Il video che ha cancellato Arthurs Day?

Jesus Christ haha

Without even a shadow of a doubt this was our finest hour.

Our “mad bastards” peak was that day and we’ll never hit those highs again.

“1 decade ago” 💀

I remember that video alright, and when they tried to make Arthur’s day happen, all the bands flying in to play the pubs, I met that eejit from stereophonics in one of the bars, he was tiny

Arthur’s Day was fantastic. Session through the recession.

Sure it was marketing at its peak but things were so absolutely bleak then that any respite or celebration was welcomed.

And now they’re likely someone’s dad 😅

He got played like a banjo.

Just for context, some of the reasons Arthur’s Day was such a massive fucking mess, based on my own hazy memory of it –

The gimmick was to have a pint of Guinness to hold up “To Arthur” at exactly 17:59, a nod to the brewery’s founding year. Great! 

But this meant that pubs needed to have people already in and served by 6, so they would start having free trendy youthy bands and events on from *earlier* in the day to compete with each other. And Diageo were putting HUGE money into it to make Arthur’s Day a thing out of nowhere, so there was a load of stuff on, all over the city, all day.

Obviously, the people with the flexibility to get the best of this – especially given it took place on a Thursday – were mostly students, not reknowned for their restraint with alcohol, and tbf the demo this whole marketing angle was largely aimed at, as Guinness was still trying to bring its age profile branding away from “stuffy old man drink” at the time. 

But these were pretty bad times economically, so there were also lots and LOTS of young people on the dole then, or working bits and pieces of hours a week at best, who *would* be in college or in full time jobs if this was today. 

Now either due to the gimmick or by arrangment with Diageo, participating pubs would pretty much *only* serve their products, which meant that you could *only* order Guinness on the taps in most places, or else spirits.

And since Guinness – famously – takes forever to serve in big batches, it was often easier to just order the spirits, pre game before you got there, or just sneak in stuff from the pre MUP Lidl spirit section (they used to have a fairly decent Bacardi knock off for 7ish quid) and then order mixers. 

And frankly, it’s just not very easy to *drink* Guinness all day, even if you have the money and time for it. It was the worst possible drink for this whole style of event, so, inevitably, when people couldn’t get anything else on draught they’d resort to spirits and sneak-ins too, just by necessity, and end up with the worst of all worlds. 

All in all though, heading out for the day to watch Laura Mvula with a bottle of Lidl’s perfectly fine Putinoff and some warm coke was a pretty fantastic value proposition.

Staff were under such enormous pressure trying to pour/settle/top up/serve Guinness that they couldn’t afford to give a shit while you were doing it.

When staff inevitably just *couldn’t* serve the drunkest of the drunk anymore though, and the after work crowd started showing up to make getting served even harder, those folks would migrate out of doors to keep going with whatever any of them could fetch and drag back from the nearest off license. And, again, spirits generally made the most sense for this purpose vs hauling a load of cans around that you’ll only have to find somewhere to piss out later.

So the overall upshot was that lots of folks who were desperate for cheap entertainment and free all day, and an awful lot of students, would just take the *whole* day off to drink whatever they could and go to free gigs, and be absolutely lobotomised by the afternoon, nevermind 17:59. 

And that’s why the few Heironymus Bosch-esque videos from Arthurs Day that haven’t yet been scrubbed from existence all take place in broad daylight.

This wasn’t even close to what got Arthur day cancelled. If I remember correctly this was during the first or second one? It went on for a few years after that

I was working in Temple Bar that day. I watched this particular “banjo” event in real time through the window. The amount of wasted kids walking around with literal head injuries/ gashes from broken glass/ vomit-covered clothing at 6pm was insane. Imagine the most out-of-control paddy’s day and triple it. A Spanish tourist pitched headlong down our (very steep!) stairs, got up and just wandered out to the square like nothing happened. I checked the news for days after to see if any tourists showed up dead from a brain hemorrhage.

Carnage. Absolute *carnage*.

I don’t know what I was expecting to see. But it wasn’t that. 

Drunk Guitar hero? It’s called Willy Banjo and I’ll recognise no other name.

I remember being in Vegas and they’d have these big screens outside with advertisements and every 10 minutes they’d repeat those fucking ‘To Arthur’ ads