Culture That Made Me: Iarla Ó Lionáird on Cork song culture, and other influences
Iarla Ó Lionáird. Picture: Rich Gilligan
Iarla Ó Lionáird, 58, grew up in Coolea, Co Cork. He comes from a line of sean-nós singers, including his great aunt Elizabeth Cronin. As a child, he joined Seán Ó Riada’s choir, first performing publicly at five years of age. In 1996, he appeared on the first of six albums with the Afro Celt Sound System.
He has also recorded several solo albums during his career. In 2011, he joined the trad supergroup The Gloaming. He will perform at two concerts to celebrate the music of Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin at Dublin’s National Concert Hall (Friday, 2 September) and at Limerick’s University Concert Hall (Saturday, 3 September).
It’s an old, tired story, but the reality is that where I grew up, Coolea, Ballyvourney, is famous for singing. It is known in traditional circles as a place of song. Singing runs fairly deep in my family. There was a lot of interest in traditional music in our house. We all learned tin whistle. There was always a fiddle and a flute lying around.
I remember Seán Ó Riada driving up into the yard. He had a big, black Zephyr. He was friendly with my parents. He had massive public notoriety and fame by the time he arrived in Coolea. He had panache, authority. His influence on me is more complex than what meets the eye. It’s not just access to the tradition.
Sometimes, you try to figure out why have I done the things I did the way I did them? It isn't just because of the experience of being in his choir and “the Seán Ó Riada experiment” or Coolea’s indigenous music culture. It’s also because of the wider musical culture at the time and how they interact with each other and with the young mind I was back then.
In the seán-nos world, my favourite singer is Pádraig Ó Tuama. Because of his incredible facility. He was a firm favourite of Seán Ó Riada. He was a genius. He's long since passed. He was good friends with my grandfather. In the traditional singing world, he ranks on the highest tower.
As a singer, I've always tried to take on more skill if I can, to try and expand, technically, physically and emotionally. You're always listening to different people and how they get around a song. Some of them won't suit you because they have, say, a gruff personality, or they sound different because of their body or personality. Some have invented characters. Bob Dylan is largely a character of his own invention. So is Tom Waits.
Some sing as though they’re themselves. I probably fall into that category. Someone like Joni Mitchell. Her musicianship, her extraordinary vocal skill. Her skill as a writer is so profound. As a teenager, she was the singer that influenced me most. Her emotional flexibility was extraordinary.
Talking Heads were quite bare when they emerged. I never really got into the British punk thing. The way that Talking Heads did it appealed to me. There was that fresh kinetic energy there. You didn't have to be snotty-nosed and filthy. You didn't have to be angry even. They were very stripped down.
I bought their first record — 77, the year it came out — and every single record after that. Their records were so weird and different from each other. Some — like Fear of Music — you'd listen to at night in the dark and you'd be freaked.
I remember I used to hitch into Cork city to Hennessy's to buy Brian Eno LPs. I was very taken with the records he made with David Byrne, The Catherine Wheel and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. They were so obviously ahead of their time in terms of sampling. They were crazy sounding. Also, they had all these African polyrhythms. I'd never heard them before.
I became more interested in the texture of Brian Eno's work. Those beautiful soft, dreamy textures of ambient music. I began to think was there any possibility that I could have sounds like that going on when I'm doing stuff?
The musicians from a West African musical tradition I worked with on Afro Celt Sound System found Irish music easy to intersect with, rhythmically speaking, because their rhythms are very detailed and flexible. For our first record, we borrowed most of Baaba Maal’s band. World-class, top o’ the heap musicians. They had the talking drum, the djembe, the kora — that was the core of it.
The context of music in England at the time was important to that story because of the emergence of dance music, techno, dub, drum and bass, hip hop, trip hop. They were all starting to bubble up. So the Afro Celt's were not the only sound system. They were a manifestation of making music with people and machines. Like a live DJ set.
In the 1980s and 90s, I used to travel by train and bus and I was always listening to Peter Gabriel records. I was a fan of his sound world particularly and the thoughtfulness of his songwriting. He had a revolutionary perspective on music. He wanted to expand the western mind, the western ear and the western aesthetic to music from other parts of the world.
He single-handedly has done that in a fashion that no one else could come close to with his WOMAD festivals and his label. I was honoured to be befriended by him.
JA Baker’s book The Peregrine is about following a peregrine, watching it, learning its ways. It made a huge impact on me. I did some songwriting trying to get close to what animals feel and think or how they see the world. It's a problem for humans. They're not able to do it. They do the opposite. They try to make animals like us. The urge to anthropomorphise is very strong in humans. But the urge to try and understand the animal is rare. It’s a fantastic teacher that book. It's stunning.
Captain Fantastic is a film which stars Viggo Mortensen. His wife dies. He decides to take his kids to live in a forest, away from all vestiges of so-called civilisation. It's a critique of modern life and the mechanisms by which humans learn, educate themselves and live.
What I found extraordinary about the movie is that there isn’t a perfect answer. There is a narrative around us because of climate change. We can't go back to the forest, but we must do something. It’s the most profound film I've seen in a long time.
