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Source: Daily Telegraph
Date: 12/1/97
Author: Catherine Milner
Copyright: (c) The Telegraph 1997
WILLIAM Butler Yeats, the Anglo-Irish poet, is to become a rock star. Fourteen of his poems have been set to music by bands better known for belting out rock 'n' roll than rhyming couplets.
Shane MacGowan, the rogueish former lead singer of the Pogues, who once said of his own writing "I spew it out and then tear it to bits", rasps the words of An Irish Airman Foresees his Death to the background of a heavy Irish jig. The album will also include poems adapted by the Waterboys and the Cranberries - both of whom are better known for their love dirges - and Van Morrison's adaption of Before The World was Made, cleverly turned into a boy/girl love song.
The CD, which will be launched on January 28 - 58 years to the week after the poet died - is the creation of Frank Dunne and Michael Tuft, two journalists who hit upon the idea while touring the west coast of Ireland. After gaining the approval of Anne and Michael Yeats, the poet's descendants, they approached the recording company Grapevine to make a CD.
"Most of the bands we chose do word-led songs," said Mr Tuft. "Yeats is very important to the Irish - he stuck with Ireland in the way Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, who became exiles, did not, and so many of the Irish rock bands we chose empathised with his work. Because lots of the work he wrote was in the ballad tradition, it made it very easy to adapt, and we hope the new songs will show he is part of the living tradition."
Apart from adding a heavy beat and a generous smattering of "yeah, yeah, yeahs" and "oooh babys", most of the songs stick more or less to the original poems. This is not the first time Yeats's words have been put to music. Samuel Barber, Judy Collins and Martin Carthy have adapted them.
Roy Foster, Carroll Professor of Irish history at Oxford University, whose biography of Yeats is published in March, was not impressed by the new venture. "I don't think much of adapting poems to music - it's usually unbearably kitsch," he said. "And though I quite like some of the early Pogue stuff, I don't think much of their musicality."
But others were less censorious. "There was a strong rhythm to Yeats' poems," said Anthony Thwaite, the poet and critic. "Yeats is so marvellous he could withstand anything. I don't think this CD will shove him off his pedestal."