Steely Dan

IN THE summer of 1993, Breton guitarist Dan Ar Bras found himself on stage with over 70 Celtic musicians for the close of the Festival de Cornouaille in Quimper, Brittany. Also present that night was Irish trad superstar Donal Lunny.
"It was such a success that people started saying 'what about an album?'," Ar Bras recalls, as he prepares for an appearance on The Late Late Show. "It was all very well getting 70 people on stage but getting them into the studio was a much more difficult task. But I'd known Donal Lunny for a long time so we thought, if it can be done anywhere, Dublin is the place to do it."
The ensuing album Heritage Des Celtes, released in the autumn of 1994, went on to sell 230,000 copies in France alone, while a follow-up live album did equally healthy business. Adopting the same all-embracing Pan-Celtic approach, Ar Bras's new studio album Celtic Heritage was also recorded in Dublin's Windmill Lane, again with Lunny at the console. This one features an even more comprehensive selection of Irish musicians, including Nollaig Casey, Noel Bridgeman, Sharon Shannon and John McSherry, as well as an appearance by former Waterboy Mike Scott.
"Donal was the big organiser," Ar Bras says. "We both have the ability to bring people together but I'm more of a solitary musician. When you have 15 musicians playing live in the studio you have to organise and arrange everything and you have to listen intently. Andrew Boland and Brian Masterson at Windmill Lane are the masters of that kind of thing. It's about knowing people too. A good musician is a good thing, but I'd rather have an average musician who's a nice person."
With a big, swirling textural sound, the album is a veritable index of the possibilities of Celtic music. But, according to Ar Bras, it's not necessarily innovative. "Musically, I'm not really doing anything new," he admits. "It's nice Celtic music, well arranged and sometimes quite poppy. But it has all been done before by people like Alan Stivell in the 1970s. That said, there's been a big resurgence and the '90s seems to be the time for ethnic music."
Though he has recorded several solo albums in France, Ar Bras was previously better known for his work with Breton superstar Alan Stivell with whom he toured for over ten years.
"Until I met Stivell I thought of myself as a Frenchman," he explains. "When I was young I noticed I was enjoying music like Rory Gallagher, Donovan, John Martyn and they were all Celtic - Irish, Scottish. Even The Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, are of Irish descent. When I began working with Stivell I saw the light. I have a different way of thinking and in my way of making music and relating with people. I'm part of a community where I've been living for a long time. There's definitely a special feeling about Celtic music."
Interestingly, Celtic Heritage also contains the song Dan Ar Bras performed for France in the 1996 Eurovision Song Contest - a Breton folk ballad called 'Diwanit Bugale'.
"When I was asked to do it I couldn't stop laughing for half an hour after," he remembers. "I thought, 'Are you kidding?' Then I said to them, 'What am I going to sing?' So they said, 'You're going to do a song from your album'. Then I thought to myself, here we have a chance to sing in a language that France used to forbid. It was the first ever Pan-Celtic band in Eurovision - we had Scottish, Breton, French and Welsh musicians and Fiachra Trench as the arranger was the Irish element.
He also recalls the controversy that arose at the time. "Some French people weren't happy that we were representing them. The biggest disappointment was the fact that we didn't get many points even from Ireland. Also Jacques Chirac was carrying out the nuclear testing in the south Pacific and France was very unpopular. But we had a good time, and of course Ireland won again!" n
* Celtic Heritage is out now.