Healing power of music: Frankie Gavin is glad to be back on good terms with his De Dannan bandmates
After a long and bitter dispute, Frankie Gavin is glad to be back on good terms with his De Dannan bandmates, writes
THE great Galway accordion player Joe Cooley once famously said that Irish music is “the only music that brings people to their senses.”
Watching fiddle player Frankie Gavin reunited with his old De Dannan bandmates Alec Finn, Colm Murphy and Máirtín O’Connor on stage to play out TG4’s recent Gradam Awards, at which Gavin picked up the gong for Irish Traditional Musician of the Year, the saying could readily spring to mind.
Almost a decade after an acrimonious public dispute arose over the use of the band’s name following their split, it seems the dust has settled and De Dannan have indeed, as Cooley would have had it, come to their senses.
Gavin himself is fond of quoting Cooley’s saying in conversation, when talking about his musical
career, with his own addendum: “In fact, Irish music seems to drive some people quite cracked, but that’s
beside the point,” the Galway man says, laughing.
De Dannan, of course, was the original right line-up for Gavin; a stellar ensemble that helped to bring Irish music to the world stage throughout the 1970s and ‘80s.
But things turned temporarily sour following the band’s split in 2003; Gavin and bouzouki player Alec Finn, another founding member of the band, had a dispute over the ownership of the De Dannan name. Named for the mythical fairy folk the Tuatha Dé Danann, somewhere in the band’s history, the spelling was altered from “Danann” to “Dannan.”
But Alec Finn had registered the band’s name as a business name. Things started to get complicated to, quite literally, the nth degree: De Dannan, De Danann (with the original order of “n”s restored), and even Gavin’s later band, Frankie Gavin and the New De Dannan. Different line-ups and allegiances, and it all came to a head when the trad world was left reeling by a public spat in 2009, played out on the Joe Duffy show as musicians like Dolores Keane and accordion player Tony McMahon weighed in, siding with Finn or Gavin.
Gavin himself declined to go on the show. “I had a gig to do that night, and I thought the whole things was a bit ridiculous to be honest,” he says. “My phone was hopping, and I was saying, ‘No, I’m not going on air.’ I’m not sure we’d even had a decent row about anything. The band had been going since 1976, and there are going to be a couple of spats along the way.”
“Then a few days later, the Wolfe Tones were on air, washing their laundry in public as well. It’s hard enough to make a living in the world of traditional Irish music without people taking swings at each other, so I’m glad it’s in the past, and I’m glad we’re friendly again.”
The hatchet was well and truly buried at last year’s Cork Folk Festival when the pair, along with Colm Murphy, Charlie Piggott and Aidan Coffey, played a De Dannan reunion set before shaking hands and officially laying the past to rest.
And Gavin is keen for it to stay that way, and to focus on the future. “It was unfortunate that we were out of touch for so long, but now that we’re back in touch and doing gigs
together, I think it’s important that the past stay in the past, and that we focus on the future,” he says.
The 62-year-old, who has played and performed with a veritable who’s-who of Irish trad down through the years, says this year’s Gradam Award was very moving. “I’m over-joyed,” he says.
“Of course I wasn’t expecting it, but when recognition comes your way, it’s really nice. It’s a real boost; a shot in the arm. And it’s at the beginning of the year too, so it’s a great kick-start to 2018.”
The Gradam was by no means a retrospective award: Gavin’s life seems awhirl with new projects and collaborations. Most recently, he’s been recording with his new ensemble, The Provenance, with producer Bruno Staehelin in South Galway.
With The Provenance, whose premiere full-length performance will take place in Cork’s Everyman Theatre, he’s dispensing with several of the norms of the Irish trad band.
In the first place, there are no less than four fiddlers in The Provenance: Gavin himself, alongside Sorcha Costello, Éadaoin ní Mhaicín and Ciara O’Brien, accompanied by the bouzouki and the piano. Having a band with a strong female presence was a priority for Gavin.
“Most bands have had four or five guys, and then maybe a girl singing, so I’m trying to break that tradition,” he says.
On top of the gender balance of his new band’s line-up, he says it’s the almost orchestral sound of four fiddlers playing in unison that inspired him to form The Provenance. “They’re powerful players and it’s a lovely, rich sound, almost like an orchestra playing jigs and reels,” he says.
“I got a notion a while back; I was recording some tracks in the States a few years ago, with two fiddles and a bouzouki and I thought it was a great sound, and I thought that three or four fiddles playing in unison would sound lovely.”
But while experimenting with the composition and gender of the trad group, Gavin says the emphasis will still be on “tunes people will already know, but putting a different spin on them: they just sound a little different arranged for four fiddles.”
Gavin has reservations about the recent re-emergent trend in Irish music towards fusion projects: “I sometimes call it con-fusion,” he jokes.
It might sound unlikely for Gavin, whose work with De Dannan included popular interpretations of The Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’ and Handel’s ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’, as well as collaborations with klezmer and bluegrass musician Andy Statman, to express reservations about the re-emergence of the very trend towards Irish trad fusion projects that he helped to popularise, but he says it’s all down to marrying the pace and spirit of compatible musical styles.
“We played with Klezmer musicians in New York in the ‘80s and that worked really well, because we were playing at the same speed, but for me it’s about collaboration rather than fusion,” Gavin says.
“I don’t believe in playing traditional Irish music at half the traditional speed. It’s dance music, spirited music, and it should be played at its usual speed; it’s a speed that makes your heart beat better.”
Gavin would like to tour with The Provenance, but says he’ll see what the reception is like for their debut album, and their gigs, first. “I’ve all sorts of grand plans for The Provenance,” he says. “I’m so pleased with the sound of it all; it sounds so right to me.”
“I’ve always been lucky to be in the right place at the right time with my collaborations and this feels like one of them. Whatever line-up I was in, with an extraordinary array of amazing musicians, it always felt like the right line-up. And this is another one that feels like that.”
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