The Pipes, The Pipes, Are Calling

When he's playing solo, Liam O'Flynn likes to get out the set of pipes that were bequeathed to him by the master piper Seamus Ennis. Made over 150 years ago and rescued from an English junk shop by Ennis' father, they're pitched a half-step below standard, rendering them unsuitable for the monumental ensemble pieces for which O'Flynn is perhaps best known to the general public. Alone or during his occasional appearances with the poet Seamus Heaney, however, it's to Ennis' pipes that he often turns.

"Because of the pitch and because of the mellow tone, they can give particular tunes a very special feeling," he explains. "I'd always have that set with me, because they're such a lovely instrument to play on and because of the association. The greatest honour any musician could pay to another is to pass over their instrument. And you realise when you're playing this instrument that it was made sometime back around 1830 or whenever it was, and you're just one among a string of people who've played it - the instrument remains there all the time. It's sobering. It's a great privilege, a great joy, and at the same time you realise you're one among many. It gives you a sense of perspective."

The set was made by Maurice Coyne, like O'Flynn himself, a Kildare man - a fact to which the piper attaches some significance. He's a musician who has always understood the importance of nurturing roots, both in his playing and in his personal life. On-stage, he's the most confidence-inspiring of performers. Surrounded by a full orchestra or by an assemblage of music heavyweights - fiddler Sean Keane of the Chieftains, the guitarists Arty McGlynn and Steve Cooney, veteran session keyboard man Rod McVey - it's always O'Flynn who appears to be the anchor, the solid bedrock at the centre of the action. Off-stage, he lives with his wife Jane and their beloved horses in a cottage on 12 acres near Kilcullen, County Kildare - not far from the village of Kill, where he was raised.

"My own place has always been critically important to me," he says, "even before I got married. I was a bachelor for long enough, and I always had to go back to that home base to marshall the forces and the energies. There are other friends of mine to whom base means nothing, they're just as happy on the road, but it's a strong thing for me."

It's impossible to disconnect the groundedness and stability in his life from that in his music - indeed, from the instrument itself.

"There's something about the pipes that seems to bring you back," he speculates, "to take you into history and into the past. I feel there is, anyway. It's such an extraordinary instrument - it's a way of life, almost. It demands commitment."

Liam O'Flynn's father - also called Liam - was born in Kerry but moved up to Kildare at an early age. A fine fiddle player himself, he married Maisie, a Clare woman from Miltown Malbay who played the piano and was related to the great fiddler Junior Crehan. In Kill, O'Flynn senior became the schoolmaster of the local national school, and their house acquired a reputation as a haven for any traditional musicians who might be passing through the village. There were always sessions of a Sunday; among the regular visitors were Junior Crehan, the Clare concertina player Mrs Crotty, and the piper Leo Rowsome, who made the young Liam's concert set of pipes and became his first teacher.

"I had no doubt whatsoever in my own mind from as far back as I can remember that I wanted to play uilleann pipes", Liam recalls. There was something about the sound of them that just penetrated into me. It's such a distinctive voice in itself, the pipes. There was a very strong call, anyway, to me, and I wasn't interested in playing any other instrument.

"I got a Christmas present when I was eleven or twelve of a practice set of pipes, and straight away in January I started taking lessons with Leo in Dublin once a week. I used to live for it."

During the summer holidays, the family would set off for Dingle, County Kerry or Lahinch, County Clare - travelling by motorcycle and sidecar, which attracted much attention from curious on-lookers. In his mother's home village, O'Flynn managed to make the acquaintance of the legendary piper, Willie Clancy. "He was such a lovely man," he says "with a fantastic sense of humour, a really generous character, a generous person with his music."

There were Wednesday night music sessions at Dowling's pub in Prosperous, County Kildare - where Seamus Ennis dropped in one memorable night - and in his teens, O'Flynn began entering the competitions at the Oireachtas in Dublin. Meeting up with other musicians at post-competition sessions, he became more and more integrated into the increasingly lively Dublin traditional music scene.

In 1971, Liam O'Flynn was asked to be a guest, along with Donal Lunny and Andy Irvine, on Christy Moore's seminal album Prosperous.

"It came together very quickly and very, very well," O'Flynn remembers, "and about six months later it had made a big impact and the suggestion was made that we form a group. We started rehearsing in January 1972 and the thing took off."

The group, Planxty, existed for ten years, going through occasional breaks and changes of personnel, but with O'Flynn and Irvine always forming the band's essential core. It is impossible to overstate Planxty's continuing influence on the Irish music scene today. Appealing to a young, urban, international audience, Planxty brought traditional music before a wider public, netting a multi-album deal with Polydor and touring incessantly throughout Europe and the UK. Without Planxty, we might have been spared Michael Flatley - but then, we might not have had Altan, either.

"It really captured something at the time," Liam admits. "We were just kind of swept along on all this interest and popularity. We certainly weren't wise enough to be having meetings about finance and marketing and things like that, and of course like every other band around we were done in record deals and that sort of thing."

Shortly before the band's breakup in 1982, O'Flynn was approached by the composer Shaun Davey, who had read Tim Severin's book The Brendan Voyage and wanted to compose a piece of music based on the journey. Intended at first to be a straightforward composition for solo uilleann pipes, The Brendan Voyage emerged one year later as a massive orchestral suite, with the uilleann pipes representing the boat and the orchestra portraying the various forces of nature it encountered.

"It was terrifying in lots of ways," Liam reflects. "I could read music, but not very well, and all the stuff the conductor was trying to do with his arms was double Dutch to me. And the formality of a concert hall. You can't sit down there and tune up - you knew going on stage that your instrument had to be bang on from the first note, and if it wasn't, well then, you wrecked it for the other seventy or eighty people. There was absolutely no room for error, for a drone slipping or anything like that. But it's a piece that's taken me literally around the world."

O'Flynn's pipes also featured in Davey's other works - Granuaile, The Pilgrim and the Relief Of Derry symphony. In 1985, he was honoured by the Irish National Entertainment Awards, in its inaugural year, for his unique contributions in the field of traditional music. Acknowledged

without dispute as Ireland's master piper, O'Flynn has played on a number of film scores, including Cal, The Field and A River Runs Through It; during the recording of this last, Robert Redford showed up in Windmill Lane to hear O'Flynn play.

Liam has also been a guest on recordings by such artists as Kate Bush, the Everly Brothers, Enya, Mark Knopfler and the late avant-garde composer John Cage. There have been solo albums as well: Out To An Other Side, released in 1994, 1995's award-winning The Given Note, and now The Piper's Call, launched earlier this month by Seamus Heaney in the Pillar Room of the Rotunda.

Last year, as O'Flynn was getting ready to embark on the new album, he received a telephone call from Philip King and Nuala O'Connor of Hummingbird Productions - the impresarios behind Sult, Bringing It All Back Home and other traditional music television programmes. Twenty-five years into O'Flynn's career, they felt that it was the right time for a documentary on his musical life.

"It was very, very exciting and a bit daunting, obviously, to be the centre of something like that," he observes. "To begin with, it gave one a chance to gather round - insofar as is possible - all the various people that I'd been involved with down the years, so that was a lovely thing to have happen. The film and the CD became one and the same project, and that's part of the reason why there's such a broad musical base in the CD."

Broadcast on both TnaG and RTE last April and due to be released on video later this year, the documentary features interviews, extensive archival film footage, some rather charming old photographs of Liam as a nipper with enormous ears, and, most rivetingly, live in-studio performances that went on to become the album itself.

The core band for the project consisted of Arty McGlynn, Steve Cooney, Rod McVey, and the young Northern percussionist Liam Bradley - new to the trad scene and currently working with Van Morrison. Joining them on various tracks are an impressive array of guest musicians: The Chieftains' Matt Molloy and Sean Keane, Galician piper Carlos Nunez, the Irish Chamber Orchestra (performing a lovely arrangement by Micheal O Suilleabhain of the slow air 'Bean Dubh an Ghleanna/The Dark Woman of the Glen'), and, a tad surprisingly, Mark Knopfler.

The Dire Strait plays electric guitar on O'Flynn's composition 'An Droichead/The Bridge', specially commissioned for Mary McAleese's Presidential inauguration, but O'Flynn is quick to defend himself against potential challenges from purists who might raise objections.

"This whole area of mixing musical idioms, I find it very exciting and hugely challenging. The very essence of traditional music, the reason it's so healthy, is that it's living. If you bury it in a vacuum it ceases to have the fresh air that it needs.

"But there's a very natural tension between tradition and innovation, and out of that great creativity can emerge if you succeed with it. It really is a very difficult thing to do musically, to mix musical idioms succesfully. When you do it successfully you create something new, but in the process you must have respect for the traditions you're dealing with."

Having met Knopfler in the mid-1980s when they collaborated on the music for the movie Cal, O'Flynn was invited to be a guest on Knopfler's solo album two years ago and performed with him at the Point in Dublin. "He really has a love for Irish music," O'Flynn says of Knopfler, "and particularly for the sound of the uilleann pipes - and he's a bright boy, he has great respect for other musical traditions. I sent him a tape of the piece, he came over and we all just sat in the studio and started to play, and lovely things began to happen."

Over the summer Liam O'Flynn will be playing at various festivals around the world; tours in Ireland, England and France are planned for the autumn. Unlike many musicians, O'Flynn enjoys the travelling, but he's always happy to get home to Kilcullen, where his life revolves around reading, playing music, attending the odd concert in Dublin and looking after the horses.

"As a kid growing up I was always into sports, into running and football, and I was always really into horses," he explains. "My father was a schoolteacher but the farm across the road had horses, so I spent all my time there. It's always been a real passion with me, the horse thing - there's a real empathy there."

It was through the horses that he met his wife, Jane, ten years ago.

"It was out on the gallops on the Curragh - there was a friend of mine, at the time he was assistant trainer in one of the big yards. I went out one morning with him and there was a large string of horses, and this person came up sides with me. She was making the horse I was riding pull really strongly, and in not so polite language I asked her to pull off a bit, but anyway, that's how I met her! She's very seriously involved in the eventing, very high powered, much more so than ever I could possibly be - she was on the Irish team last year at the European championships. For me it's just my hobby."

I suggest to him that horse-riding is a bit like music in that it involves a high degree of subconscious awareness: allow yourself to actually think for a moment about what any particular muscle is doing, and you lose the lot.

"That is very true, it's instinctive, and as you say, the harder you try to remember everything, the worse it gets. For me, it's a completely natural state when I start playing music - I don't consciously concentrate on any of the individual things to do with the tune.

"I would always feel peculiar if I didn't want to play. I know if I won the Lotto in the morning and I didn't have to go out and make a living, I would still want to make musical plans and continue on doing musical projects for their own sake. It's a case of trying to keep an overall balance - a balance first of all within the musical life between the travelling and the recording and all that sort of thing, and then a general balance within one's life anyway.

"It's not easy, but it's not a bad life. I wouldn't change it." n