Last July, after living here for a decade and a half (give or take), Sarah McQuaid pulled up the tent pegs and moved to Cornwall. Now if I moved to Cornwall, I think I would more than likely buy a big woolly jumper, get a cat, a lot of coal and sit in front of the fire all day looking out at the sea.
Fortunately Sarah McQuaid is made of sterner stuff than I am. And although she possibly has got the jumper, cat and half a ton of coal thing going on, she doesn’t appear to have spent more than a few minutes gazing dreamily at the sea. What she has done is tour extensively in the UK and more recently in Europe, where her ability to create an intimate atmosphere which draws the audience in has been gaining her a solid reputation as one of those ‘when are you coming back?’ performers, making her a favourite with promoters and audiences alike. She has also been busy putting together the long awaited follow-up to her first album When Two Lovers Meet which made lots of year-end lists despite the fact that it’s a re-release.
If, like myself, you’re chomping at the bit to hear album number two, you can at least get yourself along to one of her upcoming Irish dates. Yes, that’s right, she got gone but she can’t stay gone for long, and is about to embark on an exhaustive Irish tour, traversing the length, breadth and depth of the nation. The tour dates are:-
Thursday March 20th:- Thyme Square, Dromore
Friday 21st:- Castle Ward Stable Yard
Saturday 22nd:- Rowallane garden, Ballynahinch
Tuesday 25th:- Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire
Wednesday 26th:- New Music Club, Clonmel
Thursday 27th:- Ballina Arts Centre
Friday 28th:- Iontas Theatre, Castleblayney
Saturday 29th:- Solstice Arts Centre, Navan
Tuesday April 1:- Bridge Tavern, Wicklow
Wednesday 2nd:- No Alibis bookshop, Belfast
Thursday 3rd:- Riverside Theatre, Coleraine
Friday 4th:- Barry's, Grange
Saturday 5th:- South Roscommon Singers Circle, Knockcroghery
Central to Sarah’s first album was the involvement of Gerry O’Beirne on guitar. Gerry has just released a new album of his own The Bog Bodies and Other Stories. The album features his entire ragtag collection of stringed instruments from 12-string and Spanish guitars, national and slide through ukelele and tiple to an old five-string banjo he found on a porch in Texas where Lightnin’ Hopkins used to play. The fiddle playing of Rosie Shipley features on a couple of tracks, but otherwise the guitar is king. The album is part travelogue, part tour diary, with songs evoking stop-offs in Alaska, New Mexico and Texas as well as songs evoking his native Clare.
Mr. O’B speaks eloquently of being moved by seeing the remains of the bog people in the National Museum: “The final tracks, ‘Oldcroghan Man’ and ‘Clonycavan Man’, were composed for two Iron Age bog bodies lately discovered in Ireland, carefully preserved by the earth to which they were committed long ago. Time and the bog seem to have burnished them into an essence of their persons and personalities. Oldcroghan Man was about six foot five; a powerful man. Clonycavan Man was five foot three and wore hair gel that could only have come from France. What stories they could tell! When I saw them in the National Museum in Dublin, I immediately thought about writing this music”.
Coming from a background of managing Bill Hicks and Ed Hamell, the luxuriantly coiffed Peter Casperson might seem like an unlikely champion for Irish folk music, but his United For Opportunity label has released albums by the Guggenheim Grotto and Damien Dempsey in the United States. The one thread that links them is Casperson’s unshakeable conviction that performers with something to say should be given a platform to say it (he’s also very much involved with Ani diFranco). It’s in this context that United For Opportunity has decided to release the latest Black 47 album, Iraq.
He confesses that he was uneasy about how the album might be received in a United States which is becoming increasingly conservative. They’re not the first people to write about the war in Iraq – Canadian Bruce Cockburn actually travelled to Baghdad to experience the conditions there first-hand before writing ‘This Is Baghdad’ on 2006’s Life Short Call Now – but Black 47 has a very close relationship with its fanbase, many of whom have served in the military in Iraq and who came back and recounted their experiences to band leader Larry Kirwan. The songs have been written throughout the course of the war, and a significant batch of them were penned as public opposition to the lunacy of the United States' presence in Iraq grew over the last year – which neatly paralleled the making of the record.
The night that the invasion of Iraq was set in motion – St. Patrick’s Night 2003 – Black 47 were playing at New York’s Knitting Factory. Although their shows are often raucous, on this occasion all hell broke loose, and so began a period of agitation against the war. By his own admission, the period between 2003 and 2005, when support for the war was at its strongest, was one of the lowest periods of Kirwan’s life. He traces the turn in the tide of public support against the war to September 2005 when the protest against US involvement by Cindy Sherman, whose son had been killed in Iraq, led people to re-examine the reality of a war in which their countrymen (along with countless Iraqis) were being killed on a daily basis.
Uneasy with the notion that a band should preach to its audience, the album is filled with black humour and seeks to touch its listeners in a non-didactic fashion. Interestingly though, for the conspiracy theorists among you, Black 47’s website was inaccessible when I tried to check some of these details.