Fiddler on the hoof

For anyone who’d been paying attention to violinist Colm Mac Con Iomaire’s inspired contributions to the Frames and Swell Season recordings and live performances over the years, the surprise was not that he’d finally recorded his own album, the majestic The Hare’s Corner, but that it took him so long.

“(Kila mainstay) Colm O’Snodaigh was on my case for years, saying, ‘Have you written a tune yet?’” Colm explains over coffee in an Enniscorthy restaurant, having just returned home to Wexford after a spell of touring duties with the Swell Season. “And what took so long was getting good enough on the guitar, bouzouki and banjo to be able to actually ground the sounds that I was hearing. So it took a while for my ability on other instruments to warrant making a record.”
Rather than hire one, Colm figured that if you can’t afford a carpenter, learn how to build the shelves.
“Also, I know how the shelves should look! Without wanting to be a control freak, you hear it a certain way and you want to manifest that, and you’re willing for it to fail, but at least for it to be entirely your own failure. I suppose it’s a by-product of being in The Frames for so long – you do get wise and you learn from your mistakes, working on tight budgets and being able to get the maximum results.”
The Hare’s Corner was recorded in a mobile home at the back of Colm’s house with the help of long-term friend and collaborator Karl Odlum. Did he have a vision of what he wanted to do before the sessions began?
“I had loads of fragments. I found myself using the metaphor of approaching a horse. If you approach a horse directly you’re likely to startle it, you have to approach it sideways. It’s the same with bits of music. You’re hearing this music in your peripheral hearing, you’re trying to sidle up to it without the birds flying away. You approach it laterally, and then it just comes into focus on its own. Music is something that exists outside of us, so I don’t think you can necessarily take credit for being the lucky fucker who caught the fish. If it isn’t you, it’s going to be someone else.”
In keeping with the album title, Colm’s system of symbols and metaphors is agrarian: hares, birds, horses, fields.
“Well, I am and I’m not from Dublin,” he explains. “All of my childhood holidays were either spent in Leitrim, where my mother’s people come from, or Connemara, where my dad’s people come from. Irish people’s connection to the rural and the timeless aspect of our history, there’s been a real interruption in the last 50 years, people rejecting everything that was old, associating it with peasantry and poverty and child abusing priests and all sorts of negative aspects of control.
“But in the Irish speaking reality in Gaelteacht areas… it’s almost like with the English language came prudishness and shame, which is definitely part of the Catholic thing, there’s as much a connection with Puritan values from England, more of a concern with class and outward appearance. So these values are quite new to the Irish people, relatively speaking, and I suppose I was fortunate that the values I was given were something else. I mean, I’ve seen old women crack what would be in English the most crude, bawdy jokes, but in Irish it’s more a celebratory, earthy thing.”

The Hare’s Corner is out on Plateau Records