The emergence over the past few years of Connolly’s Of Leap as a thriving live music venue is nothing short of extraordinary. Currently running an average of three to four gigs per week at a time when the rest of the country is complaining bitterly about the dearth of outlets for good live music, Connolly’s has even further confounded the experts by earning a reputation as a venue bands positively love to play. And all this in a venue perched along the only street of a small seaside village an hour’s drive from Cork city.

Part of that remarkable success must be attributed to the fact that Paddy McNicholl, the manager of Connolly’s – who still bears unmistakable traces of his Northern birthplace in his accent – is an avid musician himself. His musical track record can be traced back to his stint with the Northern outfit Rodeo in the early seventies to his current band, Cliff Rescue And The Helicopters.

But McNicholl has another angle on the whole process of running live gigs. “Continuity plays a very big part of it,” he says. “Too many venues either want instant success and are not prepared for the long haul, or they panic at the first sign of a decline in audience numbers. But if they had the bottle to keep going through the lean times they would probably find that things would pick up almost automatically. Activity breeds activity,“ he told Hot Press.

He also has some astute observations to make on the often antagonistic attitude of venue owners to the musicians they employ. “Based on my experience I firmly believe that if you work with musicians, instead of against them, they’ll never let you down. I often think that the hostility is based on a complete misunderstanding of the musician.

“They see a band on stage, having a good time, probably playing music the proprietor does not understand and it might seem like an easy way to make loads of money. Apart from the fact that most musicians don’t earn great money, and some virtually starve, the promoters overlook the hours of study and practice and rehearsal that has to be gone through before even a half-decent band gets near a stage.”

He would argue that for many venue owners,s the band is a lower priority than other overheads, adding that, “in the worst cases they actually come bottom of the pecking order and have to accept whatever is left of the spoils after everybody else is paid – and that’s assuming there is anything left”.

Of course he would also admit that the sense of free expression and the unconventional lifestyle of most musicians must also be a source of envy to those whose souls might never be touched by any kind of artistic performance. In contrast McNicholl’s obsession with music oozes from every pore of his wiry frame.

As a result of that obsession, Connolly’s of Leap has become

virtually every Irish band’s dream date for reasons for which you do not need to look too hard to identify. There is a first-class drum kit permanently set up on the stage and the sound system enables him to record every gig so that bands are given a cassette copy of their performance almost as a matter of course.

As a result, McNicholl must possess the most valuable collection of unreleased material in Ireland, given that most of this country’s top artists, from Something Happens to A House, Engine Alley, The Pale, Mick Hanly, The Saw Doctors (and their producer Phil Tennant), My Little Funhouse, Donal Lunny, Davy Spillane, Draíocht, Dr Strangely Strange (who recently did an anniversary gig to a stuffed house) and Liam Óg O Flynn, have played here.

But the visitor’s book is not merely adorned with the cream of the Irish crop. Bands have travelled from as far afield as Germany, France, Australia and even a band called Ceili’s Muse from Tucson, Arizona came here specifically to record their own album, having heard such good reports of the ambience of the room! Had we a proper government policy on this matter such a treasure trove of quality material would be available in some archive for the whole population to explore, but unfortunately we must await a similar development to that in the UK where the invaluable John Peel BBC Sessions are now coming on the market one by one.

McNicholl’s attention to detail is evident in the provision of a close-circuit television screen beside the sound desk, thus allowing the engineer mixing the live sound to watch the band on stage, a particularly useful facility on those many occasions when the line-of-sight to the stage is obscured by the packed audiences who regularly travel the hour’s journey from Cork City or from Waterford in hired buses.

In another sense, the size of the audience a band attracts to Connolly’s is a reasonably accurate benchmark of their real drawing power nationally, because anyone who goes to a gig at the venue has had to make a conscious decision to do so as fairly serious music fans, whereas in a busier town there can be an element of people attending this gig or that gig on a whim or almost by accident of circumstances. In that regard some of our more self-regarding bands have found a trip to Leap a rather humbling experience!

McNicholl marvels at the genuine loyalty and thirst for music of his audiences and he openly admits that it is their commitment that has put Connolly’s on the Irish music map. “Even if a band has a poor night attendance-wise, they can rest assured that every person in that audience was a real fan of music and they in turn become ambassadors for that band because of their natural tendency to talk about the music and spread the word about the bands they think are worth seeing.”

The venue itself is blessed with fine natural acoustics and has been described by one studio owner as providing a marvellous “wash of sound”, a fact no doubt enhanced by the combination of wood and stone from which the room is built. Indeed some experts claim it is the best environment in which to experience the pipes of Davy Spillane or Liam Óg O Flynn. The ceiling is adorned by a cornucopia of memorabilia which McNicholl has amassed over the years, including laminates, old covers of Hot Press and autographed photographs of Irish and international stars.

It will amaze anyone running a venue in these troubled times in a major town that none of the material has ever been stolen or damaged, except for one occasion when, as McNicholl recalls, “We had a photo of Wendy James from Transvision Vamp doing something fairly provocative with her hands and some women objected to it and removed it.”

There is also on display a letter from solicitors acting for the Mean Fiddler in London demanding that McNicholl stop referring to Connolly’s of Leap as Ireland’s Mean Fiddler. In reality it was a journalist or a musician who had committed this heinous crime, so McNicholl placed an ad in the Hot Press Yearbook saying that Connolly’s Of Leap was “not Ireland’s Mean Fiddler –but better” and heard no more from them!

As further evidence of McNicholl’s commitment to music he

has recently announced plans for a record label which will be called Rescue Music, a name which, whether by coincidence or not, acts almost as an unofficial banner for his endeavours in putting live music back on the West Cork map. Rescue Music will have sister companies in publishing and management, but McNicholl is anxious to avoid people assuming that the label is heavily funded.

“It’s basically a fairly organic development of the various recordings we’ve done here, both live and otherwise, over the years. Quite a few bands were impressed with the quality of the recordings and started asking if there was any way that we could release them, so I teamed up with my musical partner Martin Walter from Switzerland, got some excellent advice from David Reilly who is Lir’s manager and also an experienced solicitor, and we decided to go for it.”

However, just as Connolly’s as a venue developed a reputation that has slowly spread far beyond these shores, the intention is to allow the label to grow organically and find its own level. This attitude will come as a welcome alternative for those who have encountered the increasingly more dictatorial policy of the major labels and where a tendency to regard music as a mere product on a production line has become much more prevalent than ever before.

Rescue Music will allow all of the creative decisions to be made by the band themselves on the basis that most musicians have a fairly well-tuned instinct for such matters as track selection, sleeve design and running order, although McNicholl has a reputation for his generous sharing of the experience he has garnered over the years and for forthrightly expressing constructive opinions when asked.

“The independence of the label is another important factor from my own point of view”, he stresses. “I think it’s important that there should be an independent vehicle for bands who have that same spirit of independence and who may not want to get sucked into the corporate world which can be so soul-destroying.”

He also concurs with the view that bands are at long last realising that getting a deal with a multi-national label can create as many, if not more, problems than it solves, and that bands can do as much on their own provided they have the necessary tenacity and determination. He would see much sense in Pierce Turner’s view that the prevalent approach of writing and recording an album and then taking it to the public through live performance is the complete reverse of the natural process whereby musicians are performers first and foremost and only record what has been tried and tested in a real musical environment.

“The notion that you have to get a record deal is a hangover from the sixties and seventies when there were a small number of major companies and if none of them wanted you then you simply did not have a recording career. That hang-up with getting a deal has obvious appeal to those lazy bands who sit around waiting for someone else to do everything for them, but the smart people are not prepared to sit passively around any more. There’s no secret about making a record anymore. The technology is there for anyone who wants to use it and it’s great to see more and more people using it, especially in Ireland.”

He has no intention of scouring the highways and byways of Ireland searching for talent, believing that Connolly’s brings him into contact with more than enough talented bands without him having to go looking for them. As he himself put it: “I have absolutely no desire to be some kind of record mogul. I’m a musician who has fortuitously found himself in the position where I can do some things that I want to do and to endeavour to do it in Leap is a challenge in itself. I have no illusions that it’s going to be easy running a label on a shoestring and even my own band Cliff Rescue And The Helicopters will have to face the same practical problems as any other band we talk to.”

So he dismisses any comparisons with Peter Gabriel’s Real World set-up in the small English village of Box as more than a little fanciful and perhaps a bit premature, but one cannot help noting that the musical motivation is not dissimilar and given that McNicholl’s favourite album of all time is Hot Rats by the late, lamented Frank Zappa a fairly open-ended music policy is virtually guaranteed.

And just as Peter Gabriel’s operation has made Box a Mecca

for fans of world music, the West Cork area around Leap is also becoming a magnet for international musicians. Former Jimi Hendrix Experience bassist Noel Redding, who recently performed at the 25th Woodstock Anniversary gig, lives in nearby Clonakilty, while eccentric English folkie Roy Harper, celebrated in the song ‘Hats Off To (Roy) Harper’ on Led Zeppelin’s monumental Led Zeppelin lll album, is reputed to have moved into the area.

Sixties superstar Donovan, another man who spends a lot of time in Ireland, recently used the venue to rehearse for his performance in Britain at a concert to mark the anniversary of the death of Rolling Stone Brian Jones, so Connolly’s reputation is no longer restricted to the boundaries of this island and it will surprise nobody if Rescue Music before too long adds some international artists to its roster in similar fashion.

Beyond allowing itself to be used as a channel for the more motivated bands, Rescue Music will not insist that the artists who record for it must conform to any one particular style of music, and neither is there any insistence that bands must record their material in Connolly’s. In fact discussions are already advanced with several bands who have produced their recordings independently in established, professional studios like Xeric in Limerick, and who simply want to use the services of Rescue Music as a means of getting that material released in concrete form.

To be able to have their publishing royalties collected by the label’s publishing arm with a royalty split based on the industry norm is another attraction, particularly as the efforts of IMRO mean that Irish composers and publishing companies will in the future receive a fairer shake than they have been receiving from the colonialist PRS.

Of course McNicholl is well prepared for the ill-informed assumption that if you own a record label, or any company for that matter, you must automatically have a limitless fund of money. The credibility of Connolly’s as a venue has also established his reputation as a man renowned for his fair dealing and that will be another factor in the label’s favour.

The first release is expected to be an EP from a crusty band called Big Bag Of Sticks whose distinctive sound is an amalgam of Irish folk-rock and reggae with a fiddle player who regularly sets off on solos that resound with the influences of Eastern Europe folk melodies.

Another band whom McNicholl is championing is Harmonix, a versatile five-piece featuring four members of a family living in Bantry but who all were born in Liverpool. The brothers are called Fon and Conn, while the sisters are Tara and Sarah, prompting fairly predictable enquiries about Don, John, Ron, Farragh, Cara and Dara!

One of their own songs, ‘First Love Fairy Tale’, would not be out of place on an album by either of the Black sisters, but they also purvey a solid rock-cum-soul style, complete with exquisite harmonies, and interspersed with the occasional foray into Celtic-rock territory, all performed with a confidence that only comes from a combination of exceptional talent and seven years working together.

The musical tastes of the members of Harmonix varies from classical music to The Beatles, U2, Fleetwood Mac, Aerosmith, Van Halen and The Rolling Stones. They are currently assembling a European tour and have entered into a songwriting collaboration with Tim Daly who has worked with Dave Stewart, Feargal Sharkey, and on the Momentary Lapse Of Reason album by Pink Floyd.

Another project that McNicholl would dearly love to see coming to fruition is an album to raise awareness of, and funds to alleviate, the ever-growing problem of child abuse. “I have this concept called ‘Every Punch Needs A Kiss’ inspired by a marvellous song of that name written by Martin Egan from Tralee and brilliantly performed, but not released, by Draíocht. It so accurately encapsulates the problem that it would be a pity were it not to be put to some beneficial use, say as the title track for an album of songs about child abuse,” he maintains.

Many marvel that such a hive of activity can be centred in

one small, rural Irish village. Having examined all the possible explanations I have decided that it must be something to do with the water. Otherwise how can you explain the fact that Paddy McNicholl’s wife Eileen Connolly, who looks after the bar aspect of the venue and who, incidentally, is rapidly gaining a fine reputation in the West Cork area for her expertise at massage and her knowledge of aromatherapy, has a child almost exactly every four years?

As he puts it himself: “Connolly’s is a way of life for me. And even if at the moment we’re actually working for the bank, to be permanently surrounded by great music in one of the loveliest places in all of Ireland, with great people, a healthy environment and a really humane pace of life to bring kids up in, sure where else would you get it?”

Somehow you cannot help suspecting that he’s not really expecting you to answer.

SOMETHING COOKING IN THE KITCHEN?

Open Kitchen have just released their debut E.P entitled “The Easier Said Than Done? E.P.” on their own label in association with Paddy McNicholl’s Rescue Music.

The band are based in Cork city with a line-up that includes Mal from Liverpool (Guitar/Vocals), Brian from Rathkeale (Percussion/ Vocals), Bobby from Killeagh (Guitar/Vocals), James from Foxhall (Bass/Vocals) and Hank from Mallow (Guitar/Vocals).

Open Kitchen’s origins can be traced back as far as New York’s Greenwich Village in 1987 and to the Cork city scene of the beginning of the nineties. The band’s present line-up evolved from informal get-togethers at the back of Turner’s Bar, Parliament Street in Cork, in October 1993. Since then they have been busy putting the following achievememts on their C.V.:

• Playing at the Rock The Cradle gig at Cork City Hall in aid of Bosnian refugees in November 1993.

• Doing the opening honours for The Stunning on several dates on their recent farewell tour.

• Entertaining the inmates of Spike Island Prison (Twice!).

• Chalking up well-received residencies at several top Munster venues such as The Meeting Place (Midleton), The Lobby, (Cork City), Black Toms, (Cahir), The Bantry Bay Hotel and The Noggin in Mallow.

• and wowing the discerning audience at Connolly’s of Leap!

The Open Kitchen E.P. consists of original material and is the fruit of some intensive sessions at Elm Tree Studios on The Mardyke in Cork, where the industrious outfit are already working on the recording of their second E.P. They are enthusiastic about continuing their collaboration with Rescue Music and cite Paddy McNicholl’s generous help and encouragement as a major inspiration for what they have achieved to date.

THE PALE SURVIVE Connolly’s

Whenever The Pale are confronted with a gruelling up-and-down the map of Ireland sort of tour, you get the usual groans and mutterings you can expect from musicians who prefer to be permanently welded to their matresses. But all you have to do is mention Connolly’s of Leap and watch the exchange of knowing grins.

It’s the Pale’s equivalent to getting a sly rasher sandwich on a Lough Derg pilgrimage. It’s the hospitality, you see.

For starters, you can while away the hour waiting for your turn to be sound-checked examining the array of rock memorabilia that adorn the walls. Over the bar there’s a dirty great sea-trout with such a startled expression on its face that it naturally leads to speculation as to whether Mr. Fish was actually conjured up in the minds of previous entertainers sampling the host’s world-famous alcoholic concoction, Turbo-Baileys and manifested itself in the current space-time continuum above the bar.

Of course your host Paddy will innocently maintain that the potion contains Baileys and something else. Wink Wink.

The in-house P.A. is suberb, the pool table is a bit wobbly. There are no crowd barriers front of stage, so Matt Devereux gets to dance with the fans and the last time the Pale played there the Palettes discovered they could climb in the dressing room window.

If you do an overnight in Connolly’s and survive, an hour’s drive gets you to Rossnagarry where The Pale regularly stop to play football on the beach.

One of the great mysteries of Connolly’s is where do all the people come from? The venue is in the middle of nowhere.

A couple of years ago our host sold us a bass guitar for an extortionate amount of money. The deal was struck in the wee hours on the other side of several glasses of that “stuff”. It still hangs around the studio, unused, looking at us reproachfully. It’s known, with less effection as ‘The Plank’.

Despite all this, we’ll be back.

To pay homage to the trout. • THE PALE

FROM THE HARMONIX

“Paddy has made a lot of things possible for a lot of bands at Connolly’s of Leap. Bands get the much-needed opportunity to record, rehearse, and gig in a venue that’s geared towards music. It’s a unique room, both for performing and rehearsing. The back wall, with its stunning dragon mural, is made from natural rock and gives an amazing resonance and a unique atmosphere. Rescue Music is being set up to help bands, to work with them, not against them.

“We find that when we’re recording there’s no need to try to reproduce a good live sound. With Paddy at Connolly’s, it just happens automatically. The equipment is a joy to play on. Paddys’ handmade Ayotte drum kit is one of the best in the country and a delight to all drummers who use it.

“Everyone from the biggest name acts such as The Saw Doctors or The Pale to the smallest local bands are more than welcome to play at Connollys and avail of the facilities there. Thank you Paddy, from all of us in Harmonix.”