Major Thinkers - Back In The 80's/ Farewell To The Coast

Irish New Wave via the USA

Label: Phaeton

Year of Release: 1980

The shadow the Boomtown Rats cast over everything else means that when you mention Irish New Wave - from the Republic of Ireland rather than Northern Ireland - there's barely room in anyone's heads for the other bands. You might get a few people managing to splutter out names like Radiators From Space or The Vipers, or even the occasional clever dick pointing towards U2's early work, but the spectre of His Bobness seems to chill the room.

To be fair, The Major Thinkers are an odd case in point, since they weren't even based in Ireland. The nucleus of the group consisted of Wexford performing partners Pierce Turner and Larry Kirwan, who relocated to New York in the early seventies and spent a period of time performing in folk clubs there as a duo. For this project, however, they were bolstered by members Paul J Ossala on bass and Thomas Hamlin on drums and their style took a much more fashionable turn. 

While abandoning Ireland might have caused them to become slightly more forgotten back home than they deserved, they remained signed to the Irish label Phaeton and issued their one eponymously titled LP through them in 1981, as well as this Double A sided single in 1980. 

"Back In The 80s" is another example of that absurd phenomenon of a song's lyrics asking people to think back to the melodrama of the decade before it had even got underway (The Martian Schoolgirls "Life In The 1980s" is a bird of a similar feather). Through choppy guitars, futuristic beeps and squeaks and strangulated vocals, it does sound oddly like a 2000s parody of the New Wave era from which it stemmed, the group singing about rock and roll resistance and Government assisted suicides. There are traces of the futuristic camp influence of glam throughout, proving that the jumps from one music genre to the next aren't always as clean as we'd like to believe.

Neither this single nor the LP sold in huge quantities either in the USA or Ireland, and the group disbanded not long afterwards. Pierce Turner went on to have a very acclaimed solo career which continues to this day. This kicked off with the Philip Glass produced LP "It's Only A Long Way Across" on Beggars Banquet in 1986 and a further ten LPs have followed since - there's a mountain of material to climb if you're interested.

Kirwan went on to issue two solo LPs, "Keltic Kids" in 1998 and "Kilroy Was Here" in 2001.

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