Stuck In The Midlands With You

IT WAS the pain in the brain that finally did me in. Twenty-four hours and sixty-three thousand bars later and I was on death’s door, bleating to be let in. It was that kind of a trip. And who said that nothing happens in the midlands?

Ferbane, Co. Offaly. Either a haven for emigrant Ku Klux Klaners (Fear Bán – ‘White Man’) or a cradle for transsexuals and assorted hermaphrodites en route to more conservative sexual identities (Fear Bean – ‘Man Woman’). Whatever way you look at it, the prospect of boarding a caravanserai to such an exotic destination was one to be relished – especially given the fact that the alternative was a wet Thursday night perched bestride a sod of turf in front of the telly. Yes indeed, when Danny Guinan and Tommy Walsh delivered the invite they didn’t have to hang around too long for my RSVP . . .

The toothbrush packed. The dancing shoes resoled. The Riverdance gúna resurrected from the ashes of another night on the boards. (And I bet you thought all us Hot Press hacks moped around on barstools all evening. Hah! We do – but only after we’ve tripped the light fantastic around the dresser at least once. It’s in our contracts, you see.)

Hiney’s was beckoning us, its barroom renowned from Kiltormer to Kinnegad; its pristine quadraphonic sound system the envy of every audiophile from Maynooth to Moyvane. Danny assured us that the trip back to his home turf would take no more than an hour and forty minutes but being accustomed to supersonic vehicles that skim the potholes (as opposed to sinking into their depths, as we inevitably did) and show blithe ignorance of such navigational inconveniences as bends and single lanes, he’d plum forgotten that crucial half an hour that we had to tack on to get us from the civilised side of Clara to Ferbane. Singer/songwriter extraordinaire, he may be. Eddie Jordan he certainly ain’t.

And so, having survived an abortive attempt on Danny’s part to set the car, us four and the entire petrol station on the banks of the M50 alight, we finally descend on the house of Hiney, by way of Kinnegad, and a merciful stopover at Harry’s, the only unidentified airport terminal in the country, with 30 and 40-seater state-of-the-art transporters awaiting the call to taxi to the main Kinnegad runway. Hell, even the PA system would leave Gatwick, never mind Knock, for dead. And a curious antidote to the Bank Manager’s Lament, the bane of every Junior Chamber member’s life: They say that Naas is a terrible place/Mullingar is just as bad/Newcastle West was never the best/But fuck me . . . Kinnegad.

All the bad press in the world wiped clean by the house special, the mother of all fry-ups, better than a 30 grand account with Carr Communications. Fortified thus, we sallied forth, pedal to the floor, in search of a decent pint and an even more decent song or three.

And so to the town by the river of God. Hardly a shrine to the latest and greatest, Offaly’s still made its mark on the live music scene, although its main claim to fame stretches back more than a decade ago. It was then that Shinrone took its place among the musically enlightened nations of the earth and decided to play house with the likes of no less luminaries than Arlo Guthrie and Mr. Zimmerman himself. Even The Pogues managed to navigate their way to its hallowed hall. Yes, when Dublin was still in thrall with the follicly challenged Dickie Rock, and Cork hadn’t quite come to grips with the intricacies of Jimmy Crowley’s vocal meanderings, Shinrone was basking in the joys of premier imported musicians. For a while there it was looking as though they’d have to build a flyover from Leixlip to Banagher to accommodate the coaches alone. But like all inspired events, its days were numbered, its rosy halo now a distant memory . . .

Ferbane stands adrift in the midlands, its back arched baldly against the Dublin road, its sides flanked by St. Mary’s Parochial Hall at one end and a mighty lively chipper at the other. It’s 9pm and anyone with half a cerebral hemisphere is tucked up safely in front of the telly. There are a few strays about though, and one in particular has the misfortune to request a soft apple from the proprietor of a local shop with a fixation on energy efficiency, judging by the 40 watt bulb trickling a thread of light on the barter. His seemingly harmless request is met with a smirk and a head toss, accompanied by the stinging: “Sure, haven’t you a fine mouthful of delf to manage a hard one!” He’s left with little option but to lope out, appleless and red-faced, and doubtless vowing never to sully the threshold with his orthodontistry again.

The opposition taverns make for interesting, if brief, interludes. The ‘Ball O’ Malt’ is too brash a hostelry for our purposes and Grennan’s looks all booked up with Thursday night’s ESB cheques.

So it’s back to Hiney’s in search of the music. Speranza are unlikely progeny of this strange milieu. Born of Guinan and Walsh’s twin desires to “play traditional that isn’t traditional,” it’s a partnership, if not quite made in heaven, at least partly airfixed on cloud nine, far removed from the mundane (and decidedly odious) constraints of the real world, and Greenwich Mean Time. As soon as Speranza hit the Offaly border, they enter what they lovingly refer to as Hiney Time, where clocks tick tock but never advance, where time and tide wait not just for every man, but every lame dog as well.

Being one of eight pubs at the beck and call of some 1,500 people might not suggest that every night’s a sell-out, but Hiney’s can lay claim to more than a few overflowing guest books. Four Men And A Dog stop by every now and then. So too Andy Irvine and Freddie White, (who was more than a tad peeved that he didn’t receive the same rapt response to which he’d grown accustomed in the Béal Bocht), and a rake of other wayward travellers who settled there en route to venues further westward. And with only the bogs and the power station to keep things ticking over, small wonder that the appetite for soul food is hale and hearty and well ensconced in Hiney’s.

“Mind out” is the greeting round these parts, and although the novice might duck, thinking it the midland equivalent of ‘fore’, it quickly seeps into the braincells and worms its way to the lips more than once before the night’s out. “It’s not simple” is another colloquial nugget that covers everything from weather forecasting to the mental arithmetic that Johnny Lappin and Alan Connaughtan engage in as they flog CDs after the show.

Once you’ve mastered the local thesaurus the night’s anyone’s and HP, never backward in coming forward, draws a sharp intake of breath and enters the fray – with zest.

Speranza is a footloose toddler now, a healthy five-year-old pedestrian – with designs on raising a gallop one of these days. “Don’t fuck around with me” was Tommy Walsh’s salutation-cum-admonition to Danny Guinan (henceforth to be known as The Dubious Brothers) on the occasion of their first encounter half a decade ago. Having hauled their asses, accordions, guitars and assorted stragglers the length and breadth of Europe in the back of an orange VW, they cottoned on to the possibility that they just might have something in this harebrained idea of theirs.

“It’s been a labour of love,” offers Guinan, still smiling after all these years, “and we’ve lived in one another’s pockets for the last five years.”

After the original line-up engaged in a touch of spontaneous combustion (on their return in the back of the, by now, clapped-out VW), Walsh and Guinan decided that they’d engage session musicians for any further gigs since their own (mercifully intact) partnership was still intact – and accounted for all the creative drive behind Speranza anyway.

“Working with session musicians has been so much better,” insists Guinan, “because if you’ve got five permanent members of a band and you’re struggling, you end up with five chiefs, all shouting and roaring. Nothing is coherent. This way is so much better, because the music is all our own and we’re in control.”

If Speranza lay claim to no other virtue than to patience, the five years in the wings has at least taught them to cherish the long haul and to hold their breath for no-one. (A bit like their patroness and namesake, Oscar Wilde’s Ma, who, it’s said, ploughed her own highly distinctive furrow alongside those of her gamey husband and even gamier son).

“We feel like we’re starting afresh now,” Guinan elaborates, “that ’95 is our year, but we have learned to be patient! When we started out, we used to set ourselves these silly deadlines like, every January we’d say: if it isn’t working by May, we’ll pack it in. But sure, you might only play 20 gigs between January and May!”

Tommy Walsh is equally stoical in attitude:

“I think this is the best way really, because after five years there’s no part of the music business that we don’t understand. We certainly don’t have our heads in the clouds.”

Session musicians come and go by their very nature, yet Speranza have managed to lay at least intermittent claim to three key players who’ve followed their trail for the best part of two years now. With Eddie Lee on bass, Tom Jamieson on drums and all manner of exotic percussive bits and pieces, and Daragh Connolly on keyboards, they’ve got the luxury of a tried and tested trio who are still outside the loop when it comes to the crunch of making big band decisions.

“We are lucky,” Guinan nods, “and we’ve built up to a situation where it doesn’t look like just Tommy and me up there, with the others on the periphery. It works as a unit. Speranza is a band for all intents and purposes, though it has a different structure to the usual one, I suppose.

At this stage The Dubious Brothers are flicking through their mental cardexes at the rate of knots. A whirlwind of scéals sweeps them through the chapters until they come to a screeching halt at the door of one Dolores O’Riordan, who occupies more than a passing thought in their joint cerebral filofax. Speranza know all about the modish pretensions of the media and so too do The Cranberries, according to Tommy Guinan, anyway.

“They are a classic case of going away, coming back and not being too impressed with having been ignored here,” he avers. “And they were the same band that they were when they left but because they caught on to something huge in the States, all of a sudden they were ‘ours’, and everybody wanted to hang onto their coat tails. Well, I’d say Dolores O’Riordan would have a lot of bones to pick with a lot of people in this country. I’d say that they found it as hard to break it here as we are now.”

(And later, listening to their venomous and powerful live rendition of ‘Poison Pen’, the irony of being ignored because of your culchie origins hits home with all the force of a 7lb belt of a mallet on the cranium. For three minutes there, it looked and sounded like the Dubious Brothers were on intravenous run-offs from the power station, a Ferbane special, so to speak.)

By their own admission, a ‘harem scarem’ of sounds and styles, Speranza lay no claim to the purist agenda. Images of Ukrainian waltzing gypsies meld with schizoid stepdances that could be from Dun Chaoin, (only they’re not), and there’d be no-one less surprised than themselves if the Balfa Brothers dropped in for a spoonful of jambalaya. Heck, even Gabriel Yared (he of Betty Blue infamy) can be heard echoing through ‘Strawberry Jam Forever’, the accordion elevated from its status as ultimate missionary from hell to that of heavenly being – and all in the space of a handful of bars).

But Danny Guinan’s under no illusions about what gives when it comes to playing around with the native chords.

“Traditional music is a strange pitch to be playing on,” he says, “because the referee’s a bastard, basically! I don’t agree with the way Comhaltas do their job, and their ideas on music are very entrenched.

Tommy, ever the pragmatist, sets his viewfinder closer to home, to the live circuit, which is what counts as far as he and Speranza are concerned.

“If you go to any session in Dublin, you’ll find that everyone adds their own thing,” he notes, all but wringing his hands in frustration at this ugly monster called purism that raises its bulbous head with alarming regularity. “And one of the reasons that Speranza is such a melting pot is because of Danny’s and my musical backgrounds. I’m a classically-trained accordionist (imagine, he played with 40 other accordionists – a veritable satanic revenge on humanity – SL) and Danny comes from a country/bluegrass/folk background – so when you put those things together it’s amazing what you can come up with. That’s why Speranza sounds original.”

But the accordion! Probably the greatest rehabilitation success since Liz Taylor left the Betty Ford clinic with her liver rekindled by all kinds of wondrous cocktails and potions. How is it that so maligned an agent as the accordion (and the purveyor of more than one cringingly painful migraine chez Long in the past), can have elevated itself to the highest echelons of musical endeavour in a few short years? Tommy Walsh isn’t short of an opinion on that one.

“Mick Finn of The Café Orchestra has brought the reputation of the accordion a long way,” he observes, “and really, lately, people have started getting into the older instruments again. Like, the harp is beginning to take off all over Europe. Basically it adds a lot of balls to the music!

“I think the first people to really use it well were The Waterboys, and on the outside of The Hothouse Flowers’ album, Home, sure, isn’t Liam O’Maonlaí holding one! So in the right hands, it’s not such a bad instrument!”

Yet how much of Speranza 1995 is audience-driven? Is it a case of giving the punters what they want to hear, having strawpolled what’s out there on the live scene?

Tommy’s mortally offended at the very suggestion that they might be so readily bought out.

“Most of it (our music) is our own,” he admonishes, the cigarette flicking nervously close to my larynx, “because there was no way I was getting in to playing bolloxology like ‘The Marino Waltz’. But just because the music industry is driven by a need to pigeonhole different types of music doesn’t mean that we’re going to be as neatly boxed up. We’re not!”

Another thing that riles these Dubious Brothers more than anyone kicking a mule is the propensity among the Irish media and music industry to buttress the ivory towers that some folk like to surround themselves with, regardless of the sometimes questionable quality of their work.

It’s a subject particularly close to Danny Guinan’s heart, and one on which, like the driest of Martinis, he can wax lyrical anytime, any place, anywhere.

“I think that some quarters of the media adopt a ‘holier than thou’ attitude,” he insists, “about particular artists who are almost deemed untouchable. And because the network is so small here, if you stand on somebody’s toes, they’ll stand on yours ten times over.”

“Which is a pity,” chimes in dubious £2, (aka Tommy) “because we’re all there to be given a bit of a bollocking every now and again.”

Danny’s on a roll now. He’s building up to a trot, and there’s nothing between him and a rake of hurdles ahead. “I’m talking about everyone from Mary Black to Christy Moore to Donal Lunny to Christy Hennessy. I think Christy Hennessy writes abysmal songs, I think they’re awful lyrically. And I’m not saying that what Speranza are doing is mind-blowingly brilliant or earth-shattering, but I do think that people should be more aware of what they’re doing, what they’re writing.”

Could it be that this ‘club’ has proved impenetrable to these neophytes, and that the presence of such an ‘inner sanctum’ is, by its very existence, an affront to the newer breed who want to make it on the basis of what they can do rather than who they know?

Tommy Walsh nods strenuously. “It’s like this River Of Sound now: there are an awful lot of artists appearing on that who are all the same! If they want to go out there and tell people where the influences are coming from in Irish music, then they should at least bring the cameras out to gigs, film them, and say, ‘that’s what they do. It’s not what we’re interested in, or it’s a heap of shite’, but at least show it so that people who’ve never been at a gig can hear it.”

Danny cuts across, face redder than the hair on his head, eyes glistening with animation, his favourite subject is centre stage.

“We’re not part of the golden circle,” he says. “There is definitely a club and I think that most people get turned away from the door. It just strikes me as strange that the same people have been at the front for a long time now. The whole scene needs a breath of fresh air.

And you can’t get much fresher than the backyard of Hiney’s. Their arrival in their home territory is marked by free pints all round. Speranza have some dear friends around these parts. With a ceiling fan fresh from its cameo in Apocalypse Now, poised to give Tommy Walsh one of the closest haircuts he’s ever had (should he venture to levitate a couple of inches upwards in the heat of the moment), the féile swings into action and . . . it’s a full frontal assault on the senses for the guts of two hours.

Walsh plays a mean jazz fusion accordion that has few, if any parallels. And Danny’s (a red-headed gearceach amid the ecstasies of the set) elastic ankles go like the clappers between ‘Bringing It All Back Up’ and Speranza’s hallmark, ‘Before I’m Thirty’.

Hiney’s is alive with excitement. Twenty-punt notes are frozen in mid-air, en route to the till but transfixed by the sheer exuberance of The Dubious Brothers in full flight. Like a hybrid of Patti Smith in her guitar crushing heyday and Cooney and Begley on speed, all that seems to be left is for the volume to be turned to 11 – and they’re off down the home stretch, faces grinning madly, eyes boring holes in the ozone, fingers and toes clicking at an unmerciful rate!

But on Hiney time they’re only on the starting blocks. Once the front bar is cleared by the local boys in blue, (in surprisingly diligent form), we adjourn to the kitchen, where the duo are joined by all shape and size of stray relative and rabble alike, all of whom seem possessed of incredibly agile vocal chords, and even more unbelievably lissom temporal lobes that compose impromptu ditties and rhymes to suit the moment.

They flick through everything from ‘Seasons In The Sun’ to ‘Betty Blue’ and ‘Chantal De Champignon’ – and all points east and west. With enough lubrication on tap to fill Blessington reservoir there are no excuses and no silences. At one count there are 19 bodies rapt in unison, bodies and voices at one, blissfully ignorant of the rising sun and the frightful demands of hard copy.

Gráinne O’Brien, PR assistant without compare, ferries one shattered hack back towards the Leixlip bypass. It’s now 7am and the snow-covered Wicklow hills beckon in the distance. But there’s work to be done, copy to be filed. And a bike ride to be taken to collect the pay cheque. And that’s where the pain in the brain takes hold and refuses to release its grip until I finally locate a bed many hours and fistfuls of soluble Disprin later.

Speranza know how to party. I just wish they’d send their invites for the weekend!