30 years a Bloom-in'

This year, Luka Bloom celebrates 30 years as a professional musician. Over those three decades he’s fought many a demon (both internal and external), reinvented himself, struggled for and won universal acclaim, survived record deals with two major labels, saw the naked racism of the Irish at home and abroad and overcome the ‘Christy Moore’s brother’ tag. Here, we look backwards and forwards with the artist formerly known as Barry Moore.

Jackie Hayden: What were you doing in 1972 when you became a full-time musician?

LUKA BLOOM: I was preparing for my last year in school and in the summer I was invited by Christy Moore, Liam O’Flynn, Andy Irvine and Donal Lunny, who were nearly called Clad after their initials, but who wisely instead opted for Planxty, to be the opening act on their Irish tour, including unbelievable gigs in Inisheer and Inishmore. They were my first paid gigs.

JH: But you had been playing before that?

LB: Well, I grew up in Newbridge hearing lots of music from my sister Eilish and brother Christy, and my mother was also a great singer. I had started learning the guitar, but when I heard Donovan, James Taylor, Neil Young and so on I immediately started to write songs. I even started to experiment with open tunings which mystifies me to this day.

JH: After Joni Mitchell perhaps?

LB: Maybe. I’d just gotten the Blue album and probably recognised the chords couldn’t be achieved with normal tuning. But I’d heard English folkies like Martin Carthy who also used open tunings.

JH: Had you been gigging before the Planxty support?

LB: I knew fellas in a company called Rotary Screens in Newbridge, and on Friday nights we’d go into a back room in one of the pubs with guitars and the rest of the lads would finance the drinking and we’d play. I had a local audience when I was fifteen or sixteen.

JH: Were you a folkie singer-songwriter with a bit of Irish trad then?

LB: There was no trad played then. You were more likely to hear ‘Stairway To Heaven’ than ‘Follow Me Up To Carlow’. I was a singer-songwriter from day one.

JH: Did you have a long-term music plan? What did you see ahead of you?

LB: I suppose I was hoping that one day I would record an album that would be as significant to others as James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James was to me. When I heard that album I was at boarding school with a guitar hidden away. Sometimes I’d get so excited that I’d skip off between classes and work on songs like ‘Carolina In My Mind’.

JH: Do you think you’ve made that record?

LB: I’m not really the best judge of that. I don’t know. When I go to Australia or wherever I meet people who are moved by my albums, and that’s gratifying in itself. I know I have a very privileged life.

JH: Were there surprises when you started?

LB: It was very difficult. I think I suffered from the Nick Drake syndrome, but thank God I survived. I loved writing songs and playing and singing casually for small groups, but I just couldn’t deal with professional performance. I was utterly terrified.

JH: Was it a fear of rejection?

LB: I never analysed it. But the early days in Newbridge had a beautiful innocence about them and I have really bright memories, but once I made the decision not to become the solicitor my family hoped I’d become I instantly felt this unbearable pressure and I couldn’t really cope and I took solace in drink.

JH: Yet by the mid-’70s you had the Treaty Stone album on Mulligan.

LB: 1978. It was produced by Christy. I was always very shy, but you can often feel very ambitious to make the album and be terrified about the ensuing attention. It might have suited me better if I’d copped out and just written at home. You must also remember that at that time the thing to be in Ireland was an interpreter of songs. It’s wonderful today that everybody’s writing songs, but in the 1970s if you weren’t doing Abba, or The Eagles, or Dylan or Randy Newma or Kris Kristofferson songs, you didn’t get a look in.

JH: But you were earning enough to live.

LB: Barely getting by. But it was a process I had to go through. I did another album in Groningen in Holland called (laughs) No Heroes which took me up to ‘81 or ‘82. But I wasn’t a happy camper. The work wasn’t great.

JH: Christy was obviously helpful to you starting off, but what are the advantages and disadvantages of being the brother of someone whose profile has always been ahead of yours?

LB: There are two levels to that. People forget they’re talking about my brother irrespective of whether we’re plumbers or carpenters. There’s a side to our relationship to which our careers are irrelevant, and that’s the most important part and it’s very beautiful. So it’s like asking me about the advantages and disadvantages of having a right leg. It’s a tricky question, not that I want to be defensive about it, and not to be in denial of the professional consequences.

JH: But can it be a disadvantage that people are always comparing you?

LB: Yeah. That was a huge problem and a pain in the arse for him too. But he didn’t produce my first album because he was my brother. He did it because he thought I was great. He didn’t offer. I asked him. But it pissed him off when I didn’t do as well as I could have.

I learned a lot from Christy’s attitude, particularly his attitude to people. He’s very singular in his devotion to his audience and has an unbelievable work ethic as the eldest in the family, and that was a huge difference between us. I was basically a spoiled brat who wanted to get the best possible results from a minimum of input. It wasn’t until the mid-’80s that I saw it wasn’t going to work like that. I now attribute all the difficulties I had to my own shortcomings as a person and as a professional.

JH: Isn’t that an unusual attitude for a musician? Don’t musicians usually blame others for whatever goes wrong with their careers?

LB: Blame is not a word that I’m comfortable with. But if anybody reaches a point in their life where they are experiencing problems and can only see the faults in others, that person is destined for a life of misery. Resentment and bitterness are not options anymore for me.

JH: Were they ever?

LB: I always wanted to be what I am. I just didn’t do a very good job at it. For somebody who would have talked the talk of being very devoted I was actually quite lazy. I wanted to be discovered and then mollycoddled. But when people came along and didn’t do a good job I blamed them for my lack of success. As many people do, I managed to sabotage a lot of my own potential through being terrified.

JH: How did you eventually deal with that fear?

LB: By 1982 I realised I was in deep doo-doo. I wasn’t generating interest in my music and I wasn’t getting repeat gigs. There wasn’t a big circuit and I wasn’t very good. I was writing songs that people didn’t want to hear and I was sick of them and sick of my gigs. Then I began to hear bands like The Blades and Tokyo Olympics and U2. There was something happening that was completely removed from my previous experience.

JH: And that’s when you formed Red Square?

LB: Yeah. We were one of about 5,000 bands who wanted to be the next U2! Dublin was coming down with A&R men. We were rehearsing in Date Studios in Parnell Square at the same time as Cactus World News and I think they got signed six weeks after they formed. We were beginning to come together but we weren’t making any money and by 1986 it was obvious it wasn’t going anywhere.

JH: What did you learn from the Red Square days?

LB: I learned how to sing standing up! That was an enormous transition, to go from being a folkie semi-apologising for himself to standing and moving and singing out loud. I loved it!

JH: After the band broke up, was changing from Barry Moore to Luka Bloom the next step?

LB: Yeah. I went to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annamakerrig and within two weeks of Red Square breaking up I wrote about five songs that ended up on the Riverside album, ‘Delirious’, ‘Over The Moon’, ‘Gone To Pablo’, ‘Rescue Mission’. I thought, “Oh my God. These are great songs!” I knew they wouldn’t work with the band.

I had this new energy I’d gotten from the band and listening to The Waterboys, U2 and so on and I felt totally rejuvenated. But in Ireland there was this perception of me as a guy struggling in folk clubs. So I went to America and soon felt a draw and a sense of the possibilities you get in America and which is really infectious.

But I was a bit scared that I might drift towards the Irish community and get sucked in as the brother of Christy, particularly as he was beginning to do work in America.

JH: What psychological effect did changing your name have?

LB: One that I was totally unprepared for. I arrived in Dylan’s, a tiny club in Georgetown in Washington DC and auditioned for the Lebanese owner and introduced myself as Luka Bloom. Naturally he accepted it and I persuaded him to give me the quietest nights of his week. I did that and the Red Lion on Bleeker Street, New York, right through the Winter of ‘87, packing people in from the jungle telegraph. It gave me enormous confidence for the first time.

JH: What about people here who might have said, “will you feck off with your Luka Bloom nonsense and stop messin’ about”?

LB: Oh I got all that! I had to talk to my family about it. My mother was upset.

JH: So what do they call you now?

LB: Gobshite! (laughs). They know I don’t take it seriously. It’s a nickname. It’s a pretentious, anonymous, logo, brand name and it helps me to stop taking myself so seriously.

JH: Is it something you can hide behind?

LB: Quite the opposite. It’s allowed me to come out and be myself. It’s like an actor who’s naturally shy but who can turn it on on stage. There’s an explanation about theatre where they use actual masks, that not only does the mask disguise the person but it allows the person to come forward, and that’s what happened to me. I had to get rid of all the baggage that was dragging me down, not wanting to be ignored, or get a bad review in hotpress. I had to let go of all that self-conscious shite. In time with the Luka Bloom persona I actually reached a point where I didn’t like having become a bit too cocky on stage, so I’ve pulled back from that.

JH: After the name change you got a deal with Warners.

LB: Yes, in 1989. I was the first Irish singer signed to Warners in LA since Van Morrison, and that was without any demos. They wanted demos but I told them they could hear me at the Red Lion. I did Riverside, The Acoustic Motorbike and Turf with them.

JH: How did that relationship end?

LB: It was fine and I was expecting it. By the time The Acoustic Motorbike was done I was concerned that my son was growing up in Ireland and my mother was getting on and I wasn’t seeing enough of them, and I was concerned that my life was coming second to my work.

JH: So why did you then get back onto another major label with Sony while based in Ireland?

LB: God, there’s a story! I was actually aware of Ani Di Franco and Loreena McKevitt looking after their own affairs and I was thinking of taking the independent road. But my manager Mattie Fox had unbelievable enthusiasm for me and got a similar response from John Sheehan in Sony so I went with it. It’s so easy to say you regret something, but you learn from everything. I did one album Salty Heaven with Sony. I love it but it died a death.

JH: So you took the independent route then?

LB: Yes. I wanted to have a working structure that felt at ease with the life I wanted, make my own records, finance them, license them. The first test was the covers album Keeper Of The Flame. I was scared, but it worked. It was exciting finding out how to do all the business stuff and I was surprised to find I was more capable than I thought. I had to learn to talk to people who have been dealing with the logistics of the music industry for 20 years as a complete gobshite.

JH: Why do most musicians avoid having to deal with the business side?

LB: I think musicians think that what they do is the only creative part of the process, but I’ve found that’s not true. Finding the people you trust is the big thing and it’s enjoyable too. I sent Keeper Of The Flame to about ten record companies in Ireland and not one of them responded, yet I had no problem getting deals for it all over the world.

JH: Might there come a time when you’ll feel that you’ve said all that you want to say?

LB: I’m open to that. I believe there’s already enough music in the world. I sometimes wish there was a moratorium on new material so people could catch up on what’s been recorded over the last hundred years. I don’t want to make an album unless I think I’ve something to say.

JH: Your new album Between The Mountain And The Moon features many elements of foreign culture. That’s in sharp contrast to the racism in Ireland.

LB: The racism that has emerged in Ireland in the past five years came as no surprise to me. I experienced horrendous racism among the Irish communities in America. It really shocked and saddened me.

JH: Who was that racism directed against?

LB: Anyone with a different skin colour. Very specifically, the Irish community in Boston was notoriously racist. When Bernadette McAliskey (nee Devlin) went to tell the story of Bloody Sunday to Irish-American audiences she was so horrified at the racism of the Ancient Order of Hibernians that when she was given an emblem as a memento she gave it to the Black Panthers to show her disgust.

JH: So was it latent in Ireland?

LB: We never had a migrant population before. There’s a societal problem in Ireland which is frightening. When children are born in Ireland and their families are not allowed to stay here, that’s institutional racism. But the only way I can respond to it as a performer is to articulate through my music a love of other cultures. I find North African music very inspirational. The percussionist on the album (Mohamed Bouhanna) is Algerian and he drove the rhythms. He had to leave Algeria to avoid conscription as the Algerian army is a notoriously scary place. So he moved to Holland where I met him.

I don’t know if my music has any bearing on racism in Ireland, but personally I can’t wait for more and more immigrants to come to Ireland. I think there are places in Ireland where the gene pool is just too small and we’ve very short memories. I’ve just come back from Australia where the racism is even more rabid.

JH: By responding to it do we give them an importance they sometimes don’t deserve?

LB: We don’t have that luxury, because it’s life threatening. People are being beaten up, insulted and abused because of the colour of their skin. The highest number of people from another country living here are white Americans and they don’t suffer any of these difficulties. The same for Germans, Dutch and so on. For me there’s only one race, the Human Race. People go on and on to me about the importance of being Irish, well I’m sorry, this is a great place but I’m first and foremost a human being.

JH: What about being proud of one’s nationality?

LB: I’m not proud of being Irish. I’m no more proud of being Irish than I am of having pink skin.

JH: That wouldn’t be a popular view in some quarters. Aren’t we supposed to be patriotic and proud of our country?

LB: Love and pride are two different things. I love living in this fabulous piece of turf called Ireland. I love the different accents. I love the small town world of Ireland, nature, the sea, the people. But being proud of being Irish, that’s different.

JH: To borrow a song title from the new album, are you a bogman?

LB: (laughs) I’m a wannabe bogman, about to become an apprentice bogman, relocating to the bog about five miles from Naas or Newbridge.

JH: So how will you know when you’ve achieved complete bogmanhood?

LB: I’ll never achieve it. It’s beyond the reach of every townee. You have to be born to it, but I’m willing to learn.

JH: Is ‘Gabriel’, also on the new album, about your son?

LB: No. It was inspired by my son when he was very young asking me if I believed in angels. I gave one of those unsatisfactory mumbly-type answers parents often give when their baffled by a question. But I was so dissatisfied by my response that I puzzled over it for days. Then I remembered when I was five or six having an awareness of an Angel Gabriel. On my recent tour of Australia I played it when Gabriel Byrne was in the audience and he was quite chuffed.

JH: There are aggressive rhythms running through songs like ‘Monsoon’. Were they influenced by the punk days?

LB: Oh yeah. When I went to America first I played support to The Pogues and you can’t do that and be reserved and shy and quiet. You can’t play gentle ballads to 4,000 rabid Pogues fans and survive. I was also influenced then by the rhythms of post-punk bands like U2, Simple Minds, Aztec Camera and so on. I still employ that in my live shows.

JH: And you’re still standing up!

LB: (laughs) Yeah, I’m still standing up!