Halfway through my chat with the legendary Tommy Makem he breaks off mid-sentence to interrupt himself with a self-deprecating comment. “But then maybe I’m just a grumpy old man”, he says. Far from it, but Tommy Makem is a passionate man – as his views on many issues to do with Irish culture and identity testify.

Tommy Makem was a key member of The Clancy Brothers (“and Tommy Makem”, to give them their full title), who were one of the first Irish acts to establish an Irish identity on the world music stage, long before U2, Riverdance, Van, Enya, Sinéad and most of our modern musical heroes. Admirers have ranged from Bob Dylan to the younger generation of Irish folk-based acts, like Kieran Goss and Brian Kennedy.

In the Ireland of the early ’60s, songs like ‘Jug Of Punch’, ‘Whiskey In The Jar’, ‘Brennan On The Moor’, ‘Shoals Of Herring’ and ‘The Leaving Of Liverpool’ competed with The Beatles for space on Irish airwaves – and often won. Aran sweaters vied with collarless jackets as the fashion accessory of the day and their distinctly different, if complementary, musics dominated Irish radio for a considerable time.

Back then, too, they played concerts to thousands, especially in the US, whereas today, many of the ballads they sang seem to have fallen into disuse. Yet Makem is as busy and as committed to the cause as ever.

“I’m just back from a two-month tour of America, straight into an Irish tour,” he relates. “But although the sizes of the audiences may vary, I do exactly the same show, and I still get a tremendous kick out of performing these great songs. And when you hear the lusty singing from the audiences, they obviously do too.”

So does he never tire of singing old songs like ‘I’ll Tell Me Ma’?

“Actually, not many people know that I wrote the last verse of that song, about the wind and the rain,” he says, “but a lot of young people want to hear those songs today. A kid in Belfast the other night wanted me to sing ‘Johnny McIldoo’. The young people in this country are being fed so much junk it’s disastrous. None of them get the chance to hear any of their own culture. It’s constantly being pushed down their throats that their own culture is less than what’s imported. Yet Irish music has never been more popular all over the world! Nor was it as well played as the young people are now playing it.

“But the old song tradition has been forgotten about. In Ireland, the music business people don’t want to know about Irish music or Irish poetry. It used to be the pint of plain was your only man, now rock’n’roll is your only man! But my three sons have a band with two others and they sing the songs, although they might be the only ones operating as a totally singing group here.”

Indeed, Makem is almost obsessed with the value of song.

“Singing is the first art,” he maintains. “Before any art, prehistoric man sang. Before anyone had a language, they expressed through song what was in their souls, if they were hurting or joyous or elated. With a song you have the beautiful grace of the melody and the power of the poetry of the lyrics and the two of them together makes a very powerful thing.”

So is Ireland unique in this rejection of our indigenous culture? Tommy Makem doesn’t think so.

“Oh no. Scotland is as bad. England is probably worse. England has reduced its culture to Rupert Murdoch. The tastes, what you listen to, read, hear, wear, eat, it’s all dictated by Rupert Murdoch. Culture is now page three, a naked young girl and whichever soccer player started a fight after getting drunk and what the young stars in Hollywood have for breakfast. Yet there’s such a vast culture here that people can’t get tuned into.”

What other changes has this much-travelled performer observed at home over the years?

“I feel very sad at the way Ireland has gone. There’s no manners and no honour left anywhere. Your word used to mean something if you were half a decent person. Now it’s all ‘me me me’ and instant gratification, people drinking as much as they can in the shortest time possible and then getting sick on peoples’ shoes, or urinating in the middle of the street. It’s a horror! The whole country has been reduced to that.”

But what does he feel has driven those changes?

“They think it’s modern. Old people used to be respected for their learning and their experience, but the young people couldn’t be bothered with that anymore. You’ll notice it in driving habits. It’s, ‘Get out of my way, I’ve got a bigger car than you have and you shouldn’t be on the road’.”

But are there no good things about Ireland today?

“There are some great young musicians, but they won’t get a chance to shine in this country. Irish-America should be very proud of the way it has saved a lot of our culture. They’ve done a better job than we’ve done at home, and bands like Cherish The Ladies are helping to pass the music on for another generation. A lot of the great popularity of Irish music abroad came after Riverdance, but before that Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann did some tremendous work too.”

So should we reject everything that comes from outside?

“No, of course, not. But we’re told that what the other people have is better, when the opposite is true! I remember a sign at Dublin Airport that described us as ‘the new Europeans’. I’d get furious at that. We’re the old Europeans! They boast about sending new computer operators to Europe, but we should be sending some of our vast reservoir of poets, singers, dancers, actors, story-tellers.

While Tommy Makem concedes that it is hard for new artists performing Irish music to make an impact, it can hardly have been any easier for him and the brothers in the late ’50s? Surprisingly, he disagrees.

“Actually it was easy enough!” he says. “The Clancy Brothers and myself were all actors and the folk music boom in America was just getting going with people like The Weavers, Harry Belafonte, The Kingston Trio. We were floating around getting odd jobs off Broadway or in television drama. We worked on an album of rebel songs called The Rising Of The Moon in 1959, but we weren’t trying to be big stars. About a year later we did an album of drinking songs.

“Irish songs were getting known then too. A man called Peter Kennedy recorded a vast collection of songs and tunes all over Ireland and Britain and much of it was used on a weekly BBC World Service programme called As I Roved Out. Programmes like that helped spread Irish music all over the world.

“We happened to be in the middle of the folk thing when it started rolling. We had a huge repertoire of songs few of them had ever heard, and the four of us had learned the songs from other singers – whereas the American folkies had learned a lot of their songs from recordings or books.”

Makem used to own a bar in New York yet he doesn’t drink. I wonder if this isn’t a contradiction and whether his abstention is a recent development.

“No, I’ve always been a teetotaller. But there’s no contradiction. Don’t I sing lots of drinking songs? I’m not a hen either, but I like eggs!”

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem will hardly win awards as the most originally named outfit in music history, but can Makem remember what illustrious alternatives were rejected?

“We had one of our first big gigs coming up at the Gate Of Horn and we needed to finalise a name. We made out about four pages of names, like The Moonshiners, The Blacksmiths, The Druids. We even thought of The Chieftains! But we couldn’t get all four of us to agree on any of them, so when we arrived we saw the owner had put ‘The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem’ on the billboards outside the venue – and that was it.”

Some of the group’s work has appeared on re-released CDs, but not always to Makem’s approval.

“Outakes from live concerts have been put out on CD, stuff that we might have done just to warm up, but never meant for release,” he points out. “Record companies have also put out compilations of our recordings without any permission. That’s very sneaky. You wouldn’t know if you were getting paid for them all either. It’s all very dicey. After Sony in America put out an album with my own song ‘Four Green Fields’ on it, they offered me 0.003 cents when 7.5 cents was the norm. I told them that was an insult and wrote 7.5 cents on the contract and sent it back. The contract went back and forth for months, and when I tried to talk to someone I’d get shuffled around from Joe in one department to Elizabeth in another.

“Eventually I got through to the boss, Tommy Mottola, and he sent word down that I was to get 5 cents because, he explained, it was based on our 1961 contract, so it was kind of sorted out.”

Although the Grim Reaper has ensured that the quartet will not be performing together again on this planet, Makem still continues his work of spreading indigenous Irish culture with missionary zeal. For those wishing to start exploring his vast contribution to Irish culture the man himself would recommend his first solo album Songs Of Tommy Makem on Tradition Records, or any of the seven or eight CDs he has released himself including the latest, The Song Tradition.

When Tommy met Bob

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were in the maelstrom of the ’60s folk revival which spawned the era of the protest singer and folk poets like Bob Dylan. Dylan soaked up much of the Irish folk tradition from the Irish quartet’s gigs at the White Horse Tavern after he first arrived in New York. He later went on to nominate Liam Clancy as his favourite singer and named Makem as “the best ballad-singer ever”. But did Makem like Dylan?

“I found him a nice young fellow. Bob used to follow The Clancy Brothers and myself around Greenwich Village where we played the clubs. He’d meet us in the street at three o’clock in the morning and stop us to sing twelve verses of a song he’d written to a tune he’d heard us singing the night before! He asked us to sing at his 30th anniversary concert in 1992 in New York. We did ‘When The Ship Comes In’. Sony Music wanted to have the after-concert party at somewhere like the Waldorf Astoria, but Dylan insisted it happen in my bar The Pavilion where he used to pop in once in a while. I don’t think he sang at the party. There were people like Ron Wood, George Harrison and Eric Clapton with Dylan and the craic was great.

“We were all linked in the way songs get passed back and forth. In the ’50s either Patti Page or Jo Stafford recorded an Appalachian song called ‘The Nightingale’. Dominic Behan took the tune and wrote ‘The Patriot Game’ to it. Probably through us singing it, Dominic’s song got back across to the USA where Dylan heard it and wrote ‘With God On Our Side’ to it, so the song came from America to Ireland and back to America again!”

Tommy’s targets

Murdoch – “England has reduced its culture to Rupert Murdoch”

Tom Mottola – “Sony in America offered me .003 cent when 7.5 cent was the norm”

Page 3 – “Culture is now Page 3, a naked, young girl”