In response to Barkinglot's open call, here is a song that almost cost me my friends a long time ago.   It's an Italian Eurovision entry from 1974.   It won, if I remember rightly.  I know it was released in English after the Eurovision and, according to the youtube comments, it reached No. 6 in the Irish charts and No. 8 in the UK charts.   Unfortunately, being a penniless student, I could not afford to contribute to the chart-listings back then.   Instead, I recorded it from the radio and then played it over and over, struggling to get that bridge in the middle, practising the phrasing, until I had it perfect - as I thought.   The trouble I had getting the lyrics back then - I look back now and wonder where I got all that misguided energy?    

For some reason this had just been another nice Eurovision song for me until 1977.   Maybe I started listening to a different radio station when I left home to go to university.  This was the time of pirate radio stations and a new type of 'DJ': vainglorious, pseudo-'hip', machismo-atic (as opposed to the charismatics, who were the religious spinners) moustachio-ed attic-dwelling graduates of Electronics101.   The pirate radio craze swept the country in a cultural revolution similar to the effect broadband has had more recently.    Young people tuned into Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline, illegal eyries broadcasting the tunes of radical artists like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles while their parents tuned into a mushrooming crop of local radio station: Radio Limerick, Raidio Luimni, Big L.   

These stations succeeded, indeed survived, because they offered innovative programming and were keenly responsive to their community audience.  They had the local news, local sports results, local parish announcements, local bands, local heroes, local accents.   For the Ireland that existed outside of Dublin, they highlighted the incipient obsolescence of the national broadcaster. 

Competition was fierce.   Radio Limerick secured a dedicated, substantial market share of the county's listenership for its regular morning reading of the Death Notices from the national papers.  When the newspapers threatened to sue, the local undertakers rushed to supply the information directly to the station.    The listeners phoned in their appreciation; it was better this way, they said, because 'now you don't have to put up with that awful rustling of the pages  in the middle of it all and will you play 'Four Roads' for my mother, she's inside listening to you, she listens to you every morning, d'you know she'd forget to milk the cows she loves your show so much?'   There was no such easy notoriety on the national stations.  

These mature denizens of illegitimacy played the classics: Sinatra, Elvis, Eurovision, and country music by prominent Irish artists of the showband scene like Big Tom and the Mainliners.   Yes, that's an actual band's actual name.    Incredibly inappropriate today; attractive beyond belief yesterday.     If you don't believe me, check this out but, I warn you, this clip should carry a health warning for anyone under 65:

 ... and yes, I sang along with this song, too.  Chagrin, thy name is 'Open Call'.   

 It seems now so long ago and yet, it's only been - oh, yes, thirty years.   Hmmm.    In Rag Week, our second year in college, we decided to set up a campus pirate radio station: Radio Rag Week.       We strung the aerial from the roof of our house to  a large tree opposite and cleared out the spare room.   Our all-female household became a mecca for every solder-wielding wooly-jumpered nerd and every 45-collecting open-necked Jon Peel-wannabe on the campus.    Too late, we tried to set boundaries: 'You have a table in the back room, why do you have to use the kitchen table too?'  Very soon, we regretted our too-eager offer: 'WHO left the lid up again?!'  Every surface held printed-circuit boards, dirty cups, parts of almost-recognisable things, parts of not-recognisable things, records, tapes, tools - we were inundated by industry, overwhelmed by their optimism. 

Funny the way things work out sometimes.    This rash decision of ours had two significant consequences:

(1) A year later, we approached our neighbours to advise them that we would each be 21 and planned a series of 21st parties that year.   We discovered that the house cater-corner to our own was owned by the local Garda Superintendent  (local head of the police force).    He had no problem with our plans and graciously assured us that he would not be put out by them.   So we were nonplussed when he casually asked, as we left, 'Are ye  going to take down that aerial now that ye've got rid of the pirate radio station?'  We stammered something guiltily incoherent and ran back to the house where,

(2) the wooly-jumpered nerd who would be my husband was asked to remove the offending evidential aerial immediately!

Fortunately, my husband did not know me when I sang this song.   I sang it at every opportunity the third semester of first year, usually drunk but not necessarily so.   (Just like I couldn't afford records, I couldn't always afford alcohol, which ranked higher on my Maslovian pyramid at the time.   Later, after discovering home-brewing with my husband, my options were broadened.)   My heart was being broken by a caddish boyfriend and I bemoaned my fate in these lyrics.    At first my friends were sympathetic and listened to my tale of woe.    They agreed he was a cad, they assured me I would be much better off without him, they encouraged me to tell him, as the lyrics said, to 'Go before you break my heart'.     But it was easier and more satisfying in an ill-defined, self-indulgent way to drink and sing this song.   And the more I sang this doleful song the fewer friends I had to comfort me.     I wasn't telling them to go - but I wasn't telling my CBF to go, either.   They were good friends, kind and caring.    I was wallowing and they knew it and they refused to tolerate it.     Eventually, I did, too.  And the next year I learned a new song.

But that's another post for another day.  

So, readers, beware this song!   Listen, like, leave!   Beware wallowing!