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where everyone is there for a good time, but when you play they stay quiet and lis- ten to the words. If you play an Irish festi- val you’d definitely have a gang at the back shouting their heads off.”
“T
Radie had never even set foot in Eng- land before playing Cambridge and was particularly taken with Sidmouth.
“It’s like an English Miltown Malbay. I’d like to hang out there more and play some of the sessions because I find the concertina playing fascinating. It’s pretty separate to the concertina playing in Ireland and I’d like to figure it out a bit.”
They regard their greatest prize in Eng- land as the approval of Martin Carthy… and in Ireland the approval of Christy Moore, who would occasionally drop into their singing sessions in Dublin.
Daragh: “He came over one time to Cormac and Radie’s house and spent the afternoon there singing songs with us in the kitchen – that was surreal.”
Cormac: “We kind of held it together.
We were having sandwiches and tea and singing songs together and he was like ‘right, see youse later lads, maybe we’ll play a gig together some time’. We just looked at each other and said ‘Was that Christy Moore?’”
Amidst all the attention generated by the centenary commemorations of the East- er Rising in Dublin this year, it’s tempting to
hat really struck me about the first gigs we played in England at Cambridge and Sidmouth. Cambridge has a festival atmosphere
foist a political persona on them, particular- ly with references to ‘rebel songs’ bandied so liberally around them. Yet, while they did embrace some of the peripheral fringe events surrounding the Easter Rising cente- nary, they shy away from suggestions of nationalism and rebellion.
Ian: “I like some of those old rebel songs. They’re all part and parcel of the tra- dition. They were really out of fashion for a long time and it wasn’t OK to sing them but they seem to be coming back in fashion. Personally I find a lot of them distasteful – all the bloody, gory images and violence against the Brits – so I wouldn’t be able to sing a lot of them, but they are a valid part of the tradition. It’s people’s history… peo- ple’s version of events that happened and the history isn’t pretty.”
“But with the centenary there has been a lot of dialogue and discussion about what has happened in Ireland over the last 100 years and a lot of stuff has come out into the open, so it’s been a good year for that kind of thing. People talking about what has gone wrong and what can we do to bring things forward, because things have been rough in Ireland for quite a while.”
Radie: “Especially looking at the state of things now and saying ‘what would those lads from 100 years ago think about what is happening now?’ The fact that the people in power now are trying to co-opt the whole thing for their own intents and pur- poses and shift the narrative.”
At one point Ian says: “All good music is political to me, all the music I’m into has a message in some way, but I’m not interested in the in-yer-face stuff. I overdosed on that
in the early days. Nothing is that simple so I’m into a more subtle approach.”
Radie expands the point: “Individually we all have our own politics and well- defined ideas and your own ethos will come out not just in the songs you write, but the songs you are drawn to. I don’t know if it’s an express wish of ours to come across as political, but if you hold views it will come out and permeate things creatively one way or another. On Jools Holland we played a travellers’ song and an anti-war song. But as for being a political band, that sounds a bit too official for me.”
Those powerful Dublin accents are at the crux of everything they sing, of course, though Ian doesn’t understand why this should be considered noteworthy.
“Why wouldn’t we sing in our own accents? I was at a festival in Donegal a cou- ple of years ago at a late night session and I was asked to sing and somebody said ‘you’re not going to sing another one in that Dublin accent are you?’ I said of course I am! How else would I sing? It really used to bug me when I was on the punk scene and people would sing in English accents. Turn on the radio today and hear an Irish band and the chances are they’ll be singing in an American accent. That seems to be the norm. I don’t understand it.”
They don’t know why people have taken them to their hearts with such relish and have no wish to understand why, lest that taints how they approach things in the future. They have no clue why they should be considered different because they’re only doing what comes naturally to them, but different they certainly are.
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