Sean Campbell, Cambridge, writes:

In the last issue of JMI, John Waters recommended a recent book that I wrote with Gerry Smyth (Beautiful Day: Forty Years of Irish Rock) for ‘anyone with an interest in Irish pop music’. He also stressed that the authors both ‘know their music, and are convincing in their love of it’. However, there were a number of points that require some correction.

Waters suggested that the book’s selection of songs was ‘predictable and uncontroversial’. However, the book includes many acts (Orange Machine, Eire Apparent, Mellow Candle, My Bloody Valentine) often obscured in accounts of Irish rock. More established acts are represented, moreover, by lesser known songs, hence SLF and ‘Johnny Was’, rather than the more ‘predictable’ ‘Alternative Ulster’.

Waters is mistaken to suggest that the U2 song featured in the book – ‘Beautiful Day’ (2000) – was the group’s ‘first British Number 1’. U2’s first UK No. 1 was, in fact, ‘Desire’ (1988), and was trailed by two further UK No. 1s, ‘The Fly’ (1991) and ‘Discothèque’ (1997).

Notwithstanding this point, Waters claims that our book merely confirms the view that ‘U2 are the point of the story’ of Irish rock, and ‘that there is no other story’. Beautiful Day may take its title from a U2 song, but it devotes only one of its forty-one entries to the band. Readers of the book are just as likely, therefore, to take acts like The Pogues, Van Morrison or Clannad as the main points of interest. We trust that readers of JMI will reach their own conclusions.