Here are a few clips of pub and street musicians I saw last week in Dublin, Ireland.

• Mutefish at Temple Bar, with some footage of a large leprechaun
• Brown Eyed Girl by a band at Gogarty’s
• Another guy at Temple Bar who was playing Johnny Cash until a drunk guy grabbed the mic and started singing Raglan Road
• The Wild Rover (very quick clip) at Gogarty’s
• The Beatles’ Yesterday on pan flute or something? Grafton Street
• A guy on Grafton Street with a guitar built off a Castrol oil can
• Some clips from the Musical Pub Crawl that I took from Gogarty’s: Rocky Road to Dublin, You Couldn’t Have Come at a Better Time

And a few funny comments I remember from the tour –

• We won’t be playing Danny Boy or The Minstrel Boy. We’re not a boy band.
• One of the songs was in Irish (Gaelic) and had lyrics to the effect: “100 women think they’re mine when I drink with them, but 2/3 of them drop from my mind when I think of you.” Another section compared his love to a favorite cow he lost and then found as a child.
• “Your tour books probably say the Irish are very friendly. That’s not actually true. They’re just nosy.”
• “The Irish have never invaded another country, but we’ve infested many of them.”
• Back in the 60s there was a guy called Bang Bang that everyone in town knew. He was kind of crazy and would pretend to shoot people with a golden key. Everyone would play along and it was common to see even businessmen “go down” when shot. He’s immortalized in the song The Mero: “Bang Bang shoots the buses with his golden key, Hey hi diddley I and out goes she.”