When the first incarnation of
Five Go Down to the Sea? broke up in 1984, lead vocalist Finbarr Donnelly and guitarist
Ricky Dineen remained in London after the split. They moved from
Rotherhithe to
Shepherd's Bush, where early 1988 they recruited Dublin-born bassist Maurice Carter and Swiss drummer Daniel Strittmatter and reformed under the name Beethoven. After a debut gig at the
Mean Fiddler, the band came to the attention of Keith Cullen, owner of Setanta Records, and for a period he acted as their manager and promoter. The band released an EP,
Him Goolie Goolie Man, Dem, in early June 1989, produced by
Jon Langford of the Mekons and
the Three Johns. It was Setanta's first release, and contained five tracks, including a cover of "
Day Tripper" by
the Beatles. A few weeks after release, on 18 June 1989, Donnelly drowned while swimming in
Hyde Park's
Serpentine Pond, at the
age of 27. Dineen had been out with him that day, and they had planned to meet at a pub later in the evening. Dineen 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." A second EP, planned to feature a cover of
Queen's "
Bohemian Rhapsody", was never recorded. Dineen was grief-stricken and with the band at a sudden end, said that he "drank [his] way though the 90s" until his career revived in the early 2000s. ==Reception==