The shifting sands

I’ve been aware of the Sands Family pretty much all of my life. Growing up in Newry they, along with Tottenham Hotspur goalkeeper Pat Jennings, were what passed for celebrity in the midst of all that monochrome. Even though they weren’t really from Newry, even though in our heart of hearts we thought Mayobridge was about as cosmopolitan as outer Mongolia, we still claimed them. That ridiculous parochial arrogance kept us going in our mediocre lives throughout a time that was bleak for all sorts of reasons.

I was learning guitar around that time, three chords learnt from a folky who worked in the school language laboratory – rows of reel to reel tape recorders that we looted to serve as makeshift practice amps when punk hit town a couple of year later, and even there the influence of the Sands Family was making its mark.
Even at school, they were inescapable. My German teachers were, in quick succession, a hardcore republican who went on to become a leading member of Sinn Fein and a senior figure in the Assembly and a quiet German introvert who had been so impressed by the Sands Family that she followed them back to their native land and settled in Newry. No-one, and I do mean no-one, came to live in Newry unless they absolutely had to. I guess that’s when it really hit home how successful they were. They had toured in Germany, they had German fans. Lots of them apparently. I couldn’t, back then, think of anyone else who had played in Germany. Presumably the big bands of the time, the Stones, Zeppelin, had all been there but – speccy little provincial nerd that I was – I didn’t know that.

It seems a big enough leap of faith for a substantial slice of German youth culture to be drawn towards a rural family from the very edge of the continent singing in a foreign language. That generation of Germans, though, were infused with a magical empathy. The Second World War really does seem like history now, like something that only exists in schoolbooks or National Geographic documentaries, but the Sands Family’s youthful German fans were a scant generation away from it.
Some had been born during the war, many more just after it. They had parents and older brothers and sisters who had been participants, whether willingly or unwillingly, in its blunt, grinding brutalities. They knew, maybe not at first hand, but at one remove, the awful human costs of atrocity. They were politicised, optimistic, and they felt deeply for what was happening in Northern Ireland at the time. It is perhaps no coincidence that the apogee of the Sands Family’s success in Germany happened at precisely the time when the Northern Irish psyche was being dragged to its nadir by the dirty war being fought in the murder triangle and along the back roads of the border.

It was a filthy time, a time of debilitating paranoia and outright fear. I can remember dreading the winter nights when my father had to work overtime and would be coming home in the dark, worrying about whether he would come home at all, worrying about whether my cousins, who had been ‘lifted’ and were interned in Long Kesh, were being tortured. I don’t think there is a man, woman or child who lived through that period who wasn’t radicalised by it. But while many of us became more staunchly republican, or more deeply entrenched in unionism, the Sands took perhaps the most radical standpoint of all. They stood for peace. They espoused dialogue and reconciliation and they sang songs which dug underneath the fence that divided the community to find that we came from the same rich brown muck.
Then, if you’ll pardon an entirely inappropriate metaphor, they stuck to their guns. For close on 40 years now, the Sands Family as a group and as individuals have written songs that celebrate the people of the country they hail from. If anyone can claim to be a folk singer, a singer of ‘folk’ songs, it is Anne, Ben, Colum and Tommy Sands. What they write doesn’t ignore the divisions that wrack their community. The ostrich mentality will not find any favour with them; rather, they search for the common everyday kindnesses and acts of commonality that transcend those divisions.
Along the way, they have extended the same empathy that was once extended to them. Tommy has recorded with the Bosnian cellist Vedran Smailovic who makes the same kind of stand for peace in his own land that marked the Sands Family out as different.

Tommy Sands’ latest album (with what you might call the Sands Family 2.0, son Fionan and daughter Moya) is entitled Arising From The Troubles and with that often present punning humour that he so often puts to such good-natured use, the ‘arising’ trumps the ‘troubles’. It brings together 18 songs, most of them not recorded previously, which touch on the experiences of a people under a self-inflicted siege and its relief at the hands of peace. Along with himself and his two children, the album features an incredible (not a word I like to bandy about lightly) line-up of guest musicians including his siblings, Pete Seeger, Tao Rodriguez Seeger, Dolores Keane, Steve Cooney, Arty McGlynn, Donal Lunny, Andy Cutting, John McCusker and others.
In celebration of its release, Tommy has committed himself to playing in every one of Ireland’s 32 counties this autumn. Some of them – like the National Concert Hall appearance in Dublin on September 28 – will be in the company of Tom Paxton, while later in the tour he’ll be joined by Peggy Seeger. Check out his website at tommysands.com for details of when he’ll be coming to a venue near you.