Bloom With A View

Luka Bloom doesn’t look 43. When I walk into the room in the Berkeley Court Hotel where our interview is to take place, he’s standing in front of the window, guitar strap around his neck and an acoustic six-string in his hand – he strums it and I’d swear that he’s 12 years of age. Every time he plays on stage the look is the same, one of wonder and even serenity.

He smiles, shakes my hand and greets me by name – even though we’ve never met before. He poses for the photographs without complaint, knowing that it’s easier just to do what the photographer wants, joking and smiling the whole time. Then he sits back on the bright yellow couch, with the guitar close to hand should a sudden need for chords arise, and sips away intermittently on a Ballygowan and a coffee over the course of the next hour.

Of course, he’s well used to the promotional obligations that go with releasing an album; after all, Salty Heaven is his fourth LP as Luka Bloom, the name Barry Moore adopted for himself when he crossed the Atlantic a decade ago. Now he’s back living in Ireland, explaining that there were “very practical reasons” for his return.

“My mother was getting older and I wanted to be around her and to be with her,” he explains. “At the other end of the scale, I have a son who at that time would have been hitting eight years of age, and I felt it was time I was around him more.

“I’d also achieved a lot of what I wanted to achieve in America in a fairly short space of time, which really surprised me,” he continues. “By the time I got to 1992 I was already beginning to have a working life back in Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and beginning in Ireland, so my reasons for going to America were starting to disappear. So for personal and professional reason, it made sense for me to want to come back home – it was nothing more traumatic than that.”

It’s been three years since his last album, Turf, but Luka hasn’t been idle during that time, road-testing new songs on the highroads and byroads. The songs for Salty Heaven were written about two and a half years ago in Birr, Co. Offaly, but the album had a long and winding gestation period before its release.

“It was the end of 1994, the beginning of ’95,” he sets the scene. “I’d been dropped around six months earlier and I was at a point where I’d no manager, no record deal and I was kinda hanging onto a publishing deal that didn’t really mean anything. So, in a way, I as back to where I was before I went to America, except that this time I had an audience and there was a possibility to do something.

“So I made a conscious decision to go off and devote a year to just building a body of songs that would not just make the next record but would give me a sense of direction. In order to get stuck into the work, I decided to get out of town ’cos I’d always been in cities working, whether in Dublin or New York. So I decided to explore a little of Ireland, to go somewhere where nobody knew me and I didn’t know anybody. You don’t have to go to Australia to find that.”

Birr fitted the bill nicely.

“I decided I’d spend a bit of time there, initially to hide, then to do some work and then because I really liked it,” he smiles.

Most of Salty Heaven was written in this period and when the time came to record, he relocated to Naas, Co. Kildare, where friend of his, Eoin O’Neill, had renovated an old mill, and where he had the space to record.

It was now April ’96 and, by his own admission, Luka had “no real clue what to do. I was scared ’cos I’d borrowed a fair bit of money to even do that and there was no sign of anybody bursting to sign me.” Rather than release the album independently, Luka (and his new manager Mattie Fox) hooked up with producer Peter Van Hooke and crossed the Irish Sea for another period of recording.

“It meant taking those performances we’d done in Kildare and allowing all these people I didn’t know to come and play on the tracks,” he recalls. “It was a whole new adventure for me and I was a little bit scared of it but I felt that it was needed and I decided to trust it and go along with it.”

Luka’s two and a half year journey eventually took him from Birr to the famous Abbey Road Studios, which he describes as “unbelievable. Again, I was slightly intimidated because I’m not used to working in what I would regard as rock star environments. I had visions of going in and needing a backstage pass to get inside the door, but it wasn’t like that at all. They were incredibly helpful, professional and extremely good at what they do.”

When the album was finished, still had no record deal and was up to his ears in debt. Salvation came along in the form of Sony Ireland MD John Sheehan. “He had never heard me before. He had never seen any of my gigs but he just heard it and loved it.”

It’s just as well John Sheehan did love it. Otherwise, the arrival of the excellent Salty Heaven may have been delayed even further. And make no mistake, Luka’s fourth LP is a joy. Some of it reads like a diary entry. Cue ‘Ciara’, which tells the tale of Luka and the heroine of the title engaging in some romantic activity in Kildare.

“I’ve never actually written a song as directly about somebody that I fancy before,” he admits. “I’m not great at that confrontation, in-your-face style of songwriting, but the song is pretty much straight as it happened. There’s something about her name that in the chorus, lends itself to a sort of a pleading, (sings) ‘Ciara, where the fuck are ya?’ (laughs). That to me is the key of that song, and when it comes to the chorus it has that sense of ‘Where in the name of Jaysus are ye and why won’t ye go out with me?’”

Simple narratives like ‘Ciara’ and the fairy-tale simplicity of ‘Water Ballerina’ mix it up with more powerful songs relating to alcohol abuse (‘The Hungry Ghost’), the environment (‘Rainbow Warrior’), the disintegration of organised religion (‘The Shape Of Love To Come’), and even the famine (‘Forgiveness’).

‘The Hungry Ghost’ tells the tale of someone “Falling up and down the main street . . . People say that’s what being young is for”. No harm there, you might think, considering it’s a familiar image from almost every Irish person’s youth, but the famished spectre of the title is none other than the demon drink, ready to pounce on the recovering alcoholic.

“It was partly autobiographical,” Luka confesses, “but the actual story came from something that I’d read about another person, an American guy who was talking about being off the drink for 15 years, having had to give it up because it was getting too serious for him. It was interfering with his whole life and screwing him up. Somewhere in the course of the 15 years he forgot how much shit he’d been in and he just started drinking. Within two weeks, he’d lost everything. He got it together again but the second time round he said, ‘it was as if there was a hungry ghost waiting for me’.

“It’s been a while since that’s been an issue for me, to be honest with you,” he continues, “but it did give me some recollections and a realisation of how easy it can be to forget how much shit went on. I don’t mind being reminded that it wasn’t always beautiful out there.”

Another track, ‘The Shape Of Love To Come’, is a two-pronged composition, one part a chronicle of the collapse of power wielded by the Church and the other a personal search for his place in the world and his own sense of spirituality.

“I don’t mind writing songs about my own confusion but I hope I don’t do it in a way that is navel-gazing or anally retentive or whatever the buzz words are for someone who’s a boring old gobshite,” he smiles. “It’s a challenge to try and write about a journey or search that you’re on that doesn’t sound like you’re tortured, because they’re not tortured songs.

“I was never a strong Catholic,” he admits, “because I grew up in a house where all that was fairly loose. There was never any sense of having to belong to the Catholic community. My mother was very strong on belonging to your community and looking after people: if people were having a bad time, to help them out. But she was never strong on pursuing a religious path – she always felt that that was your own business.”

However, Luka believes that simply disowning or condemning one’s religious upbringing may not be enough.

“Even the paper you happen to write for, it’s always been a great outlet for people who are angry with the Catholic Church,” he says. “But that’s something that, in recent years, has become very easy. It’s very easy to just be angry, particularly when there is justification for it, but it’s not enough. For me, it’s not enough because I think that if I choose not to be a practising Catholic in Ireland, that’s fine, but am I satisfied with being completely atheistic or completely agnostic? What drives me?

“I feel for people who have been completely devoted to Catholicism, who have had their world shattered by revelations. It’s probably not dissimilar from what must have happened in the Soviet Union when the whole Communist value system just seemed to fall asunder. These people would have been devout Communists for generations, and all of a sudden the whole thing was meaningless. If you think that we’ve been doing this for hundreds of years, that doesn’t just fall down without there being a serious aftershock, a spiritual aftershock.”

This spiritual vacuum has led many people to seek solace outside organised religion. The spirituality Luka refers to in the song itself seems a lot simpler than Catholicism’s rules and regulations and yet he doesn’t show disdain for the Church or its teachings.

“I love the communal aspects of Catholicism, where people gather to help mourn the death of a child,” he stresses. “The Catholic Church, in many ways, is at its best helping people through difficult periods of grieving. We’ve had some incredible examples of that recently in the North. I think that organisations and institutions like the Catholic Church don’t just survive in people’s hearts because they’re oppressive or because they fill people with fear. They survive because they serve a very important function in people’s lives.

“It’s just that I can’t go into a church on a Sunday and see some guy stand on a pulpit and preach to me about morality. I can’t take it,” he adds. “I don’t judge people who choose to do that and I absolutely respect their choice in doing so. It just never worked for me.”

Instead, Luka Bloom has found peace in the natural world, acknowledging a sort of ancient spirituality that takes its root from the beauty of the landscape. Part of this fascination he ascribes to the fact that he has lived in cities for so long.

“When I go into the natural world, particularly in Ireland, I do feel closer to myself. I find that the songs flow through me much more easily. It’s a fact of my life and I don’t make a big deal about it and I don’t apologise for it,” he states simply.

“There’s a lot of sacred land in Ireland. When you live in a completely urban environment and all your reference points are urban, when you talk about sacred land people just think ‘Oh, fucking hippy’. But that’s an easy way to dismiss me or anybody who uses that type of language.”

He sums it up: “I just find it interesting that at a time when you have incredible religious chaos in Ireland, there is a certain amount of fear and trepidation, but I genuinely feel that most people are figuring it out. I think the reason that most people are able to figure it out is because there is an incredible spiritual history to tap into here. It’s not all in books. It’s in places. It’s in fields. It’s in ring-forts. It’s in ditches. It’s in hills. It’s in Kildare. It’s in Meath. It’s in everywhere you go in this country.”

One of the places mentioned in ‘The Shape . . .’ is the Hill of Tara, which I’m sure anyone who has been there will agree, is a special place with its own unique, intangible atmosphere.

“You’re talking about a very ancient, powerful place,” Luka agrees. “If I’m ever within shouting distance of Navan, I’ll always call to the Hill of Tara and just go for a walk up there. I walk around the whole field, and look out on the plains, and I just feel really charged with it, that fantastic energy that nobody can explain to me and I don’t need explained to me. It’s a lovely feeling of belonging. This is part of my heritage and I love it.

“I was up in Virginia, Co. Cavan, a couple of months ago and on the way back I went up there, about seven o’clock in the evening. On my way back down, who did I see coming up to go training on the Hill of Tara but the entire Meath squad. There isn’t even a football pitch there. But Seán Boylan, the Meath trainer, knows what that’s all about. He understands the power of a place like that. And the whole sense of belonging and the whole sense of history, the whole sense of warriors going to battle. This was three months before the Championship.”

Some might think that the song ‘The Holy Ground’ is about the same emotions and spirituality, but specifically it relates to the healing power of music. Luka maintains that, for him, this sacred place is to be found inside.

“That’s part of my problem with religion,” he explains. “Most religions tell you that the God you need is outside yourself: you have to go to this church and listen to that man talking and that man will help to put you in touch with God. Whereas, I really believe that in everybody there is a place inside themselves where people can get in touch with the God of their choosing.”

Even though his holy ground is not a physical place, the physical world is ever present throughout Salty Heaven, with images of natural beauty cropping up in almost every song. Not surprising, then, that one song in particular, ‘Rainbow Warrior’, deals with Greenpeace, and those who devote their lives to its protection.

“It’s only in the last 50 years that it’s become uncool to talk about mankind as being connected with nature,” he maintains. “The vast majority of people live in an urban environment, and, with the pace of technology, we increasingly distance ourselves from the natural world. But at the end of the day, we still basically consist of water, air, flesh, blood and shite. And so, much and all as it may seem uncool to acknowledge the fact, our family is the natural world – we’re part of it.

“I hate words like ecology and environment,” he continues. “Those words are cop-outs for people to describe someone like me. We’re all environmentalists because we are as much a part of the natural world as animals and fish and birds. I don’t care how uncool all this sounds, it’s a simple fact of reality.

“But I don’t get up in the morning and wonder what’ll I save today,” he laughs. “Some people are very openly and unapologetically politically driven in their songwriting, like Billy Bragg, and I absolutely admire that and respect that. But it has never been a calling of mine. If I respond to something emotionally, I’ll usually end up writing a song about it.”

Another subject to which Luka has responded emotionally is The Famine, and the pain and suffering it caused and still causes today (‘Forgiveness’). But does he believe that The Famine is still a relevant factor in modern Ireland? He pauses for a few seconds before speaking, collecting his thoughts.

“I have to arrive at a personal decision for myself before I write a song like that,” he explains. “Because I don’t know the answer to your questions. I don’t see myself as an authority on Ireland. I don’t see myself as an authority on what’s happening in Ireland and I certainly haven’t a clue about what people ought to do to make Ireland a better place.

“But we do have a long history of suffering and it’s all encapsulated in The Famine, for me. I definitely still believe it’s an issue. Why I say it’s a personal thing, is that one of the things I realised about my life is that if I hold onto bitterness and bear grudges, I become a bitter old bollocks. I don’t want to be bitter. I choose to want to trust people. I choose to want to forgive. It’s something that I aspire to, not for any grandiose reasons, for the simple reason that I want to sleep at night.”

Referring to calls for an official British apology for The Famine, he observes: “If I’m depending on somebody else to apologise, and they don’t, then I can hang onto the bitterness forever, and in the context of the famine, I made a personal decision for me that I wanted to move on and I wanted to let go,” he says.

“I’m not trying to say it’s easy and I would certainly never want to go up to somebody on the Garvaghy Road or the Falls Road and say ‘Don’t you think it’s time to . . .’. Who the hell am I to say that? I’m only talking from my experience, from my own life. What anybody else does or how anybody else views the famine in the socio-political world or in their personal world, is their prerogative. That’s something they’ve got to deal with. But I certainly think it’s something that’s worth dealing with, because I do believe that we have been affected by it. How could we not be? It’s only two or three generations ago.”

I recently saw Luka play live in Mother Redcap’s on the same day that his older brother, Christy Moore, announced his retirement from music. I didn’t find out about Christy’s decision until the next day, but Luka seemed very emotional on stage, performing a version of ‘City Of Chicago’, a song he wrote that was made famous by his older sibling. How much did it affect him when Christy decided to call it a day?

“I was very emotional and I was surprised to the extent to which I was affected by it,” he says. “But it’s not really that hard to understand. When I was 14 or 15 years of age, Christy was singing in folk clubs in England and, one of the arrangements with our family was that Christy would bring me to England for two weeks of my summer holidays. I have very early memories of singing in folk clubs in England with Christy. Then, the first real gigs I did were in 1972/73, opening for Planxty when they toured the After The Black album.”

In fact, almost all of Luka’s formative gigs, all of 26 years ago, were based around the early working life of Christy, who even produced Luka’s debut as Barry Moore in 1978. So how big an influence was his older sibling on the then impressionable teenage mind of the young Barry Moore?

“Funnily enough, musically he wouldn’t have been that huge an inspiration on me,” he says. “Our style of music and our taste in music is very different. But I think I’ve been very affected by his attitude to his work, and his way of working with people would have influenced me more than his actual music.

“I was very moved that night in Mother Redcap’s and I didn’t know until that evening that was the day the retirement was announced. I felt very fragile with it and very raw. He was just in my mind because he’s my brother. It’s almost as though people are surprised but people forget that before Christy was a singer, before Planxty, before any of those things, we were brothers and that’s the nature of our relationship. That’s what matters, it’s all that matters.”

With one generation of the Moore clan calling it a day as regards performing, happily there are more to fill the gap. Nephew Conor Byrne for one, who released his debut solo album earlier this year; Luka handled production. The dynasty goes on.

“Well actually, I asked Christy about a year ago would he mind taking some time off so myself and Conor could get a look in,” Luka laughs.

“There’s more to come,” he promises of the Moore family. “There’s one or two others that are shaping up now. But that’s what happens in Ireland. If there’s music in a family it tends to filter through, and some people gravitate towards it and some people move away from it. But when we get together, there’s usually a fair few songs and tunes running around. That’s just the way it is with us.”

The rest of the year will be busy for Luka Bloom, with Salty Heaven being released in Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and Australia and eventually in England and America. So he will be on the road for about a year, starting in September with an Irish tour which includes Dublin’s Olympia Theatre.

All in all, I remark, he seems a happy man.

“Happiness is a funny thing to talk about,” he muses. “Happy and hippy, it’s funny how those two words are alike and they seem to turn people off almost as much. Happiness to me is a condition that includes sadness, it includes darkness. If somebody is a happy person, it doesn’t mean that they are never black or blue or down or frustrated or fucked up. It absolutely includes all of that.

“I used to think that I suffered from a condition that I heard once described as terminal uniqueness. When you get to a point that you realise that everybody has dark periods, and get comfortable with that, and accept that as part of your life, then it’s possible to be happier about the world and about life. But I’d be an awful gobshite if I didn’t look at my life and the way it’s gone, and not realise what a lucky person I am.”

He cites an example.

“I had occasion recently to find myself in traffic early in the morning and to see what it’s like for people who have to go into that every day, to face into horrific traffic. I think the suburban dream now has become an absolute nightmare, especially in Dublin. And so many people have to live it every day to earn their crust, to keep up their living standards. There’s no point in my life where I would have been able to do that and survive it. I know that about myself. I’ve been fortunate enough that I’ve been able to find a way to express myself and to give something and to earn a living doing it. That’s a pretty good thing to know starting your day. It’s a good reason to be happy.

“And I think it’s important to acknowledge that. I make no bones at all about acknowledging my basic love of the world and appreciation for the fact that I am still on the planet, because a lot of people I know and love didn’t make it to 43 years, including my own father, who died at the age of 41. I’m the youngest in my family and I’ve outlived my father by two years.

“Outside even my own family, just people I know, like Frankie Kennedy, like Bill Graham, like Derek Dunne, like so many good people who were taken away so young. When those kind of things happen and you’re still around, still working and singing and still have that opportunity, it puts things into perspective.”

• Salty Heaven is out now on Columbia Records.