Light in the Western Sky

Asian Dub Foundation. Mark Lanegan. Rodrigo Y Gabriela. The Handsome Family. Cowboy Junkies. American Music Club. Gavin Friday. Laura Cantrell. Elbow. Julie Feeney. Martha Wainwright. Rufus Wainwright, Alabama 3. Teenage Fanclub. Joan As Policewoman. Steve Earle. Seasick Steve. Billy Bragg. The Rapture. Lisa Hannigan. Daniel Lanois. That’s quite an honour roll for any music TV series, but when filmmaker, broadcaster, musician, musicologist and Other Voices creator Philip King takes stock of the last seven years of plenty in Dingle, he finds himself fixated upon the enigma that is Amy Winehouse.

“She was absolutely fantastic,” he recalls. “She stepped across the road from Benner’s Hotel into the church, skipped onto the stage, turned to the microphone, just a bass player and guitarist, no rhythm section, and I could hear Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald... She sang like a bird, I never heard the like, it was truly remarkable. And then, as Levon Helm said about Elvis in 1956, ‘I looked at the car and we didn’t see him anymore – he was gone’.”
The line-up for the eighth series, due to be recorded in St James’s Church and other locations in Dingle this December 5-9, is just as impressive, featuring Snow Patrol, The Magic Numbers, Villagers, Imelda May, The XX, Fionn Regan and Richard Hawley. Other Voices remains one of the few television shows that still has the conviction to render music for its own sake, tastefully and unfussily staged and filmed. Over the past seven years King and his crew have refined the show while remaining true to its basic premise of capturing the magic in the room.
“Seven years ago I was sitting in a recording studio in RTE’s Radio na Gaeltachta,” King recalls. “I often say on the South Wind Blows radio programme that this is the edge of Europe, looking out towards America. And Glen Hansard came into the programme and we talked about who was playing music in Ireland, and out of that grew the notion of doing Other Voices. Glen presented the very first series, and I’m just looking at the line-up here: The Frames, Damien Rice, Interference, Damien Dempsey, Nina Hynes, Mundy, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Paddy Casey, Roesy, Emmett Tinley, Ronán O Snodaigh, Ger Wolfe, Josh Ritter, Jerry Fish, Katell Keineg and Mark Geary. It was an interesting subjective picture or soundtrack of that particular year, in our own environment, for ourselves, with the best technical innovative talent, the best lights, the best sound, the best production that’s possible.”
And who are the people who make this Dingle miracle reoccur on an annual basis?
“The show cannot happen without Tina Moran, the producer of the programme from its inception. It cannot happen without the director, Maurice Linnane, who brings his remarkable visual palette and gifts to bear on this thing – he’s been around the world with U2 and the whole bit. These are 24-hour days. We shoot all the documentary material at various locations around Dingle, and out west into the Dingle Peninsula, the top of mountains, beaches, individual performances, chats and conversations with all of the artists, little spontaneous collaborations, and he’s there with his crew.
“And then he walks in the door of his truck and watches the soundchecks as they happen and films into the night, and then we digitize all that material and start again the following day. They’re the conditions that, when you’re fired up, enable great things to happen. The music producer is Aoife Woodlock, who I have known for many, many years, and she is one of those creatures who, like you and me, lives music, loves music, is entirely besotted with music, has fantastic ears, works in the business and brings all of her talent and imagination to bear.
“The series has changed and mutated over seven years,” he continues, “but there is still a meeting of artists in an atmosphere where there are no laminates, no passes, none of that, and the town and the peninsula wraps its arms around the musicians, gathering them to itself. There was a magnetic pull to this place when I came here first as a small boy in 1966, and I kept coming back here. There’s something in the language, the people, the cadence of Irish itself, the music being fully traditional, something that Harry Smith would definitely have recorded.
“So when artists come here, whether it’s Mark Lanegan walking down the street in his leather trousers out of a strange Los Angeles, or Ray Davies sitting in Foxy John’s bar having a pint, they feel something here. Maybe the notion of expression, of making music, is still extant, and there’s something old and fundamentally Irish about that, the rhythm under the dancer’s foot, the energy of the funeral, or the exultation of when you win the match or when a baby is born. That’s present in the atmosphere, and I think that’s why people make the journey.”
King believes it’s crucial that this year’s Other Voices should articulate a spirit of hope in a time of dearth – not least because when RTE was unable to fund another series, the production team needed to find other ways of keeping the ship afloat.
“The story of Other Voices this year is a story of gratitude for me,” he says. “I think the message that it sends out is the Obama message really: ‘Yes we can!’ Early on in the year we were very challenged by the state of affairs at the national broadcaster – and the state of affairs generally – and somebody said to me around March or April, ‘You won’t be able to do that this year I’d say’. And I thought about it for a while and I decided we had to give it a go. And once the decision was made by the core production team, who invest a massive amount of human capital into making this happen, it was remarkable. People came together and said, ‘It would be a shame not to see this happen. It would be great to keep this thing going through the dark times so we can get out the other end and be there to sing about the good times again’.
“I use the word gratitude very seriously,” he elaborates. “Things are possible. The people who are the artists, who will re-imagine Ireland, who are individual little republics who plough their own furrow, who sing their own song, who write their own sonnets, these people when they bond together will effect a national consciousness, because if we can imagine it, it will happen. If we go back a hundred years and we look to the Revival, would Yeats or a young Pearse be in the room? The artistic community, all of them, from visual artists to poets and playwrights and painters and novelists and writers, would all be... I don’t like to use the term ‘national conversation’, but there would be a dialogue going on as to what we are about. Teams of rugged individualists who have real belief and get up every morning and go to work, lonely and all as it is. The nation is a hundred years old in 2021, but we probably have an emotional age of about 17 or 18. I think we’re being asked very hard questions, and the artists will be in the vanguard of answering those questions, and will sustain us into the future.”
This sense of confidence and conviction is reflected in the presentation of Other Voices, a sense of integrity rare at a time when actual music programmes featuring actual creative artists are eclipsed by LCD ‘reality’ TV car crashes, covers acts and grand guignol X Factor fiascos that reduce the mystery of music to a nag race for celebrity.
“There are three words that I’ve been using quite a bit over the last couple of months,” King says. “Tradition, translation and transmission. By tradition I mean in the broadest possible sense: I consider rock ‘n’ roll to be a traditional music at this point, its modes and its grammar are prescribed. The artists involved are the translators of the work, and then we transmit it. The word transmission is such a powerful word really. It’s left an indelible thumbprint on the way we play our own Irish traditional music. When I made Bringing It All Back Home, 19 years ago now, I went on that journey to America and found out what happened to our music over there, how it changed because it collided with technology and was sent back to Ireland in 78 records and wax cylinders full of static, putting on Michael Coleman records that were recorded in America... It affected the way we play the music, but the music still remains true to itself.
“Our music really made a hugely significant contribution to the development of popular music in America. Mick Moloney, the great music historian from Limerick, now living in New York city, has written eloquently about this. We were there when minstrelsy started. Stephen Foster sat on the banks of the Ohio River and looked into the slave state of Kentucky and wrote down what he saw. We were there at the birth of Tin Pan Alley – there’s a song called ‘If It Wasn’t For The Irish And The Jews’. We were there at the invention of the music business and contributed to the development of The Great White Way, otherwise known as Broadway. George M Cohan, who wrote ‘I’m A Yankee Doodle Dandy’, changed his name from Keohane to become a Jew because it was cool to do so, it was an actual business imperative.
“But we also developed a harder power, which was the creation of intellectual property and copyright, and those things were fundamentally important. All that might sound all over the shop, but what we do with Other Voices in Dingle could not happen without all those things having happened before it. We can platform this stuff that we do in West Kerry to the world on every device known to man. And it will find its way into terrestrial television again this year. I’m grateful to RTE who fully funded this project over the last seven years. They were unable to do so this year and we felt it was right and proper to see if we could fund it and keep a presence on terrestrial television in Ireland and send it out to the world. And Failte Ireland has come on board – they see that when people like Guy Garvey come and sing ‘Weather To Fly’ in Dingle it means something.”
Certainly, if corporate cultural imperialism is transmitted through the tube, the disgruntled minority can still stage a counter insurgency. There remains a democratic element possible in broadcasting: 100 yards of main street in Dingle can count for as much as 100 yards in Berlin or New York.
“That’s absolutely true,” says King. “The tactile exchange of something that is orally transmitted is absolutely present in the relationships that happen here, the way the music is made. And then we can send it to the world. It’s all encapsulated in the Derek Mahon poem:

‘How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right’.”