'Everybody’s seeing the cherry blossoms': John Spillane on how Cork inspired his new album
John Spillane.
Covid-19 restrictions have been particularly tough for performance-based artists, so there’s something extremely moving about the short film called Dancing Through Cork recently released by one Cork dance school.
Students of the Joan Denise Moriarty School of Dance shot a video, compiled from self-filmed footage of dancers performing at a variety of Cork landmarks. The choreography was set to John Spillane’s latest single, We Come in the Wind.
“It’s absolutely adorable,” Spillane says. “I got such a kick out of it. They had asked me if they could use the song for a performance in Fitzgerald’s Park, but of course that got cancelled.”
Spillane’s songs melodies have danced through Cork for decades. From his odes to the city’s cherry trees, to his famed Ballincollig song, now, at 60, he’s frequently hailed as unofficial laureate to the second city.
“People ask me for songs now,” he says. “I suppose it kind of built up since my Orca song long ago, when an old lady asked me to write a song about the killer whales that came up the river. It’s a running joke now. If I go to the shop for a pound of sausages, the girl might say, ‘Write a song about that, now, John.’”
Corkonian humour aside, Spillane says his back catalogue of songs, so firmly rooted in a sense of place, have found a new listenership within the past year, he believes as a by-product of the fresh emphasis Covid-19 restrictions have placed on locality.
“It’s like looking at the ground under your feet, isn’t it?” Spillane says. “My cherry blossom song, which came out 19 years ago, got more airplay last year than it ever got. Suddenly, everybody’s seeing the cherry blossoms.”
Spillane’s latest album, 100 White Horses, is even more inclined to name-check Cork localities than ever before: from Bishopstown to Ballyphehane to UCC’s college gates, it’s a sonic stroll within your 5km.
“All 11 songs came from journeys I’ve made to places in Ireland to do gigs,” he says. “The first song is Bishopstown and I got two gigs in the GAA there a couple of years ago. I’m from Wilton but I had played football for Bishopstown and went to school there. It was the easiest song I ever wrote, because I know the place like the back of my hand.”
The release of Spillane’s latest independent album has been quite some time in the making, from an intensive crowdfunding campaign to fund the record, through to a year’s delay due to the unprecedented events of 2020.
But restrictions or no, it’s time to release 100 White Horses, Spillane says: “We were aiming at April last year, and we put it back by a whole year. But you need to get it out. So much of music is online these days anyway, and I’d rather get it done and get it out, than put it back by another whole year. And we don’t even know where we’re going to be next year.”
As for all musicians, Spillane saw his work cancelled last year and ended up making numerous applications for government supports, some successful and some not. While the release of his album has been supported by a MISP (Music Industry Stimulus Package) grant, he missed out on an Arts Council Bursary he had applied for.
Gig-wise, he’s been keeping up his monthly De Barra’s of Clonakilty gig with live streaming, and has performed for a funded Culture Ireland event.
Apart from that, Spillane has largely been occupied with tying up the loose ends of the €25,000 crowdfunding campaign he ran to fund the recording and release of 100 White Horses.
“I’ve been going down to the post office in Passage West with parcels for weeks,” he says. “We put together a very serious and rather complicated campaign and the amount of follow-on work is enormous. But it’s fun. I enjoy putting CDs in padded envelopes and posting them off around the world. I used to work for the Jamaica Banana company packing fruit when I was young and it’s like that. It’s very mindless and fun.”
The top reward for Spillane’s crowdfunding campaign saw him don his bardic hat to offer a bespoke song composition to anyone who would put up €1,000 for his campaign, which has been, he says, nothing if not challenging.
But the outcome has been, he says, the album he wanted to make, one with a “bardic Irish, mythological, fairy-tale kind of a vibe.” Spillane enlisted Kerry singer Pauline Scanlon, a frequent collaborator, for ethereal, multi-layered backing vocals.
“Somebody commented, weren’t you very clever to employ the services of the Irish fairies on your new record,” Spillane says. “I was delighted with that. But I turned 60 in January, and what better way to turn 60 than by releasing a deadly album?”
- John Spillane 100 White Horses album launch live streamed from De Barra’s of Clonakilty is on Thursday the 1st of April at 9pm.Tickets and info: https://johnspillane.ie/shop/john-spillane-100-snow-white-horses-album-launch-livestream/
- “I’m reading Manchán Magan’s 32 Words For Field. It’s right up my alley. He’s a well spaced-out man, a real thinker outside the box. I’m also reading a book on oriental mythology, by Joseph Campbell. It’s trying to get to an understanding of religion, really: comparative mythologies from around the world.”
- “I’m binge-watching old episodes of The Sopranos. I don’t know what the attraction is, maybe it’s because it’s gangsters. And I’m watching Geantraí on TG4: it’s trad sessions in pubs all over Ireland. It’s kind of a sca thing: who do you know and who don’t you know, and hairstyles people had in the 1990s, and choice of tunes. It’s a bit of a session.”
- “People send me music and I try to keep up with it and write them a note back, tell them it’s brilliant. I have some new songs by Ricky Lynch in my car at the moment and I listen to those, and I have albums by Edel Meade and Stephen Heffernan which I have to listen to. I’ve been listening to Ger Wolfe’s new album, Morning Star. It’s lovely, quite a hippyish kind of a one, but that’s Ger being Ger.”
- “I re-watched The Crying Game the other night, with Stephen Rea. In 2003 I got the Irish Music Award for best Folk and Traditional. It meant an enormous amount to get it. It was in the Point Depot in Dublin and when I went up to get my gong, it was Stephen Rea who presented it and he brought an amazing amount of gravitas to the moment.”
- “I’ve been listening to Blindboy. He’s very entertaining. And I’ve been listening to Russell Brand: he’s got all sorts of weird stuff, things about Kundalini Yoga and stuff. He’s a bit of a star. The radio is mostly for driving and I’ll listen to R na G, or flick through the Cork stations.”
