A LITTLE BIT OF WHAT YOU CLANCY

LIAM CLANCY is in sparkling form as he looks forward to the release of a documentary on his life, which explains how he escaped the Irish Ayatollahs and wowed a young Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village.

Tara Brady, 23 Sep 2009

It’s the night before I’m heading off to meet Liam Clancy and I’m obsessing on the word ‘troubadour’. Nothing wrong with that: it’s a fantastic coinage, one that is most relevant to Mr. Clancy who did, after all, call his 2002 autobiography, The Mountain Of The Women: Memoirs Of An Irish Troubadour. An odd, mongrel word, it first popped up in the 11th century to describe the wandering minstrels of southern France, eastern Spain and northern Italy and most likely hails from a fantastic conflation of ‘taraba’ (“to sing”), an Arabic word, and from “turbare”, the Latin for “turning up unannounced.”

“Unannounced! Ha!” exclaims Liam Clancy. “I like that a lot. A travelling musician who crashes your party.”

Sitting in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel, the singer is in good form despite his need for an oxygen mask and an array of medical supplies. The man once described by Bob Dylan as “the best ballad singer I’d ever heard in my life” can no longer break hearts with his rendition of ‘The Dutchman’, but he still jumps to his feet and offers tea.

“I’ve had to stop singing altogether,” he says, without a note of self-pity. “I got a virus out in California which has left me with pulmonary fibrosis, a terrible thing, the scarring of the lungs. I only have 45% capacity left. There’s not a damned thing they can do about it. And the drugs I have to take – steroids and stuff – for some reason they go straight to the larynx, which makes you hoarse. It’s an assault on all fronts. It has played merry hell with me.”

These days he takes solace in words rather than music.

“Music and performance are the same thing for me,” he says, cheerfully. “I love the stories. I’m as happy as a poem with a song.”

Liam Clancy, as we come to understand from Alan Gilsenan’s excellent new documentary portrait The Yellow Bittern, has always been a troubadour, an unexpected guest. Born into a thoroughly musical household – mother loved a sing-song, dad was an opera fan – the young Liam was a creative fellow, painting, writing, designing theatre sets and acting in dramatic productions in his native Carrick-on-Suir.

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