Folk That: Why there is richness in poverty

In most groups you find a mixture of personalities with the more garrulous members making most of the running and the quieter ones working away in the background. Dervish are no different. Tucked away at the heart of the band since its inception 20 years ago, flute player Liam Kelly has been one of the creative centrepieces of their work together.

Indeed, ‘O’Raghailligh’s Grave’, from 2003’s Spirit still ranks as one of my favourite pieces of music ever. Irrespective of era, irrespective of genre, that emotive slab of solo flute has a power to cut through any preconceptions about traditional music and grab you by the gut. Although he is truly the quiet man of the band, there have been other hints that things were stirring. He composed the tune, performed by Dervish, used to re-brand the FAI.
This month sees him step out of the shadows of Dervish and into the spotlight as Clo Iar-Chonnachta releases Sweetwood, Liam’s debut solo album. Sweetwood is the area in Leitrim from which Liam’s family originally hails and the album hinges around a lament which gives the LP its name. Also featured is a tune written with his Dervish bandmate Michael Holmes, entitled ‘Bethnal Green’, which reflects on their time spent in London in the ’80s.
Liam is launching the album in the Glens Centre in Manorhamilton on Friday July 24, playing at the Willie Clancy Flute Concert on Tuesday July 7, and performing with Dervish this summer in Stuttgart, New York and California.
Petr Pandula, best known as the proprietor of Doolin’s Magnetic Music Cafe, has been so inspired by Philip King’s thoughts on how we might imagine our way out of the current economic travails, that he has circulated an open letter to many of the key players in the Irish traditional community urging them collectively and individually to jump off the now stalled Celtic Tiger bandwagon and re-energise themselves creatively.
I’m all in favour of some creative re-energising, but I do think the idea that Irish musicians were ever fully aboard the gravy train is certainly open to question. There is an inference that some musicians may have piggybacked the Celtic Tiger economy and carved out a ‘nice little earner’ for themselves like some diddley-eye Del Boy, that prices may have gone up a little higher than the market could take, leaving consumers feeling like they’ve been taken for a ride.
Still I can’t help wondering why, if we’ve become so versed in sharp business practice, there aren’t more BMW-driving musicians of my acquaintance, why my own crumbling 10- year old Saab, with the imprint of a cow collision still not beaten out of the bonnet, never got replaced with some shinier model. Still, at the heart of what he says there is a grain of truth. Musicians, like most of the rest of the country, got blindsided in the ‘boom’ years and were led into a life which revolved around servicing the abnormally high levels of debt that we were encouraged to embrace.
We were sold a mirage and like the rest of the mugs we bought it, hook, line and mortgage.
In the original Irish Times article Philip King spoke of the way that music brought a richness to life that existed outside and alongside the day-to-day worries and constraints of the musicians that play it. That richness has always been a part of our cultural DNA and Philip’s view of its significance is a long term one. His key contention is that if we remain true to the creative urge that pulls musical greatness from the most mundane of circumstances, we will retain the integrity that makes us, and has always made us, a beacon.
Petr laments that the traditional music community has by and large, with the exception of the Tara motorway protests, been silent in objecting to what is worst in our society, contrasting it with the politicised folk movement of the seventies and early ‘80s, when musicians came together to protest against the treatment of the hunger strikers or the proposed nuclear power station at Carnsore Point. But I think the folk musicians of today exist in a different context.
The Irish protest movements which grew on the back of the civil rights movement, in the North of Ireland as well as the US, evolved from that dynamic at a time when society as a whole was shifting its moral compass. Nowadays, when the bulk of Irish society can clearly see that there are faults and that there are actions needed to right them, the job of addressing the issues is a more subtle one. There are musicians, like Jinx Lennon or Captain Moonlight, who have turned their gaze firmly towards the Celtic Tiger while it was still a vibrant fire-breathing beast and who continue to do so — but for others, there may well need to be a period of self-examination before the focus is turned outwards. In making the Rocky Road album, for example, Damien Dempsey has stopped to reflect on what we are and where we came from, rather than launch straight into an attack on what we have become.
I saw just as many deal-hungry musicians in the heyday of punk as I do now. I don’t feel that all is lost, I don’t feel that we have lost the will to fight back against the burden that oppresses us. The Irish music scene does not exist in a vacuum and as the means of releasing music have become more attainable, so it becomes harder for the true voices to be heard above the drone. The musicians have a duty to create as purely as possible — but the consumer too will have to knuckle down and work harder to find the gems amid the dirt.