One irish rover

That voice. There wasn’t any like it before, and there won’t be any like it again. If David Bowie once eulogised Bob Dylan’s rasp as sounding like sand and glue, then Ronnie Drew’s was Jameson’s and rusty nails. It was a voice as familiar as your da’s, one that evokes the pub, the bookies and the fishmarket, dog-rough and unpretentious and smelling of fags and malt.
It’s the first recorded voice this writer remembers hearing, at the age of four or five. The song was ‘Weela Weela Waile’, a murder ballad as brutal and blackly comic as anything by Johnny Cash or Nick Cave.
“Theeeeere was an ould woman who lived in the woods…” Three minutes of Irish southern gothic gangsta ballad, with a dash of Brothers Grimm thrown in for good luck – a nasty little infanticidal number laced with slapstick and horror. It was also, bizarrely, but somehow fittingly, the last song sung at Ronnie Drew’s funeral in Greystones last week – at the conclusion of a service that seemed more New Orleansian than Irish in atmosphere, Dubliner Barney McKenna “got a rush of blood to the head” and felt compelled to break into the song.
But then, Ronnie Drew never stood on ceremony, nor dealt in mawkish sentimentality. He was many things: a singer, storyteller, actor and public figure, but could never have been accused of having aspirations towards bourgeois respectability.
Born in Glasthule in 1934, the eldest of five children, Drew left Ireland for Spain to dodge the 1950s version of the draft: a civil service job. He learned to speak fluent Spanish and flamenco guitar, playing the bars and restaurants for three years before returning to Ireland to seek work as an actor, performing in The Gate, amongst other venues.
In 1962 he formed the Ronnie Drew Group with Luke Kelly, Barney McKenna and Ciarán Bourke, and the ensemble honed their chops at sessions in O’Donoghue’s pub on Baggot Street. Dissatisfied with the name, Drew rechristened the group The Dubliners, at Kelly’s suggestion, after James Joyce’s 1914 book of short stories. The group recorded their debut album The Dubliners With Luke Kelly in 1964. Shortly after, the mercurial Kelly departed for a solo career, and was replaced by Bobby Lynch and John Sheahan for their 1965 live album, but he rejoined for the classic third album Finnegan Wakes in 1966.
It was about this time that Ronnie Drew learned the song ‘Seven Drunken Nights’ from Connemaran sean nós master Joe Heaney, at a session in Donoghue’s. A variation on the old Scots-English-Irish-Appalachian narrative ballad about a drunken cuckold who repeatedly has the wool pulled by his missus on returning from the pub over seven consecutive nights, the group recorded it as a single in 1967. The bawdy nature of the lyric caused something of a ruckus – RTE prohibited airplay of the tune, and the Bishop of Cork tried to ban the group’s concert in his city – but the controversy only worked in the song’s favour. The pirate station Radio Caroline picked up on the single and granted it heavy airplay, and it became a huge hit, nestling in the UK Top 5 alongside The Kinks and The Who, resulting in the incongruous sight of these bearded reprobates appearing on Top Of The Pops, blasting out their fluke missive from the old weird Hibernia.
This was the band’s heyday. They boasted considerable musical firepower in the form of McKenna and Sheahan, while Kelly’s passionate, declamatory style on standards like ‘Muirsheen Durkin’ and Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Raglan Road’ contrasted beautifully with Drew’s wry, ironic delivery of tunes like ‘The Pub With No Beer’. (Mind you, Ronnie could play it straight too, most notably on Brendan Behan’s Mountjoy crie de couer, ‘The Old Triangle’). If The Clancy Brothers were the folk boom’s Beatles, then The Dubliners were the Stones. Their approach to the music was gruff, rough and ready, an antidote to the snobs who viewed these songs as museum pieces. The group’s approach to the music was akin to compatriots like Behan and Kavanagh’s attitude to storytelling and poetry – artful yes, but also heartfelt, the stuff of commonality and community rather than elitism and exclusion. For a traditional group, The Dubliners’ approach was progressive, prophetic even, anticipating Tom Waits and The Pogues (it was hardly any great surprise when, to commemorate The Dubliners’ 20th anniversary, Shane and co joined the group for a seditious, mob-handed version of ‘The Irish Rover’, a top ten hit in 1987). Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Jimi Hendrix and Nick Mason had all professed themselves fans. Thin Lizzy scored their first hit in 1973 with a rock reinterpretation of the standard ‘Whiskey In the Jar’.
Meanwhile, The Dubliners recorded an astonishing 12 albums and embarked on countless tours between ’67 and ’74. However, the work rate took its toll. Weary of the road, Ronnie Drew took a five-year sabbatical, during which time he released two solo albums, before rejoining in 1979 for what would be a 16-year tenure.
Following his final departure in 1995, he stayed busy over the next decade, recording and releasing a further seven solo records, including two collaborations with Eleanor Shanley. Ever eclectic, he put together his one-man raconteur show The Humour Is On Me Now, and also worked with Christy Moore, Antonio Breschi and Paddy-punks the Dropkick Murphys, not to mention fronting DART campaigns, the My Dublin series for 98FM, and narrating the stories of Oscar Wilde for a News Of The World CD.
In August 2006, Drew’s handprints were added to the walk of fame outside Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre. The following month he was admitted to St. Vincent’s hospital to undergo tests, and was diagnosed with throat cancer. Still he kept working, one of his more intriguing projects being a series of recordings with Jah Wobble for the Niall Austin produced Pearls album, featuring adaptations of poems by Shane MacGowan, Brendan Kennelly and Louis MacNeice set to ambient soundscapes. Then, in June 2007, Deirdre, his wife of 40 years, died, and Ronnie appeared on Ryan Confidential that October, shorn of hair and famous beard, to speak about the loss, and of his ongoing battle with cancer.
In February of this year, friends and comrades rallied to record ‘The Ballad Of Ronnie Drew’, written by Bono, The Edge, Simon Carmody and Robert Hunter of the Greatful Dead, and featuring a cast of musicians that included U2, Kila, Sinead O’Connor, Glen Hansard, Andrea Corr, Shane MacGowan, Gavin Friday and Bob Geldof. The single reached Number 2 in Ireland, with proceeds going to the Irish Cancer Society. Last May, RTE’s Arts Lives series broadcast a Drew documentary entitled September Song, produced by former Dubliners manager Noel Pearson and featuring interviews with the Drew family, Bono, Billy Connolly and Damien Dempsey, one of The Dubliners’ most conspicuous young heirs and advocates.
On August 16, Ronnie Drew passed away at the age of 73. He was survived by his two children and five grandchildren. Thousands attended the memorial service in Greystones, including musicians Keith Donald, Mary Coughlan, Eleanor Shanley, Phil Coulter, Mike Hanrahan, Don Baker, and Paddy Moloney, plus representatives of the President, Taoiseach and Lord Mayor’s offices. A motley crew, united in honour of the Irish rover.
Days after his death, U2’s Bono posted the following tribute on the band’s website.
“Weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs... that’s what I loved about Ronnie Drew’s voice and spirit. Music to inspire, to console... an optimism that was contagious... that’s what U2 took from The Dubliners.
“Ronnie has left his earthly tour for one of the heavens... they need him up there... it’s a little too quiet and pious. God is lonely for a voice louder than His own... then the bad weather will break...”

KEITH DONALD
(musician, producer)
“The first time I met Ronnie was in the ’70s, in the Green Room of the Gaiety Theatre where we both used to drink. Before that I’d known Luke Kelly and Ciarán Bourke, who was a neighbour, so I knew Ronnie by repute. So we got to know each other very well over the years.
Then a mutual friend, a songwriter, the late Donal McDonald, played me a song he wanted The Dubliners to record, and he wanted me to arrange the song, which I did for their 30 Years A-Greying album in 1992. Ronnie then asked me if I would be interested in doing an album with him, and so I produced his Dirty Rotten Shame in Windmill Lane, in 1995. It was an interesting process, as we started off with no songs at all! Then he bumped into Elvis Costello at an airport and asked him if he’d write a song for the album. A week later Elvis sent ‘Dirty Rotten Shame’. Then he met Shane MacGowan in London and Shane said he’d write a song, and that was ‘The Dunes’. We also recorded songs by Christy Moore and Bono.
Ronnie was always good-humoured and we had great craic. I was just talking to Anto and Myles Drennan who played on the album and we remembered loving the experience of working with him. But then Ronnie worked so hard on that album. Remember, a lot of the songs we did were outside his normal style, and he practiced the songs incessantly, getting the phrasing and the pronunciation of the words spot-on. But then Ronnie never shied away from a challenge. I think he felt it kept him alert and alive. He often observed people in their 40s he felt were just waiting to retire. He hated that notion.
He was never just a guy who sang ballads either. He worked with Jah Wobble in London, and he acted in plays, pantomimes and films. He didn’t like being bored, which is why he didn’t settle for the day job when he was 20 and went off to Spain and learned flamenco guitar.
It’s almost impossible to calculate the impact Ronnie and The Dubliners had on Irish music. It was the very early '60s when they made their first albums. Ireland back then was a very different place from what it is now. I had just arrived in Dublin from the North, and there was a compactness to it then. You’d see the same eccentrics on the street time and time again. It was unheard of for any musician from Ireland to be successful abroad the way The Dubliners began to be successful. This was before Van or Rory or Thin Lizzy or anybody.
But with Noel Pearson managing them, they started playing all over Europe, like Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, and Irish folk music became almost their folk music! They were probably taken far more seriously abroad than they were here at the time. I managed Ronnie for a while in the mid-'90s, and I got a stream of letters and emails from all over the world from people who thought Ronnie and The Dubliners were legendary gods. In Ireland, certainly at the start, they were regarded as a bit of a novelty act, and I’m not sure if they ever got the due credit.
Ronnie brought his own spirit to things. He was an autodidact, and didn’t have a formal education beyond about 16. He was hugely interested in all kinds of art forms and a voracious reader. He’d read more of the Irish classics probably than people doing an English degree. He collected art, mostly Irish. If he made a lump of money from a tour he could go out and buy a Jack Yeats painting. He supported many young Irish artists not by faint praise, but by buying their works.
He had great curiosity, but he was hard on himself too. He didn’t see himself as a success as such, and was forever beating himself up over his failures. He didn’t feel he was automatically entitled to anything, whether fame or prestige or money. So long as he provided a nice home for his family he wasn’t at all materialistic for himself.
My fondest memory of him goes back to a night in the mid-’90s when he arrived at my house, smoking a cigar and wearing his Crombie coat. I was inside, but unfortunately I’d lost the keys and couldn’t let him in! But that wasn’t going to deter Ronnie. My daughter Alex was in bed, and she was a little surprised to see him, with his cigar still alight, climbing in through her bedroom window, and then heading out her bedroom door with not a bother on him, as if he did this sort of thing every day. That was the kind of guy he was, a kind, decent and extremely honest man.”

MIKE HANRAHAN
(musician, producer)
“The voice of Ronnie Drew has been in my life since I was about 12 or 13. My Dad had an album which had ‘McAlpine’s Fusiliers’ on it, and I was even then struck by the presence in his voice.
I met him in the early ’80s when The Dubliners were one of the first bands to encourage my own band Stockton’s Wing. We toured a lot together, including a great tour of Australia in 1986. We would have been in a lot of sessions together, and I became a good friend of Ronnie’s over the years.
Then Ronnie rang me early in 1997 to ask me to give him a dig out with a new show he was putting together. He wanted to get back to the theatre, sing a few songs and tell stories. He had a basic outline for the show. I agreed and we did a few warm-up gigs and got Derek Chapman to direct. Ronnie was into what he called accessible James Joyce and Sean O’Casey at the time, and he wanted to talk about his times with Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan and Brendan’s father Stephen. So he amalgamated all this stuff into a show called The Humour Is On Me Now. There was one very emotional moment for me when I closed my eyes on the stage while Ronnie was singing ‘McAlpine’s Fusiliers’ and my memory went back to my teenage years listening to him sing that same song on the record my father had. That show was so successful we did an album which included two songs by Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Raglan Road’ and ‘If Ever You Go To Dublin Town’.
Around 2000 Mattie Fox was managing Eleanor Shanley, who had sung with The Dubliners, and he came up with the idea of us recording ‘A Couple More Years’, a song by Shel Silverstein, who wrote ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ for Dr Hook, so when we saw how well that worked we toured and recorded as a trio.
Working with Ronnie was incredible for me as a musician, as he gave me the opportunity to express myself like never before and to really hone my guitar playing skills and step up to the plate on that front. He was always very serious about the show and the performance, and he’d be nervous for an hour before every gig. He was constantly reworking the text to see if he could tighten it up or improve the show in any way. He liked toying around with the older songs to keep them interesting and to stop them getting stale.
We toured together for about ten years, and he was always punctual, preferring to get there a day early than be five minutes late. The show was what the day was about. Travelling maybe four hours in a car to a gig he was very stimulating company. He was never too interested in the music business as such, although he tried to be, but he trusted me to look after the business details. He much preferred talking about music, history, art and politics, and was very astute at judging people's character. In that sense, I took a lot of my counsel from him and he’d nearly always be bang-on.
He always spoke fondly of Barney McKenna. He loved Barney, and it was the two of them who started the whole thing off when they did the John Molloy revue at The Gaiety in the late '50s. He was very well read and was interested in how the country was being run, especially as it affected the ordinary decent working class who were the real people he identified with. He was very proud of Dun Laoghaire where he came from. He paid scant regard to bullshit.
There are so many fond memories of him, but one in particular came to mind. After he died I was privileged to have five minutes on my own in the house with him and ten years of my life flashed by, and most if it was very funny.
I remember we were in Israel and had a day off. Ronnie was probably the worst tourist ever, but I convinced him to go to Jerusalem on a bus. When we got there I think the people thought Ronnie was a rabbi, as they kept saluting him with prayers. We went to the Wailing Wall and I was mesmerised looking at it and watching the way the people moved back and forth in prayer. Then Ronnie said to me, ‘Mike, what time does the wall change colour?’ I said, Ronnie, I don’t know what you mean. It doesn’t change colour.’ And he said, ‘Well, haven’t you seen enough of the thing, so can we go now? It’s just a feckin’ wall!’
If you ever needed to be brought back down to earth, Ronnie was the best man to do that for you. I’ll miss him dreadfully.”

ELEANOR SHANLEY
(singer)
“I was the only woman who ever recorded with The Dubliners, and probably the only woman who sang with them either, and that’s how I first worked with Ronnie. It was for the 30 Years A-Greying album in 1992 on which I sang Bob Dylan’s ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’ and ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’. I was singing with De Danann at the time, and The Dubliners got guests in to sing with them, including De Danann, Rory Gallagher and The Pogues.
Later I was touring Finland with my own band and bumped into Ronnie en route. Mike Hanrahan was working with him at the time. During a casual chat we talked about doing something together back in Ireland, and from that we started doing a few gigs together, and that’s how the album A Couple More Years came about in 2000. I was touring with Ronnie and Mike while also keeping my own band going with John McLoughlin. In a way, singing with Ronnie and Mike was easier, as Ronnie was an extremely well-known and well-respected singer.
It was a great learning experience for me too, especially as regards how to approach a song. I could see the way Ronnie didn’t just casually pick a song he fancied and just sing it. Every song Ronnie took he made it his own, no matter who’d sung it before or who’d written it. He’d go through every single melody line and every word in the lyrics in great detail. It was the same with the stage show, we’d rehearse lines with each other over and over, and every entrance and exit would have to be worked on until it became a spontaneous thing. He’d never stint on putting the work into the show, and he took his craft very seriously. But then, he had a great love of the stage and acting.
On a personal level he was a great man for keeping you balanced. I remember one time when I was touring Germany with De Danann and Ronnie got into our bus. To me here was this legendary god, and he sat down and we started chatting. I was looking out the window. It was my first trip through Germany and I was marvelling at the beautiful scenery, especially the forests streaming past the window. But when I said as much to Ronnie he turned to me and said, “Ah, love, what is it only trees, trees and more fucking trees!’ And he was right.”

PETE ST JOHN
(songwriter)
“I first met Ronnie in 1968 and we became great friends over the years. I really liked his late wife Deirdre too, and saw their children Phelim and Cliodhna grow up.
I was living in America when The Dubliners started to become big in Ireland, so it wasn’t until I got back here and began playing around places like The Embankment in Tallaght that I really got to know Ronnie as part of that folk gang. There was a great love of socialism in that group, and Ronnie never really lost that working class side of him.
I know the two sides of Ronnie. There was the Ronnie the public knew and then there was the complex man who, like a lot of working class people of that time, had a chip on our shoulders. He was a gentle soul on one hand, and very tough on the other. Like most of us then, he was looking for his position in life, and he went off to Spain. I think he found his place eventually, but it was an ongoing quest in one sense, as if what he was doing today was the step to the next thing. His interests were so diverse, just like Luke Kelly. They both read a great deal, but while Luke stayed more or less inside the Ewan McColl fold musically, Ronnie was into jazz and other stuff, and in later life when he felt he hadn’t done enough of it he guested with Peter O’Brien the jazzer. But he also sometimes missed being part of The Dubliners, so he’d duck in and out as he felt like it.
He went through a depressed period when he moved away from The Dubliners and was more or less down in Greystones sulking, so I went down to see him and told him, ‘This won’t do. You’ve spent the last six months licking your wounds.’ So I did a deal with Joe O’Reilly Senior, the head of Dolphin Records, and in order to give Ronnie a new identity away from The Dubliners I produced an album with him in 1978 based around Kilmainham Jail and including some of my own songs like ‘The Mero’. We borrowed the Guaranteed Irish idea and I called the album Guaranteed Drew.
Of the songs of mine he recorded, the one he fell in love with and felt it was the strongest lyric I’d ever write, was ‘When Margaret Was 11’. He liked the message of it, and at the time of Thatcher’s invasion of the Falklands some people saw a link to her, although it wasn’t about her, so it worked for both of us. He felt he did the definitive version of that song.
I’ve lots of lovely memories of our times together. I remember coming out of the Gaiety once with him and lots of people were saying hello to us. He turned to me and said, ‘People think we’re characters!’ But Ronnie was a character, one of the most recognisable characters in the country. He liked having that positive identity too, although I used to slag him and tell him he was a Culchie because he lived as far away as Dun Laoghaire! He had a great respect for other Dubliners like Noel Purcell and Maureen Potter.
Back in the ’80s I wrote a song for the All-Ireland Final between Dublin and Kerry. I actually wrote two versions and had both ready for whoever won. Anyway, Kerry won and the single ‘The Kerry Victory Song’ was a big hit. I went down to Kerry for about two weeks to promote it, wearing a Kerry jersey with the number zero on it. I was doing a gig in the Gleneagles in Killarney and Kerry heroes like Bomber Liston and Nelligan the goalkeeper were at this gig with about 6,000 fans. Of course the big build-up was to this song, but unknown to me, Ronnie was in the wings. So just as were about it go for it, who emerges from the wings but Ronnie. The crowd erupted as he came over to me, shaking this bag of coins at me and shouting, ‘Here’s your 30 pieces of bleedin’ silver!’ There was chaos after that!
I met Ronnie for the last time, only about two weeks before he died, for a cigar and a glass of wine. I knew the end was close and so did he. But he was resigned to it. Ronnie lived life as if everything he did was just the next step along the way, and I think that’s the way he approached death too, as if it was just the next natural step in his life.”