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Was it a bird? Was it an old song that you remembered? What is a long gone song?” The very rhythm of MacGowan’s line, and the varying perspectives it throws up, cap- tured O’Neill, who is a huge fan. “I think he is a true poet, the real deal… So, it was- n’t a hard decision.”
Traditional song The Galway Shawl opens the album – unaccompanied, unvar- nished, but always warm. This ballad became well known through the Alan Lomax 1956 recording with Margaret Barry singing. “I have a great, huge feeling of familiarity with her, not just her singing but in the way she talked about life,” O’Neill told me as we discussed the chal- lenges for Barry and the travellers she lived with. “I put The Galway Shawl on [the album] because it was very much a part of my life in the last year and a half,” she went on. “I was asked to learn that for a film called Song Of Granite about the sean nós singer Joe Heaney.” O’Neill appears in the film singing the song and it has been in her set ever since.
Nasty, paranoid, Along The North
Strand has Christophe Capewell’s hell-fid- dle scratching the mood, scraping against Cormac Begley’s “concertina kind of breathing like a panicked horse... the sense of panic was what I wanted to execute, and he went for it, he went beast on it… I said ‘Christophe if you can, try and bounce off
what Cormac is doing there. This is chaotic, it is chaos, that’s the only thing for here.’ I started to whistle and squeal and then off he went, he did it. He did more than I asked. Yes, that was exciting, it was an exciting moment in the studio.”
automation eats their jobs alive. “That one was suggested by the National Con- cert Hall,” she explained. “I was there to take part in an album that we made about the river Liffey and the docklands.” On Rock The Machine her words are bal- last to the industrial drones and ticks of the music. “That’s me bowing the banjo. I took the violin bow and I’m bowing the G-string of the banjo. It’s an uncomfort- able feeling but I like it. I think it works. I think it gives it a sense of machinery. That’s Christophe again on the fiddle and harmonium on that.”
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As for traditional song The Factory Girl: “That was Radie’s idea.” O’Neill and Lankum’s Radie Peat are friends. “She was saying, ‘I really like the idea of learning this particular song,’ and we started working on it. Radie is good at working on harmonies. I’m good at singing harmony once it’s in, but I’m not good at sitting figuring it out –
’Neill’s own Rock The Machine narrates the loss of dignity, livelihood, comradeship and structure for workers at Dublin’s docklands, as
she is… Our voices, we’re not the same. We’re definitely not the same… they’re very complementary if that doesn’t sound too confident or cocky. I think I’m very proud to say that me and Radie’s voices are interesting instruments alongside each other and I hope that we get to explore another song or two in the future.”
And it’s back to Lankum for the inclu- sion of O’Neill’s original, Violet Gibson, the frankly tragic and incredible account of an Irish woman who voyaged over to Rome in 1926 in order to assassinate the fascist dic- tator Mussolini. “Ian Lynch suggested to me that I write a song about Violet Gibson. So, I went and looked up this woman and said, ‘Off we go, this is interesting’… she wanted to kill him, she wanted to take him out. There is no one way or another about this. But unfortunately, she didn’t succeed. In the song as well, she said, ‘I’m mad, I know, I’m not denying that. I’m mad enough to do something like this, who else is going to do it?’” It’s a human, insightful take on an extraordinary story.
With Heard A Long Gone Song released and ready, Lisa O’Neill has spent the end of 2018 touring internationally. Look out for her: she plays Celtic Connec- tions with Slow Moving Clouds on 2nd February 2019 and for further details on where else to catch her visit
www.lisaoneill.ie
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Photo: Claire
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