The Blow Team

As you’d pretty much expect from a legendary establishment owned by a renowned flautist and former member of Planxty and The Chieftains, Matt Molloy’s Pub on Bridge Street in Westport town has hosted countless trad sessions over the years. It’s safe to say, however, that the locals have never before witnessed a performance quite like tonight’s one.

It’s a cold Sunday night in February and, with the backing of a stomping rock band, young Dublin flautist Alan Doherty is playing his instrument with wild, sweaty abandon. What’s interesting is the tune he’s playing. It’s ‘Uprising’ by Muse. Sounding like it’s never quite sounded before...
Tonight’s the semi-official launch party for a new book and double CD entitled The Brilliant Irish Flute, the first release in a planned series of recordings called the Inis Turk Beg Sessions. When complete, The Brilliant Series will be the definitive celebration of Ireland’s traditional instruments by a selection of the country’s top musicians.
The Then CD of The Brilliant Irish Flute features that instrument in trad mode – playing airs like ‘Down By The Salley Gardens’, ‘The Road To Lisdoonvarna’ and ‘Fig For A Kiss’. CD2 Now pulls apart the flute and re-assembles it for pop/rock contemporary classics including Kings Of Leon’s ‘Sex On Fire’, The Stranglers’ ‘Golden Brown’ and even Outkast’s ‘Hey Ya!’
The Inis Turk Beg Sessions came about when Nadim Sadek, retired marketing maverick and extremely well-connected owner of Inis Turk Beg – a small private island in Clew Bay off the Mayo coast – decided to do a musical project to publicise the place. He approached the head of Warner UK who advised him to talk to the supremely talented publicist Suzanne Doyle who cut her promotional teeth working for the U2 organisation, and later for Bono directly. Deciding to keep it in the family, Suzanne, in turn, introduced Nadim to her husband – Kíla percussionist, film-scorer extraordinaire and music producer, Lance Hogan.
“Nadim who owns Inish Turk Beg had this idea to do a music project that originated on the island,” Lance explains. “He approached the head of Warner Bros in the UK. Basically he said do it with Suzanne and she came to me.”
A couple of brainstorming sessions later, they had a plan.
“The idea was to do a series of books and albums on Irish instruments, focussing on one at a time, and showing it in its traditional setting and also pushing the boundaries and getting it to be the lead vocal, so to speak, on contemporary music.
“We went for the flute first. At the moment we’re looking at the harp or the fiddle as maybe being the next one. But there’s a nearly endless number of instruments if we wanted to do them. There’s the pipes, the mandolin, tin whistle, the accordion, the Irish voice was another one. The idea is that this will build into a whole series.”
Of course, they needed some talented musicians to make this happen.
“I sat down and literally trawled through my contact book, everyone I could think of, looking to put a band together that I thought would be capable of pulling this off,” Lance explains. “Because the idea was basically that I’d take my studio and plant it on the island and work with musicians for the nine days and literally just from start to finish try and invent the whole thing. Aside from picking the songs, I didn’t really do any pre-planning. I just wanted to get a bunch of musicians together and see what happened.”
The recording sessions happened on the island over nine days last summer. The recruited musicians included Sean Regan, Steve Belton, Shea Fitzgerald and Alan Doherty (though the likes of Moya Brennan and Peter Molloy were also drafted in for a couple of key tracks). Lance played drums and produced the sessions. Although they had a lot of fun, they worked hard too.
“We were doing 18-hour days,” he recalls. “We had to, in order to record two albums worth of material. The first three days we spent just doing the trad. All the trad stuff went down live. It was just setting everyone up in a room, trying it, working it out, and going for takes. So we got all the trad done relatively quickly – three days. Then the contemporary stuff was slightly more complicated because of drum-kits and electric guitars, etc. So we really just did it song by song. Naturally, there was a lot of working out of song structures and then experimenting and trying to take it somewhere different.”
They had a few celebrity visitors during the sessions.
“A few people came to visit during the recording, which was nice, it broke up the whole thing. Barry Devlin came out. He’s an old friend of ours and it was great to have him out, because to be honest, at that stage, we still didn’t know what we were doing. We were like, ‘Is it any good? Is it turning into karaoke? What will people’s reactions be?’ So having someone like Barry come out and stay the night was great. We played the stuff to him and he sat in on one or two of the live takes. He really got off on it so that was hugely encouraging. We are doing something right here. We’re not just in our own little world.”
The accompanying book, written with authority and plain love of the flute by bestselling author and journalist Dave Kenny, also features some stunningly vivid photography by award-winning snapper Dylan Thomas. Rather than being a worthy but dull account of the flute’s origins and musical genealogy, it’s actually an incredibly funny read.
Here’s Kenny on the ‘Head Joint’ of a flute: “Sounds like something illicit to smoke and, possibly, might make a useful ‘bong’ if you’re so inclined. This contains the embouchure, or blow hole. Either way, you’ve got something to puff on.”
“That was definitely something we all agreed on – the book couldn’t be too serious,” says Lance. “We didn’t want to do the definitive flute album and definitive book on the flute. It had to be done slightly tongue in cheek and with a bit of mischief, really. Because otherwise it’d be no fun for us. None of us wanted to take it too seriously, or the music to be taken too seriously. Even though it’s approached seriously, it’s meant to be fun.”
How did they decide what songs to cover?
“With the trad, we basically just wanted a good cross-section to showcase stuff to listeners who may never have heard trad before. A good cross-section that would give a good insight into what the flute can do and what it does do within traditional music. And then the contemporary stuff, I suppose, was very much our musical tastes. Nadim, Suzanne, Dave and myself. Actually we brought in Nadim’s two teenage daughters as a sort of representation of their generation to make sure it wasn’t all ‘60s or ‘70s music that we love, and that it would appeal to teenagers as well.
“So it was a couple of sessions of sitting down, throwing songs out and listening to them. A lot of songs had to be thrown out because they wouldn’t have worked on the flute. I had a barometer, of sorts, which was if somebody named a song, I made them whistle the melody there and then. I was like, ‘if you can’t whistle the melody here and now then it’s not going to work on the flute’. So that’s how we picked them.”
Has there been any reaction from any of the contemporary acts whose music you’ve covered?
“I haven’t heard anything yet. I know the bass-player from Muse has got a copy of it. I haven’t heard back from him yet so I’m a bit nervous of that one. But maybe no news is good news.”
Although there was never a plan to take The Brilliant Series on the road, initial reactions have been so positive that it’s now a distinct possibility.
“To be honest, this band was put together for the project specifically. Touring was never really talked about. But it’s starting to get a really good reaction so who knows? If there was a demand for the band to tour, people would be well up for it. So there’s no plan in place right now, but it could well happen.”

The Brilliant Irish Flute is available in shops and on iTunes now.