The Star of the County Clare

“Usually when I finish with an album I don’t want to hear it anymore,” top reggae producer Denis Bovell says, as he thinks back on his production involvement with Sharon Shannon’s new album Out The Gap. “But this one, I play it in my car. I play it to everyone, even the most ardent, hardcore reggae fans. I go: ‘Whadda think about that?’ And they go: ‘Hey! Who’s doing that!?’”

Denis is sipping a pint of Guinness in the Abbey Glen Hotel in Clifden, as he waits with the rest of us for the arrival of Sharon Shannon on stage. He’s a happy man. “I think this is a new step forward in Irish folk music. The revolution has begun,” he continues. “I tried for some time before to interest someone in the marriage of Irish folk music and the reggae beat, because I felt that the two were somehow related. I mean, in Irish folk music there’s that skip that gives it great dancebility.”

The road to Clifden is a bumpy one, winding its way through land inhabited by stone, bog, furze, whins and quiet lakes. The Twelve Bens are to the right as you approach, hunched like giant’s toes.

“Only sheep could graze on it,” I overheard a man say on the bus journey there. “And there’s not much for them. It’s just beautiful,” another replied, allowing the word ‘beautiful’ to stretch out like the stone walls that trail endlessly about.

I was thinking about how far away Dublin and city life was when Sharon Shannon bounced onstage. No fanfare, no dimmed lights necessary. No, this was all about the music – and the craic that the music would bring. There she was, as unpretentious a performer as you are every likely to see. The words of welcome were brief and you could see that she felt a little awkward making conversation. She wanted to play her music and that she did, delivering a set full of joyous, exuberant energy. There were wide smiles on the stage whenever the music got into an intoxicating groove, and particularly when Donal Lunny got up and blasted away alongside Sharon.

Having watched so many rock gigs where bands pose at being pissed off and bored, and are so cool that they don’t even have to look at nor recognise the existence of the audience, this was refreshing indeed. Sharon and Donal were up there having a great time and they and the other members of the band were doing their level best to make sure that the audience would have a good time too. “People are playing music to enjoy themselves,” Donal Lunny would later say, “and that’s the way it should be. Music should be uplifting at all times. I mean, it should be like any other art form – like theatre or poetry – it should give a lift to your spirit.”

Certainly, Sharon Shannon’s music is joyous and full of a love for life. “Sharon does what she does with such feeling and cheerfulness,” Donal enthused, “that it’s natural she attracts a lot of listeners.” While her extraordinary outgoing nature undoubtedly contributed to making her debut the biggest selling Irish traditional album in history, the fact that Sharon Shannon is, as Denis Bovell stated ‘a classic player’ certainly helped too. “She knows that thing with her eyes closed,” Bovell says. “In her sleep.”

H H H H H H

The idea had been to do an interview with Sharon down in Clifden, but with an all-night session and heavy hangovers, and a large group of journalists over specially from England, it didn’t quite work out. So it was that we met in a quiet area of Dublin’s Harcourt Hotel the following week.

Sharon Shannon is from a farming family in Corofin, County Clare. “There was four of us in the family, plus my mother and father, and I come third,” she explains. “The oldest is a brother, Gary. Then there’s Majella, myself and Mary. And we were always encouraged from an early age to play music. My parents don’t play but they’re great set dancers and really they were a great encouragement always. My grandparents played.”

It was her oldest brother, Gary, who was the early driving force. “Gary went to tin whistle classes in Corofin,” she remembers. “There was lots of different ones. One of the ones that I went to was Tony Lenane. He was a great fiddle player and he taught me the tin whistle. But it was mainly Gary that taught us the tin whistle, and we were all playing tin whistles. And when he was about fourteen or fifteen he took up the concert flute. So, we all took up different instruments. Majella got a fiddle, I got an accordion and Mary got a banjo.

“Then there was this friend of ours in a neighbouring village called Toonagh,” she continues. “Frank Custy was his name; he was the school teacher there. He was a great music person. All the kids in the school played instruments. And he used to run ceilis every Friday night. And we used to go over there to the ceilis, and it was a brilliant night out. We were all only eleven/twelve/thirteen, and this was a great night out, dancing and playing music. It was like a little barndance or something. It just gave us a great love for music, I suppose, because it wasn’t drummed into us. We saw the funny side of it.”

All the ingredients were there for a family band, although that never really materialised. “We hardly ever played as a family, no,” she states. “We used to always be doing our own thing in the house. (laughs) We’d be fighting over certain rooms in the house to play. Sometimes we’d be all playing in the one room and we’d be all playing different tunes. We’re all very kind of strong-minded, I suppose. We all wanted to do our own thing.”

Sharon was determined to learn her instrument inside-out. “I was mad into playing the way I wanted to, even if it took me hours and hours,” she says. “Sometimes I’d be practising for five or six or seven hours. Because it was good craic. Trying to get something, as well, made great satisfaction. Succeeding.”

Were there any particular influences during this period? “I was playing the accordion, but I was always crazy about fiddle playing,” she responds, “and I was very influenced by a fiddle player called Tommy Peoples. He was the fiddle player with the Bothy Band. And I was really mad about the Bothy Band. That kind of music excited me. I had hardly ever heard accordion players at that stage; I was just trying to play the music that I loved in my head.”

Some will plague their parents until they get them a drum kit. Others will dream of their first Fender guitar. However, choosing the accordion, for Sharon, was something that, just happened. “When we were all playing the tin whistle, and Gary decided to take up the flute, we all kind of said: we’ll all get a flute. It was Gary’s idea – I suppose he had a thing in that back of his mind that we could have a little family band or whatever, but it never happened – for us all to take up different instruments. So, I just liked the sound of the accordion or the look of it.”

As luck would have it . . .

H H H H H H

Playing music for enjoyment is great but to be able to make a living out of the thing you love doing is something which thrills Sharon Shannon. However, it’s not as if she had some master plan from an early age that she would someday become a professional musician.

“It just happened by accident really,” she states. “I suppose most young people, kids anyway, don’t have a clue what they want to be. I never had a clue. At the same time – anything but school. I just hated school. Even probably the worst job in the country I probably would have been glad to do, rather than to be studying. I’d been doing odd gigs all the time when I was a teenager. And it just happened then, that I never had to do anything else. I got more and more gigs.”

When we’re young, most of us want to be wild and free. We want to live every day to its full, while our parents are left to worry about our future. It would probably be true to say that Sharon wasn’t the easiest to keep an eye on. “I spent an awful lot of time in Doolin in North Clare, playing gigs every night, but it wasn’t going down too well at home,” she admits.

Ultimately, she was faced with a choice: on one side her parents wanted her to become responsible, to settle down to her studies, to look towards her future and a job. On the other was the call of the music. A close friend, Eoin O’Neill, helped her to decide. “He just used to say to me that there’d be no problem,” she remembers. “He said, don’t take any of that pressure or hassle to go and study.”

She was living the only life she wanted to live. “I was making enough to survive,” she states, “to pay rent and eat and enough to have a good time. To be able to go out and have a good time. That’s all I wanted and it was perfect. And when I said that at home, it wasn’t good enough at all. Of course, because you don’t know how long it’s going to last. But the way I look at life is that you just take every day as it comes. Eventually my parents just gave up. Because it was an awful lot of hassle. Loads of sweat and tears.”

While her parents could not prevail on her to leave Doolin, something else just might have – horses. “I used to be mad into horse riding,” she states, her eyes lighting up. “I still am. My father had loads of horses, always had. We used to train them ourselves, do some show jumping and hunting and everything. All of us were really obsessed with that.

“For us, it was even more than the music. And we used to go off to gymkhanas every Saturday and Sunday. But around the age of sixteen . . . I used to ride a pony, and for the show jumping competitions you have to be under sixteen to ride a pony. After that you have to ride a big horse. And then at that stage I was starting to leave home, so it just changed. I just drifted away, bit by bit.”

Having finished her Leaving Cert, she left home permanently. Sharon settled in Doolin. There she would mix with musicians from all over the world, an experience which had a definite impact on how she would approach playing music in the future. “I ended up learning tunes from all those people,” she says. “I was there regularly from about the age of sixteen. As soon as I finished the Leaving Certificate I was gone. So, from then on it was just tunes from all over the world. If I heard a melody I liked, it didn’t matter to me whether it came from County Clare or whether it came from Sydney.”

Sharon is aware of those within traditional music who are very much into the purity of the form, and while she obviously respects their views, she is strong-willed and determined enough to experiment and to go her own way musically – wherever that may take her.

Purism – whether it be in music, literature or wherever – is often equated with elitism. However, as Donal Lunny points out: “There are arguments for and against having outside influences in the music. Because of its history and because of its geographical location, Ireland’s traditional culture survived, or a large chunk of it survived. Unlike, say, France or Britain or mainland European countries, where the tradition was constantly being diluted by influences coming in, and therefore is practically invisible. Ireland was lucky to have a culture which was undisturbed for many years. And it’s still alive and thriving.”

Accepting the necessity of keeping the centre solid, Donal believes however that, “now is a great time for experimentation and cross-fertilisation with traditional music.”

Sharon Shannon’s music is a veritable melting pot of world musics. From America, Portugal, Canada, Cape Breton, Scotland, Finland, she borrows and moulds tunes with her own particular style and arrangements. And from Jamaica too. Now, not many would think that reggae and trad have much in common. But Sharon Shannon did. In rehearsal one day her and the band just got into a reggae beat, and it felt good, so she followed her instincts, as usual, and went looking for the reggae, which she found in the form of Denis Bovell, famed for his work with Linton Kwesi Johnson, among others . . .

“The results were amazing, fantastic,” she says. “John Dunford and Denis Desmond arranged for us to go to London to meet Denis Bovell. We had about five days booked in a studio over there in Brixton.” They had only intended to do one track with him – ‘The Mighty Sparrow’ – but, “it went so well the first day with the first track that we got it done in a few hours. It just worked really well, so we ended up doing five tracks. And we hadn’t a clue what we were going to do. It just happened, there and then in the studio. It was amazing.”

H H H H H H

Reggae is one thing – Jamaica, after all, has strong historical links with Ireland – but for certain trad heads, rock ‘n’ roll, and particularly the dreaded drum kit is something that should be kept well away from traditional music. I remember once having a great conversation with a venerable traditional musician and his family. Everything was fine and friendly until I uttered two dirty words: The Pogues. Well, you would swear I had taken a can opener to their faces the way they curled. It made me wonder. The venerable musician found it hard to utter their name without wincing. The Pogues were very far from the pure drop, as far as the venerable musician was concerned.

Sharon Shannon appears on the cover of Out The Gap with that most essential piece of rock ‘n’ roll gear – the leather jacket – and while the album itself is far from punk, it has its feet placed firmly in 1994. “I don’t even find a big difference,” she says, comparing those who play rock ‘n’ roll and traditional music. “All the people who are my friends here in Dublin, they’re the same kind of people as my friends in Galway, and they all get on great. Everyone knows everyone else in the music scene, whether it be a rock ‘n’ roll musician or a traditional musician. They all respect each other as well. So, it’s not as if it’s a big change. They all play together. Like, if Richie Buckley comes into a traditional session, everyone is completely delighted, and everyone is completely thrilled that he’s there. And probably the other way around.”

Sharon Shannon, meanwhile, is a hugely successful female artist in what has been ‘traditionally’ pretty much a male preserve. As Donal Lunny put it: “I think it is a sign of the times that she is enjoying the success she is. I think it’s also a sign of the times, the session we had last night in Clifden – I think there were six women playing. And I was proud to be in there. It’s like, there were more women playing in that session than I think in any other session I’ve been in.”

However, Sharon doesn’t see herself as any sort of trail blazer, and while she does acknowledge that in the past, “the women never got out,” she realises that she herself has been lucky to arrive on the scene at a time when such prejudicial attitudes were well on the wane. She laughs when she hears about what Donal Lunny said about the session in Clifden. “It wasn’t a conscious thing that it was all women,” she says. “It was just a coincidence.”

Maybe so, but a positive coincidence all the same, like so much that has happened to Sharon Shannon. It’s been quite a roller coaster for her over the last couple of years. Two albums under her belt, touring like mad, playing for President Clinton at The White House, along with getting a commission with Donal Lunny to write the music for BBC’s big budget Autumn drama, Shannongate.

Writing original music for Shannongate has particularly excited her, although it has made her a bit nervous too. “Oh, it’s completely new for me, setting music to a film,” she says. “But I’m really enjoying it. God, all I did really was wrote a load of jigs and reels. Donal’s doing all the work really, ’cause I haven’t a clue. If Donal wasn’t there I’d be completely lost. It’s thanks to Donal it’s getting done. But I’m learning a fair bit anyway.”

I ask her if she had composed original stuff before. “Yeah, a few bits and pieces,” she replies. “I have loads of things but I never really wrote them down or recorded them, so they’re all lost really; I can’t remember any of them. Not ‘til I was asked to do this did I start trying to get them down. Sometimes I can’t go to sleep with tunes. Before I’d be just wishing they’d go away and let me go to sleep. But now I try to get up and write them down. You know, the tunes I had before, I just never had any confidence in them. I was too terrified to play them for anyone. But playing with Donal, he’s just really good encouragement. I’d love to get good at it. I’d love to write tunes that I’d really like, myself.”

While she is very confident about the future, she is not making any plans about directions she would like to take or musicians she would like to play with. She’s taking it all one day at a time, as is her nature. “I wouldn’t like to be looking ahead,” she explains. “Even when someone tells me that something’s going to happen, that I’m going to play with a certain person, I wouldn’t like to get too excited in case it wouldn’t happen. I always say: I’ll believe it when I see it.”

When she thinks back on what has been the highlight of her career so far, it is a simple thing: playing music. Her tour with The Waterboys she remembers fondly. “The best time we had was when we were travelling around Spain and Portugal and Italy,” she says. “We just played music non-stop in aeroplanes, in airports, trains, buses, everywhere; we just really had a great time.

H H H H H H

When the interview is finished, Sharon Shannon picks up the two empty coffee cups she has been drinking from and brings them up to the bar. It is a simple act of courtesy – not very rock ‘n’ roll – and is indicative of her attitude, as a person. She may be the talk of the town right now but that will never impress or affect her half as much as having the craic in a good session with friends. She has a philosophy of living today to its full and letting tomorrow look after itself.

“Well, I suppose that’s the way I look at life,” she explained as the interview was winding up. “I was happy to be barely surviving. Happy to be able to have a good time. And the same now. Things are great at the moment and have been for the last ten years or so.”

Things have been and are great for Sharon Shannon but there is little doubt that it took much determination to make them so. Lots and lots of practice and the confidence and courage to follow her own vision have made it possible for her to be where she is today. On a final note, I had asked her if there was a line of poetry or some phrase which she held close to her heart.

“I always loved that phrase . . .” she replied. “I don’t know if it has anything to do with me or not. Everyone knows it: If you love something, set it free. It’ll come back to you if it is yours, and it won’t if it never was yours. I don’t know if that has anything to do with me or my music, but it’s a great motto.”

•Sharon Shannon's new album Out the Gap is currently available on Solid Records.