Archive article of the week: interview with Derek Bell

"Steffie’s first reaction was ‘children are a bundle of fucking trouble, anyway’. "But she, quickly, took another viewpoint. Yet we haven’t, selfishly, decided not to have children. If you’re going to have no children then you must find a bigger, human family to deal with. Both of us have found that. We each have our individual harp students, that we take care of, directly. And a family of audiences, listeners and concert organisers, all sorts of things. That feeds the same need.
"In fact the Great Master’s poem is very appropriate in this sense. ‘I will be a divine gypsy/I will sing and I will roam all over the place/And I will go where none has gone before and sing a new song/That none has sung before'."
That's from an interview with the late Derek Bell - harpist, multi-instrumentalist, eccentric, Buddhist, great joker, great serious person, Chieftain - which we bring you to mark his recent untimely death.
Recommended, whether you were a fan, or are just an aficionado of wise minds and comic geniuses. Click here to read.
(and if you want to read the previous part of a larger interview with his band the Chieftains, mostly centring on Paddy Moloney, click here.)