Under The Stairs: How the Corner House in Cork inspired a trad album
Eoin Ó Riabhaigh and Johnny McCarthy literally under the stairs in the Corner House pub in Cork.Picture: Emmet Ó Riabhaigh
It was Belfast flute player Harry Bradley who decided that the window seat favoured by other musicians at the Corner House in Cork city was not, from an acoustic perspective, the best one in the house.
Under the stairs was, he reckoned, a preferable spot for the weekly sessions at which he joined uilleann piper Eoin Ó Riabhaigh at Fearghal MacGabhann’s renowned traditional music venue on Coburg St.
“Everybody else used to play out by the window but Harry, in all his wisdom, decided that’s the place,” says Dripsey-based Ó Riabhaigh.
Bradley ultimately “had to emigrate to Dublin, then to Belfast, from whence he came”, his Thursday night space under the stairs being filled by MTU Cork School of Music lecturer Johnny McCarthy.
What Bradley could not have envisaged was that his seating choice would retain such significance that years later it would become the title of McCarthy and Ó Riabhaigh’s first collaborative album.
“The whole album is built around that, being under the stairs when we’re playing, and the tunes are mainly made up of tunes we play inside in the Corner House,” says Ó Riabhaigh.
His musical association with McCarthy, however, predates their Corner House connection by decades and has its roots in Cork Pipers’ Club, whose 1960s revival owed much to the efforts of Eoin’s father Mícheál Ó Riabhaigh.
Ó Riabhaigh Snr, a civil servant from Killavullen, near Mallow, was a celebrated piper who taught at Cork School of Music and inspired musicians on a variety of instruments, hosting Pipers’ Club sessions at Dún Laoi on Cork’s North Mall and Dún Mhuire, where the Grand Parade meets the South Mall.
McCarthy, who played whistle and flute in his early years before taking up the fiddle, went on to study classical music in a Swiss conservatoire, while Ó Riabhaigh graduated from the Pipers’ Club to the vibrant music scene at the Phoenix bar on Cork’s Union Quay, “much to my ould fella’s chagrin, I imagine, he being a Pioneer”.
Mícheál Ó Riabhaigh, inheritor of the famed Canon Goodman pipes, which are now in Eoin’s possession, was the chief formative musical influence on his son, who became a full-time uilleann pipe-maker.
“He was my teacher, apart from I remember Willie Clancy being in the house, Leo Rowsome, and Willie Reynolds, a piper from the Midlands, and I used to pick up tips off them, but primarily it was my father that was the guiding light,” he says. “I was 16 when he died.”
In the repertoire of McCarthy and Ó Riabhaigh Jnr to this day are tunes learned at the Pipers’ Club. “It’s actually a hobby of Johnny’s to play tunes that are so far back in my memory that it kills me to bring them forward, but Johnny loves doing it,” says Ó Riabhaigh. “We do still play a lot of the tunes that my dad taught us.”
The tune selections on Under the Stairs also reflect Sliabh Luachra’s influence on McCarthy, a member of the Four Star Trio for over three decades.
Ó Riabhaigh’s choices include Connie O’Connell’s ‘The Torn Jacket’, which he says is “probably my favourite tune of all”, and two polkas composed by the late Séamus Creagh, whom he describes as “a big buddy; we played together a lot”.
The duo both contribute self-composed tunes, including McCarthy’s distinctive ‘Küsnacht’, written for his wife Ger and recalling their time living beside Lake Zürich in Switzerland.
‘Billy’s March to Glory’ McCarthy dedicates to his uncle, bagpiper Billy Lehane, while ‘The Eye of the Needle’ and ‘The Kilcoleman Lass’ were written for his mother Nell, a native of Kilcoleman in West Cork.
McCarthy also composed ‘The Dripsey Polka’ for his “dear friend Herring” aka Four Star Trio guitarist Pat Ahern, who appears on the album, along with Garry Ó Briain and Macdara Ó Faoláin on bouzouki and McCarthy’s son Cormac on piano, while Ó Riabhaigh’s son Emmet designed the cover.
“Johnny is a much more talented composer than I am,” says Ó Riabhaigh, who wrote three of the album’s tunes, including the intriguingly-titled polka ‘Rabies’s No 12’.
“Rabies is my nickname and I called it No 12 because if I called it No 1 sure everybody would know I only had one tune composed and what kind of a marketing ploy is that?” he laughs.
Ó Riabhaigh, who says he is a “reels and jigs kind of guy”, admits “pipers tend to be fierce show-offs” who prefer “the big tunes, the Bucks of Oranmore, the showpieces” to polkas and slides which he previously looked upon as “just for dancing”.
“So it’s kind of strange,” he says of their inclusion here. “But there was no great design, no grand plan, we just played the tunes that we like playing.”
- Under the Stairs is available on Bandcamp, from Custy’s of Ennis or the Corner House, while Ó Riabhaigh and McCarthy play the Ionad Cultúrtha, Baile Mhúirne, on March 22 and Dublin’s Cobblestone on May 7.
