John Francis Flynn: 'I’m not going to save Irish music because it doesn’t need saving'
John Francis Flynn at Other Voices; he plays St Luke's in Cork on Saturday.
On the morning that the news of Shane MacGowan's death breaks, John Francis Flynn has been to Belfast and back, to collect an errant vinyl pressing of his already critically acclaimed second album, Look Over The Wall See The Sky.
There are two songs on Flynn’s new album that, while not written by MacGowan, were certainly much-loved renditions of his: Ewan MacColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’, and ‘Kitty’, which Flynn says is a song MacGowan learned from his mother, who would have first heard it around hearths in rural Co Tipperary as a child.
“I was listening to a live version of ‘Kitty’ a couple of years ago, and it really drew me in,” Flynn says of his decision to include the song on his album. “I thought it was incredible. His delivery of every song he sang was amazing, but that one particularly hit me. It’s very much a Tipperary song; it’s funny that it takes someone like Shane MacGowan to save those songs. ‘Kitty’ is maybe one of those songs that could have been lost if Shane MacGowan hadn’t recorded it.”
MacGowan and The Pogues took Irish music out of the dry-stone-walled fields and into the grit and the grime of the big city: in the case of songs like ‘Kitty’, quite literally. Flynn does the same: Look Over The Wall See The Sky is eight interpretations of songs, reworked against a kind of distorted urban soundscape that is all modern Dublin.
‘Willie Crotty’ is one of them: an 18th century Waterford song recounting the fate of the famous Comeragh mountain outlaw, which Flynn has dragged up the rocky road to Dublin, modernised and set amongst songs that are all, in their own manner, odes to the current state of the city where Flynn was born and reared: the corporatisation of beloved landmarks, the developers’ stamp on the cityscape, the struggle for housing.
“I chose the songs through whatever I was going through myself,” Flynn says. “Willie Crotty is a Robin Hood type character, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor around Waterford. I guess that whole legend of him being a man of the people resonated.”
Marino-born Flynn, who grew up playing tin whistle and graduated to regular trad sessions in several Dublin hostelries, was involved in the 2021 campaign to prevent Smithfield’s famous Cobblestone pub from being turned into a hotel: upholding musical and cultural traditions are, to him, an antidote to what ails his hometown.
“When things started getting hyper-globalised and lost in a sea of corporate branding, people started really engaging in the culture,” he says. “You can put down roots in your culture, even as your home is getting wiped out by big business, even if you´ll never be able to afford a home in your own city. You really start thinking about where you’re from and what that means, and it’s very easy to engage with Irishness or explore your identity: just sing a song, or listen to a song.”
The November riot that rocked the capital was, Flynn says, “a shame”, and a rallying cry to a warped form of Irishness. “This album is about exploring Irish identity and what it means, and it’s the opposite of what happened the other night,” he says. “There are plenty people who are living in Dublin who are not from here, and who are as Irish as the next person.
“You can be from anywhere and engage with Irish culture in an honest way and if it resonates with you, I think anyone can really be Irish.” Look Over The Wall See The Sky has only been released a month on River Lea, Rough Trade’s folk division, and it’s garnering rave reviews, creeping onto the end-of-year listicles that dominate December, and is hot-tipped for a Choice Music Prize nomination in spring. The accompanying tour of Irish venues is underway, with the UK to follow and a residency in the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris in the spring.
His audiences internationally, he says, are a “big mixed bag” of older folk fans, a young and more experimental crowd, and the Irish abroad. Flynn’s boundary-pushing arrangements, his experimental take on much-loved songs: how does this go down with folk purists?
“I experiment with Irish music, but I leave its essence alone,” he says. “If I´m playing a tune on the tin whistle, I won’t be experimenting with any odd modern way: I don’t jazz up the actual playing or singing of songs: it’s all about how they are framed. I’m into the old-school stuff, but I am into lots of other types of music and that informs how I frame songs.
“I don’t think Irish music needs to be refreshed or modernised. I’m not going to save Irish music because it doesn’t need saving, it’s very healthy. It’s just that there’s a broad spectrum of what you can do with Irish music. You can engage with it in so many ways.”
- John Francis Flynn plays Galway’s Róisín Dubh on Friday December 8, Live at St Lukes in Cork on Saturday December 9, De Barras of Clonakilty on Sunday December 10, and Dolan’s Warehouse, Limerick on Thursday, December 14
