f56 Remembered Roots
Fiddle master Kevin Burke talks to Tony Montague about the London Irish music scene of the 1960s.
O
n weekend nights In London in the late ’60s, Kevin Burke and his mates from New Eltham would regularly head downtown to the Marquee
Club in Soho to catch the likes of Joe Cocker, Rory Gallagher, Duster Bennett, and Jo Ann Kelly before they became stars of British blues and rock. But on Sunday mornings, and on other evenings of the week, his bus rides across town were in pursuit of a different kind of crack alto- gether – one that happened more quietly, in pubs not clubs, and in what was in effect another country.
“You’d get off the bus, walk down the street, and step through the doorway of the pub into Ireland,” Kevin recalls, from his present home in Portland, Oregon. “Everything was Irish, all the music, the accents, the talk – about Gaelic football, milking the cows and cutting the hay. Two hours later you’d step onto the sidewalk
and be back in Swinging London. So it was like a time-warp or place-warp. All of a sudden you were in a different world.”
On 2018’s live solo release An Evening With Kevin Burke, the legendary fiddler of The Bothy Band doffs his cap to some of the leading musicians he knew and played with in those sessions, people like Lucy Farr, Bobby Casey, and John Carty. The album is a flawless recording of unaccompanied fiddle and, unusually, includes the spoken introductions for each set of tunes – delivered low-key with humour, wit, warmth, and a lifetime’s knowledge of the music.
Before moving to Dublin in the early ’70s to play with Christy Moore and later join the Bothy Band, Kevin was absorbing Irish ways while living in the green pas- tures of suburban south-east London. His first home was in Charlton, just a few hundred yards from Charlton Athletic football ground.
Stepdancing at The Favourite – Reg Hall on melodeon
“People would come to our flat – the upstairs half of a house – for visits, but because there were neighbours below we had to concern ourselves with the noise a bit. When I was eight we moved to our own house in New Eltham. I was already playing by then, and people were coming over from Ireland to stay – young lads or young girls, who might be with us for the first couple of weeks to get their feet on the ground. My dad was a policeman, and to the mums and dads back home, if they had a teenager who was emigrating to London and didn’t know anyone, he was a respectable person they could stay with.”
“A lot of them were neighbours of my parents in Sligo, and most were interested in music. Some of them played. All through my childhood we’d be going to dances, ceilidhs, and sessions. So we knew lots of musicians. There was a small dance hall in Victoria which was very family- friendly, more like a parish hall than a commercial ballroom. I started playing in ceilidh bands when I was about fifteen, in dance halls in Elephant and Castle and again in New Cross, Fulham, Cricklewood, Manor House – all over London really.”
Fulham Broadway was an unsuspected mecca for Irish musicians, just a short walk from the King’s Road parade of London fashionistas. “There were three pubs fac- ing each other – The King’s Head, The White Hart, and The Swan. All had great music. Three or four nights a week there’d be music in Fulham, and you could just ramble from one pub to the other. There’d be, let’s say, Raymond Rowland [accordeon] and Liam Farrell [banjo] play- ing at The White Hart, then you’d go across the road to The King’s Head and it would be Roger Sherlock [flute] and Sean McGuire [fiddle], and then back across the road it would be John Bowe [accordeon] and Paddy Taylor [flute].”
“When I was a little bit older I started going to Dalston to The Favourite. And Murphy’s in Whitechapel was a good Sun- day morning spot as well. There was also a lot of music in Camden Town, but it was a little bit far for us to go to and my parents thought it was a bit rougher, so as a child they were less inclined to bring me there.
Photo: John Harrison/ Brian Shuel Collection
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