and spilled over into live radio. We took part in a number of festivals such as Northern Lights in Ballycastle. After a run of about three years the shows became more irregular. The last show took place in 2002. It was a fitting end with a superb line up of traditional, folk and blues musicians and master class poet Patrick Fiach. Our loyal fans turned out in force but closing time comes to all things good.
I have always enjoyed travelling and musical opportunities present themselves in unusual ways. In 2000 I ended up in Havana with two Australian friends. There were a couple of buskers on the waterfront. We listened and gave them some money. Then my friends gave them more money and I played for the buskers. They watched and absorbed my playing just as much as I watched and absorbed their playing. It was fun! On another trip to Cuba I had dinner with a musician in Trinidad. After eating we took turns on the guitar. Although he was a bassist by trade he had a lovely touch on the guitar. Trinidad in Cuba is famous for the fusion of Spanish guitar and the Bantu drum. San Pedro de Atacama is a little dusty town in the middle of the Atacama Desert in Chile. There were a couple of cantinas where you could eat and drink. After a day’s mountain biking or trekking I visited the cantinas. An eight piece Chilean mountain band wandered round the cantinas. Ethereal pipes, surging rhythms and the desert skies. Somehow all these musical experiences become distilled.
I have always liked the sound of the bouzouki. A lot of that is down to Planxty, especially the playing of Andy Irvine. He is my favourite string player. Playing live Andy Irvine can pick complex counter melodies with ease and his song writing has an otherness quality to it. I taught myself bouzouki about five years ago. A luthier called Joe Foley made me a guitar shaped bouzouki. It’s a bouzouki with the deeper tone of a folk guitar. The instrument is a goldmine of harmonics and drones. Sometimes it sounds like a harp, even a piano. It is unpredictable and I find it a great help when composing tunes. I also like Leonard Cohen and the defiant irony of his lyrics.
At the age of 50 I took redundancy from teaching to focus on my music. I concentrated on song writing. I wrote 8 new songs and three instrumentals. I revised an older composition of mine
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