It s a gorgeous July evening on the cobbled terrace outside the renovated warehouse that houses the London headquarters of Virgin Records. A sizeable number of Virgin employees and hangers-on, plus a few journalists, have gathered to hear Altan perform songs and tunes from their new album, Runaway Sunday, the band s second release for the label.
A launch, a showcase, a nice lig for the media types it s all of these things. But in some ways it s the secondary purpose of this event that s more significant. Most of these young trendies swigging Rolling Rock and chowing down on sausages and sauerkraut would have laughed if you d told them five years ago that they d be spending an evening listening to a traditional Irish band. Diddley-aye stuff, they d have called it, all very well for a night in the pub, but we work with rock n roll, thanks just the same.
Due in large part to Riverdance and its spinoffs, however, trad is now a happening thing, and Virgin want to make sure that their people have got the message and know what it s all about. Blackwater, Altan s first album for the label, was launched in Donegal, so this is the first time that most of the Virgin staffers here will have seen the band play live . . .
If they weren t converted already, they ll be fans from here on out. Maybe it s just a trick of the light, but it seems as though there s a kind of magic in the atmosphere, with the low rays of the setting sun making a clearly delineated black silhouette of the huge, ornate gasometer that looms in the background, creating red-gold halos round the heads of the musicians and illuminating Mairiad Nm Mhaonaigh s translucent tunic as it rustles in the breeze. Cameras are clicking like mad all around the stage, and it would be easy to smirk and dismiss it all as a clichi, a calculatedly beautiful spectacle set up for the benefit of the press except that you can t, because of the music.
Declan Colgan, the A&R consultant who signed Altan to Virgin, says that what initially attracted him to the band was that they reminded me of the first time I saw The Bothy Band, or the first time I saw The Clash. It was that same energy coming off the stage. It s not often that you see something like that.
That energy comes across in spades here on the terrace, even with a helicopter buzzing overhead and Ciaran Tourish s dodgy fiddle lead sending loud pops across the sound system. The band don t seem to notice, so wrapped up are they in their playing and singing. They ve been on the road for ten years and they d have a right to be jaded, but these people love their music. Hearing them, you really can t help but love it too.
It s about not holding back, explains Mairiad. It s letting it all rip. It s a great feeling - as a person said one time, it s not really you that s playing; you re only a catalyst. This thing is coming from somewhere else, and you re not in control of it at all. It s something else that s happening.
What I m trying to do personally is . . . when you hear a person play, they make you so happy, you just want to listen to them all night, and the feeling is just so high. Listening to any type of music I get the same feeling, more so from raw solo fiddle playing the likes of John Doherty, Con Cassidy, people like that. When I would hear those people playing it would send me somewhere else, and if we can give half that back to people I feel we ve done our job.
Mairiad Nm Dhomhnach grew up in Gaoth Dobhair (Gweedore) in northwest Donegal and was taught to play the fiddle by her father, Proinsias, who remains an abundant source of tunes for the band; he also wrote the lyrics to Gleanntain Ghlas Ghaoth Dobhair , one of the songs on the new album.
She was only 15 years old when she met Frankie Kennedy, who was visiting the area from Belfast to learn Irish during his holidays and took up the flute soon after their meeting. Both went on to do teacher training at St. Patrick s College in Drumcondra, Dublin, and in 1981 they married. Two years later, they recorded their debut album, Ceol Aduaidh (Music From The North) for Gael Linn.
That recording was largely responsible for introducing Ireland s mainstream trad scene to the Donegal style a style characterised by a particularly fiery, energetic delivery and by its own distinctive repertoire, with highlands, Germans, mazurkas and strathspeys added to the standard mix of jigs, reels and hornpipes.
The pair became regular fixtures at pub sessions around the city, but teaching remained their priority until 1987, when they recorded their second album, Altan, for the American indie label Green Linnet. Produced by Donal Lunny and named after Loch Altan, a lake near Mairiad s home in Gaoth Dobhair, the album also featured Ciaran Curran on bouzouki and guitarist Mark Kelly.
Altan earned rave reviews in the music press, convincing Mairiad and Frankie to take a year s career break in order to work full-time on their music. With the addition of a second fiddler, Paul O Shaughnessy, Altan became a band.
The career break never ended, and by the time their second album, Horse With A Heart, came out in 1989, Altan had become one of the hardest-working groups in trad, touring extensively in the USA. Unable to commit to such a heavy schedule, Paul was replaced by Ciaran Tourish, from Buncrana, Co. Donegal. Ciaran had studied with master fiddler Dinny McLaughlin, who had also given lessons to Mairiad, and it proved to be the perfect combination; the remarkable drive and solidity of their unison playing has been constantly remarked on by critics.
Mark also found the touring difficult, but luckily he and the band managed to reach a compromise: the US-based guitarist Daithm Sproule would replace Mark on the road abroad, while Mark continued to record with the group and tour with them in Ireland and the UK.
Their next three albums for Green Linnet The Red Crow, Harvest Storm and Island Angel all won Best Celtic/British Isles album of the year awards from the National Association of Independent Record Distributors (NAIRD) in the USA. Island Angel was voted the Number One Roots Album of 1993 by Q magazine and appeared on Billboard s World Music charts for eight months.
Just when the band s fortunes seemed to be at their zenith, Frankie Kennedy was tragically diagnosed with bone cancer. He courageously went on touring and recording, despite growing steadily weaker, but in September 1994 he died.
We could have gone two ways, Mairiad says now. We could have given it up, which would have been easier, or we could continue playing, which was harder for all of us, with the void of somebody as strong as Frankie missing. We just decided to take the hard road. It was very difficult, but I feel really strongly that we ve become a stronger band, a better band.
It s actually his loss that made us stronger. It wasn t only my loss, it was their loss, but we all became closer and worked harder at what we were doing. A crisis always makes you reassess yourself and refocus, and I feel the band are stronger than ever, and I think Frankie if he heard us would be very, very proud of us.
By this time, the band had been joined by the young accordion player Dermot Byrne, also from Buncrana. They were touring incessantly - largely to dull the pain and keep their minds busy and their contract with Green Linnet was coming due for renewal.
Somebody phoned me just after their last album on Green Linnet had come out, Declan Colgan recollects, and said, I think their contract with Green Linnet is finished, and I m not sure if they want to re-sign with them .
A Dublin native, Colgan had started out working in record shops, then moved into distribution, relocated to London and joined Virgin ten years ago. Now an independent A&R consultant, he s worked in the past with the likes of Brian Eno and King Crimson; he was also responsible for the signing of Michael Nyman, best known as the composer of the soundtrack for the film The Piano.
I d been an admirer of the band, and I started going to see them live, built up a relationship with them over a period of I suppose about 18 months. There were a couple of other American labels certainly interested and I think a couple of the majors. And I guess we just took it nice and gradually and got to know one another, and found out that we shared a lot of the same ideas about music and about what we thought we could do with them.
One of the things that we emphasised to them was, we re signing Altan for what they are and for what they re good at, not for some vision of what they might be if we had a load of synthesisers or a drumbeat or a remix. We felt that we could take it to a larger audience without having to compromise them as a band. It s possible still to go out and sell music to a broad mass of people without having to ruin what s special about it originally.
The record industry thinks in terms like: this is a jazz record, this is world music, this is folk. I don t. I don t know anybody who listens to music who thinks like that. You don t think, I m going into a record shop, I am going to buy a folk record. You think, oh, that one got good reviews, I ve heard a couple of good things about that, I ve seen a couple of good things on the TV, I ll pick it up. And it doesn t matter. And if you treat not just the marketing but the whole approach to the band properly, you will hopefully reach the sort of audience they deserve.
Certainly, the band are happy with the move into the big league. It gives us a bit more comfort, Ciaran Tourish points out, in that there s more time in which to prepare material, and it also means that now we can tour any country in the world and have a record company presence there. And that s a big difference. You know the product will be there, and there are people there to back it up.
For the recording of Runaway Sunday, Altan spent eight weeks holed up in a couple of houses in Tonabrockey, Co. Galway. We were staying in a beautiful place, Mark Kelly recalls, and then in the evening time we d start working, putting tunes together. It meant that we were all on hand, so that a lot of the ideas that people had we could work on immediately.
This is the first time that the band have tried their hands at writing original material. A Moment In Time was inspired by a photograph of the great Donegal fiddler John Doherty; it s a tribute not just to Doherty but to all the older musicians who passed on their music and their love of it to future generations of players. Co-written by Mairiad and Mark, the song was a collaboration in every sense of the word, giving rise to a number of late-night arguments over the telephone: I d be ringing him up, saying Mark, I don t like that word, I can t stand that word , Mairiad laughs. Then he d ring me up about some other word but this is what happens when two minds get together!
Last year s Blackwater has already achieved platinum sales status in Ireland, and it seems likely that Runaway Sunday will mat the same, if not better. Altan played recently at the New York Fleadh and are midway through a hectic round of European festivals. Few groups in the folk and traditional realm can match their stature, and in some ways it s difficult to imagine where they can go from here.
The band themselves, however, are confident that they will keep maturing, improving and developing as they continue their steady ascent through the ranks.
I like to think that each record has been a little progression, says Mark, and this latest record I feel is a step forward in a lot of ways. The production is a little more broad, and there are a couple of newly composed songs on it, but it s still very identifiably an Altan record, and I don t feel it s that wide a step from where our roots are, from the integrity of the music that we concentrate on, the Donegal style. n