Look What They've Done To Our Songs, Ma?

The Dublin Folk Festival proved it. We're in the middle of a folk movement, larger and more significant than the sixties revival. The music is of a higher quality than before and the audiences more knowledgeable - as a result of which bands can no longer get away with coarsely cranking out belligerent ballads or churning out grandstanding sets of jigs and reels.

Bands like The Chieftains or The Bothy Band are now competing on equal terms sales-wise with Big Tom or The Stones. But even if they haven't quite reached that peak of sales, all indicators point positively to the conclusion that their audience is increasing, and has a deal to go yet before reaching an upper limit.

Yet, despite the foregoing optimistic intro, I was feeling ambivalent about this project since I've often had the (possibly paranoid) feeling that the folk community en masse has not always been the most easy-going towards individuals who don't wholly accept the mysteries of the discipline.

Folk musicians are among the most articulate and self-aware of their trade, liable to shred any gossamer theories I might indulge in. I'm coming at this from a rock angle. But let it be said, as most Irish rockers will testify, it's virtually impossible not to be touched by folk music.

It's an integral and vital aspect of the prevailing musical climate, so much in the air that it likely provides a major reason why Thin Lizzy are such a unique rock band. Why, even Van Morrison admits to having been affected by it, so much so that he'll theorise about the blues and Irish traditional music having a common source, far back in the mists of pre-history.

So I'll stick my neck out and find how the axe falls anyway.

Tuesday night of the Festival and The Bothy Band are playing Liberty Hall. First flagship of the Fleet Mulligan, The Bothies have travelled many a missionary mile since their beginning. It seems that every time we ring up the Mulligan office, they're off round the Continent. "If this is Tuesday it must be Belgium" is their present way of life.

Like many of their contemporaries, The Bothy Band are part of a new generation of roving scholars; sowing and nurturing cells of folk fervour throughout Europe. Coras Trachtala mightn't be aware of it yet, but in these days of recession, folk music is a thriving export and The Bothies are in the front line of the Irish invasion.

Back to base... and the realisation that Liberty Hall isn't my first choice for a folk event. My happiest memories are of evenings in Slattery's or The Meeting Place. The concert setting always makes for predictability - and erects a barrier that separates band and audience.

Seamus Ennis plays support and I remember an evening, five years ago or more, sitting so close to the stand that I could have shook those surgeon's hands of his. Those lean, prehensile fingers are the measure of man. More perfect hands for a piper, there cannot be.

And in a club, Seamus lures the audience into his own world, so subtly and so unconsciously that it isn't till it's over you realise you've been seduced by an immaculate showman (Bill!!! - Ed.)

Against the odds, he repeated the trick at Liberty Hall, telescoping the theatre till it seemed but a quarter of its actual size. With any other performer Seamus' mixture of stories, songs and piping would seem an undisciplined mish-mash, but his persuasive personality fuses it together till nothing could be more natural.

And then he walked off, gently and firmly refusing to return, his genuine courtesy showing up the encore game for the charade it too often can be.

Follow that! The Bothies need not have had any fears. The audience were ever-ready to be converted and at the end of each number, the seats around me erupted into storms of applause. Only one long encore did they take, but they could easily have followed with another.

But later at the Festival Club, one could detect a Bothy backlash. And since the hard words came from people I respect, I couldn't but listen attentively to the determined opinions that The Bothies were losing their sensitivity, hammering away with decreasing respect for the melodies - the effect possibly of playing to foreign audiences, whose knowledge of the finer points of traditional tunes must be less than any Irish addict's.

Me? I'd enjoyed the concert. But here and now let me say that I don't claim an A-plus in traditional music. If I was going to take any critical tack, it was to make the point that playing a largely instrumental set to a seated, immovable audience sets up some problematic contradiction. The Bothies play dance music and there were times during the gig when I was eager to get up and move. It's the old concert coitus interruptus.

But if there is one seeming certainty in the situation, it's that success has set new problems and that there's a likely parting of the ways between the purists and bands like The Bothies who see themselves as pathfinders.

Donal Lunny and Triona Ní Dhomhnaill were the candidates for interview, a fitting selection since many of the criticisms were directed at what can only be termed the Bothy rhythm section.

Donal, very much the technician, organised and analytical, measuring his sentences shrewdly and carefully, makes his opinions felt without any superfluous rancour. Triona - the last I'd seen of her was at the Festival Club in the Tailor's Hall, harmonising on 'Barbara Allen' with her sister Mairead, oblivious of the surrounding alcoholic haze.

It's Donal who takes the lead in our conversation, firmly guiding the tiller - but he doesn't have a monopoly of the chat, as Triona slips in, every so often to nudge the discussion along.

We talk initially of the band's formation. From both their accounts, it was an extremely casual affair at first.

Donal kicks off: "There's a lot of confusion about that around. People assumed it was my band, that I'd instigated it, coming out of Planxty, since I was the person they knew the best. It wasn't so at all. It was really Tony McMahon and Micheál O'Domhnaill, if anybody."

They all came together for informal lunch-time sessions organised during Gael Linn's anniversary celebrations and during the autumn and winter, more enduring links were forged. But as Triona says, everybody involved had other plans, other jobs. "What we decided first was to go down the country and do a gig every weekend in some small town, have the crack and meet the local musicians.

"Everybody was still working. Paddy Glackin was teaching, I was working in Gael Linn, Matt was in Aer Lingus, Donal was producing, while Tony and Micheál were working in Radio Eireann."

The gradual path from such informality to the point where The Bothies became a professional band wrought its changes. Tony McMahon, who had ambitions in RTE decided to follow his fortunes there, while Paddy Glackin fell by the wayside also. (See interview in July 21st issue of Hot Press). Tommy Peoples and Paddy Keenan were the replacements for the first album.

At first, Mulligan was seen as their own custom-built label, but as Donal remarks, "I think it very quickly built up because there was so much material around. Also disillusionment with the bigger record companies."

That's the factual hors d'oeuvre to the meat of the interview. I ask Donal and Triona about the early intentions of the band. Donal takes up the baton.

"The whole principle of accompanying traditional music is a delicate area because of the way it's been approached before. There's been abuse of the traditional modes. I'm not saying we haven't broken traditional modes ourselves, but when you have a certain scale in a tune, all the accompaniments should spring from that scale. You try to underline the various strengths and characteristics of the tune."

How have those intentions worked out?

Donal: "The roles which Micheál, Triona and myself have in the band, there's a certain discipline attached to it as to what you can do within the structure of the tune - and it took a while to find it.

"My playing has changed since the band started in that I'm doing a mixture of percussion and rhythm whereas before then, it was a much more melodic thing. The same with Triona, simply for economy of space to make the arrangements click together more effectively."

Triona fills the argument out: "I think in the beginning, we tended to follow the melody line more." And Donal punches the point home: "It tends to turn into one sound."

And this is The Bothies venture into the kind of unexplored territory that more conservative listeners refuse to risk. Before we'd settled down to the interview, Triona adverted to the increasing criticisms the band had begun to attract. She refers to them again.

"People are now getting really worried and it's cropping up all over the place. Every day I seem to pick up the paper and the writers are saying, the purists, the poor purists, they're being shocked. And the same thing was hinted at in the other thing I was talking about (by Paddy Glackin in Hibernia).

"Then there was Pearse Hutchinson reviewing our gig on Oro Dohmnaigh last Sunday and he talked about Seamus Ennis and his greatness and he talked about his fears of it all being swamped by the Europeans following us. 'Group-mania' - he used that term.

"And he said he was a little worried by the 'rhythm section' and getting away from the solo tradition of the solo piper, the solo fiddler, the solo flute-p[layer or just the small ensemble of three or four musicians flaking out together."

Donal returns. This is the much-vexed question of accompaniment.

"From a purist point of view, accompaniment of any kind is a dilution. It's water in the whiskey. And I realise that it's a contradiction to create and expand traditional music in purist terms, because traditional music, by definition, is music the way it was played two hundred years ago. Two hundred years ago, bouzoukis didn't exist."

"Or clavinets," adds Triona.

"An album of a solo piper is too intense, too demanding for the vast majority of people to sit down and listen to it. You relieve it by accompaniment. You add in various colours, and it also relates to contemporary music, because nearly all contemporary music is accompanied."

Since for simplicity's sake, they've been labelled The Bothies rhythm section, it's proper to tackle them on the use of percussion and drums in connection with traditional music. For me, the Dave Mattacks patented style leads down a cul-de-sac, not an Irish boreen. It may fit the English Morris but it doesn't fit Irish tunes.

Donal thinks all such accompaniments have their roots outside of folk, so that one gets two unconnected layers of music, one the traditional melody the other a contemporary accompaniment underneath.

"The structure of Irish music is linear, melodies that go on and on. Contemporary music is syncopated and percussive. A good bodhrán player can bring out emphases in the tune, but there's also something continuous and the spaces are less and less."

Triona takes up the bodhrán theme.

"Apparently, its first purpose was not to accompany other instruments, but was to teach dance through its rhythm. The bodhrán player was also the dance teacher."

Drum like you dance. But who's dancing? Back in the Liberty Hall seats or at any Bothy gig, their audience is a listening one and both admit the contradiction of playing dance music in that setting.

Plus, it's unlikely that the majority of their audience have much more than the faintest knowledge of dance steps. The negative rejoinder is that the music's been stripped of its original social function - the positive response is that it's searching for a new role.

Donal again: "I don't think the band would be able to play as it does in a dance situation. Whenever there was a big changeover of rhythm, there'd be people spraining their ankles. The way it works best in a concert situation is where there's room to dance and people get so lifted that towards the end of the night, they all lep out on the floor - in which case, we'll give them things they can dance to. But that might only be for ten minutes."

But Donal neither expects nor desires automatic allegiance to the codes of Irish dancing. Don't be self-conscious, dance as you feel would summarise his tolerant attitude.

A necessary tolerance for a band spending an increasing amount of time touring out of Ireland! Germany is where The Bothies are greeted with most enthusiasm. Something in the German temperament sees Ireland as a mystic rural haven, free of the impersonalities of modern industrial living.

They also identify with Ireland as a once-suppressed country but Donal isn't altogether happy with political constructions being laid on their music.

"In a way, that's false. I think many Germans get into the music with a political thing in the back of their minds. We're not really interested in that. The last tour was when I first realised it was there. There are undertones of socialism among the people who are interested in Irish music, which is fine. But whoever bloody well likes should come along and listen to the music."

On the continent, The Bothy Band and groups like them fill a gap. The two World Wars were the ruination of indigenous European folk culture, Donal claims, and added to bomb and bullet was the propaganda stroke by which the Nazis harnessed folk music to their bloody chariot, to its post-war disgrace in West Germany.

So Ireland, in Donal's opinion has "a whole association-free culture, which they can take to en masse with no hang-ups. It's definitely a replacement, but people in Germany are slowly beginning to pick up the threads of their own."

The more German stories I hear, the more bemused I become. Is Ireland the Jamaica of Europe? By-passing Britain, there's a constantly unfolding traffic, the outcome of which is completely unpredictable.

It all began in a Celtic circle with mutual lendings and borrowings between Ireland and Britain. Our talk only picks at the subject and I suspect that both Donal and Triona are only just coming to terms with it.

I can only wildly speculate, but unconsciously Irish musicians may be aiding in the revival of the long dormant body of European folk music. If that should be the case, our own parochial differences will seem puny.

But we don't know and won't know for a decade, at the earliest. Meantime what if the well is poisoned? What if our source runs dry?

Irish music still suffers from inbred factionalism. It's now possible to identify four or five camps. On the edges, considered pariahs by the purists, both the folk-rockers and the bar-ballad bands; at the centre, the acts of Claddagh, Gael-Linn and Mulligan. And then niches have to be found for the parish virtuosos and singers (the source of it all), the Ceili-bands, an organisation like Comhaltas and a group like the Dubliners?

Differing camps, differing audiences and all claiming to fly under the folk banner. One striking distinction lies in the kind of audiences drawn by The Chieftains, The Bothy Band, Horslips or The Wolfe Tones.

For The Bothies, the audience is generally better-educated, better-dressed and from more prosperous backgrounds, ironic, even if only because of folk's occasional claims to be the music of the downtrodden.

That isn't to demand The Bothies should change course, don revolutionary fatigues and sing 'The Internationale' at every date. Just to point out that the dominant strain in the tradition musically in increasingly a rural one, which can't answer for the facts of life in grimy industrial Dublin.

We hover around the topic not without hesitancy, false-starts and misunderstanding. To be fair, much of it is my own fault since I'm stumbling over my ideas, not helping Donal and Triona to catch my drift.

Donal agrees a gap exists and as a musical reason suggests that, "Our songs aren't popular songs, not songs people can just sing. Many of them are very introverted. They're not sing-along songs."

Triona follows. "It's amazing, when I thought back on some of the Clancy Brothers songs that they got from Sara Makem, they were great songs, they're still great and most of them are now forgotten."

Or unusable for The Bothies. Locked away in a dusty cupboard. Don't touch!

Donal rushes in. "That's true. But the associations are so strong for us. Like 'Will You Go, Lassie Go' is a great song but somehow it's a question of musical self-respect. The second thing is to retain your own identity, together with the fact that a song has been sung 500,000 times."

That limits manoeuvre. And as they both point out, The Bothies are a rural band bec ause their present song-source, through Triona, is Nelli Né Dhomhnaill. And those are Donegal songs.

To pressurise Donal and Triona further would be to tackle the wrong people. It's ludicrous to settle blame on them or The Bothies for any uneven development in folk music. And Mulligan have recorded Liam Weldon. Even while we were talking Michael O Domhnaill was in Lombard Studios with Jimmy Crowley.

Micheál's absence on production duties brings up the next question, of the The Bothy's next album, to be released in the autumn. Donal is cagey about the venture, not wishing to give away too many pre-release secrets. He does let slip the comment that they've attempted to achieve a sound that has greater live presence, that kicks out of the speakers with more attack than before. Otherwise he's diplomatically unforthcoming.

Wait and hear.

And that album will be a better answer to their critics than any interview replies. For now, it's enough that both Donal and Triona have shown their determination to keep on their chosen path. The Bothy Band lives.

Be it High Germanic rather than the Rocky Road to Dublin, as long as it's their road and theirs alone.

That's all that really matters.