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Folk review 2005

It was a fraught and difficult year for touring trad and folk acts, but there were positives to hold onto.

Greg McAteer, 04 Jan 2006

Most of the major touring traditional and folk acts would agree that 2005 was a tough year with increasingly cautious promoters offering little in the way of enthusiasm and even less in the way of cold, hard cash.

Acts whose musical calibre and artistic integrity should guarantee them a ready audience found it difficult to draw the crowds they deserve. To a certain extent we’ve been the architects of our own misfortune, as the rush to package traditional music in the aftermath of Riverdance overlooked the fact that that phenomenon was a theatrical one and not a musical one. Thanks to the tacit complicity of many Irish musicians in branding trad as a theatrical event, we’ve seen it go head to head on the international stages with other attractions with which it doesn’t necessarily bear comparison. The artists and groups who have eschewed the bolt-on theatrical elements in favour of a vibrant musicality have found audiences caught like a rabbit in the headlights, unprepared for the feast in front of them.

There’s an element, too, of ghetto-isation with Irish music. Whereas other roots music traditions around the world have embraced the conventional music industry, Irish music still seems, by and large, to have a rather gauche relationship with the mainstream industry. It is still a rarity for the trad community to show a clear sense that it understands the ties that bind it to the roots musics with which it shares a common heritage. For its part, the mainstream industry, at least in its Irish guise, seems resolutely resistant to the tender charms of anything remotely rootsy unless it can be shoehorned into the singer-songwriter idiom. While this has had some admirable successes, and I’m thinking principally of the inexorable rise and rise of the extraordinary talent that is Damien Dempsey, it has – even in his case – been a long time coming.

There is a peculiar tunnel vision implicit in the mentality that sees it as unproblematic to market a number of virtually indistinguishable operatic tenor acts, but sees it as impossible to develop a market for music from a traditional background. Even in the face of the huge success achieved by the reformed Planxty, it seems beyond belief that anyone would sign one of their natural successors to a conventional record deal.



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Greg McAteer

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