Ricky Dineen

Dineen grew up in Churchfield in Cork City, and formed his first band in 1978 with school friends Philip and Keith O’Connell.[7] He met vocalist Finbarr Donnelly in 1978, when they bonded over a shared interest in UFOs and music.[8] Until then Dineen had been a hard rock and Pink Floyd fan; Donnelly introduced him to post-punk and other groups heard on John Peel's BBC radio show.[3][9] Nun Attax developed an early live following in Ireland, and in the late 1970s became scene leaders in the punk movement that grew around the Arcadia ballroom, managed by Elvera Butler and Andy Foster.[10][11] Their local breakthrough came in 1981 when three of their songs were included on the Reekus Records live compilation album Kaught at the Kampus, alongside tracks by Microdisney, Mean Features and Urban Blitz.[12]

In 1983 they renamed as Five Go Down to the Sea? and recruited Úna Ní Chanainn on cello to play the bass parts. With the addition of a celloist, the band's sound changed significantly , moving away from their punk roots towards a more Captain Beefheart and surreal sound.[12] They recorded their most acclaimed EP Knot a Fish later that year,[12] which was described in 2001 by Cathal Coughlan of Microdisney and The Fatima Mansions as "just incredible...completely different to Nun Attax...it wasn't like a rock band anymore, it was...bizarre but coherent. Nothing when on for longer than two and a half minutes...[it was] a completely focused attack of extreme Cork eccentricity." [13] The band moved to London that winter, where they built a live following across England, with most of their fan base centered in the north. They released two further EPs, The Glee Club (Abstract Sounds, 1984) and Singing in Braille (Creation, 1984). Dineen was unhappy with the Creation recording and said in 2014 that while he liked the Foster, the band was trying to do something that they weren't suited to and that they "were trying to be over the top a bit...and it was a disappointment".[14] The band went into hiatus in 1985, although Dineen and Donnelly stayed in London and played a number of gigs with a drum machine early in 1986, but without industry interest.[13][15]

Donnelly and Dinned reformed as Beethoven (at first known as "Beethoven Fucking Beethoven") in 1988 and released the Him Goolie Goolie Man, Dem EP on Setanta Records the following year.[3][16] In his review for the NME, writer Steven Wells awarded the record “Single of the Week”, and said that "The centrestone of this jewel of a record is the kidnapping, tarring and feathering, mugging, shagging and destruction of "Day Tripper".[8][17] Before they could build on this success, Donnelly accidentally drowned 18 June 1989 while swimming in Hyde Park's Serpentine Pond, aged 27.[4][18] Dineen had been out with him that day, and they had planned to meet up later in the evening.[18] He later said, "If you went out for the craic with your friends on a Sunday afternoon and one of them didn't come back, it's surreal-like. Even though we were both 27, you're still young. It changes your whole life because we went from planning our future, thinking we were going to be in England for a while, to the next minute being on the flight back to Ireland."[8]

Their planned second single was never released.[7][15] Grief stricken and with the band at a sudden end, Dineen returned to Cork shortly afterwards, where he "drank [his] way though the 1990s", until his career revived in the early 2000s.[19]

Dineen current band is as music writer and guitarist with Big Boy Foolish, a band with guitarist and vocalist Liam Heffernan,[20] who self describe as "Post punk Geriatrics".[21] In June 2020, they released their debut single "Horsey!",[22][23] described by McGrath-Bryan in The Evening Echo as continuing Dineen's sound "along a grinning, black-humored trajectory".[24]

In 2021 McGrath-Bryan wrote that "unsatisfied with nostalgia, the pair have spent the last number of years cultivating a body of idiosyncratic, drum machine-propelled tunes that sit somewhere to the left of the current wave of genre revivalism."[6] Their second single, "Up the Airy", was released in August 2020,[25] followed by "B-B-F" that December. Their single "Nunzerkat", which Dinnen said was the ‘fourth in a trilogy", was released in January 2021 and topped the iTunes Music Store's Irish rock category.[6] Their November 2021 single "Bothán" was described as falling "somewhere between their post-punk roots and a mad, spacey take on low, loping country-ish lead guitar."[26] The dance influenced track "Sycophant's Dance" was released in late 2022.