THE BODY ON THE LINE
A periodic book on Traditional Irish Music and the railroad of imagination.
Chapter One
It was dark as I headed for the train station. I left the office an hour later than usual, having spent an enjoyable afternoon with Afterhours' lead singer Alan Burke, (he is now very happily solo, Afterhours having become an after thought). I met him in the elegant splendour of the Davenport Hotel, a huge neo-classical wedding cake that commands the approach road to the North-west corner of Merrion square. The surroundings may seem grand for what some may consider lowly traditional music, perhaps you are thinking, is the editor of Irish Music magazine getting ideas above his station? I will defend myself with the excuse of convenience and comfort. The Davenport scores highly on both counts, and is a great place for my style of interviewing.
The meeting had gone very well, we clicked, Alan is an affable and likeable fellow. For me, interviews should be open-ended conversations and for that the first requirement is a comfortable setting. I believe this interview method leads to a greater depth in the final material. As a technique, there are a few draw backs, it takes time, it assumes a degree of rapport with the person being interviewed, and, it leaves a lot of material on the cutting room floor. Not everything discarded is necessarily dross. Writing in any capacity is, as Dr. Johnson said, done for the money. In the world of magazines this means short condensed articles, where only the strongest flavours bubble to the surface. Here is the reason for this book. Take some of those cuttings, connect the patches of randomness, and explore them afresh. But first, let's get back to my train journey.
I caught the 6:30 Tralee train from Dublin's Heuston station. My eventual destination was Thurles, County Tipperary. Unlike the song, I never consider this a long way. On a good trip the train journey is about 70 minutes. Enough time to prepare for a busy day on the outward leg, and plenty of time to catch up with reading, relax and drink tea as I head home. The journey becomes more of a time than a distance, and this is a metaphor to which I will return later in this chapter.
The train stopped unexpectedly somewhere beyond Clondalkin ( an ancient village which is now part of the urban sprawl of South-west Dublin). I could not say where exactly, once obvious locations were now mere lights on a blackened background. Time was the only clue to where we might be. As the train did not move, both time and space became chaotic. The usual relativity between the two, which normally helps us to anchor ourselves, began to dissolve. I became vulnerable to the ticking of my imaginative clock.
A short message came over the loudspeaker.
"We regret to inform passengers the train is indefinately delayed, due to a body on the line".
The engine of imagination picked up steam and time became literally inconsequential. It then struck me how we construct our world from words. Places and events taking on the shadows and hues of the language used to describe and encircle them. Remove time from a train journey and only internal connections remain, there is no reference to the next or last station, only to what is happening in the carriages. As we waited for another announcement only the simplest of external world's was conceivable. Parallel bars, running forward for one hundred and fifty miles to a place we call the Kingdom. I began to imagine the tracks; metal rails, concrete sleepers, high tangled banks with frosted brambles, litter, perhaps blood. Blood. That word kept coming back to me, "body", the guard hadn't said "object" or "obstruction" but "body". This meant "dead body","damaged body" "broken body". More layers of tragic and horrific possibilities.
Accident, misadventure, suicide, murder, natural causes, act of god. Each little phrase itself a puzzle from which the imagination can build up further complexities. Then back again to the word, "body". More questions; is it complete, is it mutilated, is it recognisable, was it a direct hit, a glancing blow, did death come instantly, was there an exquisite agony? Who was the body? Did it have a label? Carpenter, plumber, vagrant, husband, wife, youth, addict, hero, victim? Each word in turn framing a set of possibilities, a definite coffin of consequences. Sure the newspapers would report the death, something would appear on the Nine O'Clock News, information would be forthcoming, but I would never know that person, who was now merely a body. I would have to imagineer their personality, circumstances, relationships, triumphs and failures. Even if that body was once a sister or brother, wife or husband, we would only be able ever to imagine them. Just as we all imagineer our own lives. In so doing we are all infinitely complex, fractal, shifting, incoherent and ultimately unknowable, even to ourselves.
So what do I make of my chosen profession? Talking to musicians for a living, making jigs-saws from hand me down anecdotes. Teasing out strands of information and patches of meaning from their lives. Presenting my version of their stories to a public who too, will never know the body they put on the line? Only an essence, which is perhaps more part of the reader than the teller of the story. What of the stories that musicians tell? Do they form patterns, can I bring out more of the essence of a person by locating a good story, or am I looking for the same tale time and again? How many variations on the two standard stories are there?
Musician's tales often orbit around either a Me or Us star. Sometimes switching between the two as circumstances and opportunities allow. If the music is a personal statement then the Me legends predominate. For others traditional music is acollective and shared journey, a thing we label "culture". Is there tension between the individual and the collective, is the group effort restrictive, does this hamper self expression and dampen artistry; as Tommy Hayes once bemoaned of the creative drudgery of a Riverdance sabbatical? These are some of the themes to explore over thee years as this book takes shape.
There you have part of an answer to what I think of my chosen profession. It's not honourable in the sense of the gladiatorial sacrifices of a GPO siege, or the bravery of Veronica Guerin. Although for journalists of her calibre, working on the edge of darkness, the metaphor of martyr holds. I am not crusading for a greater glory, some mythic Erin Go Braugh, or upholding the rights of man to sing play and make merry. I am open to the shred of evidence and the shrouds of doubt, the glow of nostalgia and the white heat of ambition. I cannot however, just act as a looking glass, reflecting all back. There are times, when I must interpret and imagineer (that word again), explain what I hear, make some internal sense of it all. A report is only a moment's condensation of something much bigger. The honour of the profession is to apply the pen honestly. For me that includes laying bare one's own stance on the issues. Writing is never neutral.
All writing, because it takes time, is always open to more thought than speech. Writing up an interview is often a consciouss alteration and niggling reworking of the original conversation. Make no mistake, writing is always loaded. Autobiography, is the fuel of all scribbling. We bring to the page traces of past eruptions, such that acts of writing may become archaeological exercises, where new layers of old evidence are exposed. Good writers can recognise dusted features, and relate the stratigraphy to events and circumstances beyond the obvious. They bring the reader into their own world as well as that of their subjects. We know what Conor Cruise O'Brien stands for, we appreciate the style of a Gaybo or Pat Kenny. Their personalities are an addition not a distraction in their journalism.
So to autobiography. In a past life I was a biology teacher. The reason why I am not now a teacher of biology is complex, circumstantial, interesting to me, but I will spare you the navel gazing and the deep soul searching ( for the cahnge of careers did involve a lot of thought and a laep into the dark). However, there are a number of ideas that have come along with me as baggage from this history. Ideas that have the power to help me imagine the word pictures I construct when interviewing and interpreting people. As reading is a leisurely occupation, give me a few moments to explore some of these ideas.
As a biologist I was interested in three ideas, stochastic processes, contingency and myths. I'll look at these simply and briefly. Stochastic processes (sorry there isn't a short hand moniker) can be viewed as luck. If something is stochastic it is even more random than mere luck. Drawing a card from a pack or the picking of the scorer of a Hurling goal, are reducible to possibilities. What racing people refer to as odds. Winning the Lotto, can be narrowed to very long odds, but it can be stated with some degree of certainty; if it couldn't the gambling industry would go into decline, the Curragh would be covered in shopping malls, Croke Park engulfed by red roofed suburbs and the yearly chase for the GAA silverware would become haphazard and meaningless. All teams want to emulate the great Kerry years or the triumphs of Tipperary. Such is the power of history and the force of luck, it keeps us involved from year to year, following our Parish teams to spot the lucky few who will go on to greater things in some distant but eventual field of glory.
Stochastic processes are not like that. It's as if the Tralee water polo team beat Liverpool in a seven a side hockey tournament during the American football Superbowl replay. Surreal isn't it? Yes, but life is actually like that. Games after all are simplified versions of our daily struggles.When life loses it's stochastic surrealism, it loses interest, the punishment of prison is the dullness and predictability of a hundred similar days.
Contingency, is closely related and often caught up with stochatsic processes. It isn't about the inevitable, but about the beginning of things. Many folks get this arse-ways in biology exams. It is often brought in to explain evolution and as such it is true for anything that changes unexpectedly over time. (Boy hasn't Irish traditional music evolved this century!). Many people, try and suggest where the music is going, this was a fairly explicit sub-theme in the RTE series A River of Sound. I know it is impossible to say where the music is going, to predict a highway or a boreen from the proverbial cross roads. Because some, or indeed all of the tradition is open to stochastic processes, off -the- wall luck if you like, and the rest is due to contingency, what many musicians call respect for past masters.
What is contingency then and how does it apply to an understanding of the music? When the shaking hand of luck has drawn the cards, and our great musician appears, or even a lesser musician, but one nevertheless who will make a difference (as has been often said of Bob Dylan), contingency takes over. Academics often call this a paradigm shift, a point where there is no going back, things have changed, our understanding has been altered, it is not possible to conceive of our world without this event. The action of the event becomes our explanation. Could Paul Bardy have sung Arthur MacBride without Bob Dylan as a model? In traditional Irish music, there are plenty of examples of the first kid on the block, Morrison and Coleman from the early days of recorded music, Planxty and the Bothy Band, Moving Hearts and latterly Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill. They become essential reference points, locating the music as being here and now, allowing us to explain the road it has travelled down. Like the Tralee train, once you lose sight of the time and the place, the destination is open to doubt and uncertainty. Today's traditional music is contingent on a handful of influential players, who they are is open to debate. I am not going to list these, PJ Curtis has already gone down that track in his Notes from the Heart, and Fintan Vallely's book The Companion to Irish Music is almost an encyclopaedia , almost a Hall of Famelook to those for lists of names and mini-biographies. Even if we could come up with an argued shortlist of "the wonderful few", it could tell us next to nothing about where the tradition will be tomorow. Who could have predicted the baroque eloquence of Hayes and Cahill to develop ten years down the line from a culture which created Moving Hearts and the rhythmic agendas of Donal Lunny and Steve Cooney?
Lastly the third leg of my old biology stool. Myths. The vernacular use of the word myth is like a lot of folk wisdom, not exactly on the point but near enough to have resonance. Myths are not lies, not malicious half-truths, not bad. A story becomes a myth when it has the power to explain, (often in a shorthand fashion), a greater community understanding. Myths are a necessary part of our western tradition, a sort of bag of delights to be dipped into around the turf fire at night as the Shanachie tells us something we always knew about ourselves. There is many a myth circulating in the highest corridors of traditional music. Here's one, belonging to the category, myth as over simplification - Traditional music is rural.
It was rural, but the twin evils of emigration and urbanisation, together with the commercialization and industrialization of farming have lead to the countryside emptying. I live in rural Tipperary, it's hard to find a session in my local town. Yet I know there are over 130 free sessions a week in Dublin. The music now lives in the cities, but the rural myth remains. The first ever Ceili Dance was held in London, a city not noted for rustic green pastures and simple peasant pleasures. Yet Fleadhs are always held in small cosy rural localities. Why?
Traditional music has developed as it has become urban. The basic forms are still there, jigs, polkas, hornpipes and most of all reels. Look closely and you'll find the structure of this music as well as the setting has changed. Today the music is more often played for musicians and listeners, whether this be in an informal session or on a concert platform. Traditional dance tunes are now faster, often syncopated, they swing. Musical ideas have been amalgamated from rock and roll, and occasionally as with Planxty and the Bothy Band have imported sophisticated polyphonic devices such as counter melody from the classical world. Listen to some of the wonderful music on Live at the Favourite, recorded by Reg Hall in 1960s London. What you get here is the last bright glow of the ceili house tradition, where the music was for dancing. To many modern ears this music is slow, deliberate, even boring. It takes a bit of effort to discover what is going on, you have to actively listen, there is great subtlety in the playing. Today listening has changed, we now listen for diversion, entertainment has become transient. The cultural landscape has moved on.
There's more to this change than simply jazzing the music up. Traditional dance music's structure has altered over the last thirty years because dance tunes are not now exclusively carrying folks around the floor. There is a technical point to be made here, one that is fairly simple to understand. The majority of Irish tunes follow a formula, they consist of two parts, the tune and the turn. The tune last for eight bars, is often in a lower register and it is then followed by a turn of another eight bars often pitched a fifth or more above the first passage. Sounds archane, but in reality it often means moving from one string to the next higher on a fiddle. This is sometimes referred to as a call and an answer system. For dances, the formula was to play the tune of eight bars, then follow it with the turn of eight bars, this is called singling the tune by traditional musicians, each part is played only once. As the music has drifted away from dance, the structure has become more complex. Today most tunes are doubled. The first part is played twice, often the second time round with variations, the turn is also played twice, again with a second round incorporating variation. Complex patterns may develop.The tune and turn are more often called the A and B part by players, so a typical pattern is AABB, this gives a thirty two bar piece. Variations on this AB pattern can be built up, often by small groups of players who practice before they go to session, in this way new shades of the music are discovered. Hayes and Cahill are the two players who have done the most to explore this musical structure, often playing complex pieces of music and developing dynamic tension between call and answer, it's great music, but it is not to everyone's liking.
Myth number two, belongs to the class; "more than a grain of truth in this one". All good music comes from families. This myth is much nearer the truth, but of course it isn't always to be trusted. The Mulligans of Phibsborro (in the City of Dublin) have a great traditional pedigree, uilleann piper Neilidh is the current custodian of the family treasure,(and one of the few modern pipers who can really do justice to slow airs). Neilidh's father was a fiddler, Neilidh learnt his piping in Dublin's Pipers'Club, where they tell young folks if you want to play slow airs listen to the songs first, the phrasing is all there in the Sean Nos. Exploring the family myth with another example, Tommy Hayes has no music to speak of in his family, yet he has created a whole new way to play the bodhran and elevated it to an art instrument. Winnie Horan, was in danger of losing her faith in the tradition, went off to music school, learnt classical violin and has only recently come back to the fold. She is doing amazing things with Solas . Who is to say it is her family that was the biggest influence?
Myths tells us a lot about ourselves. Many writers have written eloquently and lucidly on the myth of the rural family in Irish life. Always in some way or another coloured by references to the famine, years of colonialism , the imposition of foreign ways, and an unsettled often disturbed clan system. Best seen in the works of J B Keane, his characters people those hastily built Victorian towns, intent on imposing an urban structure on a country sensibility where the tensions are seen in religious repression and sexual tensions. Such myths are open to the worst forms of commercial exploitation, where nostalgia for some golden age of impoverished camaerdarderie is a portmanteu for marketting excess. But as both Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, and novelist John B. Keane have pointed out, such a cosy world, was a place many of us would not care to revisit. The myths prevail, we tell ourselves these stories because of a deep pain, because of emigration, because of the Acendancy or partition, or civil war, because of a "Through the Fields to the School" longing for a lost childhood, because the land like each generation of children since Black 47 has abanonded us. We don't have to blame ourselves for these stories, we are victims. We are not guilty of living in the theme park of our own history, we are trapped by it, there is no way out. If we do escape, there's the guilt to take the gilt off our achievements. Immigrants always dream of home. Media types and tourist marketeers are culpable in this game. Irish music has to live inside this imaginative space, and if and when it breaks out, as it has done with Riverdance, we can always play the begrudger and say- "it isn't the real Ireland, and sure isn't he a Yank after all". Howevere, Michael Flatley, is part of the secret hope for all our exiled sons and daughters, that they'll make something for themselves in a place where the land will keep them.
So here's admission number two, not only was I a teacher, I was born in England. Indeed much of my Irishness, is second hand, it is a product of the Diaspora. It has it's own dynamic and internal logic, forever looking back, making a land that never existed. Built up from a collage of selected experiences. Saturday lunchtimes listening to the Waltons' programme, my father's collection of John McCormack and Brendan O'Dowda records. My own avid caching of any Dubliners album I could find. The first bodhran, a tin whistle bent out of shape, a collection of music books and ballad sheets. Tangible and accessible connections to a country that only existed in my mind. And here I am thirty odd years on, living in this country, being part of it, learning to grasp the challenge and possibilities of a deep and complex culture, not trusting the images and icons of an approved visitor's Ireland. Being critical amid the spurious and the shallow. Sharing my learning with others, through writing, often a torment, a drug , but above all else a rich and rare privilege.
Here's another story from evolutionary biology, I write this for Matt Molloy.
In late Novemeber 1997, I was in Matts' wonderful pub in Westport. "Music seven nights a week and no food." He considers it heresy for a landlord to sell anything other than liquid. After a Lunasa gig, a small party ajourned to a private room and gentle conversation and singing became the order of the night. I knew I might make a story out of the experience one day, so I sat back, perched on a stool in a dark corner, I tried to be inconspicuous, taking time to savour the ghosts of the place before drink would distort any images I might make.
Waking me from this semi-poetic indulgence, I got a small tap on my shoulder, it was Michael McGoldrick. He said quietly " Wasn't the gig brilliant? " "Yes" I said "the band were very good, really together, they had a great sound, the music moved along", I'd been impressed. "No, not us, Matt Molloy, playing with us, being on stage with him, I was so nervous, he was brillaint, he's the main man." So locked in conversation, Michael told me about how his father played hours of Paddy Canny and Matt Molloy records to him as a child in Manchester. He began to understand about the flute from a very young age, he could hear the music, he was learning to listen. We talked about being fathers ourselves, how we wanted our own sons to have the music, not just as a gift or a chore, but as a joy. Michael told me how he plays slow airs to his young son Rory, to lull him to sleep. The boy is being trained as a listener, he's every chance of having the music. Then Mike said something very sentimental, "I wish my dad could be here now, to see this." He wasn't refering to his sell out gig, or his recent trappings of fame, but this dark back room , a small Mayo pub, with the hush fallen for a singer. And boy what a singer, so much music in his voice, trills, grace notes, perfect pitch, he was singing amusing songs, nothing maudling, natural and impish, it wasn't contrived paddy whackery. But here was a link, perhaps a fragile and tenous one at that, to the hidden Ireland of the imagination. In that small instant everything you read from Bord Failte was true, a knockout blow, we were in a direct collision with a myth made real and the feeling was good.
The singer ended his song, there was no applause, this wasn't a performance, clapping would have been crass. Murmours of approval, minor shouts caught in the backs of throats, "good man" "lovely singing" and the simple coughed "ah that's great". At this level of intimacy, the music is shared between us all, the singer gave us the song but we gave an ear. Back to the art of listening again.
The words "to have the music" came back to me, I'd heard this phrase a number of times before. Players in a session would say "do you have the Star of Munster, The Copperplate, the Repeal of the Union, do you have any polkas?" Now in a similar session amongst English musicians they might use the phrase "do you know Lads a Bunchum" or "do you know Monks March". Having a tune is a powerful idea, it means more than just knowing the tune. I know a few bars of Mozart, I can recognise them as I wander around Dunnes stores on a Saturday, but I don't have enough of them to sit at a piano and ratlle off Eine Kliene Nacht Musik in its full plumage. I know a number of Irish tunes, after a bit of listening in a session, I can do a bad job of busking them, picking out a poster paint version. Many won't stay in my head, in that sense I don't have the tunes. To have something you've either got to want it so badly that you'll settle for nothing else, or be given so much, there's no escaping the consequences.
Anyway back to Matts back room. Having consumed more than my allotment of the famous black libation, I was, as they say, getting a bit full, and conversation became chaotic as a conseqience.
Talking was only making sense to me, you know how it is, the imagination filling in the gaps, the mind running faster than the mouth, so only snippets of sense come out. I was like that tarin in the dark near Clondalkin the lihghts were one but I was going nowhere. When this happens, I have a simple rule - go to bed. Here's the story I was telling to Matt, I hope it makes more sense this time round.
I asked him how he'd become so interested in the music, after all he was a city child, he hadn't been brought up in some rural-ceili-ing haven in the West. Moreover, what did he think of the state of the music now? He told me about getting involved during the dark days of the fifties, when rural Ireland was emptying, emigration sending boat-loads of young people to England or America every week. The way Clare fiddle player, Paddy Canny has said, "we knew more of our neighbours in London than we did in our own parish". The music could have been lost. Comhaltas and the Fleadh movement changed all that, it became fun, vital and above all patriotic to play. Players said, 'here we are, a people who have something of our own, something we wont let die, something that has some value, something we cherish, we will grow it, and we will protect it and we will share it.' As the fifties became the sixties, new groups appeared. The Clancy Brothers, took recently collected songs, straight from the kitchens and back parlours of rural Ireland, onto stages in New York, London, Dublin and Las Vegas. They added a touch of theatre, popularising old ballads in a new, international way. Not every body liked it of course, some said it was turning the culture into show biz.
Later The Dubliners and Planxty followed, bands who explored the musicality of the tradition, went beyond the relative simplicity of the kitchen ceili and the cross roads dance. I remember my first Dubliner's LP, I was sick at the time, some childhood illlness, probably involved spots and bottles of pink penicillin. My father gave me a copy of the Dubliners' Finnegan's Wake he said "just listen to these boys, they are like the Clancy's but there's more music in them." Barney McKenna and John Sheehan to be exact. After the Dubliners, there was Planxty, the best ballad group of all time, where would the music go from there? Inevitably it lead to the Bothy Band, but look it's only inevitable in hindsight. The Bothies were a paradigm shift, a contingent point in traditional music. They created a new way of playing the music, of looking at it, the use of harmony, a driving rhythm section, to a point where many of the concepts of big stadium rock were now evident. Above all, The Bothy Band succeeded musically, because each of it's players was at the top of their game.And my host Matt Molly was one of the Bothy's .
So I then asked Matt, what about the older players, who did he revere in his youth, (as young musicians now laud him and the Bothy Band. James Morrison and Michael Coleman, were his choices, because they were geniuses, they had something transcending words, that can't be noted or pictured, the only way to know it is to listen. Take the time, make the effort to hear what they were playing, know it as head music. By this I understood that these players were imagineering the music, they could see it in their minds and had such phenomenal technique to play it on their chosen instruments. What of today's musicians? Matt was generous, and serious. There are plenty of excellent players around at the moment, the standard is better than it has ever been. But I wondered are there any to match his greats and if so who and why? After a little thought he said, Michael McGoldrick.
I came in with my own theory, and made a complete hash of it. This after all was a late night conversation and not an interview, we were both allowed our agendas. So I told the story about the sock and the duvet. Something biologists use to explain stochastic processes and contingency. There's also another version involving a drunk on his way home. On the night I got the two myths mixed up and of course made no sense at all. Here's the sock story.
Socks and duvets are essentially the same class of objects, open pockets. They are meant to be entered and exited from one orifice only and are made of textiles. There are two important differences, socks come in pairs and duvets are as a big as beds. When they are washed, these objects come into a dynamic, moving, random and stochastic existence. For the majority of cases, for most washes, the contact between them is fleeting and external. However, once in a tumble or drying cycle, a sock will get caught up in a duvet, which sock, and when, are not predictable, the chances are stochastic. When it occurs however, contingeny takes over. We've lost a sock, the pair is now reduced to a single, the socks have become devoid of purpose, (unless we have only have one foot or habitually wear odds socks). Applying this theme to traditional music is fairly simple and instructive. We can see the music as either a sock or a duvet. Duvets swallow up and alter the socks, socks are the potential losers and ultimate victims. Some pessimists say that traditional music is being swallowed up by the duvet of commercial pop, so experimentation, mixing the wash as it were is not allowed, the chances of losing a sock or two are so great, don't do the laundry at all. We can stick with the old dirty linen. Traditionalists, with a true sense of musical history, will tell you the culture has been absorbing fads and fashions for years, the reel, jig and polka all came from Europe. Insular conservatives reply by thanking God for the uilleann pipes, our very own indigenous instrument. The surprise is this instrument has remained within traditional music. The pipes are capable of far more, as players such as Davy Spillane have recently proved. (Listen to Maddy Priors solo album Flesh and Blood, where the pipes play a Sibelius suite, it sounds ominously like Musak, but it proves the instrument is not restricted to Irish traditional music). Or to put it another way, do the Italians ever worry about the numbers of folk playing Irish tunes on their fiddles?
So where does this put the Morrisons and the McGoldricks? Both players expereinced the force of emigration, their work was and is, as much out of rather than in Ireland. In their own ways they are accustomed and open to the other musics of their age. Their genius, is partly technical, they can do amazing things with the physics of their instruments, but they have music in their head space. They have the possibilities, the potentials, the shapes and twists of tunes. They have the technique to be able to achieve this with a degree of taste that is at once familiar and unervingly fresh. Always challenging other players. In our laundry metaphor they are the duvets of the traditional world, absorbing other influences, being big enough to stay essentially the same, yet full of chance enfoldings. Matt aknowleged this when we talked about Micheal McGoldrick. I argued, he has such a relaxed fingering style, more akin to pipers than fluters and great breath control. Yes said Matt, "but he's got far more than that, he's got it where it matters most, it's in his head."
Although I understood what he was saying, I didn't have it the way he did. Having the music in your head , is actually just that, it's there, like oridinary folk have a vocabulary. We choose words and their meanings to help us make sense of the chaos of our experiences. I presume that is how the great musicians actually work. Notes, patterns, harmonies, rhythms all play upon their imaginations as words play on mine, they find infinite avenues and pathways from their experience of music, that can only be expressed in more music, for these people the notes and sounds of the air are a coherent language. As journalists and writers, I believe it's our job to articulate this in words and ideas, and for me this is the crucial point, without ideas music journalism, is nothing more than an exercise in linguistic gymnastics, an inferior offspring of name dropping and as impoverished as stamp collecting, a tawdry form of train spotting. As you read the book, I hope it arouses ideas and questions. The aim is not to write the usual fly on the wall music book, but to connect ideas together. I want to show that traditional musicians have something to say, they are not all caught up in a tangled frosty bank of nostalgia, neither are they all set on hurtling the miles down a straight track to a warm and predictable destination. They have generously placed their bodies on the line and we are left in the silent night to imagine the meanings of their melodies..
Search through the chapters, and discover ideas, stumble over myths and wonder about luck and contingency. Here's a thought to start you on the way. What would the world of Irish music be like if Andy Irvine hadn't spent a year in the Balkans?
copyright Sean Laffey 2000