Come Here To Me!

Evening Herald, February 1987.

Last weekend, I had the honour of leading a walking tour for the MusicTown festival, exploring the musical heritage of Dublin’s northside. The tour brought us from George Desmond Hodnett (he of ‘Take her up to Monto’ fame) to the Asylum nightclub, and from the anti-jazz crusade to Christy Moore’s anthem for the striking Dunnes workers. One of the more unusual stops on the tour was the O’Connell Bridge. For me, the bootleggers of old were a necessary stop on the tour.

Something has truly entered the folk memory of a city when it begins appearing in fictional accounts of the place.  In Brian Leyden’s book Departures, published in 1992, we read of  a character heading “Over O’Connell Bridge in a head- bobbing current of pedestrians, past bootleg tape and pavement jewellery sellers. Leaping out into the stream of oncoming cars and green, leaning double-deckers at the intersections.” More recently, Rachael English included the bootleggers in her own novel, writing of how “He threaded his way along O’Connell Street, around the queue at the Savoy cinema, past the doughnut kiosk and over the bridge. He nodded at the man selling bootleg cassettes and gave a few coppers to a woman begging for change.”

Recollections of both buying and selling bootleg tapes on the bridge have made their way online in recent times. One seller recounted the manner in which Gardaí would occasionally raid the O’Connell Bridge, leading to frantic scenes:

Gardaí “raided” the Bridge, as if it were some dingy speakeasy, with the impish tactic of approaching from both ends simultaneously and removing their caps so they couldn’t be easily seen. Lads scarpered. Cases of precious C60s and C90 were lost to the evidence room of time. Unless some brave warrior stepped forward and took the fall. Getting arrested with your box meant it was your property and you could get it back. You might have 30 tapes in a case. 3 or 4 pounds a pop? What’s a brush with the law against that kind of cheddar?

Bootlegging on the bridge was at its height in the late 1980s, leading the Evening Herald to proclaim in 1987 that “the bootleg business in Dublin was never healthier than it is now. On O’Connell Bridge…Chris de Burgh, Bruce Sprinsteen, U2, Simple Minds et al line up in cassette cases for £3 and £4 a time.” Following Michael Jackson’s Pairc Ui Caoimh performance in 1988, sellers reported hundreds of copies selling on the bridge in days. At £7 for a two cassette set, it was a relatively expensive investment, when recordings of gigs could be famously poor quality. Still, there was a rush in the purchase and hope in the gamble. As Clinton Heylin notes in Bootleg! The Rise and Fall of the Street Recording Industry, “bootleg collectors the world over will remember their initial ‘hit’ – that first time they stumbled upon a stall or store selling albums you weren’t supposed to be able to buy.”

Mike Scott of the Waterboys was quoted in the press as saying he had no strong objections to bootleggers, and had even bought bootlegs of Waterboys gigs on the bridge. Taking to the stage at Dublin’s National Stadium, Morrissey introduced a new song by saying it was a gift to the bootleggers, as he had yet to record it. Other artists, in particular U2, were less jovial about it all.

The speed with which the recordings would appear on the bridge was remarkable. In a piece exploring the economics of it all, the Irish Press noted in 1991 that “During U2’s Joshua Tree tour, tapes of concerts in the United States of less than one week vintage were available in plentiful supply.” To an extent, Irish artists were generally not too bothered about live recordings of their gigs being sold, but bootlegged copies of studio albums were treated very differently. Gardaí seized more than 4,000 bootleg tapes in raids across the country in October 1992, at a time when the ‘industry’ was beginning to unravel.

By then, things were changing. The dominance of the CD, coupled with the arrival of music megastore Virgin beside the bridge,  didn’t help those flogging tapes on the bridge.  A former customer, in a brilliant memoir piece, recounted:

The last time I clearly remember them on the bridge they were selling the Nirvana at The Point Depot cassette from 1992 with Kurt’s own ‘Rock Star’ signature on the cover (another show I attended). It’s possible this was one of the last big sellers for the traders. Maybe with the increased uptake of CD or the Gardai cracking down on them this business seemed to gradually move into shops from then on but the emphasis was more on unreleased studio recordings.

These tapes remain as interesting mementos of magic nights, sometimes in Dublin venues that are no longer with us, like the SFX Hall or McGonagale’s. The homemade, DIY covers of many of the tapes make them something of a design curiosity too, and while more and more bands are now releasing official live recordings of their shows, these tapes offer a nostalgia that cannot be matched.