Whistle While You Work

YOU VE TROUNCED the opposition at all the Fleadhs from Kilcummin to Kilburn; you ve traded licks with everyone from The Pogues to Eddi Reader, Annie Lennox and Brian Kennedy; you ve fanned the flame with all manner of African and Caribbean musician on the Afro-Celt Sound System: hell, you ve even stomped the length and breadth of the Zooropa stage, whetting the well-nigh insatiable appetites of the U2 fanclub. So what do you do next?
If you re James McNally, you make a whistle album filled with movie scores and Shane MacGowan gems with just a tincture of your own stuff thrown in to get the gastric juices flowing. Hmmm. Not quite your common or garden How To Get Ahead In The Music Business 101 but then again, James McNally isn t your common or garden neophyte with a weakness for the limelight.
Funny thing is, that for a man who s forged a fair share of his identity in the company of the less-than-contemplative Pogues (post-Shane, mind you), this is an album that barely speaks of this past incarnation.
Mmmm, McNally offers, well-used to (and probably sick and tired of) this assumption that Pogues membership equals mania, both personally and musically. Because of my association with the Pogues, everybody puts me in a bracket: I m wild, I m drunk . . . but a lot of their great music was very soulful. Shane wrote some great ballads, but they still have this association. The sound of the whistle lends itself so much to this calm kind of sound, and I think it works very well. I love space and distance, and when you have a life of playing in front of thousands of people, touring the world, staying in hotel rooms in lonely cities, then the live performances are the storm and the recording is the calm.
Almost entirely instrumental apart from an inspired sean nss coupling, Saviour , with Iarla S Lionaird Everybreath is a brave venture, considering the way in which sundry chancers out there have flung instrumental albums at the market with little or no quality control considerations. McNally is no Phil Coulter of the low whistle, though, and lyrical considerations are amply dealt with by way of some mighty fine set pieces that tell their own stories, without the constraints of grammar.
I saw this themes album as an introduction to me , he offers. Through instrumental music, you don t really have to have lyrics to know what the person is saying, or what comes from his heart. And with the whistle, it feels like that s my voice: I m breathing and singing through it.
STRIKING POSE
A multi-instrumentalist with a penchant for weaving, the design on McNally s tapestry just depends on the folk he s keeping company with at any particular time. Once it was Marxman and Siniad O Connor. Lately, it s been Simon Emerson and Co. from The Afro Celt Sound System. And these days he can be seen paddling his own canoe alongside the likes of slide and electric guitarist, Tom McManomon and gifted Spanish guitarist, Jamie Clarke.
Cutting a striking pose in his black leather and shades, McNally is far from the quintessential traditional musician with a penchant for Kinsale smocks and Birkenstocks. There are no prizes then for guessing as to the contents of his record collection. It s certainly not all Tulla Ciilm Band bootlegs.
When my friends were heavily into the glam rock of the 70s, I was listening to the Bothy Band, to Joe Burke, De Danann, Planxty, he admits. I used to vamp on all the Ciilm bands! The only one outside of that, really, was Elvis Presley so I must have been a kind of Elvis Tradley, I suppose . . .!
Listening to the original pieces on Everybreath, it s not hard to hear the genes seeping through the music. Saviour , the final track, is a faultlessly honed hymn to life, while the zygote Bandia marries The Homes Of Donegal and The Island perfectly, and hints at a larger, longer life of its own, probably onstage. McNally s musicianship is beyond question. As for Mo Ghra , it s tempting to suggest that his genetic lineage owes a few chromosomes to Michelangelo, such is its renaissance-like ability to juggle countless sounds and images at one and the same time.
But what does Everybreath evoke for its creator? James McNally sees things in cinemascope. Not confining himself to a 20 screen, he s intent on taking the music to the widescreen where all its colours can be projected.
Driving through the desert, he offers, a sort of Twin Peaks void, if you like. There are a lot of magic moments in there for me. Black Is The Colour is probably my favourite, but the whole album allows you to drift off to some other place. That s exactly what I wanted to achieve. n