“DRIVE IT LIKE YOU STOLE IT: ‘SING STREET,’ MUSIC, AND DUBLIN IN THE ’80s” (BY KERI O’SHEA)

Do you remember when music meant everything? Whether you were playing it or just listening to it, music in the last decades of the 20th century was far more than background noise to millions of young people. That’s the central idea behind Sing Street. It’s a story about a group of Irish teenagers who see music as a means of escapism, or perhaps even a more literal escape from a world which, at the time, offered more than its fair share of hardship and unhappiness.

The film is set in 1985. Long before Ireland joined the single European currency and enjoyed the so-called “Celtic Tiger” period of economic growth ― itself now a memory ― the country struggled with poverty. The film acknowledges this right from the start, showing news bulletins about mass emigration to the UK during the decade when the UK ― despite its own problems during this time ― seemed like a better option for building a future. The impact of poverty and deprivation is felt throughout Sing Street. It’s why, at the very top of the film, fifteen-year-old Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) has to change schools, moving from his old fee-paying private school to the Synge Street Christian Brothers School. This is a real educational establishment, still open today, though how they do things there now is very different to the 1980s (a point made clear in the film’s end credits). However, the past is a foreign country: Conor is tasked with adapting to Synge Street’s world of tribal rivalries, endemic bullying, and corporal punishment which gives way to outright assault, at the hands of the fearsome Brother Baxter (Don Wycherley). Turn up in brown shoes, when the uniform policy calls for black? Expect to walk around with no footwear for the day, and that’s just for a start.

This kind of treatment in school was an expected part of life in Dublin at the time. Outside the school walls, the city was a tough place. Whilst many Dubliners still speak fondly of the era, recalling a sense of real community back then, it was still an arduous time and place for anyone growing up, raising a family, or just wanting to pay their own way. The Troubles were still raging north of the border, and although any associated violence tended to occur in Northern Ireland, just a decade earlier Dublin itself had endured a spate of Loyalist (pro-British) bombings. The city wasn’t just losing a generation to emigration; there were also three-day weeks, mass unemployment, issues around drug addiction, air pollution, and urban dereliction. Through all of this, the Catholic Church continued to exert significant influence over all the institutions of the country, not least education: at this time, it was not unusual for people in religious vocations ― nuns, priests, and brothers ― to also teach, bringing their religious agendas with them. There were lots of Brother Baxters, enjoying a seemingly inviolable kind of power. 

As Conor struggles to orient himself in this new environment, and as other issues begin to impact his home life ― not least the relationship breakdown between his parents (in an era when divorce was still illegal in Ireland) ― he needs a distraction, and he finds one. This is a coming-of-age story, after all. Outside school one day, he sees a beautiful girl called Raphina (Lucy Boynton), and he’s desperate to impress her.

The way that he decides to do this is through music: he instantly becomes “Cosmo” and invents a music project, asking her if she’ll be in his band’s video. As an aspiring model expecting to have to go to London for a career, she’s interested, and better still for Conor, it gets them talking. Now, though, he has to make good on the lie: he has to actually form a band. Recruiting some other boys from school, including multi-instrumentalist Eamon (Mark McKenna) and of course a smooth-talking manager (and cameraman), Darren (Ben Carolan), their band ― Sing Street ― is born.

Director John Carney ― himself a Dubliner and a Synge Street alumnus who grew up in the city at the same time as the boys in the film ― calls Sing Street a “stealth musical.” Music of course features prominently throughout the film, but not just in the songs the boys write and play themselves. More broadly, the film is about the role of music; it commemorates something, a part of life which has now changed forever in the era of Spotify, streaming, and the rise and rise of corporate power over what we hear and who we see.

Music and its impact are everywhere in Sing Street: it’s immediate, real, and meaningful. We see the whole family sitting down to watch Top of the Pops ― a weekly British chart show which ran for 42 years ― back when it was a weekly highlight for millions of viewers across the UK and the Republic of Ireland. MTV Europe was still just around the corner (launching in 1987), but the very fact that it could launch points to the rising phenomenon of the music video; the boys want to make their own video because they’ve been impressed by the ones they’ve seen, most notably the Duran Duran video for “Rio,” with its affluence, sun, and surf offering something worlds apart from anything the boys could ever have experienced. The boys can discuss genres and styles too, call themselves “Futurists” and mean it, and namecheck some fantastic ’80s bands: Depeche Mode, Joy Division, and The Cure, to name just a few. Whereas the band in the breakout hit The Commitments (1991) ― another film set in Dublin where music offers hope ― opt to play soul, the boys in Sing Street are after something more forward-looking, maybe because the whole film is forward-looking. Not only was music an enjoyable part of adolescence at this time, it also shaped so many other aspects of a young person’s life, and the film has some fun with this, showing Conor’s personal style changing as his musical tastes expand (though perhaps predictably, Brother Baxter isn’t too enthused about the make-up).

Key to Conor’s changing tastes, though, is his relationship with older brother Brendan (Jack Reynor). Brendan has an enviable record collection, and one way that he shows his love for Conor is by sharing that knowledge with him: talking him through different releases, styles, and influences. Being older, he’s also able to offer Conor insights into what else is going on in their lives: for instance, he’s the one who tells Conor that their mother wants to leave their father. But one of the film’s saddest aspects is in the way that Brendan ― despite still being very young himself ― seems to have totally given up on life. His love of music did once translate to musical aspirations of his own, something which the film doesn’t reveal until close to the end, but it seems that Brendan has already resigned himself to a monochrome existence under the pressures of poverty, isolation, and limited life chances ― thousands of Dubliners may have felt similarly.

He now lives vicariously through Conor: it’s touching, but also tragic that this bright young man seems ready to smoke his life away in inner-city Dublin even whilst acknowledging its shortcomings, commanding his kid brother that he has to take control of his own life and “drive it like you stole it” ― move forward, don’t wait, get going. His hope for Conor and Raphina as they take the risky step of trying to escape Dublin under their own steam is genuinely very moving, because it’s a brother hoping against hope for his own brother. It’s about love. It’s why he’s so exhilarated for Conor at the very end of the film, regardless of whether Conor’s plan is a workable one ― and a realist like Brendan has to know that it probably isn’t, at least not in the most straightforward sense. The film is dedicated “To Brothers Everywhere,” which could apply both to Synge Street alumni and to siblings, just like Brendan.

Whether or not Conor and Raphina make it all the way to the UK, there’s a sense of possibility in Sing Street which itself feels like a time capsule now. The difficulties of their lives in Dublin, the promise of a better life over the sea: whatever happens, they have broken away from something that had oppressed and stifled them, whether they physically get to London now, or later. Key to all of this is music, and Sing Street is an affecting tribute to that special time and place. Its world of bands put together by performers, a world of recording DIY demos and videos, bands writing their own lyrics, finding practice spaces, and playing first-ever shows feels ever more remote.

Whilst the film offers its own improbable fantasies, what unfolds in Sing Street still feels much more plausible than it ever could today. Then, music was the start of something: it was an important, self-chosen chapter in growing up which really seemed like it could shape everything to come, at a time in life when change didn’t just feel possible, but inevitable. Sing Street has a Dubliner telling us what Dublin was like during his own early life, but also ― via his characters ― pointing out just how special a place music could hold.