Culture That Made Me: John Spillane on Planxty, the Arcadia, and Behan
John Spillane
Born in 1961, John Spillane grew up in Wilton, Cork.
During the 1980s, he performed with Stargazers. Later, he joined the band Nomos.
In 1997, he released The Wells of the World, the first of a dozen solo albums.
He won Meteor Music Awards in 2003 and 2006.
Several notable artists, including Christy Moore and Sharon Shannon, have recorded his songs.
He will perform at De Barra’s Folk Club, Clonakilty, 9pm, Thursday, August 3, a monthly live residency that has been going since 2002.
- See: www.debarra.ie
When I was around nine years of age I fell in love with music listening to three records on loop with my friends.
One of them was Planxty’s self-titled debut album. I loved Andy Irvine singing, “A blacksmith courted me…” It was a formative record.
I hear bits of it coming out in my songwriting. There was a great richness of melody in the songs they sang, songs like Sweet Thames Flow Softly and Only Our Rivers.
I also love that they introduced us to English and Scottish folk songs. They had a more international folk repertoire rather than a strictly Republican, anti-English diet.
When I was 18 I had a job at the Arcadia in Cork as a “humper”. I got paid £10 to carry bands’ gear in and out at the end of the night.
I was in a band playing there as well, support gigs mostly. There was a particular period that went on for about two and a half years called “UCC Downtown Campus”. Elvera Butler founded it.
I saw The Cure there, U2, The Radiators – who I loved. Gavin Friday, the lead singer from The Virgin Prunes, came out dressed as a woman and said “Shit” for about 10 minutes non-stop.
It was shocking and garish and interesting. It was a brilliant scene.
An album I loved as a teenager was the White Album.
It seems incredibly sophisticated to me, deep and meaningful, mystical and brilliant.
I spent a lot of time learning Blackbird by Paul McCartney on the guitar.
Like a lot of people in those days, you’d learn music by lifting the needle for a split second, and then putting the needle back down again and learning the next bit, trying to figure out what each note was.
We learned chords one note at a time.
The first film I went to see on the big screen – when I was about nine – was the musical Oliver!
It was at the Capitol cinema in Cork. I found it quite overwhelming.
It’s a stunning film. Oliver Reed played Bill Sykes. It was a huge production full of great melodies and songs.
There's a freedom about Joni Mitchell’s songwriting – where she can soar this way and that way.
She has been able to open up new avenues.
She can branch off here and branch off there melodically.
She's very much like a poet: “Just before our love got lost you said/’I am as constant as a northern star’/And I said ‘Constantly in the darkness/Where's that at?/If you want me I'll be in the bar’…”
I love the fact that she’s grounded in very traditional folksong as well.
I loved Leonard Cohen so much. He was fabulous. As a teenager – when I discovered him – I remember thinking: that's my favourite album of all the records we have in the house.
It was Songs from a Room. It had 'Bird on the Wire' and 'The Partisan'. It’s the poetry of his songs that is most attractive to me.
With all good artists, there's a surprise element. You think you know what they do – and then they surprise you by doing something completely different.
With Neil Young, there’s a breadth to his work. For example, you get a song like A Man Needs a Maid. I love that song. It's a great song.
Then you get a song like Winterlong and it's a totally different kind of song. I love when he goes Native American. I love Broken Arrow. I love Cortez the Killer. He has political songs like Southern Man.
He can come then with surprising little gems like Only Love Can Break Your Heart. He has the capacity to surprise.
Bob Dylan is incredible.
I remember listening to him as a teenager and being gobsmacked at his ability to write gem after gem.
Like, say, that Desire album – every song is brilliant on it.
Dylan is an example of somebody who absorbed a tradition and then reworked it.
When I was younger, I was fascinated at the amount of “borrowing” he did.
Songs like The Girl from the North Country is Scarborough Fair, which is an older Irish song called Strawberry Lane.
His courage – or sheer cheek – in taking these famous songs and reworking them and calling them his own.
He was part of something very big that happened in the Sixties with the folk revival.
The gig that blew me away the most was the first time I saw Moving Hearts.
I played support with them in the Savoy in Cork. The gig was around 1981.
They were the most stunning thing I had seen live. It was the first line-up of Moving Hearts.
Christy Moore was singing and Davy Spillane was on the pipes.
I saw him live about five times, which had a big effect on me.
Part of it was the pipes. They were a brilliant band.
There was a big – for want of a better word – patriotism vibe about them, an Irish pride.
And Christy has always been a hero of mine.
When I was about 15, I went to Dublin for the first time. We went to see a play in the Eblana Theatre, which was in the basement under Busáras.
It was a Brendan Behan play called An Giall, which was an Irish language version of his play The Hostage.
It was my first full-on theatrical event. It was full of songs. Brendan Behan was a brilliant songwriter.
The Old Triangle is a classic. It was a production that stayed with me.
I loved the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – before it was made into a film – by Ken Kesey.
I remember the book being passed around.
Sometimes until you read a book or see a movie, you’re not introduced to the tragedy of real life because it’s hidden.
There is nothing that happens in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that doesn’t happen in every mental asylum, but it's hidden, until somebody writes a book about it.
It was shocking – and heartbreaking – to be let into that world.
