A lifetime in music

To coincide with Bill Whelan receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from IMRO, we despatched our own Jackie Hayden into the archives in search of the milestones in Whelan's career. Along the way the man from Limerick produced records by fellow Limerick men Reform, U2, Stockton's Wing and Paul Brady, was the musical director of the backing orchestra on Saturday Night Live on RTE television, composed material for the films Lamb and Dancing At Lughnasa among others, and was responsible for the musical score for the RTE TV history series The Seven Ages.
1950 Bill Whelan born in Limerick.
1970 Composes score for the film Bloomfield.
1978 Member of the jazz-rock band Stacc, who release a single on CBS.
1979 Joins Planxty on keyboards.
1981 Timedance, composed by Whelan and Donal Lunny, and performed by Planxty,
features in the interval of Eurovision.
Timedance released as a Planxty record.
1983 U2's War is released, containing the Bill Whelan-produced track 'The Refuge'.
1987 Composes The O Riada Suite.
1989 Joins Board of IMRO, on which he serves continuously until 1997.
1992 Commissioned to compose The Seville Suite. Produces and plays keyboards on the Andy Irvine/Davy Spillane album East West.
1993 Composes the orchestral work The Spirit Of Mayo.
1994 The seven-minute Riverdance segment proves to be the hit of Eurovision.
1995 Invited to serve on Government Task Force set up by Minister Michael D Higgins.
1996 Composes original music for Jim Sheridan/Terry George film Some Mother's Son.
1997 Receives Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album for Riverdance.
2000 Riverdance opens on Broadway.
2001 Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from IMRO.

Bill Whelan is best known these days as the composer of the music for the multi-platinum selling, mega successful music and dance extravaganza that is Riverdance. And with good reason too! Since it first opened for business at Dublin's Point Theatre on 4th February 1995, what started out as a seven-minute Eurovision interval segment has since attracted a world-wide audience of almost 12 million people. Riverdance, the album, has sold over 2 million copies world-wide, winning Whelan a Grammy Award in 1997 for 'Best Musical Show Album'. He was also named Billboard Magazine's Top World Music Artist for 1996 ... 1997 and the Riverdance album was voted the Top World Music Album for 1997.

Meanwhile, no less than three separate productions of the show continue to tour worldwide to packed houses, with two shows currently in the US, one on Broadway and the other in California. A third is about to embark on an extensive European tour.
Hard to believe then that Riverdance - The Phenomenon, is barely six years old. But for Bill Whelan there was a life before Riverdance and his CV reads like a potted history of Irish music over the last three decades. In the seventies he worked as a studio session musician and arranger, as well as doing spells in the orchestra pit on stage productions such as Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph ... The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. He also gigged regularly and recorded with his own band Stacc, a superly musical outfit which featured the cream of Irish session musicians.
His involvement with Irish traditional music and musicians has occupied much of his time since 1980 when he was a member of the legendary Planxty. He also produced records for major Irish folk artists including Andy Irvine, Patrick Street, Stockton's Wing, Davy Spillane and the Bulgarian/Irish band, East Wind.
He has also worked extensively in the theatre over the years. His adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore had successful runs at London's Old Vic, Melbourne and Sydney and received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination. Since 1989, when he was appointed as composer to the W.B. Yeats International Theatre Festival at Dublin's Abbey Theatre, he has written original music for 15 Yeats plays.
Later orchestral works included the specially commissioned piece, The Seville Suite (1992) and The Spirit Of Mayo (1993). His work in international film includes Lamb (starring Liam Neeson) which he co-composed with Van Morrison, his score for the Jim Sheridan/Terry George film Some Mother's Son and the original score for the film version of Brian Friel's award winning Dancing At Lughnasa, which starred Meryl Streep. Whelan also recently composed the musical score for the critically acclaimed Irish history television documentary, The Seven Ages, produced and directed by Sean O Mordha.
Along the way, the prolific Whelan has composed jingles and TV/radio commercials, scored film documentaries and worked with international stars of the calibre of U2, Van Morrison, Hothouse Flowers, Kate Bush and Jimmy Webb, among many others.

It all began 30 years ago, when a young Bill Whelan arrived in Dublin fresh from Limerick, with a demo tape of songs in his pocket and dreams of becoming a professional musician and composer. His first port of call was Trend Studios, then seen as the hip centre of the music business in the capital.
"There were few enough doors out of Dublin at the time but there were no doors out of Limerick," he recalls. "The only people who'd made it out of Limerick up 'till then were Granny's Intentions! Even people like Richard Harris had to go to London to make it.
"That door into Trend was also the door into the Irish music industry at the time. Eamon Andrews studios might have been better known, but as far as we were concerned that was strictly for the showbands and the sponsored radio programmes. Trend was where all the serious stuff was done."
Whelan managed to convince Trend's studio boss John Dardis to offer him some freelance session work - which he did.
"The first session I did had Louis Stewart on electric bass - an instrument he hated," recalls Whelan. "He said it was like a fire extinguisher, handy to have around when you need it but totally unnecessary most of the time! Des Moore was on guitar, Dessie Reynolds was on drums. I also remember doing sessions with Gerry Anderson, who's now a broadcaster with the BBC in Northern Ireland."
Whelan played on every kind of music "from pop to cabaret, jazz to traditional and folk to classical", learning his chops and gaining a reputation as a serious head.
"You started at ten and worked 'till one. I remember when I got my first session fee, #9, which to me was amazing. I had actually got paid to play music! It was difficult to even consider that you would ever go beyond Dublin at the time. Looking back at my career as a solo player, arranger, composer, you had to do everything. This week you might have been doing a programme for RTE, next week a TV commercial or music for a documentary. There was an upside to it in that you got exposed to an incredible range of stuff until you found your own voice
"But I had to constantly remind myself why I originally got into the business. I grew up in a time when the cult of the producer had started with people like George Martin and Phil Spector and I loved the whole business of being able to take something and shape it. Producers tend to come from either a musical or technology background they're either engineers who have developed a feel for music or arrangers who develop a knowledge of the technology - which was where I was coming from."
His first major production triumph came when he produced Johnny Logan's 1980 Eurovision winner, 'What's Another Year' - the first Irish win since Dana had scooped the Grande Prix a decade earlier.
"I really enjoyed the whole experience of producing Shay Healy's song for Johnny Logan," he recalls. "What it meant for me was that I had a number one record as a producer. The success of that led on to me being asked to write a centrepiece for the following year's Eurovision, which became 'Timedance' with Planxty - which in some ways had echoes of what Riverdance became. It certainly opened doors for me with RTE and I began to receive commissions from them for various projects.
"People down in Limerick thought I worked in RTE full-time and was in the big money," he laughs. "They even started spelling my name with one "l", like Bil Keating who was big in RTE at the time. I never worked full-time for RTE, though it was a good employer for a freelance musician like myself. But gradually that died out and the amount of home produced programmes became very scarce."
In 1989 Whelan worked on a major music series for RTE with John Hughes - who would later manage The Corrs.
"It was called An Eye On The Music and it went out on a Sunday night and it was the world's best kept secret! I don't know anyone who remembers it!
"I arranged and conducted the orchestra and we had an incredible line-up of guests including people like Midge Ure, Lloyd Cole, Paddy McAloon from Prefab Sprout, Brian Kennedy, who had a band called Sweetmouth at the time. The Chieftains were also involved, The Hothouse Flowers, and a whole of raft of film composers including Elmer Bernstein, as well as world musicians. We even had Jimmy Webb on it.
"That was probably the last of the really big music series' that I had anything to do with. They don't seem to make programmes like that these days. If I was in the same position now as I was 25 years ago, it would be very hard to see how I'd make a living."
During the eighties, Whelan inevitably got caught up in the A...R frenzy which saw planeloads of UK record companies descending on Dublin in search of "the next U2". Working at the time as a producer of the highly-rated Sligo band Those Nervous Animals, he recalls those days of chequebook waving with no little horror.
"I can clearly remember being in the Baggot Inn around the time of my association with Those Nervous Animals. There were about ten A...R men and it was a case of trying to please them all at the same time. I found it an ugly period. It was all to do with making a quick kill: it had nothing to do with what should drive music. It's just not possible to do things that way, you're trading on people's dreams and greed and aspirations.
"Artistically, the eighties for me were good, in that what had begun in the late 70s' with Donal Lunny carried on into the eighties. Everything from Stockton's Wing to working with Andy Irvine. Unfortunately, it wasn't a great time to be making a living. To be honest with you I got quite depressed about it and seriously considered emigrating."

The nineties would be a different story. Though it was far from roses all the way, for Bill Whelan this was the Riverdance decade - and it certainly provided him with the rewards that had eluded him till then, and in spectacular terms, too.
As history has recorded, Riverdance was composed especially for the interval act of the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. The original seven-minute orchestral piece conceived for hard-shoe Irish dance was televised to a European audience of 300 million viewers. As a single release, Riverdance spent 18 weeks at No. 1 in the Irish charts and was a Top Ten hit in the UK.
Later that year Bill Whelan began to write Riverdance The Show and in February 1995 it had its first performance at The Point Theatre in Dublin. Since then it has gone on to play to millions of people world-wide with both the album and video topping the charts around the world.
Riverdance had its early origins in the Spirit of Mayo celebrations, which took place in the national concert hall in Dublin in 1993. Whelan had been commissioned to write the music for it and Michael Flately, then performing regularly with The Chieftains had been asked to take part, because of his Mayo connections. Jean Butler, who would go on to appear in Riverdance, also took part. RTE producer Moya Doherty and John McColgan were both present in the audience that night and - impressed by what they saw - commissioned Whelan to work on the Eurovision interval segment for the following year.
"I had already decided that the piece would be set up with a song, using Anúna and the drummers who were in the Spirit of Mayo concert. So I wrote the piece, demoed it in my own studio and Micheal and Jean came in to dance to it. We began to get a hint of what was to come when the entire dance troupe began rehearsing it in Digges Lane. We felt we something special on our hands."
The performance that night on the Eurovision elicited on overwhelming, emotional response from the public and came to represent and symbolise all that was progressive about Irish music, dance and culture.
However the potential of Riverdance was by no means clear at the time. Back in 1995 Whelan spoke to hotpress about his initial difficulties in getting Riverdance off the ground. "I had a lot trouble even getting the record released at the time," he said. "I eventually managed to convince an insurance company to release it."
He also spoke of the anti-climax, which followed the initial bout of enthusiasm after the Eurovision triumph. "There was a curios hiatus immediately after Eurovision where no one had any idea what was going on or where we should go from there. A lot of people were saying we should do a whole show based on the original piece and others felt it should be left as it was. All those accusations about cashing in were made and I was worried about that too. But there was another imperative involved and that was in exploring what could be done with all these elements, especially the dance component. We'd only scratched the surface with the original Riverdance and I wanted to explore other areas like the Eastern European influence, which is quite strong within Riverdance."
With investment from RTE and from U2 manager Paul McGuinness, as well as 57th Street's Maurice Cassidy who would later be instrumental in promoting Riverdance globally, Whelan and the show's producer Moya Doherty travelled around Europe in search of inspiration. They went to Seville to look at Flamenco dancers, met choreographers in Budapest and travelled to Atlanta in the US to look at gospel singers. Whelan set about writing the music for the show in earnest in October '94, and the show debuted the following February to generally ecstatic acclaim.
At the time Whelan came under fire, from some traditional musicians in particular, for diluting, and even exploiting Irish music for his own ends. Back in 1995 as Riverdance was taking off into the stratosphere, he stated emphatically that it was not traditional Irish music. "It is new music with traditional Irish music as its principal inspiration," he said. "So anyone who says it's screwing around with Irish traditional music is arguing from the wrong angle."
Today he remains adamant that Riverdance has maintained its integrity in the face of an unstoppable onslaught of copycat productions.
"I plead guilty in that I wrote the music for Riverdance," he states. "I'm delighted to be associated with Riverdance and I'll always defend it and be there for it. But it is irksome when you see all these attempts to cash in on the success it has generated. I don't mind if people cash in but I can't be held responsible. Are U2 responsible for all the U2 clone bands that came along in their wake?
"Some of the stuff that has been written about the role of Riverdance and Irish music has hurt, of course it has. Riverdance gets slagged and some of that criticism is fair enough. I remember at the beginning someone wrote that the success of Riverdance was going to open a 'gathering swine rush' of like-minded stuff. That was probably right but I feel whatever I did was the result of years of work that I had done before it. What has happened after that, was thrown together by others to make a quick buck.
"There is a view of Irish music internationally that wasn't there before Riverdance and I have to accept some responsibility for that. I've seen Riverdance performed by Maltese people and there's a show in Germany that's a complete copycat of Riverdance. It all gets meshed into the same view of Irish music and there's nothing I can do about that. On the other hand, I was at a small event in Mayo recently and a bunch of kids came out and did something that was straight out of Riverdance - and it was great."

Despite the massive financial rewards that have flowed into Bill Whelan's personal coffers from Riverdance and other projects, he hasn't been sitting back, or resting on his laurels. He is currently working in collaboration with writer Colm Toibin, on a major new project, a musical inspired by his love of South American music.
"I have always loved Latin American music, stuff like Antonio Carlos Jobin," he explains. "Colm and I came up with this story about two people who begin a musical journey in Ireland, move to Seville in Spain and then down to Salvador in Brazil. Harmonically it's very complex and hugely enjoyable to work on. Obviously, one of the things that comes with the success I've had is that it is easier for me to make a phone call. I can meet up with someone like Sergio Mendes and can connect with him on a musical level.
"We travelled to Brazil for research purposes and we had some amazing experiences," he relates. "We went to a 'candomble' ceremony in the middle of the night in a rural township. It was astonishing. It was basically a voodoo ritual with people drumming and dancing into a trance state. It was incredible from my perspective and all of this is feeding into the story - though I'd stress that I'm not plundering the music for my own ends. It's not meant to be a representation of their music in any form, it will be my own take on it."
Does he envisage it being as big a project as Riverdance?
"It's really hard to say how it will evolve but I wouldn't see it being as big as Riverdance. We're excited by the story but it's early days yet and it has still to be decide what it's going to be and whether producers will be excited by it.
"I'm driving this project myself but it's such a cross-disciplinary thing really and there will be a lot of collaboration involved. These things are very pleasurable when they work out - but impossible to predict."