Dublin Opinion

I am not altogether comfortable with the title of this series of posts. To begin with, I’d consider myself a poor authority to be pronouncing on what constitutes a ‘great’ band. And to finish with, most of the bands or individuals we’ve posted on here have belonged to the ‘beautiful losers’ tradition - commercial acclaim having eluded the majority of them, for whatever reasons.

The Harvest Ministers are a far more discreet outfit than my own last choice for this series GIB 20 - Virgin Prunes / Gavin Friday but they don’t escape from the beautiful losers label, I suppose. The founding preacher goes under the wonderful surname of Merriman (which he shares with the author of the amazing ‘Cúirt an Mheán Oíche’ poem). However, our chief minister is a Will rather than a Brian.

With the family name he goes under, Will could hardly have avoided poetry in some form or other. He didn’t manage to and began life as a songwriter in the mid 80s - eventually gathering a band of apostles around him which became the Ministers. As they will tell us on their homepage, HM’s website a first single ‘You Do My World the World of Good’ garnered them attention from cross-channel scouts and resulted in them issuing their excellent debut LP ‘Little Dark Mansion’ on the almost legendary Sarah Records label (don’t anyone pronounce the word ‘twee’!).

This LP is the main basis of my appreciation of the Ministers - a beautifully-crafted, mainly acoustic affair. Pertinence of this gem’s title to the current situation with housing in Dublin, is purely coincidental. Since ‘Little Dark Mansion’ the band have released three further albums, the last in 2003. Two of these albums were for the Setanta label Setanta - a recurring phrase in these posts, Donnelly bless them.

According to the HM’s website, they have just released a new EP ‘Love Will Call on You’ surely to be found in the usual outlets over there. Unfortunately, hours of Google searching under their name (and that of Merriman) have only left me with many scary videos of Yank preachers or football jocks (which is debatedly worse) so I can propose to you no video evidence of the Minister’s craft. There are MP3s available on their website and also the regulation 4 tunes on their Myspace page HM’s Myspace

If they’ve just released an EP, I’m sure they’ll be on a stage soon in Dublin so get out from behind your flatscreens, live a little, and open your ears to the good news.