The Commitments
The Commitments (1987) is a novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle, and is the first episode in The Barrytown Trilogy. It is a tale about a group of unemployed young people in the north side of Dublin, Ireland, who decide to start a soul band. As with most of Roddy Doyle's other works, the characters are complex and evolve throughout the book.
Plot summary
Two friends - Derek Scully and "Outspan" Foster - get together to form a band, but soon realise that they don't know enough about the music business to get much farther than their small neighbourhood in the Northside of Dublin. To solve this problem, they recruit a friend they'd had from school, Jimmy Rabbite, to be their manager. He accepts graciously, but only if he can make fundamental changes to the group. First being the sacking of the third, and mutually disliked, member - their synth player. After this, Rabbitte gets rid of their name, (which was And And! And, a name Derek has a hard time comprehending as he has forgotten what an exclamation mark is. "Fuck Fuck exclamation mark Me" is Jimmy's reply to the suggestion) making them "The Commitments", ("All the good 60s bands started with a 'the'.") and, most importantly, forming them from another synth-pop group to the face of what he thinks will be the Dublin-Soul revolution. ("Yes, Lads. You'll be playing Dublin Soul!")
He witnesses a young man singing drunkenly into a microphone at a friend's wedding and is struck by the fact he is singing "something approximating music". He decides the band should play soul music. Jimmy places an ad in the local paper reading "Have you got soul? Then Dublin's hardest working band is looking for you". Eventually, he gets together a mismatched group with seemingly no musical talent, led by mysterious stranger Joey "The Lips" Fagan, who claims to have played trumpet with Joe Tex and the Four Tops. They quickly start learning how to play their instruments and perform a number of local gigs.
With Jimmy Rabbite, a music-fanatic, as their manager the Commitments seek to fufill their goal of bringing soul to Dublin. In the beginning, Jimmy includes all of the country Ireland, but later decides that the "culchies" have everything whereas the Dubliners were the working-class and had "fuck all". Bringing soul music to Ireland was then reduced merely to the city. In attempt to make classic soul and R&B more "Dubliny", it is decided that some lyrics should be changed to make more sense to life in the Irish capital.
The lineup of the Commitments:
- Jimmy Rabbitte - Manager,
- James Clifford - Pianist,
- Imelda Quirke - Backup Vocalist,
- Natalie Murphy - Backup Vocalist,
- Mickah Wallace - Bouncer/ 2nd Drummer,
- Bernie McGloughin - Backup Vocalist,
- Dean Fay - Saxophonist,
- Liam "Outspan" Foster - Guitarist,
- Billy Mooney - 1st Drummer (quit because he couldn't stand Deco),
- Joey "The Lips" Fagan - Trumpet,
- Derek Scully - Bassist,
- Deco Cuffe - Lead Vocalist.
Tensions run high between the band members, not helped by the jealously and animosity Joey receives from other male members due to the attention he receives from the female backing singers. The band slowly become more and more musically competent and draw bigger and more enthusiastic audiences, until Joey promises the band that Wilson Pickett, who he claims is an old friend, will join them at a gig and jam with them. When Pickett doesn't show, animosity between various band members boils over and they break up. This only happens in the film.
Fagan soon goes to America after one of the girls tells him she is pregnant (she was actually lying, only saying this for the attention). In the end, Jimmy, along with the band's other founding members, forms The Brassers, an Irish hybrid of punk and country.
The film, book, and soundrack were all hugely popular in the 90s, and a group containing some of the film's actors still tours. There are some differences between the book and film, the most obvious being that the novel was composed mostly of dialogue, with hardly any physical description; the movie concentrated much more on the collapse of Dublin's backstreets. Unlike the film, which could be categorized as comedy-drama, the book was almost entirely comedic.
External links
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