27 f Nowt So Punk As Folk
The extraordinary rise and rise of ‘Dublin folk miscreants’ Lynched has been a wonderful thing to watch. Colin Irwin hears about singing in your own voice and the folk award they really won. Photos: Judith Burrows.
Folk Awards… “Please welcome Lynched who are going to sing an IRISH REBEL SONG…” Blimey O’Riley, you think. An Irish rebel song. Live on Radio 2? At the Royal Albert Hall? In front of all the BBC suits? Not to mention Sandie Shaw? And Hardeep Singh Kohli. And Martin Freeman. And that woman who used to be on breakfast telly?
A So what’s it to be then? Come Out Ye
Black & Tans? Kevin Barry? Sunday Bloody Sunday? Give Ireland Back To The Irish? Darting eyes train on Ian Lynch, Daragh Lynch, Radie Peat and Cormac Mac Diarma- da seated slightly uncomfortably centre- stage, perhaps thinking longingly of the grubby squats, Dublin pubs, alternative fes- tivals and protest marches that have been their more familiar domain for most of their career. And, with unassuming strength and suppressed passion, they play Sergeant William Bailey, an engaging song loaded with ‘tooral looral loos’ which celebrates the downfall of a recruiting officer for the British Army.
Bailey isn’t killed or maimed and, unlike the unfortunate recruiting officer in Arthur McBride, doesn’t even have a football made out of his rowdy dow dow. An anti-recruit- ing song, certainly, and a good one, but fair- ly restrained as these things go and hardly equipped to topple empires.
“I have a definite idea of what rebel songs are and that’s not one of them…”
Meet Ian Lynch singer, guitar, uilleann pipes, articulate, reasoned, amiable, throat seemingly constructed of coaldust. “It was probably more to do with the BBC putting a little disclaimer in before we played it. We originally wanted to play Cold Old Fire but they said there were too many people doing laid-back songs already so they want- ed us to do something more upbeat.”
But then Lynched have become well acquainted with the surreal foibles of the music industry this past year or so in an astonishing journey from obscure self-styled “Dublin folk miscreants” to the new dar- lings of the folk scene offering an “authen- tic voice of the streets” connecting old bal- lad singers to classic Irish bands of the past in a refreshingly modern context. Playing at
n audible gulp skips around the regal surrounds of the old Albert Hall as Mark Radcliffe steps forward to announce the next live act at this year’s BBC
Albert’s gaffe in front of the great, the good and the gaudy of the folk world as shortlisted candidates for three awards is but another bizarre landmark.
Over toast and tea a few days later they are still wide-eyed about it all.
“It was… fascinating…” This is Radie Peat, concertina, sallow-face, soft of voice, chatty, confident, opinionated. “The room was amazing. I’d never been there before. It’s incredibly difficult to play those kind of rooms constructed for unamplified music. Once you put speakers in it does really strange stuff, which is quite distracting. From the front it sounded totally normal but to us it sounded like we were in a weird echo chamber the whole time. But we were in tune, which was my biggest fear.”
Nominated for three awards – Best Group, Best Album and Horizon – they ended up winning none. Were they upset about that?
“Nope.” Daragh Lynch, guitar, song-
writer, tattoos, smiley, personable. “We got a much better award than that – Martin Carthy said he liked us. We met him at breakfast the next day. Him and Norma were there and he said ‘I think you’re the best thing since Planxty.’ You don’t need an award after that…”
Proud parents were over in force to see them, ending up after the show in the mid- dle of one of the late night sessions that inevitably follow these occasions. Strategi- cally placed betwixt Eliza Carthy and Alas- dair Roberts, Radie’s dad grabbed the opportunity to sing a Scottish song. “It was the first time I’d ever heard him sing in my life,” says a still shell-shocked Radie. “I had no idea what he was going to sound like.”
Daddy Lynch, meanwhile, was right there at the heart of it all (“Once he starts you can’t stop him”), delivering his big party piece, Gerry Rafferty’s Her Father Did- n’t Like Me Anyway. “He always adds an extra line…he sings ‘Her father didn’t like me anyway’…then he waits and goes ‘THE OLD BOLLOX’.”
All of which adds to their sense of won- der as the kettle boils for the eighteenth time and they reflect on the miracle of musical mishap that has brought them to this point. Liberal references to a punk ancestry (the “traditional music is more punk than punk” quote proffered to some herbert from The Guardian by Ian Lynch last
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