Dillonology

Sometimes it’s the singer not the song. Traditional ballads are like Greek myths or soap operas or Shakespearian sonnets or any formalised means of expression. It depends how they’re used. Conventional conceits don’t get old, but their practitioners sometimes do.

Which is why Cara Dillon’s debut album is a welcome curio. I say curio because it’s a bona fide folk album but it’s on Rough Trade. Because the material included on the record is ancient, but it sounds new-minted. Because on paper the formula reads like any sean nós chanteuse going for a dip with Phil Coulter in a Ballygowan-filled Sea Of Tranquillity, but in practice there’s something subtler going on, almost out of earshot.

But then Coulter, for all his crimes, is more than the Celtic Clayderman. He also produced Sinéad O’Connor’s Universal Mother with John D. Reynolds, who mixed Dillon’s album. But more about that later. The point is, somehow this 27-year old Derry singer has figured out how to breathe life back into songs murdered more times than Jason from Friday The 13th, songs domestically and publicly abused by rogue galleries of buskers, balladeers and bar-room bawlers.

Exhibit A: ‘Black Is The Colour’, for which Dillon won a BBC Radio 2 folk award. Like ‘Summertime’ or ‘Sweet Home Chicago’, here was a landmark composition begging to be redeemed by someone with an intuitive ear.

“I know,” says Dillon, “a lot of people have said to me, ‘’Black Is The Colour’, that’s been done to death’, but the fact is these songs have stood the test of time. They’re so powerful and the melodies are so strong and beautiful and haunting that they’ll always be around.”

Dillon herself grew up steeped in traditional music in her native Dungiven, Co. Derry, attending Fleadhs, competitions and workshops, being afforded the opportunity of hearing some of the masters of Irish singing in pubs or on the street. By the time she won an All Ireland Singing Trophy at the age of 14, she’d become obsessed with the trad scene.

“You suddenly find that your soul is reacting to everything,” she says, “You get involved in going to fleadhs and competitions and suddenly you win a prize like that… it was such a big deal at the time, like you’ve really achieved everything. It was just sheer love of it.”

Nevertheless, she wasn’t cosseted from pop. The youngest in a large family, Cara was exposed to her elder siblings’ tastes. From that time, Kate Bush remains an enduring influence:

“She’s my musical hero, a musical genius I reckon. That (Hounds Of Love) is the most amazing album, it’s my favourite album of all time because it just takes you on a journey. You wonder what was going on in her mind whenever she was writing some of the words to the songs. It’s so beautiful, it gives you the goose pimples on your arms sometimes, the chanting, it’s kinda terrifying.”

But then, some of the material Dillon and musical foil Sam Lakeman selected for her eponymous debut album is tarred with the dark stuff, frequently addressing oblivion in its literal and metaphorical terms. There are songs dealing with various rehearsals for death, American wakes, the rot of the soul from unrequited love. The latter subject is evident in the album’s finest moment, ‘Green Grows The Laurel’.

“It’s really intense,” Dillon says. “That’s the beauty of a lot of these songs – you have to get involved in them. You can enjoy them for what they are on the surface, the musical quality of them, but if you sit down and delve into them you’d be really surprised at the content. Like ‘I Am A Youth That’s Inclined To Ramble’, people leaving everything to go and find and find a fortune in America. That must’ve been so hard back then because it literally was a one-way ticket. People just did not return back and maybe were never heard of again.”

While young in trad years, Dillon’s vocal expertise reflects an extensive track record, touring Europe with Oige, being offered the vocal chair in De Danaan and working with Phil Coulter before joining Equation, who were signed to Warners subsidiary Blanco Y Negro. When she and Devon-born Lakeman left the group, Geoff Travis offered the pair their own deal. They worked with a series of label-touted producers and songwriters (including Boo Hewerdine and former Fairground Attraction man Mark E. Nevin) and Dillon flew to Ibiza to appear on Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells III. But after some consideration, the two elected to seek instruction in their own original demos and fled the Warners umbrella. Travis re-signed them to Rough Trade, alongside such unlikely bedmates as The Strokes and The Moldy Peaches. They recorded the debut album Cara Dillon in Devon and Donegal, and since it was released last September, the record has become something of a quiet phenomenon on the British and Irish folk scene.

“A lot of people say to me, ‘What in the name of God is a folk album doing on a trendy label like Rough Trade?’” Dillon admits. “But it’s so good for us, because what we’re doing is trying to take these songs and put them in a modern context and let a lot of younger people the same ages as ourselves know that folk doesn’t have to be Arran jumpers and all that. Rough Trade have got The Strokes and they’re so successful now that there are people who buy everything that comes out on that label, they just worship it. And a lot of people have written to us and posted messages on the website saying, ‘I’ve never bought a folk album before, but I bought your album because it’s on Rough Trade and I can’t wait for the next one’. We’re actually being exposed to a whole new audience which mightn’t necessarily have happened if we put it out on a small trad label.”

Is the folk scene a political minefield?

“It can be. I have to say not in Ireland at all. We’re so lucky because we’ve got people like Paul Brady and Van Morrison and Brian Kennedy and Donal Lunny who always keep reverting back to their roots. The whole Irish folk scene is more willing to experiment and embrace different types of music, but in England for some reason people are quite narrow minded, they’re not as open to trying out things. We’ve done a lot on the folk circuit there and they’ve been brilliant to us and I appreciate everything, but a lot of people have said to me, ‘I think this is as far as you can go with folk music, you’ve really broken some of the boundaries and you can’t experiment any further’. Whereas over here, winning the HOTPRESS award, we’re sitting with people like Bono and Ash and The Corrs and I’m just like, ‘This is so brilliant for folk music, this is what it should be like.’”

True enough, the British pop charts are only occasionally raided by folk poachers, fluke hits from Steeleye Span to The Levellers. In Ireland, there’s constant traffic between the rock and trad streams, whether obvious – The Pogues, Hothouse Flowers, The Frames, The Corrs – or oblique: Phil Lynott’s one-off with Clann Eadair, or Bono and Gavin Friday’s collaborations with Sinead on the In The Name Of The Father soundtrack. Which, it must be pointed out, also featured a cameo from John D. Reynolds. Dillon got the call to appear on Reynolds’ Ghostland album Interview With The Angel last year, and she graces the record’s twin highlights, ‘Sacred Touch Of Beauty’ (the most explicit recorded evidence of her Kate Bush fixation) and ‘Faith In Love’, a sleeping beauty of a song that, in The Corrs’ hands, would surely have breached the top 20.

“There were great plans to release ‘Faith In Love’ as the single, and they were talking about doing a video and I was totally up for everything,” Dillon recalls. “And I don’t know exactly what happened, but it didn’t seem to do as well as everybody had predicted. Maybe it didn’t get the right push. It’s such a shame, I always keep thinking some time down the line somebody will discover it again.”

In the meantime, Cara Dillon has her own career to attend to. One suspects that, if she takes the risks, she could bring the ballad into peculiar new territories, from Long Kesh to Bangladesh to Marrakech. Her phrasing is so steeped in indigenous Irish music, the trad centre would always hold.

“I’ve never been trained to sing at all,” she admits. “I’ve just sat and listened to a lot of singers and learned songs verse by verse and just picked up some of the ways to use ornamentation. It all came very naturally, I’m very lucky. My grandmother who died when I was three was a very good traditional singer and so it’s definitely something that’s in our genes.

“A lot of people say to me, ‘I really like that song and I like the way you sing it and your style, could you tell me how you do it?’ and I don’t really have an answer for it. I know I can sing and I know I can sing in tune, but I can’t see why people like my voice so much. I just count it as a blessing every time I get a compliment like that. I open my mouth and hope for the best.”