Slyrydes – Gatekeepers

Picture an arts administrator pushing sixty, in a pensionable job nobody can sack him from, deciding who gets public money according to whose family he knows. Then heading off to a south Dublin shopping centre to feel good about liking punk bands. That’s the narrator of “Gatekeepers”. Mark Raftery plays him straight: someone who did very well out of the Galway 2020 culture year while the year itself flopped, who thinks music belongs to the comfortable and not to anyone from the west of Ireland. He treats filling in forms as the real talent. He keeps up with new music mostly through Saturday-night ballroom TV, and by the end he’s openly admitting he’s on the make. The band call it a swipe at the “rampant cronyism that permeates through Irish arts funding and indeed public funding in Irish society generally.” Writing it as a monologue makes it land harder than a straight protest song would.

Dan Doherty produced again, and has now joined the band full-time. After the raw live sound of the early singles, he gives Slyrydes a tighter, studio-built edge that carries on from July’s “One Is Too Many”, with Pete Maher mastering. Out now on Blowtorch Records.