The pauline conversation

Some of you may not have heard of Pauline Scanlon, yet she has achieved what many other well-established artists only ever dream of. For a start, she has performed in front of a 60,000-strong crowd at the Glastonbury festival on more than one occasion. In fact, having worked as backing singer to Sharon Shannon for a number of years, she is quite the live veteran.

Having played regularly in the Droichead Beag in her native Dingle from the age of 13, her truly unique and charming vocal style was noticed at a live session in Galway some years later by Shannon, who eventually snapped her up as a member of her backing band.
“She called me when she was changing her band and asked if I wanted to do a gig, which turned into a couple of gigs, which turned into two years of touring,” Scanlon recalls. “It was so much fun, even her music has a bit of craic about it. She’s also a bit of a risk taker, which I really admire. The traditional scene can be kind of blinkered, and people are afraid of criticism within the community, but she’s unafraid and very strong.”
Scanlon is a delightful, charming, fresh-faced and highly engaging character – little wonder, then, that so many well-established artists agreed to appear on her debut album, Red Colour Sun, including Damien Dempsey, Sharon Shannon, John Reynolds, Justin Adams and Kieran Kiely to name but a few. Seeing as the art of collaboration is one that she has clearly mastered, is there anyone else she would like to work with?
“I’d love to get a good traditional band together, I’d have all of Lunasa in there, John Reynolds on drums, and Sinéad O’Connor on backing vocals – that would be the ideal fantasy football situation,” she laughs. “Actually, so would Alison Krauss, who I love, Liz Fraser and Ghostland. I’d also love to do something with Declan O’Rourke and John Spillane. I love the quality of his writing. In fact, I’d love to do an album called Pauline Scanlon Sings John Spillane.”
Scanlon maintains that, as a result of her upbringing in The Kingdom, Irish music is pretty much in her bones.
“I’m from a traditional background, there has always been singing in the family, I could talk before I could sing,” she explains. “Dingle is the kind of place where creativity is encouraged, even in the schools. It gives you a great sense of culture and a lot of my history is based there, so I guess it’s where I get my sense of ‘Irishness’. There’s an unpretentious ‘Irishness’ even in the landscape, kind of earthy and organic.”
As a native, she was pretty much at home on the Dingle set of Other Voices: Songs From A Room, in every sense of the word.
“I performed in front of all my friends and family, which was great,” she recalls. “I worked with Declan O’Rourke, who made it much less daunting an experience.”
In fact, while she may have cut her professional teeth within the traditional/folk community, her stint on Other Voices signals a crossover into the singer-songwriter foray, though she’s loathe to be labelled either which way.
“I guess I’m somewhere in the middle, though I’m not a hardcore traditional singer. I never wanted to do a purely traditional record as it wouldn’t have been a true reflection of my influences,” she maintains. “There tends to be a kind of ‘traditional tokenism’ with some singer-songwriters now anyway, so the line is already blurred. There are others that identify with the folky tradition, like Damien Dempsey, and he incorporates it into what he does truthfully.”
While Scanlon may be at the start of a meteoric rise, she remains refreshingly grounded and unusually wily for someone about to release a debut.
“To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I would like proper fame, or to have to do the media courting thing. I just want to make records and work with the people I want to work with.”

Pauline Scanlon’s Red Colour Sun album is out on Daisy Discs