This Weekend I’ll Mostly Be Listening to… The Zen Alligators August 18, 2012
Posted by irishelectionliterature in This Weekend I'll Mostly Be Listening to....trackback
Was looking for material from another band when I came across some material from The Zen Alligators and given the recent mention of The Horslips by wbs, I figured I’d do the Zen Alligators this weekend. They released a number of singles in the early 80s, were fairly popular although never produced an Album before they broke up.
I always liked the name and used to see posters for them playing the likes of the TV Club. I remember too arriving at a cousins house in the early 80s and being very impressed with her collection of singles which included the Zen Alligators, Tokyo Olympics and other Irish bands with fancy names from the time.
The band contained two ex-members of Horslips, Johnny Fean on guitar and vocals and Eamon Carr on drums.
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The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
Excellent group and great to see this post. Who can that someone be is a classic of its kind – to my ears there was a Dr. Feelgood/pubrock angle to them. Great song (I remember them doing it ‘live’ on the Late Late Show). I was always surprised given by how much they put out on single that they didn’t go for the album. I’m presuming MP3s of their output aren’t around, no?
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Great post, excellent group. Who Can That Someone Be is a classic. I suppose the first anyone heard of them was the terrific intro to that song which is some way to come in. I think I saw it on an RTE kids programme called Anything Goes which ran for several hours on a Saturday morning and ran a commendably large amount of videos by Irish bands. Or it may have been on something presented by Dave Heffernan, an incredibly serious young man who hosted some brilliant shows including one called Aspects of Rock which introduced me to all kinds of strange wonders. He’s kind of forgotten now but was a Fanning type hero to the serious young indie fan back then. Or at least he was to me.
After the ZA, Carr and Fean joined up with Charles O’Connor, the Horslips member most people tend to forget if asked the names of the band members in the pub even though he was arguably the most influential, to form The Host who released a good album called Tryal, based on the burning to death of Bridget Cleary, accused of witchcraft by her husband and neighbours at the tail end of the 19th century. Angela Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary is a classic of Irish history, a great read. In Roy Foster’s biography of Yeats, there’s a bit about the poet getting all distraught about the incident and wondering if this invalidated his ideas about the nobility of the Irish folk tradition. “Don’t worry WB,” said someone to him, “they’re always at this kind of thing in Tipperary.”
I’d say ZA are maybe less Feelgood style pub rock than a continuation of the West Coast American rock style you get on Horslips tracks like Loneliness and Rescue Me from the two albums. I know those songs are considered as a betrayal of their noble Celtic Rock roots but I like them a great deal and think those two albums, particularly The Man Who Built America, stand up very well. They really were very good songwriters.http://youtu.be/m6JLgjMmxz0
That West Coast influence can be seen in these two tracks from Tryal.
Fean subsequently went on to form The Last Bandits with Simon Carmody of the Golden Horde and Nikki Sudden of early Post Punk band Swell Maps. They didn’t last long but this is a really beautiful song and a lost classic of the mid eighties.
IEL’s mention of Tokyo Olympics brings me back.
A very good band, previously DC Nien, and one of a group of bands who disdained the epic rock style of many of their counterparts and went in for a synthy funky feel, the likes of Some Kind of Wonderful, Fountainhead and Sligo’s great Those Nervous Animals whose best song, and one of the best Irish songs of that era, I include merely because my sister’s boyfriend used to be in the band.
I.
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Fair point re west coast. And I’d entirely agree re how that aspect of their sound is sometimes undervalued. Loneliness and The Man Who Built America are remarkable songs. But a heap more on those albums are equally good. I only heard the Host back in the day and my memories aren’t vivid so I’ll have to go back and listen.
Tokyo Olympics were class. And DC Nien.
TNA good too.
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Remarkable is the word for it. I’ve always absolutely loved the lyrics of The Man Who Built America and the way the flute keeps coming in as though it’s the persistent ghost of their Celtic Rock incarnation.
Maybe that Concert Hall gig might be worth a jaunt though really the Horslips gig I want to go to would be one in around 1976 in the Mayflower in Drumshanbo or the Kon Tiki in Rooskey. If anyone sees a time machine going for a reasonable price on E-Bay let me know.
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Yep. Those songs – well, they’re part of an era. But also they capture, and maybe it is the instrumentation, a real sense of what it was to be away from the country and yet be part of amazing times and events in the US. That sort of double edged sword of not being here/being there, homesick/excitement. TBH the only Horslips album I actively dislike is the last one and even then Guests of the Nation is good in a clunky kind of a way.
I’ll take shares in that time machine!
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“The Host who released a good album called Tryal, based on the burning to death of Bridget Cleary, accused of witchcraft by her husband and neighbours at the tail end of the 19th century”
We did a Hotwire package tour with the Host and LABF in late ’85. My first experience of touring and an introduction to the vanishing but stubbornly persistent world of the showband circuit. Last night was all of us on stage doing Dearg Doom IIRC.
Came across a CD reissue of the Last Bandits record on expensive Japanese (?) import in Jumbo here recently. Took me right back. Nikki Sudden was the author of one of those pieces of homespun rock ‘n’ roll wisdom that one could live by: he was of the opinion that if you were very close to being completely broke, you should give away the few bob you have left to the first beggar you come across, so it’ll stop bothering you.
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That’s an album I haven’t listened to in years, the Last Bandits.
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That was the first album I ever bought. (Now, there’s a topic for a thread…)
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You’ll be seeing a This Weekend I’ll be Mostly Listening to ‘Jailbreak’ by Thin Lizzy soon so 🙂
Bought in Woolworths in Newry at some stage in the very late 70s or early 80s. My brother and I went halves on it. The anticipation as we read the sleeve all the way home to Dublin!
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[…] a real love of the Zen Alligators singles – retro, even at the time, but catchy as all hell and IEL covered them on a This Weekend here. Carr’s HotWire label was an important part of the Irish musical landscape for quite a while. […]
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