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Sean McGuire
Lion I think. Up in Camden Town there were several, and in Kil- burn, and Cricklewood. In South London it was a bit more sparse, but they were there too. Just in London there was Irish music all the time – no question of ‘was it dying out?’ These people were playing it, so were their parents, and their kids. With the English folk scene it was obviously divorced from mainstream living. It did feel like something you’d look up in a library. It never seemed to be a part of life like the Irish. Lucy Farr and Roger Sherlock weren’t playing to preserve the music – it never crossed their minds that it might stop. But in the folk clubs you could sense a lot of this stuff was being preserved. Many of the people singing it weren’t really good, but if they didn’t sing it then nobody would.”
“It was only then that I found out that what was happening in the Irish pubs was also folk music! [laughs]. I didn’t know that. I thought folk music was Joan Baez and Simon & Garfunkel. Then I started to see people from English folk clubs showing up at the Irish sessions. They were beginning to see ‘Oh, these Irish fellas have got their folk music, but it’s in a different kind of condition and serving a different purpose – one which our music used to serve’. So people started to see where each other was coming from. I remember that shift. You started to hear more about ‘British Isles music’ and ‘Celtic music’. The net broadened. That all started around ’66 – ’67, but back in ’62 – ’63 they were isolated – the English folk music would happen in one place, the Irish music in another.”
The tunes on An Evening With Kevin Burke are not all Irish, nor all traditional. They include a French musette, Paris Nights, written by Kevin’s fellow Portland-resident Cal Scott, with whom he recorded Across The Black River in 2007. And the album ends with a pair of Quebecois reels, The Dion Reel and The Mouth Of The Tobique, learned from his late Celtic Fiddle Festival colleague Johnny Cunningham. But the central core is provided by the airs originally learned from session musicians in London and Sligo – and by Kevin’s words, setting them up.
“When I was learning and hanging out with these older peo- ple they’d play a few tunes and then there’d be a bit of chat – sometimes about the music, sometimes about the player they got it from. Or they might say, ‘Have you ever heard Jim play this tune? He’s got a funny way of playing the second part’. Or, ‘I think his dad wrote it’. And someone else would say, ‘I don’t think it was his dad but his uncle’, and so on. And sometimes it would spiral off into some yarn that had nothing to do with music, like how his horse fell down a hole and they had to drag it back up… [laughs]. I was in the habit of hearing tunes in that kind of context.”
Kevin’s own patter – as heard on An Evening – brings his audi- ences closer to him, to the tunes, and to the musicians and places he evokes. “Solo fiddle is not always easy to listen to – not for two hours or more. So I use the talking to put them at ease, and make them feel that whether you know something about this music or not it’s there for everyone to enjoy, so don’t worry about it. I think it helps to give listeners a bit of context to hang their hat on. I try to make it light-hearted but informative, almost like education by stealth. And I think it’s nice for people to understand that I’m real- ly just a link in the chain.”
An Evening With Kevin Burke is released on Kevin’s own Lof- tus Music label, and available directly from his website.
kevinburke.com F
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