Tom Dunne: Lankum are heaping praise and building anticipation— for good reason

'It’s why we just call Bruce the Boss. It saves time. We all get it. We know the score. So maybe, from now on, we’ll just call them Lankum. They are Lankum and that says it all'

Thu, 06 Jun, 2024 - 17:57

Tom Dunne

Hard to know what to say these days about Lankum. Can a band have too much praise? Can this create a praise surplus? If they have more praise than they need, than they can ever possibly use, are there some who really need it but are going without? Starved of praise.

Do the top 10% of bands own 76% of all the praise in the world, just like with wealth? Or is it worse? Should someone in the organisation issue a statement? “OK, we get it, you love us, but go steady, will ya?” Not that it’s not well deserved. They are amazing, life affirming, and wonderful. I don’t want to add to the praise/no praise disparity, but I do get it. There is a magic in that unity of voice and music. I never listen to an album without marvelling, questioning all I know.

If Planxty were the “Beatles of trad” then Lankum can claim to be the “Radiohead of trad” and that’s a lot to take in. Many people grew up putting trad and bands like Radiohead in very different boxes. Seeing those boxes as being part of a bigger picture is startling.

It’s like a scene from The Matrix. Don’t try and understand it if you’ve been drinking.

Their new press release is a case in point. Lankum are, it tells us, Mercury and Ivor Novello award-nominated, have been voted Album of the Year in Uncut, The Guardian, Loud and Quiet, and The Quietus, with high rankings in MOJO, NPR, DIY, Crack, Songlines, Music OMH, The Line of Best Fit, Louder than War, and the Skinny.

Read all this out on radio before you interview them and there will be no interview. “Time up!” a PR person will say, and they’ll be wheeled away. It’s King Charles territory. Apart from being the King of “over there” he is also: The Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, the Great Stewart of Scotland etc.

That’s why they just call him the King. It’s why we just call Bruce the Boss. It saves time. We all get it. We know the score. So maybe, from now on, we’ll just call them Lankum. They are Lankum and that says it all.

All of this is a long way of telling you that ‘Rocky Road’, the new single from the about-to-be-released Live in Dublin album is, yet again, amazing. I was at one of the shows the album is culled from, and the introduction to ‘Rocky Road’ caught my attention.

They seemed not unaware that over the course of the song’s long history it has made its way often into the clutches of stereotypical Irish “cabaret” trad. That’s the type of stuff hauled out amidst harps and dancing colleens for American tourists. To extricate it from that “pints and hurleys” grip wasn’t easy.

But so worthwhile. It is an amazing song. Lankum’s harmonies and sheer energy elevate it enormously. It never rests. There are extra beats in each bar that give it a wild forward momentum. It is breathless, unrelenting and astonishing.

It was written in 1862 by DK Gavan, — the “Galway poet” — for a singer called Harry Clifton. Clifton was a big star at the time. They say when he died, aged just 40, you could hear his songs being whistled all over the UK.

But it doesn’t end there. His biggest hit was a song called ‘Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green’ and the melody of that song was borrowed by a Geordie of the name of George Ridley. A miner from the age of eight, he turned to music when an industrial accident left him unable to work.

The melody he borrowed became a song called ‘Cushie Butterfield’ which is still sung on the terraces at Newcastle United FC to this day. Brendan Grace repurposed the lyrics to give it a Dublin angle and had a hit with it too.

Ridley was dead by 30, but are you ever really gone if 40,000 fans are singing your song? His great, great nephew is Eric Burton of The Animals.

Welcome to the Matrix! All of this reminds me of an interview I did some years back with Christy Moore. “Why?” I wondered, “when you went to England at the height of The Beatles, did you not go into pop?”

“There is only folk music,” he told me.

I won’t lie, the wisdom of those words gets clearer every day.