The Pale on the Balcony
Dublin’s Balcony TV is great for keeping an eye on unsigned and up and coming Irish acts, though it also throws the odd establisher performer at us too - like The Pale.
The Pale were everywhere in early 1990s Ireland, especially their anthemic Butterfly beloved by so many people who presumably hadn’t heard Iggy Pop’s Passenger.
In the summer of 1992 I found myself in Turkey having pedalled a few thousand miles from Dublin . Well okay, from Holyhead. And when I arrived there, I found The Pale there before me. As I scoured the back streets of Istanbul for Turkish folk music, everywhere I looked I bumped into tapes by The Pale.
I stayed in a small run-down hotel populated by Turks, Russian prostitutes, and an Austrian woman with big hats, and the only western music that was allowed to be played in the public part of the hotel was the album Here’s One We Made Earlier by The Pale. It was enough to make you feel guilty for the low marks Ireland regularly gave Turkey in the Eurovision.
Why? I don’t know. They certainly had a unique sound for an Irish band but that uniqueness did have an eastern ethnicity to it in instrumentation and arrangement.
The highest chart positions for The Pale came in Turkey, Israel and France and over the last ten years there have been many successful cover versions of their songs in Turkey. Here for example, is Turkish band Athena with their version of Dog With no Tails, rewritten into Turkish as Palavra (Lies).
Anyway, as Gerry Adams would say, they haven’t gone away you know, so here are The Pale in 2007, on the balcony:
And, while we’re at it, HERE on video, from 1992, is that Butterfly.
The more observant among you will know we’ve mentioned them before on Irish KC. And to hear that song, go to their MySpace page and listen to track four, Féileacán. Yes, it’s Butterfly re-recorded and sung as Gaeilge
See Also:
• Seachtain na Gaeilge : Ceol ‘06
• Bairbre Munnis on Balcony TV
• Video: The Cherry Coke$
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