’s only chicken feed compared with what it was back years ago. But people didn’t realise it, hardly.” And there was no corresponding spike in prayer candle sales back then, Dessie points out. Brendan agrees. “There wasn’t a boom. People didn’t get down the same, like they are now.”

The small office in the Wisley’s warehouse in Ballinamore, Co Leitrim is busy. Dessie’s phone rings constantly. (“And where are you in Waterford exactly, Father?”) Shelves are stacked with church directories and samples, and the Wisleys share an encyclopaedic knowledge of Ireland’s clergy. “Who’s the priest in Muff?” asks Bernadette at one stage. “Is it Father Porter?” “Father Farren,” replies Dessie, without blinking.

Dessie’s three-year-old truck – painted on either side with the names of his two sons – has 200,000 miles on the clock. He takes it around to his priests every eight or nine weeks without fail. “On the same routes my father did before me,” he says. “The runs I’m doing today would be the same ones he was doing when I was a kid.”

At the busiest times of the year – like Christmas and Easter – he might sleep in his truck during the week, only coming home at weekends. “I could be finished at half past eight at night in Dublin, and the next call in the morning is down in Kerry,” he says. “So I’d drive till about one, pull over, sleep. Eight o’clock I’d get up in the truck, half eight in Castletownbere, then up through Tralee and all that.”

The rounds can be a little monotonous. “If you went round with me in the van I’d say I’m like a parrot, because I’m saying the same stuff to every priest,” Dessie says. “I used to think Daddy was hard rude. I remember the priests would ask if he wanted a cup of coffee, and he’d say ‘Go on’, and then fill it up with milk. Because you can drink it faster – if you’ve got a hot cup of coffee, you’ll be there for 10 minutes drinking it. Now I can see myself doing the same thing.”

The German quality’s absolutely amazing

He shows me around his warehouse. The truck is being loaded, ready for the week’s rounds, from pallets of candles that are stacked high to the corrugated-iron roof. There are also cases and cases of altar wine, especially imported and approved for sacramental use by a bishop. Ceramic figures of Jesus and followers, for church dramas at Christmas and Easter, lie on racks – “We’re thinking of new ideas the whole time”, says Dessie. But candles are the main business.

What does he look for in a candle? “It depends on the candle,” he says. “An altar candle, you’re looking for something that burns cleanly, no soot, it doesn’t drip down the sides.” Almost all his supplies come from Europe, he says. “The German quality’s absolutely amazing. It’s brilliant. It doesn’t drip or anything – not like Irish candles.”

The Germans, it seems, are on the cutting edge of prayer-candle technology. Their latest development is the recyclable candle cup. “In churches where they burn so many candles,” says Dessie, “they can have wheelie bins full of empty shells. And the priests were starting to feel guilty. Asking me, ‘Is there anything we can do?’” The recyclable candles burn away so cleanly that their plastic cups can be shipped back to Germany, where they are refilled. Dessie proudly shows me the boxes of empty cups awaiting pick-up in his warehouse. “It’s taking off now in this country”, he says.

But you still don’t see many ads for recyclable prayer candles in the middle of Coronation Street. So how do Wisley’s promote their business? “We advertise in Intercom, a magazine for priests,” says Dessie. “Only priests would get it,” explains Brendan. “They give them tips for sermons and things like that.”

They’ve also tried other promotional devices. “We gave out free jackets to priests,” says Dessie. “They’d get a free jacket if they bought so much. We thought it was a good idea. But there was war when we gave out the jackets. If one priest got one, and another saw it then he wanted a jacket. They’re like children.”

Dessie’s priests tell him mass attendances are also going up since the boom ended. “Where was everybody going on Sunday?” he says. “They were going shopping. To all these outlet malls and this kind of craic. But there’s no one going there now. It’s going back to what it used to be. Sundays are supposed to be a time of relaxation. Going to Mass, meeting people after mass for coffee.”

Religious goods had a harder time under the Celtic Tiger, too. “We had a lot of hassle a couple of years ago,” says Dessie. “An awful lot of places weren’t burning candles. So actually in the boom time things were getting tighter.” This trend has since gone into reverse. “Now places actually need the candle money, they’re taking the electric candelabras out – the push-button jobs – and bringing back in the candles.” Happy days for Wisley’s.

Towards the end of the visit, Dessie disappears into the warehouse and emerges with a small, unassuming-looking white candle. “This is the one we’re getting into next now,” he says. “A specially designed candle from Germany. See that bit of soot there?” He points to an almost invisible black smudge on the candleholder. “That’s all the waste there is when this candle is left.” He smiles proudly. “They’re burning that now in the cathedral in Cologne. You’ve got to be one step ahead.”

Brendan agrees. “There’s an old saying”, he says. “that it’s better to light a candle than curse the dark.” He grins. “And that’s true.”

First published in the Sunday Tribune. Photo by clementchene on Flickr.

THERE IS A long basin of steaming liquid, brown and glistening. It ripples and swills under the fluorescent light as a young man in a baseball cap dips a long ladle in. Expertly catching the drips, he dollops two glutinous spoonfuls over the contents of a thin cardboard box in his other hand and turns back to the counter, placing the dish gently next to the cash register before ringing up the sale. In the Supermac’s on Galway’s Eyre Square, just before twelve o’clock on a showery Monday morning, another portion of curry chips is ready to go.

Supermac’s is an Irish institution. It dished up chips when the country was an economic backwater, flipped burgers through the boom; and as we flounder through the recession like flies in ketchup, it’s still going strong. The chain has 92 branches nationwide, each one showcasing its combination of the hyper-branding of international fast food – burgers are cooked on a SuperGrill; diners may Go Large for 75c – with uniquely Irish delicacies like garlic-cheese fries and the Snack Box. In many towns, the Supermac’s is the first place to open in the mornings and the last still dishing out nourishment to stragglers from the pubs.

This Eyre Square outlet is the Supermacs flagship. The restaurant expands deep into the building, furnished with a kind of non-decor – half American diner, half cross-Channel ferry – that discourages close attention. On the walls, between flickering televisions, are two blown-up photographs: one of the Galway hurling team, the other a bowl of coffee beans. Well before the lunch rush, the place is is already growing busy as a steady trickle of schoolchildren and shoppers make their way between the two giant plastic ice creams flanking its double doors.

A thick-set man with amiable eyes under a thatch of light hair, Pat McDonagh is the chain’s founder and chief executive. The selling point of Supermac’s, he explains, is its local specialities. “We have adapted the food to suit the Irish palate,” he says. “Whether it’s curry chips or taco fries or garlic chips with cheese.” So is he claiming to have invented these late-night staples? “Well, we’re not sure whether we invented it or not,” he says. “Some people say there was curry with chips around the country long before, and there probably was. But we were one of the first to give it an identity as an accepted dish.” It was Supermac’s, in other words, who took curry chips from acquired taste to national institution.

Oh my God, the garlic sauce

And dressed fries, as the backlit menu over the counter demurely describes them, are still one of the best-selling items on the roster. A quick look around suggests that curry is the most popular – either with or without a lurid topping of grated cheese – and garlic a distant second. But feelings run strong among partisans of both sides. Sarah Mushbellew and her friend, secondary students, are sitting in a corner booth over the remnants of their meal. I ask what they had on their chips. “The garlic sauce,” one says, rapturously. “Oh, my God, the garlic sauce.” She sounds affronted when I suggest they might have chosen curry: “No.”

Before the lunch rush, area manager Sasa Marjanovic gives me a tour behind the counter. It feels a little like being on the beachhead before an invasion. All is scrupulously clean; workers stand in readiness at their posts; long rows of fryers bubble quietly, waiting for the metal chip baskets to be lowered. Sasa, friendly and efficient, speaks the language of a company man. Walking around, he tells me of the “high-quality dairy product” loaded into the ice-cream makers, and explains why the chicken “comes out succulent and juicy.” (It’s a special pressure fryer.) Reaching the chip station, he says proudly, “Fresh cut chips. All the potatoes are peeled on site and cooked off over here, fresh to order.”

Chips are something of a point of pride. “The chips are thicker and have more potato in them than, say, the multinational operations,” says McDonagh, emphatically. “A lot of people tell me that after they eat in Supermac’s they’re not as hungry as if they ate in one of the multinationals. An hour later, or two hours later. And in actual fact you do get 20 per cent more volume in the chips, because they’re a bigger size. That’s a proven fact, actually.”

Peter Callinan, a white-haired gentleman in a flat cap, is sitting alone at a counter with a bag of them. “I like the good fat chips here,” he says. “They’re just nicely cooked, just ideal. Much better than McDonalds. McDonalds, when you get their chips… They’re too narrow. They’re like matches. And they’re roasting hot. They’re not temperate.” He puts the difference down to McDonagh’s choice of staff. “It’s a credit to him, the cooks he has.”

A CREDIT TO THE COOKS

But McDonagh was a schoolteacher when he founded Supermac’s in Ballinasloe in 1978. Having been turned down for planning permission for a pool hall, he was forced to make a decision. “I thought, what was the next best option?” he says, sipping a Supermac’s latte which he has already recommended to our photographer. “Either we went for a furniture shop, or a food outlet.”

So he hired the cook from the local hotel – “not knowing a lot about food myself” – pressed his school football nickname back into service as a brand, and went for it. “The first year, I had one day off,” he says with obvious pride. “The second, maybe two or three.”

Those years were not without incident. Local farmers sold him potatoes that were fit only for animal feed. (“They were the lousiest chips you can imagine. Soggy and terrible.”) On the first night of the Ballinasloe Fair, with a restaurant full of horse traders straight from the pub, the main fuse went, plunging the building into pitch darkness. So McDonagh screwed up the foil paper from a pack of cigarettes and jammed it into the fuse – which worked, for a while, until it blew out the whole street. “Sparks were flying everywhere,” he says cheerfully. “I never told the ESB.” But the business took off nevertheless, and he opened another branch, and then another.

As the lunchtime trade builds, more and more varieties of customer appear. A smart young office worker in a suit sits reading a paper, absent-mindedly placing curry chips one by one into his mouth. A harried-looking mother mixes baby food in a plastic dish, tasting it to test the temperature. Three young eastern European men lounge in a booth, eyeing the females passing along the aisle. Pitching in behind the counter, Sasa explains the challenges of laying on large quantities of food very quickly. “You have to cook little and often,” he says. “To keep it piping hot. Because certain places, from our competitors, you know, would give you pretty much anything. Especially in hard times.”

For three teenagers huddled around a table on the fringes of the restaurant, a little strategising is necessary before they can make this their meeting place. “She buys one ice cream,” says one, gesturing at another. “Then we can all sit here until she’s finished.” What about then? “We put the rubbish on the table.” But the staff, I notice, are wise to this trick. At another table, one boy eating curry chips on his own is joined by two friends, then two more. A worker appears. “Are you eating?” she asks. They point out his chips, but it isn’t good enough. Out they go.

They inject the mayo in

The restaurant’s new flagship product is the Supermac’s 5oz Burger. In response to Ireland’s expanding appetite – and waistline – this has come to supersede the humble quarter-pounder, bringing an extra ounce of meat to the table. It also comes in a double-stacked ten-ounce version. (“If you’re brave, ten-ounce is there,” suggests Sasa.) The chain’s marketing executive Sinead Cassidy tells me that when they launched the new burger, a ‘food stylist’ was hired to make sure it photographed well. “It’s amazing,” she says. “Each thing is so perfectly placed. They inject the mayo in” to make sure it oozes from under the bun in exactly the right appetising way.

There is an impressive spread of ages in the restaurant at this busy lunchtime, from tottering pensioners to unweaned babies. One family sprawl over three tables. Mandelle Toal has brought her husband, two toddlers, sister, brother-in-law, and parents – all in Galway for the weekend – and it emerges that they are aficionados. “We’ve been here three times already,” she says cheerfully, “and we’re only here three days.” Helen, her mother, is at the next table. “We always come in here,” she says. “It’s great for the children. We need a Supermac’s in Enniskillen – they have one in Dungannon.” Her husband Ken chimes in. “It’s too far away,” he says, shaking his head.

In a city of 70,000 people, this Eyre Square branch serves around 10,000 customers every week. It shuts for only four and a half hours each night. The recession has affected Supermac’s, but not in the same way as other restaurants. “People who are tight on cash, who are finding it difficult, do need a treat,” he says. “One of the remarkable things I’ve seen recently is the effect that the children’s allowance has on the day’s business. You can see a spike up by maybe ten per cent. And that’s the first time I’ve seen that in maybe thirty years.”

Over time, he says, you develop a feel for restaurants. “In a well-run restaurant, there’s a buzz in the place,” he says. “And you can probably feel it in here now, you can feel the atmosphere. People are sitting down, they’re talking to each other. You can see it even in the table next door to us now.” It is a group of students in black hoodies, doing something very nerdy with a mobile phone. “They’re interacting among themselves,” he says. “They’re happy.”

As the lunchtime trade dwindles and the afternoon wears on, the profile of customers changes. The lunching office workers leave, and are replaced by shoppers; there is a group of women in high heels with armfuls of expensive-looking bags. Dotted around one area of the restaurant are four or five middle-aged men, each eating alone, each staring absently into the distance though the others are so close. The staff, having weathered the storm, share a joke as they clean up behind the counter. A schoolgirl answers her phone. “Supermac’s,” she says, as if it were obvious. “Where are you?”

Photos by Eddie Virago and albyantoniazzi on Flickr. A version of this article was first published in the Sunday Tribune.

Real talk: R Kelly

THE SLOW JAM is a weird branch of the musical tree. It’s usually a combination of crooning vocals with smoothed-out hip hop beats. Bendy synth sounds are frequently prominent. Prime movers of the slowjamming scene have been Usher, Ginuwine, R Kelly and recent arrivals T-Pain and The Dream; and slow jams are, almost exclusively, about knocking the socks off women. Which is to say, they’re all about being a particular kind of man.

The position of the Slow Jam Man is a curious one. On the one hand, you’re the undiluted essence of male: a master seducer driven by the urge to sexual conquest. On the other, that conquest is generally achieved by such doctrinally effeminate methods as the gyration of hips, the murmuring of sweet nothings, and the hitting of climactic high notes. For a genre obsessed with notions of masculinity, this is the elephant in the room. How do you reconcile being an unreconstructed player with – let’s face it – singing and dancing, like a girl?

The slow jam shares a lot of its temperament, as well as its musical stylings, with the mainstream of American rap. But its Thug Life works with a soft caress. Usher wears jail trousers and a do-rag, but they’re white, immaculately pressed, and often removed mid-song. Hip hop and the slow jam are both obsessed with sex; but where male rappers tend to studiously ignore any satisfaction a woman might take from the experience, in a slow jam the lady’s pleasure is paramount and dwelt upon at length. (The Dream’s song Falsetto has the refrain “She’s like ‘Ooh, ooh! Baby! Ahh, ahh, ahh! Ohh!’”) Rappers are just recipients of sexual favours; in a slow jam, the pressure is on the singer’s bedroom performance. It’s not so much the woman who is a desirable object as the man.

On April Fools Day 2005, a radio station in the States ran an item suggesting that Usher had officially revealed his bisexuality. Although they swiftly admitted the hoax, rumours to that effect have dogged him ever since. If femininity is the slow jam’s elephant in the room, homoeroticism is its double-decker bus. And yet, album liners favour Liberace glamour: Chris Brown’s has him caressing a black panther cub. In the video for Ginuwine’s breakout single Pony, he impresses a bar full of good ol’ boys with his shirt off. And YouTube is awash with topless young men filming each other in the act of ‘winding’ (the archetypal naked-abs dance).

In short, the slow jam scene is like Attitude magazine without the honesty, and it is extremely sensitive to this. When T-Pain commented on fellow singer Ray J’s sex tape with socialite Kim Kardashian – saying “The man got a huge meat, OK… He’s got length on him… Man have a foot on him” – he faced a bloggers’ firestorm, despite tagging his words with the evergreen “No homo”.

Part of the slowjammer’s problem is his narrowness of focus. Anyone who devotes that much effort to protesting their virility is going to look like they have something to hide. So it’s perhaps ironic that the singer who is most publicly, unpleasantly, libidinous – R Kelly still faces charges for a video in which he allegedly performs various sex acts with, and eventually urinates on, a 15-year-old girl – is also the artist who has done most to push his genre’s envelope.

His current project is deploying the slow-jam format to document life as a man – not just between the sheets, but in all the inconsequential minutiae of getting by. “Life is a song”, he says of his slowjam documentaries, “and I’ve realised that.” His Trapped In The Closet song cycle is essentially a soap opera. His song Real Talk, which, in his own words, “represents just how real shit gets when you arguing with your girl”, might as well be a transcript of a domestic spat, verbatim.

And the reason it’s so compelling, other than its inexpressible weirdness, is that it’s about being a (more or less) normal man in a normally turbulent relationship: fatuous and petty and not very good at coping with a cross girlfriend. In the end, the reason R Kelly can release 22-chapter domestic dramas involving gay priests, and not worry about looking weak or effeminate, is that he’s the only man in slow jam keeping it real.

Handball court, Inis Mór (and me)

IN THE MIDDLE of each of Joey Maher’s soft palms, there is a deep round hollow. “I still have the mark of the ball, there,” he says, turning his big hand upwards to show the circular hole scooped out by decades of hard hits. Joey was a handball player, with three world championship trophies on his mantelpiece. “Maybe it damaged the veins there and the blood won’t go through them or something,” he says. “I don’t know.” He hasn’t played since a stroke several years ago, but still carries the marks of his thirty-year career.

Handball, Ireland’s third national game, has been in decline for the last hundred years or so. “Years ago it was a big thing,” says Maher, who won the first of his thirty All-Ireland titles as a junior in 1956. “Handball was getting bigger headlines in the papers than basketball, camogie and everything. We used to play different places around the country, and the places would be chock-a-block with supporters, they’d have three or four or five hundred at games. Some great memories of games there, now. There was some great courts around the place.” As recently as 1982, Dublin had 39 ball alleys in regular use. Galway had 43.

The distinctive shape of the handball alley – a high back wall or stone or concrete, with two side walls climbing diagonally to meet it – is still a familiar sight in Ireland, along roads and in small towns. But more often than not, its stone or poured concrete is crumbling. Some are gradually being subsumed by woodland; some house bins and gas canisters behind restaurants and supermarkets. Some have been pressed into service as election billboards. (“Vote Comiskey No1”). Most are weedy, their playing surfaces cracked and raised with waste greenery.

The current senior All-Ireland handball champion, Eoin Kennedy, is from a handballing line: his father Eugene was a well-known player. “My dad was from Boyle in county Roscommon,” Kennedy says. “And in Boyle [the alley] would have been one of the focus points – people would all go down after Mass.” Unlike the field sports, anyone could join in. “It was a game you could just go in and play, it wasn’t like football or hurling. There was definitely a social side to it.”

The same laws forbade anyone whose name began with O’ or Mac from being in the English-occupied town between dusk and dawn

Kennedy has a PhD in electronic engineering and, when he isn’t winning handball championships, works on the national electrical grid. I meet him one sunny autumn evening at St Brigid’s GAA in Castleknock, one of the few clubs left in Dublin that still have handball alleys. He pitches in to train young boys and girls at the club. While I watch from the viewing gallery – the handball alley itself is entered via a strange, undersized door beneath a staircase that looks rather like something from Alice in Wonderland – he plays a gentle knockaround with some enthusiastic boys. Even at this level, his grace and power are obvious. (Watching championship handballers hit shots is like seeing bears swat salmon: the ball doesn’t stand a chance.)

Enda Timoney is another trainer at the club. A PE teacher, he also serves on the Handball Council’s coaching team and is a passionate evangelist for the sport – both on its own merits and as a suitable subject for PE lessons. He fills me in on the basics of the game while Kennedy plays. “This here’s the underhand… This here’s the overhand… And this here’s the sidearm,” he says, demonstrating. “It’s all about the midfield. If you want to be controlling your game, you have to control the centre of the court. You play defensive shot, defensive shot until somebody makes a mistake – and then you play an offensive shot. A kill.”

The first written record of handball in this country dates from as far back as 1527, when a town statute in Galway banned the playing of ball games against the city walls. (The same laws, according to historian Tom O’Connor, forbade anyone whose name began with O’ or Mac from being in the English-occupied town between dusk and dawn.) Purpose-built alleys didn’t emerge until the 1700s – but until then, people improvised. Any high wall would do. At the ruined Priory in Kells, Co Kilkenny, OPW surveyors noted that the inscriptions on the flagstones had been worn away by the feet of handball players

Short blue satin breeches above the knee, with a gold stripe down the side, and an open-web jersey

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Ireland’s top players would challenge each other to high-stakes matches with wagers of £100 – something like €50,000 today. Huge crowds would gather to watch. And the players were regarded rather like celebrities. A press report from 1887 relates breathlessly that champion John Lawlor played in a fetching set of “short blue satin breeches above the knee, with a gold stripe down the side, and an open-web jersey.” Swoon.

Áine Ryan, an architect by training, has made it her business to track down all Ireland’s old handball alleys – or the places where alleys once stood – and document them. So far, she has identified some 650 sites around the country. Handball courts, she says, stand alongside round towers and the spirit grocer (pubs that also sell food or hardware) as one of the only examples of uniquely Irish architecture; and as such, are something we should be proud of.

What sparked her interest in the alleys? “There was a handball alley near where I grew up, at the Turn Pike just past Urlingford,” she says. “And I was always fascinated by this particular alley for as long as I can remember. So I tried to find out a bit more about it, and in doing so I discovered that it wasn’t only used as a handball alley. It was also a place where parish dances took place.”

The unroofed handball courts were, she discovered, a sort of community centre for villages. “There are a lot of records of the alleys being used for all sorts of things,” she says. The United Irishmen of 1798 trained and met in handball alleys, as did the armed forces of the Black and Tan era. They were the venues for work fairs – “so people would gather in the handball alleys and wait for employers to come along and hire them” – Hallowe’en bonfires, and, in the 1970s and 80s, discos. They were part of the life of a town. Ryan calls the alleys “secular social spaces”: they were the only place Irish people could congregate that wasn’t the church or the pub.

As a child, Joey Maher spent hour after hour on the alley. “After school we’d rush home, do our exercises and then over to the ball alley,” he says. “Then when the big fellas would come that night, our job would be watching the ball” if it went over the wall. Balls were a valuable commodity then; if they wanted to play football, he said, “we had to make our own. Out of a piece of paper and your mother’s nylon stockings.

And you courting a woman, you could bring her to the pictures in the middle of the week

Even as a teenager he was at the court “every night”, he says. “Every night. Back then, sure there wasn’t much, only the pictures. And the old men all round there, there’d be a dozen of them on the wall every night and we used to entertain them playing each other for a couple of bob. There’d be a dozen or twenty people, all old people with walking sticks and everything, coming to watch the handball.” Well-to-do people in the area would pay a pound – “and that was a lot of money then” – to have Joey play exhibition matches for them and their guests. This had fringe benefits for a good player. “And you courting a woman,” he says, “you could bring her to the pictures in the middle of the week.”

Before the 1960s, the game used a hardball. A hardball has a core of wood wrapped in elastic and stitched in pigskin; it looks anachronistic, like it could be a prop from Braveheart. “That’s the real handball game,” Maher says. “There’s not many have the knack of really hitting the hardball. There’s an art in hitting that ball.” Growing enthusiastic, he levers himself off the armchair to demonstrate, a 76-year-old standing in his small living room packed high with trophies, cups, and photographs. “You serve that one real low, it’s a real hard serve and you’re cutting over the short line and it’s coming at you real low, and the art is getting it back up after a tough serve. It’s very fast, that ball. Oohhh, yeh.”

The game nowadays is mostly played with a so-called “softball”, made of plastic. Maher tells me he can tell good players within seconds of walking into the alley: if they’re up to scratch, you can smell the rubber ball burning.

Around mid-century, handball players were so well-known they were appearing on cigarette cards. Maher reminisces about a former champion coming to a local tournament when he was a child. “I remember Johnny Dwyer coming up. And all the old men were ‘Ah Johnny hit one, hit one’,” he says. “So Johnny took off his coat just to hit a ball, and got a big round of applause.” Today, the children playing football at St Brigid’s GAA do not recognise Eoin Kennedy on the court, though he trains at their club; and the Millmount alley where Maher watched Johnny Dwyer hit the ball is, like many others, now derelict.

The world has moved on, and left the big alleys behind

So what happened to handball? There are competing theories. One of them is that the development of roads and transport in rural Ireland made team sports more attractive. “With the availability of other modes of transport, team sports became popular,” says Áine Ryan. “Because you could assemble a team, and also people could pool up together in cars and get to a game. So you could have spectators and two teams.” Handball, which only needed two players and a ball, suffered as a consequence.

Another idea is that the very nature of the old handball alleys, which were social centres as much as sporting facilities, rendered them redundant as society itself changed. “People went there,” Ryan suggests, “less to engage in a sport than just to meet others.” For the old men on Joey Maher’s alley wall in 1950s Drogheda, there just wasn’t anything else to do. But things are different now. “With transportation and other things, when people could move around and meet people in other places, they just stopped playing. People socialise differently now, they socialise virtually, almost. You can make your community anywhere you want it to be.” The world has moved on, and left the big alleys behind; nowadays, the old men would be pestering their grandchildren on Facebook.

All of which is not to say that handball is dead. It has new leadership in the GAA, a lot of active young players, and big plans. Enda Timoney is enthusiastic about the possibilities of hurling walls – an outdoor training facility which can also be used for handball. “Lots of clubs are building them,” he says. “And if there’s handball being played there, kids might see it – and they’re ‘I want to play that’. It’s only natural. But if you’re in here” – in a closed alley – “nobody sees it.” Some towns, too, have renovated their old alleys, and are using them again. Áine Ryan’s website has photographs of all the ones she has visited, most of which are grey and abandoned – but not all. “There’s a great one of Ballisodare, county Sligo,” says Enda. “It’s a lovely photograph because people are playing in the alley. And it’s alive.”

So there might be hope for the old alleys yet. The game may have a small constituency, but its supporters are passionate. “Handball is a kind of a drug,” Joey Maher says. “I used to get in bad humour, if I hadn’t a game for a couple of days. And I used to wonder what the hell was wrong with me.” He sits surrounded by his trophies, an old hardball sitting on the doily-covered coffee table in front of him. “And it was that. I just hadn’t a game of handball. That’s the kind of a game it is.”

First published in the Sunday Tribune

THEY ARE everywhere across Ireland: small white structures sitting discreetly along road verges, on hilltops and in gardens; so familiar the eye passes over them. Many are just a weatherbeaten alcove of painted cement at the top of two or three shallow steps, though some feature expansive rockery facades and artificial caves, or cliffhanger Biblical dioramas.

But each of Ireland’s roadside shrines is unique. Most were built in just one year: 1954. The Vatican had declared it a Marian Year, and Ireland seized on the idea with gusto. Hundreds of shrines and grottoes were thrown up by groups of neighbours who formed Marian Shrine Committees. Teams of local people pitched in after work, hauling scrap metal and buckets of cement, raising money with collections outside Mass. They picked places at road forks, on village greens, near holy wells – wherever a scrap of land was free. It was a matter of pride. “A stranger approaching our city on a winter’s night, and being greeted by this shining figure of the Queen of Heaven,” one correspondent wrote to the Limerick Leader in August 1954, “would, no doubt, be assured of the warm Christian welcome that awaited him in our midst.”

Today, most of their builders have passed away, but the shrines remain. Some still draw large crowds; and the informal network of caretakers who keep them safe and clean – often the children of the shrines’ builders – are still proud of their charges. Mary is neatly kept: grass and bushes are trimmed, litter is quietly removed, an invisible hand brushes off leaves and lays down flowers. The roadside grottoes have little to do with the troubled priestly hierarchies, and everything to do with private faith. And in times like these, some would say, everybody needs a little faith.

Ila Dore takes care of a well shrine in Tullow, Co Carlow, which she brought back from disuse.

“I live on the other side of town from the shrine. I’m down to it several times during the day. First thing in the morning, definitely, and last thing at night, definitely, and it could be two or three times during the day I’d go down. Tidying up leaves and twigs off the trees, because there are some big trees overhanging it. It is a lovely place. I go over to it now, and honestly you’d need a coach and four to pull me out of it again.

“It’s just this year been restored. I did it with my friend, Brendan Dowling, and it was a lot of work. But we never considered it as work – it was an absolute pleasure, and an honour. It’s a three sided structure with a dome roof on it, with a cross above it. Our Lady is in a case in the wall, and lettering then: Our Queen And Our Mother. And she’s standing on a snake. She’s crushing his head. We repainted Our Lady, because God love her, she needed a facelift. And a new dress. And she got them.

“The times we’re living in at the minute, people are becoming a lot less religious. But we have seen that people are inclined to visit it. Very inclined. We were astounded at the number of people who attended the Rosary. And I go over to it a few times during the day now, because I want to make sure that it doesn’t come to any harm – and very often I find people there.

“There’s a very spiritual feeling about it. On the 8^th of September we had a Rosary evening over there, and it rained that evening – but strangely enough, believe it or not, nobody got wet. I don’t know, there’s something supernatural about it. We feel Our Lady is actually there, that’s how strongly we feel. You get the sense of her presence there, when you’re there.”

James O’Sullivan is the keeper of Tubrid Well shrine near Millstreet, Co Cork.

I caretake it. I inherited a responsibility, an obligation from my father, who inherited it from his father, and I will pass it along to my son Matthew as well. I come from farming stock, and we always take our responsibilities seriously. We didn’t have a whole lot, but what we did we looked after. And I see this as my duty – to look after this well the same way my father did.

Around the well there are rosary beads, and then there’s a crucifix at the end of that. So people come down and they do the rounds. The usual thing is to go around three times. There are people down there, I am not joking you, every hour of every day. The month of May being the month of Mary, that’s when people go there in their droves. And I mean at any one time on a Sunday afternoon, there could be 300 people, 400 people there. You might think maybe it was only the elderly people that go there, and sure enough they do go there. But there are younger people as well. I see a lot of people in their twenties.

And I have found out that as we go deeper and deeper into the recession, there are more and more people coming there. People come there for the solace, and the quietness. People are coming there for peace of mind. People find some strength down there – if they come with worries maybe their worries are lessened, they see things differently. If I was to say it in a nutshell, people are looking for hope. And I think they get it down there. We all go back to our roots eventually.

Money worries I think can lead on to other worries within a house. It can show cracks in a relationship. When I was growing up we had very, very little. But we were very, very happy. People now have a hundred times more than what I had, and people are deeply unhappy. Bitterly unhappy. People are finding out that happiness does not come with material things. It’s nice to have a big screen TV and things like that, but if one hasn’t, it’s not the end of the world, you know?

If you go down there, you’ll see there are walking sticks. They’re left there by people who credit Tubrid Holy Well with cures. People who had walking sticks, who needed walking sticks. I’ve taken sticks away from it and I have them here because they were getting weatherbeaten over the years. So I just left two. I’m not saying that there have been cures there, but I do know people believe there have. That’s the belief that people have.

Sean O’Neill looked after the shrine in the Prospect area of Limerick city for 40 years

Our shrine is a beautiful shrine. It’s in the centre of Quinn’s Cottages in Prospect, and there’s a statue in the centre and four square lawns in it, with beds of roses. And lovely railings around. The front gate was made by a very old smith named Dave Benson. And it wasn’t welded, it was hand riveted, the old way. And then it has ‘BVM’. You’d never come across the work again.

It was built in the Marian Year, 1954. It was built by the people in the area. It was a great community effort – everyone went in after work, all the spare time they had. And the half-day at that time was a Saturday, and they used to do it on a Saturday as well. I was only seventeen or eighteen at the time, and I would come from work and I used to go in the evening then and give them a hand doing it.

My mother and father, Henry and Rita O’Neill, would be the instigators of putting the shrine there, along with Frankie Cowhey and Mrs Cowhey. My parents looked after it for years. And when they got a bit elderly I went down and looked after it. I put a terrible lot of time into looking after it over the years, because I’d be very proud of it.

Even people who lived in the area, and their parents are dead, and they could be living abroad now – when they’re visiting, the first thing they’d do would be to go and look at the shrine. Anyone who’s coming through the area, through Quinn’s Cottages and down Prospect way, would stop and bless themselves passing it.

I have a lot of friends now, that would come from abroad. They come and visit me here, and they take photographs of our grotto. And they bring them back then, back to different parts of the world. So there’s pictures of it all over the world.

It’s very kept the whole time, it’s respected. There’s weeding, painting the gates, weeding the rose beds, and cutting the four lawns. So the grass is kept down. I’d say what draws people to it is the way that it’s kept. And the respect that people in the area have for the shrine. For years they used to say the Rosary there, in the month of May, but they don’t do it at the moment. Because a lot of the elderly people are gone now.

Jimmy Cummins’ mother Jenny looked after the grotto in Ballon, Co Carlow, for several decades

It was one man really, a man by the name of Tom McArdle. He started it in 54, and it took him five years to build it. It could be 30 foot high. I suppose he put all his time and effort into it. His family had a great devotion. Mrs McArdle was a schoolteacher here for 40 years, and she had a great devotion to Our Lady. She had a daughter and she called her Bernadette.

It’s a replica of the Lourdes grotto. There was a wall built first, and then a construction of steel. They collected scrap metal – old bed angles, and probably anything they could find. And then very fine netting wire – he put the wire in the shape of rocks and covered it over then with cement. If you tap on it, it’s sort of hollow in spots. There was a big crowd for the blessing.

To raise the money, there was a lot of waste paper collected. At the time they used to go round and collect it and they’d sell the paper. They would have had a lot of hands, helping out, from a few locals. My grandmother would have helped mixing the cement, and done a lot of riddling of the sand. And my mother was there at the building, she was 15. She remembers climbing 30ft to the top of it with buckets of cement. My mother is 76, and she was born here in Ballon. If her father was alive now he’d be well over 100, and he was born here. And her grandmother. All in the one house. So our roots are well dug in.

The grotto does play a big part in the village. It’s kept very well. There’s one man here that now looks after it, he gives his time. And people, locals would give in flowers to put on it. Last year where it was weatherbeaten there was extra plaster put on, and it was painted up. And the statues were painted. I remember when I was younger my father cleaning the steelwork and painting it, down through the years.

A version of this piece was first published in the Sunday Tribune. Photos by Steve Bowbrick, IrishFireside, damiandude and Passetti on Flickr.

Tapesponders are people who exchange tapes, instead of writing letters or emails. Gerry Feighan, a member of the Chatterbox Recording Club in Co Armagh, explains what it’s all about.

“Tapesponding would be equal to a phone conversation. The only thing is, the message from the sender is recorded. In the early days, it would have been on a reel-to-reel tape. Then when the cassette came in, that made the whole process much easier.

“Some people might play some music, then chat a bit, play a bit more music. Maybe talk about yourself and where you’re from. You join the club and you’re sent a directory of all the members, and their interests, where they live, their age. And who they’d like to converse with – male or female or whatever. So the first thing you’d do is send a letter and say ‘I was going through the list and saw your name, and I noticed that you’re interested in such and such. I would like to exchange tapes.’ And usually you get a reply back, Okay.

“I remember I was corresponding with some people from Rhodesia, before it became Zimbabwe. I taped with a professor in Lexington, Kentucky. Then there was a gentleman in Germany I corresponded with, he had been in the Hitler Youth when he was growing up. And when you heard his experience from him, as a child and how he grew into it, it was a completely different understanding of the thing.

“Or the more innovative ones would go out and record. I remember hearing recordings of a wasp tearing a piece of wood apart, made with miniature microphones. It was amazing, coming over the speakers like somebody pulling the strings of some corded instrument.

“I was recording with a chap in Japan, and he was into this binaural recording. The idea is that it would replicate the actual way we hear sounds. So the way we hear – let’s say we have a microphone in either side of our head, and that’s our two ears. And to replicate this situation, they create this dummy head and put a small microphone in each side. The fellow in Japan would put this dummy headgear on and go downtown, and onto the subways in Japan and all that.

“The membership has dropped a good bit with all these new ways of communicating. It’s not on the same scale anymore. There are still the clubs going, but not on the same scale. With the iPlayer and the iPhone and mobile and all those now, you’ve constant, 24/7, in-your-face contact, haven’t you?

“It’s quite exciting listening to all these different tapes. You’d come across a wide range of not only witty, but knowledgeable and very rational persons. I had contacts in Canada, and it wasn’t very long until they invited me out there, and I had a terrific time – all because of that correspondence.

“Hearing the human voice, there’s a more personal touch to it. Emails are great and they’re quick and they’re terrific. But being able to sit down and put this tape in… I think that’s great about it. There’s a conveyance in the human voice.”

Originally published in the Sunday Tribune. Image via spondooley on Flickr.