Tom Dunne: I'm happy to be swept along on the new wave of trad
Lankum and The Mary Wallopers: two of the leading lights of trad nua
Not everyone is as happy with the resurgence of Irish trad music as the New York Times. It may dedicate a “long read” – the term almost feels like a health warning - to the newbies but one of my listeners was non plussed. “It was shite 50 years ago,” he said, “It’s shite now.” The band he was specifically referring to were the Mary Wallopers. However, I suspect he’d have a similar view of Lankum, Lisa O’Neill and others like Ye Vagbonds that are causing such great waves at the moment.
So, I’d better be clear. It isn’t shite now, and it wasn’t then, but I’ve been around the block long enough to know that his is not an isolated view. And I’ve been around certain circles long enough to even understand that view’s origins.
I grew up in a house where my dad broke into a sweat every time he saw the Clancy Brothers on TV. It was like Father Jack. “Not those eejits in their Aran jumpers!” he’d roar. We couldn’t turn the TV off fast enough.
He’d spend the rest of the evening muttering expletives. To him they were lowest common denominator, American tourist-inspired “shite”. If you wanted to get in with him you would walk past him and say, “and the stupid woolly hats, Da!”.
Count John McCormack was his man. He would greet his songs with cries of “oh gimme you!” as tears welled in his eyes. This was the good stuff, no home knits here.
My school, St Michael’s CBS in Inchicore - a converted British army barracks that was once used to house 1916 prisoners - did not help the trad cause either. As David Bowie was singing songs about girls with “long blonde hair and eyes of blue”, the Christian Brothers were taking another tac completely.
They were teaching us seven-year-olds a song. It’s about a man whose mother has died in springtime when Irish fields were green. Sadly, there is no recording of our little voices cracking with emotion to sing: “When they carried out her coffin, down the old Bog Road.” Turning your ear from one song to the other, from lonely deaths in lonely fields, to a song for a girl with long blonde hair on the cusp of life, it felt like time travel. It wasn’t a hard choice.
My brother sealed trad’s fate. He transitioned from a wannabe Kink – all cool suits and hair – to a wannabe trad head – all facial hair, pints and rebel songs - practically overnight. He bought an acoustic guitar and he and his mates set up in our kitchen.
I thought the da would emigrate. It did not take long to spot the importance of pints in all this. These sessions floated on a sea of Harp. If they waned musically, it was a sign to immediately turn up the nationalism. Seven hundred years of oppression made people fierce thirsty.
Thankfully, the punk bus arrived for me soon after. I left them to it and took a seat down the back to seek truth and beauty. Punk’s mantra was simple: everything had to be completely authentic. Fake was public enemy number one.
Then two things happened. I slipped in to see Christy Moore in Theatre L in UCD one lunchtime. Christy was the unofficial leader of the Trad Movement in Ireland. He sang ‘John O’Dreams’ and I floated out of my body and across UCD lake.
Another night, I went to see one of my first ever gigs, a band called Midnight Well in the Project Arts Centre. Its singer was an American man called Thom Moore. The moment he leaned in to sing a harmony with Janie Cribb on a song called ‘Soldier On’, the clocks stopped. “What is this witchcraft?” I thought.
Years later, he became my first ever radio guest. He told me tales of hearing Bob Dylan singing ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and it changing his life. But the music, the music that brought him to Ireland? The Clancy Brothers.
This put me in an unusual position. I had to buy music I had heard before, but this time I had to listen to it. To go past the stock bits and hear the humanity. I think it is that humanity that is resonating in the music of this new wave of trad.
It’s the real deal and the very opposite of “fake”, the thing I got on the Punk bus to find. Who’d have thought?
