THE DONAL LUNNY STORY

b>Going back to the very start, can you describe the musical mood at the time?
You mean the 60s and the ballad boom and stuff? It was really magic when The Clancy Brothers arrived. They were brand new, really. The songs they sang, Will You Go Lassie, Go , and the big traditional songs, were immediately taken up and sung by everybody for the next ten years and beat en into the ground to the point where there are some songs you never want to hear again. But at the time they were irresistible. And the groups modelled on the Clancys in the country very soon afterwards, and that had a huge knock-on effect that lasted for years.
Did you have a sense at the time of a relative lack of sophistication musically
I had mixed feelings about it initially. Of course it was very simple, very basic chords. But sometimes they were charm What were you trying to bring to it that would distinguish Emmet Spiceland
I suppose some kind of harmonic sophistication. The fact is that Mick, Brian and myself had a good vocal blend which was a happy accident and we realised it was possible to do a lot of turns and modulations in the harmony that normally you wouldn t hear. I think we went well over the edge in terms of traditional music, bringing more urbane sounds into the equation.
What did you think of The Ludlows?
I thought they were very good. Yeah, they were quite typical of the time. Was that Paddy Roche and Anne Byrne?
There were three of them.
Yeah, there was Don t go into, it ll just get embarrassing outrage couldn t remember me Yeah, they were right at the heart of the ballad boom in Dublin here. That was around the time I had become engaged in the whole thing. The Dubliners were having an influence on things at that time as well a strong influence on a lot of Dublin groups.
Yeah, but they lead off onto another trail entirely, didn t they? The Dublin City Ramblers
Ending in The Pogues.
Maybe coming around three-quarter circle to The Pogues or something.
I think The Dub liners always had an edge. There was a very informed, almost a literary sort of background to what they did, which was really good. It raised the tone of what they were doing enormously bringing people into the era of James Joyce and Oliver St.John Gogarty and all that songs from that era, you know. They didn t just pluck the songs out, they brought the whole time with them as well. It was a good thing.
Are there any lost geniuses from that time?
I m sure there are Peter Green (laughs). You have to watch your step, you know. I m sure there are. Actually, I can t think of anybody right now, but there are people you wonder about where they are now, and what they re doing.
Sweeney s Men would have been regarded as important.
Correct. One of the people that sprang to mind there when you said lost geniuses, although it s not entirely true at all, but I ve always felt that Johnny Moynihan, if he chose to direct his music outwards and if he just engaged in the whole business of being an entertainer more, that he has amazing qualities. Part of it is that he s not concerned about making any concessions in that area, he s more concerned about the thing itself. So he s an artist. A lot of artists don t reach the general public because they don t make concessions.
How aware would you have been at that time of the O Riada connection?
Well, I was very aware of O Riada when he was happening. I only met the man once and I loved what he was doing. And he obviously had a huge influence. He probably influenced me. I would have resisted direct influences, I always did. But the process of osmosis happens.
But there were two very different strands if you think of the ballad thing on the one side and what O Riada was doing, which was almost courtly.
That s right.
They met in funny ways, but I suspect that people like, say, Luke Kelly would have had a much bigger appreciation of O Riada than O Riada would have had of most of what was going on in the ballad area.
I would agree completely. O Riada was on a mission as well. He was in the classical world at the same time and I think that probably the most important thing he did was he brought musical credibility to traditional music for people outside the genre who would have dismissed it as being just peasant music. I think now people have become more open and can appreciate the beauty of a local accent in the music and the lack of maybe harmonic sophistication but at the same time beautiful heart and soul and maybe a great groove. But I think O Riada did open that up for a lot of people. It was a separate thing to the main scene.
He was operating on a slightly different plane.
There was a lot of good old hearty ballad singing going on in pubs and round the country just cheerful, you know rebel songs and all that stuff. There wasn t much instrumental music, it was mostly guitars with the odd banjo, and on from there, whistles and accordions and whatever. But what Sean O Riada did was a leap in sophistication and he covered a big stretch in the time he had Ceoltsirm Chualann together. His celebrated statement was that he thought he had brought as far as he could bring it without repeating himself and so he bailed which is quite amazing.
So where would you stand on this issue of The Chieftains and the way t hey were seen as taking up the baton from O Riada?
I would say that O Riada established the form and he had a very idealistic attitude towards it and so there was a lot more that could be done but it was all within the parameters tht he defined. He was conscious of the modality of Irish music and what could be given to it or what could be drawn from it before he actually changed the taste of it by the addition of other flavours. The Chieftains have mostly operated within the same parameters but I wouldn t say that it was a negative thing at all that they kept going. The Chieftains have had beautiful moments, and people around the world love it.
But isn t there a kind of resentment of The Chieftains in local traditional circles?
(laughs) Er now don t be putting words in me mouth. I wouldn t say it s a resentment as such, and I wouldn t say there d be a very hard edge to it. You could get into the internecine warfare that has always existed in traditional music. But it s not worth going into, you know. Traditional music is notorious for all the back-stabbing that goes on contracts being taken out on people because they play the second part of the tune, you know, with three different notes.
I ve heard it said that The Chieftains make big house music?
Oh yeah. I don t think that s an issue. The grand house and the grand surroundings, not really. I suppose the biggest part of that would be the Gareth Browne connection.
It s got too with the tone of the music too. Again, it s got that courtly thing.
Yeah, but when you think about it, Carolan s music was a lot more popular then than it is now. There was a lot of that music being played at the time and maybe The Chieftains had the highest profile, you know playing the Planxty Drury s and Carolan s Concerto , that kind of thing. So I don t think that there was a rift there as such. That was seen as a part of the Irish tradition because the harpers were bards who travelled round from house to house. And pipers too. The harpers were completely disenfranchised when the ports were destroyed in the 16th century. The harpers had nowhere to go and a huge tradition of harp playing vanished. That was a real tragedy, I think. They moved from there into the great houses and became musicians that would stay the week, and be put up. There was a tradition of that as well, so that was all in people s consciousness.
If you were to identify the great contribution of The Chieftains in terms of the music, what would that be?
I would say their music has always had a great dignity. I mean that in a positive way. I think that s been important as well. The Chieftains have always consisted of tremendous virtuosos, some of the best players in the country at all times. Whereas you get a certain amount of cancellation when there s an ensemble, still the individual voices shine through. It s funny because The Chieftains have been extant for so long, one tends to become inured to it in a way like taking for granted the brilliant piping of Paddy Moloney for one, and the other great players in there. I m not saying it s ignored or anything like that. It s just something you start to take for granted. The way I used to take Elvis Presley for granted. Here he is again. It can actually blank part of your critical faculties, you know. It becomes a fixture.
Going back to the ballads, that was boozy music. Are there any particular memories associated with that time which have to do with the drink rather than the music?
You wouldn t be talking about the early fleadhs now, would you? Well, yeah, my drinking capabilities were very limited at the time. Two pints of cider and that would be me no longer able to play the guitar. So, it was part and parcel of the same thing. In fact, it got worse as it went on. I missed some of the earliest fleadhs which were apparently magnificent occasions, musically. But I got to some of them and whereas there was a lot of abandon, if you like, there was a lot of great music happening and there weren t so many musical messers around. But it did get to that when the big All-Ireland fleadhs grew monstrous, you know, when something like 60,000 people would descend on somewhere like Clones and there would be no toilet paper in the town after about eight hours, run out of milk, no drink . . .
The question is, did they have planning permission?
Right. Now that s a whole other ball game. You d get the lads who d buy either a guitar or bodhran on the way. Setting off, that d be the kit. And maybe a straw hat. There d be mayhem. That s what got bodhrans a bad name. At the sessions there d be groans of dismay. Somebody would arrive and start beating away in the corner and destroy the crack. And along with that was the drink thing, which really did peak in a most spectacular fashion. I remember a fleadh in Thurles. I think the publicans by some kind of bush telegraph decided to lock their doors at 9 o clock in the evening and the outrage of all the revellers on the street, of which there were several thousand, was demonstrated by smashing the glasses on the street. So there were 20,000 broken glasses on the main street of Thurles. I remember Brian Bolger, who used to be in Emmet Spiceland, modified a song, a sort of an epic Scottish ballad called The Gresford Disaster , about a mining disaster, to The Great Thurles Disaster, about how many glasses were broken in the square and all that. It was really
Moving! So Planxty was a big breakthrough.
It seems so. It was a great stoke of luck that we met up. Andy and myself had been playing down in Slattery s and stuff. And when Planxty was distilled from the Prosperous session it was just a very good choice. It worked out well. Liam had his contribution, which was huge in terms of traditional music and what that brought to what we were doing. And Andy and myself had sort of evolved a way of playing which was very nicely enhanced with what Christy added on guitar. A lot of the time it worked out really well.
It was Andy who gave you your first bazouki?
We were in his flat and there were about 40 instruments in his room. He always had Bulgarian pipes and pan pipes and tin whistles and all that kind of stuff knocking round. And one of the things was a bazouki. I was just dawdling and I picked it up and really liked the sound of it and I must have been playing it for half an hour or something like that and Andy said take it home with you because I m not playing it, I m not that fond of the slack strings, or whatever. Andy has played bazouki a lot since then, but at that time he was playing mandolin and mandola and so it was different. But I was just taken with it completely from the time I started playing it.
What was it that impressed you so much?
I loved what the bazouki did to tunes. It really clarified an awful lot of what was going on. Because guitar chords just put in straight, like standard chords if you like, on guitar, often were much too thick and strongly coloured when you put them into a traditional tune. They really masked a lot of their character. So, the bazouki in a nice way was more transparent and let it through. And a lot of drones going on in the music as well, it was possible to express that on the bazouki. So I did realise its value without realising what was going on, I suppose.
Obviously in Planxty there were four strong personalities so it must have been difficult to hold it together. It s like a marriage, except there s three different people to live with, isn t it?
Well, that s true. And I do think at times I was a kind of mediator. I was a conduit for people, as well, in terms of relating people to what was going on and to what other people were doing. You re right. It was a very unlikely collection of people.
Did violence ever break out?
(laughs) Were blows exchanged? A bit of hair-pulling I suppose in the back of the van. Our hair was pretty long at the time. But not really. Although I m sure we got on each other s nerves from time to time.
And Nicky Ryan was doing the sound at the time. There s another strong personality.
Correct. Could we have more on the monitors, Nicky? No! In fact they re off! Nicky used to get a superb sound for us. But he was very grudging in the amount of monitors he d give us because they colour the sound of the PA. You d get a bit of the monitors coming back into the mics and that. He was very alert for any of that very purist about sounds. That was another fortuitous event, Nicky.
Nicky getting into sound was a fortuitous event in itself.
Yes, he worked in a school for the deaf where they had all kinds of exotic speakers. So it got Nicky into all of that and straightaway that was the start of it. He was at a very rarefied level when he met us in terms of his consciousness of sound.
In terms of what Planxty achieved musically, is there a high watermark you can identify?
We got off to a great start. We did a tour with Donovan. I can t remember how much we d played before that, if at all. But the response was so uplifting it was brilliant. People were surprised, I think, by Planxty and uplifted. So there was a very positive response right across the board, including from people who listened to rock music or whatever. There d be older people at gigs, and younger people at gigs a really wide range.
There was a student thing with Planxty too.
That s right. So it was a joy to play to people, except when the hurdy-gurdy got damp and Liam s pipes got hot (laughs) and Liam d end up playing the tin whistle for the whole night . . .
You did a lot of gigs.
In that regard, the great tour we did when we got back together in 80 was memorable altogether. I forget how many gigs we did it was something like 48 gigs or it could have been 63 gigs in a slightly less number of days. We did a couple on the one day at times. That was a gigantic undertaking. We did five gigs in France, then 11 gigs in Germany, three gigs in Austria. It went on for ages. We started out in the Labatt s Apollo when it was the Hammersmith Odeon, I think. Or else it was that place in Kilburn, playing to 3,500 people.
Who was in that line-up? Was it Bill Whelan at that stage?
I don t think it was, no. It could have been Noel and Tony (Noel Hill and Tony Linnane) or it could have been Matt Molloy. Who was playing football outside the van at the Customs while Lofty Flynn went in and negotiated with them? We had to leave deposits on borders and all that kind of stuff. It was ridiculous. We had no carnet, you know. Hours of football (laughs).
Wasn t that characteristic of the kind of things that used to happen?
Absolutely. There was a ball in the van for that purpose.
But how come people always went without their carnets?
I think people just resisted the bureaucracy of it. Carnets! You had to describe everything with serial numbers and put a value on everything. It seemed like an awful hassle. It took a while to kick in. It meant all kinds of technicalities. It added days onto going somewhere. You had to go to a Customs office, you had to get something stamped . . . I think it meant mandatory inspection as well at various borders. So if you didn t have the carnet and you just blagged your way through it was a lot easier.
Would it be fair to say that Planxty, despite the strong personalities and rather strange touring organisation, were far more together than The Bothy Band?
Niall, I don t know. I mean, rumours and legend (laughs). At times that could be said, yeah. I think The Bothy Band was a wilder animal as an entity in many ways.
Musically as well, wasn t it?
There s no doubt about it. There was a collective personality which had more edge than Planxty and I suppose it manifested itself in many different ways. The whole personality of the band on the road was fairly tough.
But people were drinking like mad, weren t they? There was a lot of craziness?
There was, yeah. Yes, he said monosyllabically. Do you want me to go into that? We certainly knew how to enjoy ourselves, put it that way. We went to Brittany quite a lot. In Brittany there were lethal combinations of drinks readily available half a beer followed by a pastis a Ricard, Pernod or whatever. If you had eight or nine pairs of those you d need assistance finding the door. It was kind of hard to judge with a few glasses of wine thrown in. We went to Brittany quite a lot. We had a brilliant time there, actually.
With the result that The Bothy Band adventure didn t succeed as well as it might have. It didn t sustain as well as it could have.
Probably. I would say that it took its toll in terms of draining stamina. I felt we were exhausted when we stopped and we decided to call it a day and that would have been part of it. The wildness that the band had, manifested itself in the gigs. I think if we d been a more sober bunch, and been a lot more logical about what we were doing, the music might not have had the edge it had. So you wouldn t know.
Would you not think now, looking back on it, that people don t play as well as they should? They don t do themselves justice a lot of the time?
You mean in that kind of atmosphere or lifestyle? Sometimes it can affect it adversely. But not that often. You d be surprised. It s rare enough that someone would be debilitated by a hangover sufficiently for it to show in the music.
On the other hand if people booze before they go on stage you re into another scenario, aren t you?
That s true. We sailed fairly close to the wind from time to time. But there weren t any great disasters.
Only a few minor ones.
What s the word, tenterhooks? Will we make it or not (laughs) And generally we made it.
Did you always make it to the gigs? There was the odd gig you didn t make it to.
I don t know if there were. I think there were a couple of van breakdowns.
Blame it on the van.
Yeah, and getting a cab to the nearest town and camping there for the night. It did happen once or twice. We might have missed boats from time to time. There were a few of those.
Don t do any gigs on islands
I can remember the entire Bothy Band sitting at the wrong gate at Dublin airport, during a strike as well. We were booked onto a charter plane going to Amsterdam and it was going via London. So we went to the gate marked London rather than Amsterdam and sat there for a good half-hour after the plane had left before we realised that we had missed it. But we got another plane and got there on time. But things like that did happen. But just in terms of the band realising its potential, I think management, or lack of it, had a lot to do with that as well. That was probably the biggest factor. I would say that if we had been sensibly managed, if someone had had a decent run at it from early on, that the band would have gone on further. For one, we were fed up being broke. That was an aspect of the whole thing as well, you know.
Is it true that in terms of the decadence and depravity that traditional bands put rock and roll bands completely in the shade?
Depravity? (laughs)
People from the outside wouldn t understand that there were more groupies into folk bands and traditional bands?
Yeah, well one didn t lack, I think . . . eh
For occasional companionship
Well, I would just say eventful proceedings on all levels. Yeah, it was a really vibrant scene. There was a lot of attitude in the music and people got fired up. It was a scene that people really enjoyed and revelled in. It was good from that point of view. There was nothing staid about it.
I think there is this assumption that the rock n roll guys have all the good times, whereas in fact they very frequently merely dream about it.
That s true. Yeah, it s all just so much waffle. I would say though that the traditional scene maybe wasn t as connected as the rock scene. Drugs wouldn t have had the same profile as they would in the rock scene. Not that they weren t around anyway, but not to the same extent definitely.
As things progressed you were increasingly taking the role of musical leader and as the kind of orchestrator.
To some extent, yes. There was always a kind of democracy in the arrangements. And in the Bothy Band, Trmona and Micheal would have ideas which would become the backbone sometimes of what we were doing, and it would be a matter of working around that. I suppose I got into the habit of, say, doing counter-melodies for Tommy, Paddy and Matt or Kevin, when Kevin arrived. Because I d bang it out fairly quickly. It was like the problem was despatched. So by default, in a way, I moved towards that end of things.
You started taking more of an interest in rhythm?
I was completely taken by the possibilities of the groove of the tunes and the power, just rhythmic energy. I learned a lot more about it in the Hearts, I d say. You know, stuff that I hadn t encountered before like drum kit, bass, etc. That opened up another area. Yeah, it was like we were competing with popular music at the time, competing with rock music, discos etc.
What was your view of the earlier folk/rock groups, say Fairport Convention on one side and Horslips in Ireland?
At the time I think I had a much more academic attitude than I have now and I found it hard to accept without a doubt. Generally the things that upset me were bass and drums and how they were applied. I realised on the one hand that here was an enormous source of energy and on the other that an area was there to be expanded and filled in the music. And yet I had this awful resistance to just a conventional rock beat being stuck in behind a reel or a jig. I felt it really destroyed the tune s intelligence and at the time I felt that it was too much of a, well, pastiche isn t a strong enough word.
Were there any of those bands that you felt did work that got it right or close to right?
In hindsight, yeah. I think I was prejudiced at the time. I think some things did work. And I can t actually be specific. But hearing some old Horslips tracks, I don t find nearly as off-putting or upsetting as I did then, definitely. I think my attitude has broadened as well. Fairport and English bands developed on a separate track. Horslips had their own thing.
Alan Stivell made a big impact at a certain stage. What did you make of his contribution?
Well, it was: here s Celtic music. It was the Celtic thing. Maybe that was the first time it had manifested itself. And I think Alan Stivell has a sense of poetry and theatre in his presentation, and a sense of . . . grandeur?
There s a sort of scale to it
That s right, he had a sense of scale. And that s what people loved because it was a romantic area and he tapped into it. The live album he made in Dublin was a great peak for him. There was such a vibrant scene happening in Brittany at the time it s still there, you know.
A theme which runs through the development is the increasing awareness of improvisation and moving away from the fundamentals of the tune.
Right.
Are there particularly important figures or players in relation to that?
I think it was just a gradual process and, well, a lot of people were doing it in different ways. De Dannan have always had a charming style. A lot of that comes from Alec Finn and his way of playing the bazouki, which a lot of the time is more elegant than mine (laughs). So there was something happening there. Bands like Clannad also, at the time, were widening the music considerably to varying degrees of success depending on how the music was embellished or treated. Paul Brady did some great things during the time he was in the tradition before Hard Station say, and he never lost it either. He just chose to make a very complete break. I think he felt he had to do that to establish himself in another idiom. But I think he s always had enormous talent in the area of traditional music and I just love hearing him playing, or accompanying him.
What did you think when you heard Hard Station?
I liked it. I can remember listening to it from the production angle as well at the time. I thought it was very good. I didn t think oh Paul s taken another road . It wasn t that I felt he d . . .
Betrayed the cause?
Yeah (laughs). No, not at all. I just felt he d got so many things to say, it was a good thing. And from then to now. And he would have done the same thing as well, opened the music in a really nice way, a really appropriate way. And also given it energy and groove.
What is it that makes a great singer?
Is it how much truth a singer imparts to the words that are being sung, how credible it is on an emotional level? Is that a great singer? I would think so. There are different kinds of singers.
You ve worked with a lot of different people at this point and you ve undoubtedly had times you ve been working with people who are right up there and yet who don t have a great range. Let s take Christy as an example as someone who has a very limited singing range but there s a calibre to what he does.
Yes, I think it s got to do with delivery and conviction and with the singer being able to enter his or her own zone. Once a song starts, or a piece of music starts, it should create an atmosphere or some kind of momentary world and it s about being able to get inside that and bringing it to life. And I think Christy always had the conviction and the intensity in his singing, even when he was being very gentle, that just drew people straight in. So a singer will draw the listeners into the same area if it has enough truth and beauty.
Again, is there a vocal performance that you remember as one that broke your heart in the studio, or one that you recognised as a particularly special moment or whatever?
I ve had moments, yeah. A lot of what you describe. Immediately, I have memories of Dolores Keane singing and how immediate her talent, her gift, is. I always thought of her as one of the great voices. I think it doesn t require any effort on her part. It happens. It s a natural beauty in itself. Andy Irvine is someone whose singing I ve always loved he always, I think, took you to the place he was in, listening to him.
That s in a kind of storytelling way.
Creating a world. What songs . . . Andy singing a song like Bonnywood Hall or The West Coast Of Clare or a song like The Jolly Beggar , which are very quaint in ways, you know, of another era, but I think are tapped into beautifully by Andy and how he treated them.
What s your reaction to the likes of Ciline Dion, Michael Bolton the voices?
Yeah, rare voices. And this is a place where hype can really obscure your perception and your apprehension of that talent. Ciline Dion I haven t listened to her much and the genre doesn t attract me but a couple of weeks ago I saw a video for the song on the Titanic and her vocal performance is stunning, utterly remarkable. Again that is about a physical beauty and a gracefulness. It all becomes a bit synthetic after a while or it doesn t cut the mustard in terms of maybe you don t really want to get into it because it s all too graceful and too superb. But there s no doubt she s a rare singer.
But
No, no. No buts. I m just thinking about great voices seeing as you ve thrown the door that wide. Dylan has a great voice (laughs). It sounds like he s singing through the letter box sometimes.
But isn t there this thing of reading a song every nuance of a song can be shaded differently. But if you take rock and roll bands, they don t read a song at all, virtually. It s in danger of becoming a lost art, but it s there in traditional and folk music.
Well, you could equate rock music to the automobile. So everything has big fins and four wheels. In a lot of rock music it would actually be inappropriate to turn down the motor for, say, emotional reasons in the song. Because I think it would be compromised somehow. I think you d break the mould in certain situations. And that s when it s all going full-on and on top of that there s the song and even though the music is relentless or ungiving it can provide a backdrop over which something emotional can happen. If you think of The Band and where they were at, a lot of what they played was rock of a sort but with very different areas opened up. And they did some superb interpretations of songs and versions of songs, some of which were definitive.
OK. Moving Hearts. It was a hydra-headed beast.
You could say that.
But actually in terms of Irish music probably the single most important ensemble, possibly ever.
Maybe, yeah. We maybe made a bigger jump than things before that, because of the bass/drums/percussion aspect of it as much as anything else, I think.
How much of that had you got in your head?
Only some of it, really. But there were elements I wanted to exclude and they were, I suppose, the overt rock formulaic beats, you know, snare always on the backbeat, and the kick always in the place you re expecting it. But I found it really difficult to have a lot of influence on what the drums and bass were doing in the beginning, because I didn t understand it simple as that. I d never analysed it. I d always taken it for granted and so when Declan Synott appeared he was the first to join Christy and myself he was right in there, he knew how to put it together. He knew what effect certain things would have and for me it was just wow, I d never thought of that. So I was running to keep up for a long time. But it was brilliant because it made me engage with that whole area.
And obviously improvisation became much more important in that context.
Yeah, that s right. Maybe for the first time. Davy Spillane had a great moment in studio with Van Morrison. The band was doing a couple of tracks for that album called Sense Of Wonder, including the title track. And Van stormed into the studio in his inimitable fashion and we were plunged into the first song in a matter of minutes and a matter of a few more minutes after that we were taping it. Up to that point I don t think Davy had improvised, ever. And there was no time to kind of give him even stepping stones. It was like, start on the G (laughs) just start on that note and see how it goes. And he did brilliantly. It was really like a baby gull being pushed off the edge of the cliff. And Davy flew, not too sure of where he was going. But still, he got to the far side and it worked. It was a liberation for him. And it went on from there. Keith being in the Hearts and Declan taking solos that was exhilarating.