GALWAY ARTS FESTIVAL 2006

GALWAY is a place I'd been looking forward to - but somehow as soon as I arrive, things don't seem to flow for me. Firstly, my bus from Dublin takes five hours rather than three and a half. I'm also unable to get in touch with the people I was planning on staying with, and so go out searching for a hostel, at 7 p.m on a Friday night - not the best idea at this most busiest time of the year! Due to the annual arts festival going on, almost everything is fully booked, but luckily just before I resign myself to sleeping in the park I find a hostel, admittedly grotty but obviously the last choice for me. At this stage I am tired, grumpy and just glad of a place to crash so I take it.

My bed for the night sorted, I leave with my guitar to hunt out a perch - I don't need the money so much today but I've become used to this routine - get to a new place and immediately take to the streets, often for better or for worse. There are buskers EVERYWHERE and they range from the brilliant to the absolutely surreal. There are a bunch of German girls in school uniform; one sits on the pavement and strums a nylon strung guitar while the others sing songs in their mother tongue. A Native American group I saw in London two weeks back are settting up their soundsystem, complete with massive generator... there's even infamous old 'Plink-Plonk' - a guy I'd been told about before, who stands on a corner with a cardboard guitar next to a music stand where the music for 'Plink-Plonk' is clearly visible - he stands next to it repeating the two words of his song whilst simulating playing the guitar, and seems to be doing allright as well!

SO at this stage there doesn't seem to be a space for me - I'm fine with this however, not being the kind of busker to bust in on another person's perch. This is certainly a time to let the whole game go for a while...

I wander down to the Spanish Arch, a grassy seaside area where straight away a guy with a guitar calls me over. He is PETER from Poland, and seems to be warming up for a night of busking himself - his 'warm up' consists of drinking cheap beers that are hidden inside his guitar case (he calls it the 'Garda Bar' - Garda being the name for Police here...) and drawing in small crowds of people with his throat tearing versions of 'Twist and Shout' and '500 Miles'. He's a nice guy though - like almost all Polish people I've met - and persuades me to come along with him, if only for the experience of seeing how easy it is to draw money from drunk people.

I've always known the money is where the drunkards are. However, I still prefer to busk in the daytime, where people can listen to and appreciate the music. Last year in Barcelona with Paul and Brian, I saw how rich we became from going round the terraces of bars there, and had an amazing week with all kinds of nocturnal adventures, often drinking our takings away til dawn, at which time we'd go down to the beach for sunrise.. good times... Anyway, even though I know it's not really my thing anymore, I go with Peter on this new mission. We find a perch outside 'Abrakebabra' (same name as a store in Wellington - ha ha) and sure enough, our first chords seem to invoke some kind of magic spell of their own. Within a chorus of that ole Scottish classic '500 Miles' (I cringe to hear it but decide to quickly get used to it) we've made about ten Euros, coins seeming to spill from pockets and purses of besotted young Galwayites and festival goers, stiletto heels doing the drunken shuffle on the dirty pavement.

I'm uncomfortable with this straight away - it doesn't feel like real music and we seem to be contributing to this culture of 'drink til you can't see straight anymore' - certainly eyes seem to be going in different directions anyway - and my heart sinks as I observe beefy guys clumsily dancing with girls in painted on dresses just as an excuse to cop a feel of their starvaceous curves -I hate this shit, it makes me sad and almost sorry to be human...

But I end up staying a while longer. It's not all bad. There are some good moments - a Bob Marley singalong, some guy that requests a song by INXS (!)... some good craic as they say... but city life can be so gritty, so raw... I leave after making possibly the easiest money of my life, but knowing that I cannot play music in this way. I'd be rich in a week but I guess I have a problem with the musicless-ness of it all.

Seems in this world most people would rather pay for a mindless 2 chord drunken scream than a meaningful folk song - and if the charts are anything to go by, I understand who so many people are saying music is dead. Not my reality, not my way... I go back and feign sleep over the roar of inebriation outside my hostel window and decide to try on my own again in the daytime before leaving the city for a quieter place in the countryside - certainly my soul is calling for it...