Tom Dunne: An impromptu airplane session, Planxty, and my own trad music journey
Tom Dunne used to encourage his father in hoots of derision at the Clancy Brothers.
To every ying, a yang; to every bon mot, a bitter word, for every Irish trad-based band taking the UK by storm – reference, this column, last week – a chorus of “yeah, good riddance, take your diddly eye shite and never come back.” The Trad Wars aren’t as dead as we thought. The extent to which those wars are alive and well was laid bare last week in Frankfurt. I had missed the actual incident, it’s hard to keep up whilst ferrying children to Irish grinds and Cuala training camps, but I soon caught up!
It involved a group of young Comhaltas Ceolteórí Éireann members from Cavan. Travelling home, and weather delayed on the runway at Frankfurt Airport they did what any group of youngsters with instruments, high on life and away from home together would do. They started to play.
Their performance had the energy and the blind fervour of the scene in Father Ted when Father Noel Furlong, played with biblical zeal by Graham Norton, rouses the Saint Luke’s Youth Group in one more impassioned rendition of ‘Whole of the Moon’. “And look at you, ya little monkey man!” as he said to the astonished Father Jack.
The real-life version of this was captured on social media by a team of “content creators” returning from, I presume, a “content creation” event. It was viral before it had finished, and the online audience did not hold back.
People talked of preferring to take their chances in a mid-air collision. Essentially, to be trapped on a plane, with a group wielding traditional instruments was likened to the most obscene tortures possible.
When I mentioned it on radio, the anti-trad heads dug in deeper. The polemic now spread its wings to now include both the Irish language and Gaelic games. “Hated things that are foisted upon us whether we want them or not,” was the general gist. It got heated and it got ugly.
I had been an egregious sinner myself once. Whenever my dad saw the Clancy Brothers on TV he would lurch towards the telly in a Father Jack style visceral reaction and shout “those gobshites” as he looked for something to hit them with. I must admit, I egged him on.
“You’re right, Dad,” I’d scream, “show them whose boss, but maybe spare the TV. It’s November, and only five weeks ‘til we can all watch Slade on the Top of the Pops. But you’re right Dad, dem in der mad jumpers!” He had other targets: anything that had a whiff of Jury’s cabaret about it; men in pubs with banjos; Famine laments; people with facial hair; early incarnations of the Wolfe Tones.
But at some point, I changed my ways. A bit of Luke Kelly here, a bit of Planxty there. Then Christy and then The Pogues made me think: “Wait a minute.” If I was American, I’d talk about my “trad music journey” and go on Oprah, but I am Irish, so I just mulled it all over, quietly.
It is not easy to hear music afresh when you have previously consigned it to Room 101. However, in a very early chat with Steven Malkmus from Pavement when he started to rave gently about Planxty, something inside me stirred.
Later, I talked to a lad in a Bristol band called Day One whose dad had been in Sweeney’s Men. I sought them out and was once again amazed. This led me to the Bothy Band. “Hmm,” I again mused quietly.
Then in an interview with Christy Moore, when wondering why a young man going into music in 1966 wouldn’t have been leaning towards The Beatles world, he looked at me and said, “There is only folk.” There is only folk. I have thought of those words often since. Like when Damien Dempsey did ‘Hand me Down me Bible’ in one of his Abbey Theatre gigs and I thought where was that song all my life?
The answer is that it had always been there, but I’d never really heard it before. It’s a marvellous song, which in Walt Whitman fashion, starts with the chorus and then repeats it.
But it, like our language and our national sport, was presented to me by group of religious zealots as part of a narrow definition of “being Irish” which was awful then and is awful now. Pity, they did it such a disservice. But, trust me, it is never too late!
