Singer's Hampstead Home

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  Seven Songs for the Week #50 - 20th Mar 24

  Jason Carty

  Another key piece of tv this week was the Microdisney documentary on BBC on the Friday night of the St Patrick's Weekend. The pre-publicity had promised a documentary about the greatest band you'd never heard of, but I'm guessing most people watching had heard of Microdisney. It was hard to get away from the profound sadness that ran through the whole thing, as Sean and Cathal spend the 80s/their 20s skimming the possibility of breaking through. By 1987 there was no reason why they shouldn't have had that moment. This track exists in a space between The The and Prefab Sprout, who were no strangers to the charts in 1986-1988. There were a lot of bad bands that bubbled up in Ireland in the 1980s post-U2 universe, Microdisney were not one of them, but that didn't matter because they weren't in Ireland, nor did they bother hanging around A&R-friendly Dublin at all and instead went to London where the Irish were not loved. Then it seems the exhaustion and belligerence took over until they imploded. The documentary starts with the reunion 30 years later in 2018 and ends with that wrapping up in 2019. Some people would call it closure, but it just seemed to make things more sad, before Cathal dies in 2022 at the too young age of 61.