Four roads and forty islands

NEVER mind the showbands — here’s Tommy Tiernan.

Well, not quite, and not according to the man himself. The country’s most popular comedian has finished his World Tour of the Islands, and in a bar which famously played host to Daniel O’Donnell’s first ever concert, Tommy Tiernan evoked — with near-religious fervour — the name of the showband godfather: Big Tom.

In a packed Early’s Bar on the Co Donegal Island of Arranmore, the son of Navan declared his love and admiration for the man known to his mam as Tom McBride, the man who sang, “You’re going out the same way you came in”, a man Tiernan describes as “the colour of nicotine and ear wax”. Despite the laughs, he was only half joking.

Earlier in the day and over a pot of tea, Tiernan mused that in many ways, he is simply following a grand tradition, one that Big Tom knows all too well.

“Our most immediate ancestors would be probably showbands, country music,” he says, a few hours before he bounded on stage to a rapturous welcome from 160-odd people, almost all from the island. “They played small towns, venue to venue and that was just what they did.”

With a laugh he says, “Before that, concurrently you had the Redemptorists and before that again the idea of the itinerant story teller or musician who would have walked from place to place. It seems very ordinary. My heart and bones are in this rural touring”.

Tiernan seems a calmer, more measured individual than you might expect, particularly when contrasted with his firebrand stage performances, or his more infamous television appearances. Maybe it’s the island air, or more likely, his habit of walking everywhere.

“I definitely feel the walking is very important,” he says, “I’ve always felt that you’re entitled to speak to people, even though you mightn’t have any material at the end of the walk for the start of the show, you mightn’t have any material about the island or something, the fact is that you’ve walked it.

“It’s almost like the audience gesture to you is that they’ve bought tickets for the show and they’re excited to come, that’s them leaning out with the hand extended and you’re leaning out, I feel, in that you’ve walked it. That’s you reaching out.”

With his beard, knotted scarf and blackthorn stick, he does seem like the image of a rambling man from a bygone age. The new show, like the older ones, is written “conversationally”, and it’s based on furious flights of the imagination and rooted in the everyday.

“You would always be on the lookout for stories so I was kind of thinking, I wonder if I went there [the islands] would I get a story?” he says. “Sometimes you do but sometimes it’s weird, you don’t get them for three or four years afterwards. You have to absorb the experience and not understand it cognitively — you let the experience into your bones.”

In Early’s the material flows from Big Tom to Bob Dylan and many points in between. His own love of islands comes from a trip to Inisheer when he was 12 and a time living on the largest of the Aran Islands, Inishmore, in his late teens. “I always loved the idea of them,” he says.

“There are definitely different senses of humour around the country,” he continues. “I spent 10 years in Navan so that’s the language I am fluent in — it’s Pat McCabe country, Michael Harding country, it’s the drawl,” he says, contorting his words into that inimitable ‘Kee-avon’ accent. He says he is also fluent in “south Ulster fiddle”.

It’s the era of the stadium rock comedian, where people like Michael McIntyre are making fortunes by packing the London O2. Walking his own path puts Tiernan out of step with some of his peers. He doesn’t really give a damn. “It wouldn’t interest me at all,” he says. “To me Vicar Street is the optimum venue. It takes 1,000 people but it still feels like a boozy bar. I’ve talked to a few comics who have played those big places, I’ve talked to a lot of people who have gone to see shows in those big places and a load of comics tell me that they feel a bit soulless, but that the money is phenomenal. I haven’t been dilemma-ed.”

Despite his zeal while performing, Tiernan still carries some vulnerabilities. “I do wonder sometimes what it might take to keep the audiences coming back to see the show in the counties,” he admits. “At the moment it’s never an issue, but in the back of my mind I’m wondering, ‘Do audiences also need confirmation from other sources that this person is worth going to see? Do they need to see you on television once or twice a year? Do they need to read something interesting about you in the newspaper?’ That kind of thing I am kind of vaguely aware of that.”

On stage, Tiernan brilliantly translates what he calls “the strangeness and the madness” of the Irish psyche into jokes that smack you right in the chest. Viewed up close, there is the whiff of the deranged preacher about him, the devilish glint in his eye. The crowd packed into Early’s loves him for it. His set, split into two 40-minute sections, flies by in a blur. No wonder he didn’t bother wearing his watch for the second half.

Heading to the fringes obviously appeals to his sense of mischief and wonder, and the Iceland tour planned for next year is the next logical step — “the mad bastards who told the World Bank to fuck off,” as he describes them. His show touches on some of the fall-out from the economic collapse for comic effect, but it’s clear that on his travels the damage and the resilience has been on display.

“I don’t get the sense that things are as bad as we read in the papers or see on TV,” he says. Instead he feels there is a freedom in opting out of listening to the news cycle. “I knew this guy years ago in Connemara — no TV, no radio, and I used to ask him, ‘Where do you get your news?’, and he said: ‘The neighbours’.

“I met this guy in Canada, flying back from Edmonton, and I met fellas who were working — tough outdoor winter work in freezing, mid-continental Canada, wife and kids back in Carlow and him sending the money home. Eight people in two-bed houses in central Edmonton, a la London or Manchester in the ’50s and ’60s, when one person would get out of the bed to go to work and someone else would get in. That’s tough going. When you meet young people they are having the craic. Older people — that’s where the sadness is.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Tiernan likes to engage his meditative urges even further in his spare time with his interest in often bleak foreign cinema.

“There is a particular type of movie that I like which is not funny,” he says. “My job is comedy, it’s intellectually demanding, so that in order to relax I watch very depressing movies, ones where they’re peeling a mink in a forest in Mongolia. I love rural cinema, trees and farms — Glenroe, the Imax version.”

It doesn’t mean he is about to become an existentialist film auteur, however. “In some ways I do think there is a deal struck with the public. I feel myself that I have that deal with the public. You are supposed to be funny.”

His ability to engage with the people he randomly encounters continues to bear fruit. Even on the day out walking on Arainn he got a lift from a local who remarked about how, “It’s very warm for the wetness of it”.

“Where did that come from?” Tommy says, with a sense of wonder. The next day he walked the island again, the arc of Leabh beach and over to the ferry. As he trudged away the soundtrack could have been another showband staple, as played by wee Daniel and Big Tom, ‘Four Dusty Roads’: “Four country roads, leading to the friends I left behind; Four dusty roads, forever in the caverns of my mind.”