Nun Attax / Five Go Down to the Sea? Dineen grew up in
Churchfield on the northside of
Cork City, and formed his first band in 1978 with school friends Philip and Keith O’Connell. He met vocalist
Finbarr Donnelly in 1978 when they bonded over a shared interest in
UFOs and music. Until then Dineen had been a
hard rock and
Pink Floyd fan; Donnelly introduced him to
post-punk and other groups he had heard on
John Peel's
BBC radio show. Nun Attax developed an early live following in Cork and in the late 1970s became scene leaders in the local punk movement that grew around the Arcadia ballroom, managed by Elvera Butler and Andy Foster. 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. In 1983 they renamed as Five Go Down to the Sea? and recruited Úna Ní Chanainn on
cello to play the bass parts. The addition of a cellist lead to a significant change the band's music, away from their punk roots towards a more
Captain Beefheart and surreal sound. They recorded their most acclaimed EP
Knot a Fish later that year, 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." 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". The band went into hiatus in 1985, although Dineen and Donnelly stayed in London and played a number of gigs accompanied by a drum machine early in 1986, but without attracting industry interest.
Beethoven Fucking Beethoven 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. 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". Before they could build on this success, Donnelly accidentally drowned 18 June 1989 while swimming in
Hyde Park's
Serpentine Pond,
aged 27. Dineen had been out with him that day, and they had planned to meet up later in the evening. 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." The planned second single was never released. 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.
Big Boy Foolish Dineen still live in Cork City. He is currently the music writer and guitarist with Big Boy Foolish, a duo formed with vocalist
Liam Heffernan, formerly of
Mean Features. Given their early 1980s vintage, the band self-describe as "Post punk Geriatrics". Because Dineen lives in Cork and Heffernan in Dublin, they collaborate remotely by sending each other ideas and riffs that "gradually [evolve into] tunes". According to Heffernan the process began "long before the pandemic made a necessity of distributed teamwork." described by McGrath-Bryan in
The Evening Echo as continuing Dineen's sound "along a grinning, black-humored trajectory". In 2021 McGrath-Bryan wrote that they had "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." Their second single, "Up the Airy", was released in August 2020, 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. 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." The dance influenced track "Sycophant's Dance" was released in late 2022. Their debut album "Stall the Ball" was released in early 2024. The band released their debut album "Stall the Ball" in January 2024, digitally and on vinyl. It was followed by a number of singles and the January 2025 EP "Fear & Foibles". ==Legacy==