root salad f18 Mary Dillon
In these days of rushed debut CDs, the former Déanta singer has been as a tortoise. Explain, says Colin Irwin.
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o, let’s get this straight, Mary Dillon. You’ve been singing pretty much all your life. You are a double all-Ireland vocal champion, with oodles of acclaim, not to mention a celebrated decade and three albums with one of Northern Ireland’s best bands, Déanta. But they split up in the late 1990s and since then we’ve had diddley squat from you…explain yourself!
“I…er…I’ve been busy…very, very busy…” laughs Mary, putting her feet up after bidding fond farewells to her fraught English A-level students at school in Derry. For fifteen years? That’s a lot of busy…
“Well, you know how it is. People kept asking when I was going to be mak- ing a solo record and I kept thinking I must get around to it, but before I knew it another year had passed. Still, I’ve got round to it at long last…”
Indeed she has. Mary Dillon’s very first solo CD has finally arrived. It’s called North and it’s rather good, despite the practical problems surrounding her decision to record the album in her mammy’s spare bedroom when the realities of daily life habitually conspired to abort attempted sessions. “We had to stop whenever there was a noise. There were the council lawn- mowers around the grass verges outside and the boiler upstairs making a noise and we had to stop every time mammy’s phone or the doorbell rang or the kettle was on…and then we had some wee boy racers turn up outside. It wasn’t easy!”
It was never like this with Coldplay.
The catalyst for the album was her nephew Odhran Mullan, keen to make use of his degree in Sound Engineering & Recording and his battery of recording equipment. She’d already been coaxed back into live performance after a meeting with Tiona McSherry and Niamh Parsons resulted in the formation of their group Sí Van. “I hadn’t seen Tiona for 20 years or something but she phoned me up one day and said ‘Do you fancy a bit of singing?’ and that’s how it started…”
Sí Van? There’s a long sigh when you ask her what the name means. “Oh dear, I knew you were going to ask me that. It’s…I don’t really…it doesn’t mean any- thing…well it does but…it’s something to do with women…I wanted to call the group something else…Petticoat Loose…I thought that was a good name but others didn’t like it. They thought some people would think it was disgusting. So we became Sí Van instead.”
At some point down the road – and
let’s hope it’s not the 20-odd years it’s taken Mary to record her first solo album – we might expect a Sí Van recording but, in the meantime be thankful for North, a title reflecting the roots of most of the material in and around her Ulster her- itage. The original plan was to make it a thematic album constructed entirely of women’s songs, but that went out of the window as she discovered better material that didn’t fit the template. “I kept finding new material that I wanted to record but then I realised they weren’t all women’s songs, though they still had a northern
thread. In the end they were hiding all the books so I wouldn’t find anything else to put on the record.”
The key song that triggered this change of tack is John Condon, a heart- breaking account of a Waterford 14-year- old who served in the British Army and died on the battlefield in Ypres, the youngest casualty of the First World War. She’s been singing it for over a decade and soon realised it would have to go on the album. “I originally sang it as a demo and people kept asking for it so that’s why the women’s album isn’t full of women.”
Apart from supplementary musicians like her former Déanta bandmate Clodagh Warnock on fiddle, Eamonn McElhorn on guitar and Neill Martin on cello, there’s a guest appearance from her little sister Cara, singing with her on Ballyronan Maid. Not unreasonably given their shared upbringing, she and Cara have very similar vocal styles, which begs the inevitable question about her reaction to Cara’s rise – any pangs of sibling envy as she watched Cara’s career take off?
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“No, not at all. She’s done great and we’re all proud. She wanted to be a pro singer so fair play to her.”
he speaks warmly of her ten years with Déanta. “I have great memories – we were really good friends and had some lovely trips. I remember we did sit down once and decide we’d really go for it but we were all in the middle of university courses and it was awkward and then we started getting married and having wains so it didn’t work out.”
She’s more equivocal about the rigid conditions of the Comhaltas singing com- petitions in which she first attracted atten- tion as a youngster, though one epic bal- lad on her album – Edward On Lough Erne Shore – survives from those fraught days in competition at fleadhs. “I couldn’t even describe how nervous I got singing in com- petition – there was so much pressure I could feel my little two legs shaking. But then if I hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have got into traditional songs so fleadhs were a big influence. I always loved Mary Black too, as well as Planxty…oh, and Horslips. I loved Horslips…I used to play their Book Of Invasions at full blast and the whole house would shake.”
So does the release of North now mark her full re-assimilation into music? “I want to do more singing again but I don’t think I could do it all the time. Now I’m too institutionalised – I’m used to waking up at the same time each morning!”
www.marydillon.com F
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