"No Irish band has ever attempted anything as ambitious as Ghostown, and no one ever will. Why should it? It has been done and, like Pet Sounds, it's a monument forever."
- George Byrne, Sunday Times, 1998
Strumpet City in the sunset
Suckling the bastard brats of Scot, of Englishry, of Huguenot
Brave sons breaking from the womb, wild sons fleeing from their Mother.
- The Old Lady Says No! by Denis Johnston, 1928. The actor playing Robert Emmet takes a blow to the head and imagines himself wandering in 20th Century Dublin.
"It's a monumental achievement......possibly the most significant Irish rock album ever.....it's greatness lies partly in the fact that it's not purely dismissive, that it explores aspects of what it's challenging and in doing so discovers a language which is all the more moving for the associations it evokes"
- Niall Stokes, Hot Press 1979
How Many! said Mr Bloom. All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we.
- Leopold Bloom in Hades: Patrick Dignam's funeral. (James Joyce, 1922)
"If Ghostown was hardly Dublin in the rare oul' time, it never used grim music to describe the grimy streets and minds. Because everyone who cherished this LP knew its steepling choruses also counted both ours and the Radiators' means of exorcism."
- Bill Graham, sleeve note to the 1989 10th Anniversary edition.
".....For the Irish have not the heart to baptize their children completely, they want to preserve just a little paganism and whereas a child is normally completely immersed, they keep his right arm out of the water so that in afterlife he can grasp a sword and hold a girl in his arm."
- Soren Kierkegaard, Journal, 1840
"........But mostly, like all the best Irish rock records, it's about death, lowdown dirty sex and feeds of drink. I can't say if the record cured us of any of this, but at least we're still here. And it is a little disconcerting that 27 years later, an album treating the ghosts of Dublin past as if they are time-travellers in an episode of Star Trek, should now have its own ghosts - Agnes Bernelle, Bill Graham, Johnny Byrne, Ruan O'Lochlainn, Charlie Maclennan, Phil Lynnot, Dermod O'Meara, Peter Owens, Paul Verner, John Borrowman......so many more.....threaded into the fabric. That doesn't occur to you when you're 21."
- Philip Chevron, February 2005
