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The Classic Irish

Daoiri Farrell is a straight line musical descendant from Christy Moore, Andy Irvine and Paul Brady, but still his own man. Colin Irwin hears his story.

go to anyway. But then again, this is Dublin. And not any old Dublin. It’s Whe- lan’s. In Wexford Street. Lovely old pub steeped in the music culture of the city. A pub where you go in and the grey giant of a man slumped over the bar still gives you a turn and you say ‘Excuse me’ before remembering it’s a statue; and you can spend hours examining the old posters on

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trike me down and call me Ebenezer, there are queues. Real queues. All round the block. You never see queues for gigs any more, do you? Well, not the gigs I

the walls of past glories. Arctic Monkeys have played here, you know. And the great Nick Cave. And Christy Moore. Many times. And indeed, virtually anyone who’s anyone in Irish music.

And tonight these queues are for a local hero. A very local hero. In fact he grew up a couple of streets away. Daoiri Farrell.

Daoiri is what we groovy music biz types like to describe as “hot” at the moment. We know this because we’re freezing our rhubarbs off standing in a queue round the block waiting to see him.

The occasion is the official launch of Mr

Farrell’s spiffing second album, True Born Irishman, which has already inspired com- parisons with some of the great names in Irish music, and he’s pulled out the stops to make it special, assembling a cast of thou- sands on stage, including two magnificent uilleann pipers, Eoin Kenny and Blackie O’Connell.

“I love the pipes,” he tells me later. “If ever I could go back and learn an instrument, it would be the pipes. Pipes and flute. The sound is so lonesome and powerful, but not as much in your face as Scottish bagpipes.”