STING IN THE TALE

Nine Wassies From Bainne. Nine Wassies from where, you might well ask? This much we know: bainne is Irish for milk. And what’s a ‘wassie?’ A wassie is Corkese for wasp. Now bearing all that in mind, I think we'd better let the inventor of this imaginative moniker, tell you all about it himself. Over to you Giordai.

“The name, it comes from Cork. You know the craic in Cork, like, it’s all word play and tryin’ to outdo each other and stuff. We were sitting in The Long Valley one night. You know this song, I think it’s called ‘Three Lovely Lassies From Bannion' or something: "There was three lovely lassies from Bannion." And someone said, I know yeah, and there was three lovely wassies from Bannion, as well. The thing is people were punning wassies with lassies. So I was thinkin’ about it afterwards; three lovely wassies from Bannion. And then after a while I was thinkin’, three lovely wassies from bainne.

"Fuckin hell! Wassies from bainne! You can get calcium from bainne, so why can’t you get wassies from bainne? And I was thinkin’; nine wassies from bainne. I’m fuckin’ round in me head and I’m on my own. And I’m just goin’ along thinkin’; jaysus, Nine Wassies From Bainne, be a mad name for a group.”

In fact, the name describes perfectly the type of music the Wassies make. It’s music for those who want to go lepping through the imagination, PhD rhythms and idiosyncracy lyrics cooking in a pot of Cork lore and street and lane lingo, with lashings of An Gaeilge thrown in for good measure. And what it all boils up to is a succulent and intoxicating meal made by three musicians who manage to stir up rhythms and melodies which are fresh and original. And you can dance to it.

Nine Wassies From Bainne are Giordai Ó’Laoghaire on guitar and vocals, Enda Doyle on bass and Peter O’Kennedy on drums. “The thing that excites me about the music we’re making is that there’s a sort of freedom in it,” Peter says. “That’s what I really get out of it. You never know what direction you might go. The next song that we come up with, nobody knows what it’s going to sound like. And also there’s this kind of freedom in the playing as well. Even within a performance you don’t know which way something is going to go.”

The Wassies like Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, John Zorn, The Ambitious Lovers, The Feelies, The Golden Paliminos, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis . . . they might even have been influenced by some of them.

They're going down well too. I saw them do a bloody great gig at the Tivoli recently, and though at first the audience were a little bemused, it wasn’t long before they were well into it. “People are very relieved to hear something that they haven’t heard before,” Peter reflects.

Giordai is a true original, a man with a wild and free imagination and a guitarist who came out of the womb playing runs. His command of his instrument is astonishing and his ability to coax the most unusual of sounds through it and his array of effects has the whiff of magic. But Giordai’s manic inventivenes has left many of his fellow musicians fiddling with their plecs and wondering what the fuck was going on at all at all. Bass players became bus conductors rather than play with them.

“There’s no jamming culture, which is very important for musicians to grow,” he says, thinking back on the barren times. “It’s very rare that I jam with anybody else. I've often felt very isolated. For years I was saying, here I am playing this stuff in my room and there’s nobody else to play with. And until I met Enda and Peter there really wasn’t.”

There’s a quirkiness about Cork bands, a brilliant freshness. As far as Giordai is concerned it’s all down to one man and one band: Finbar Donnelly and Five Go Down To The Sea. “Previous to Donnelly,” he says, “Cork was like Rory Gallagher city. Finbar Donnelly appeared and each generation owes it to him. Even the Sultans Of Ping. Everybody comes from Donnelly. He was brilliant. He was from Belfast originally. So he mixed both of them. He hasn’t been given the correct appreciation, so that’s your job.”

Nine Wassies brim with enthusiasm, dedication and a deep love of what they’re doing. Giordai wants to explore sean nós, singing Gaeilge, the Cork dialects, Captain Beefheart and a million other things. Peter and Enda are bubbling with ideas too. They don’t have an agenda, plan or a map. As Enda puts it, “We want to try and develop individually and develop the crossovers between each other as much as possible. And push boundaries away. Hopefully we'll break down a few of the boundaries that are there.

“You always have psychological boundaries when you are trying to create something. It would be lovely to break some of them down and get into areas that you didn’t think possible.”

Let them at it!