The New Contender

22 and he's got the world at his feet. Garnering laurels and accolades from the establishment and mould-breakers alike, newly crowned Young Traditional Musician of the Year, Éamonn De Barra is far from nonchalant about such honours. Canny enough to recognise the risk that those who come to praise might just as easily bury him, he carries the mantle with pride as well as more than a tincture of reticence.

"Well, I'm just wary that people will think that what I'm doing now is traditional Irish music," he says, "but what I play is quite contemporary. And that's really not fair to the people who've been working hard to get across what traditional music is. I must make it clear to people that what I'm doing is not strictly traditional."

It's the lightning pace of change that De Barra considers so warily when trying to describe his music.

"The reason people wouldn't call it traditional is that it hasn't evolved over the last 50 years," he avers. "It's only evolved over the last few years. I suppose it's a spike off The Bothy Band, the sort of music that Lunny and Andy Irvine would have been playing. But I think it happened too quickly, and you can tell straight away where the influences have come from, because it happened so quickly. So a new name is going to have to evolve out of somewhere. The title I put on it for now is contemporary Irish music."

De Barra defies the old adage that youth is wasted on the young. His is a philosophy that might easily have been hewn from the experiences of an older, wiser musician.

"I decided to use three things," he explains, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a young whippersnapper to be pondering upon. "They are subtlety, sincerity and humility, and I just try all the time to remember that. By subtlety I mean that you don't wear a pink suit to a funeral. You have to go with the flow, so if you walk into a session that's nice and slow and pacey, you don't take over. Then, with sincerity, if you lie, you're going to be found out. You might get away with it for a while, but people are smart. Then if you start, it just snowballs, and you end up lying when you don't even mean to. I've seen so many people lying to others right in front of their faces. Then there's the humility: that everyone deserves a chance. You don't need necessarily to play an instrument to be the best musician in the room."

De Barra has been carving a niche all of his own for a while now. With a reputation as a player who's not afraid to push the outside of the envelope, he's been busy sifting traditional influences and making his own of them in a myriad of settings. As a member of Slide, with Aodán Lynch (concertina), Darragh Bracken and Mick Broderick on fiddle and bouzouki respectively, he's found a trio of soul mates who share his vision of what can be in the wily world of commercial music.

"It's a pleasure to work with the lads," he smiles, "and we really work well together. We just sit down and do our stuff, and it's for the music, not for the money."

A pragmatist at heart, De Barra has been able to marry the artistic with the realities of paying the rent, a skill all too often absent from the finest of musicians.

"I'm playing with Sessions From The Hearth with Benny O'Carroll," he adds, "and we like playing together, and Benny gets the gigs. But that's for the money, you know. It's a different thing. We've toured Germany and Italy and the odd gig in Denmark and Norway."

Ultimately, Éamonn De Barra aims to keep his eye firmly set on the prize. And that's not the dosh (a handsome £5k), or even the prospect of a recording contract (to be discussed with Dónal Cassidy of Celtic Note). The horizon stretches well past the confines of a single competition, he insists.

"I don't want to be a has-been by the time I'm 23!", he declares. "Of course I'm going to use this year to develop, but I'm not going to abuse it, and I don't want to rush anything either. It's happened to so many people. I saw that money was running the game, and saw what it does to people. But it's as important to play the £20 gigs, which I would always do. You have to be prepared to do those too. I don't want it all to boil down to simply 'who you are', who you've established yourself as being — which means that you could get up there and play shite, and people would say it's good."

Éamonn De Barra plays in The Chancery Inn on Wednesdays with Oisín McAuley and Shane MacGowan.