Burke in Beauly

The Arts Journal catches up with the great Irish fiddle player KEVIN BURKE as he makes a rare solo appearance in Beauly.

ARTS JOURNAL: Kevin, you have just finished a tour in the USA with Celtic Fiddle Festival, a group you shared with Soig Siberil from Brittany and the late Johnny Cunningham. Johnny’s death must have cast a shadow over the tour?

KEVIN BURKE: It was terrible news. He was a close musical colleague and a dear friend for many years, and to have him taken away so suddenly is a source of great sadness, but his music lives on, and we have many wonderful memories. There was definitely a tinge of sadness hanging over this tour, but it went really well. We had Andre Brunet from La Bottine Souriante with us, and he is a young, very upbeat guy. I think the fact that he wasn’t from Scotland deflected some of the feeling of how do we fill Johnny’s shoes. We thought a lot about it, and the more we thought about it, we felt that bringing in another Scottish player was going to bring an emotional toll at this stage.

AJ: Now that your Open House band is no longer active, your other main band these days is, of course, Patrick Street, with Andy Irvine, Jackie Daly and Ged Foley. Do you have a clear distinction in your mind on how these two bands differ?

KB: Patrick Street is very much an Irish band, while in Celtic Fiddle Festival the object of the game is to present how distinct each of the different styles are, then when we play together we try to highlight how there are several links. The first half of the show is typically solo things to emphasise the separate traditions, then we try to bring out the connections when we play together. In Patrick Street, even if we play something that isn’t quite Irish, there is an Irish spin on it, and in that sense its appeal is maybe narrower in the music we play, but it’s a real band. Celtic Fiddles is a bit different, but that is part of its appeal – people seem intrigued by the fact that it’s all fiddles.

AJ: How did Patrick Street come about?

KB: In the mid-80s I was considering moving back to Ireland from the USA. I used to play now and again with Jackie Daly, and I had worked with Gerry O’Beirne quite a bit too, and Andy Irvine now and again. Andy and Gerry were doing a tour as a duo and I met up with them somewhere on the road, and they invited me to join the rest of the tour as a trio. We did that, and it worked quite well, and we were saying we should do a proper tour now. I was up for it, but for the instrumentals I felt it was a bit top heavy with the two rhythm players and just me, and suggested another melody player for the tunes, which is when the idea of getting Jackie in came up. At the same time Gerry was feeling he didn’t really want to be in a band on a regular basis, and I was still thinking about moving back to Ireland, so having a band based over there seemed a good idea. Andy and Jackie suggested Artie McGlynn as a guitar player. I didn’t really know Artie at the time, but we go together and it sounded great. We made a record, did half a gig in Galway, and hit the road in the States. It’s been going ever since. Ged Foley took over from Artie, and has been in the band for nearly ten years now, I would think.

AJ: It wasn’t your first taste of being in a major Irish band, of course.

KB: No, that’s true. After I finally decided to make a go of trying to be a musician, it was a bit of a struggle for a while, but then Christy Moore asked me to join his band after he left Planxty. It meant living in Ireland, which was no hardship for me. That was great, and it was a really exciting time in Irish music then – there was all of this great crossover of ideas going on in Dublin. Everyone was interested in a lots of different kinds of music. Then the guys in The Bothy Band asked me to join because Tommy Peoples was leaving, and that again was the idea of bringing traditional music to a modern audience, but without compromising the essence of what we loved in traditional music. The band had bit of rhythm section with the bouzouki and guitar playing, and that was unusual at the time, although it is now standard.

AJ: How did you make that decision to concentrate on music?

KB: It was really when I went to America for the first time. In Ireland in 1972 or thereabouts I met the American singer Arlo Guthrie, who was the son of Woody Guthrie, as you’ll know, and he invited me over to America to do some recording, so I took him up on his offer and ended up in Los Angeles. I met lots of great American musicians from the folk-rock side of things over there, great players like Ry Cooder, Jesse Ed Davis, Clarence White, and guys from groups like The Byrds and the Eagles.

They were heavily into their own traditional music and the blues and bluegrass, but I was amazed to find that they knew nothing about traditional Irish music. Some of them didn’t even know it existed, which surprised me greatly. To them Irish music was Bing Crosby singing about his mother or ‘40 Shades of Green’ – that was their vision of Irish music. When I started playing for them the ones with bluegrass leanings saw the connection instantly, but they rest were amazed.

These were expert musicians with a real interest in folk music, and a tremendous understanding of how to bring their style of music to a modern audience, and after that trip I went home and started to think that I was either going to have to take it seriously, or accept the fact that it was going to be a weekend thing, and get a job. I had a few tentative efforts at getting a job, but the music seemed to be getting in the way, until I realised that it was the job that was getting in the way of the music, so I decided to give it a go as a musician.

AJ: You grew up in London rather than Ireland, and on your website you have an amusing description of your early training in both classical and Irish music. How did you pick up the Irish stylistic refinements – was it trial and error, or having people show you?

KB: All of that, really. There was a great accordion player we were friendly with, Martin McMahon from Clare, who was also a really nice fiddle player. When I was maybe 11 or 12 and reasonably good with a decent grasp on a bunch of tunes, it still had a kind of starkness, it didn’t roll properly. I asked him about it and he said it was too bare – I should put some rolls in. I didn’t really know what he was talking about, so he showed me, and of course I couldn’t see what he was doing. His fingers made this kind of flick, and a sound came out, and he said you should put in a few of these.

I spent the next few days hurling my fingers at the strings to see if I could duplicate what he did, and I got kind of close, but not really there – it wasn’t in the pocket, as they say. Then I came across something called mordents in my classical playing, which are five note constructions that are basically rolls, and I realised that in Irish music it is used more like a sound effect than a construction, and that by hitting or tapping the string rather than playing the note I got this sound that was a little reminiscent of the pipes, and that got me on the right track.

Then there was a guy called Tommy McGowan, who I played with a lot. He was from Sligo, and I watched his bow hand a lot, and tried to imitate what he was up to, specifically in terms of the way he would shrug his shoulder at a certain point, or stick his elbow out for a particular flourish, and I learned a lot just from trying to imitate the way he looked and the positions he took. I began tying in certain sounds with certain gestures.

AJ: You are sometimes described as a Sligo player – is that a fair description?

KB: It’s almost fair comment. I do see myself described as a Sligo fiddle player, but that is wrong. Based on is nearer, and probably influenced by is even more accurate. When I started to play I had the classical lessons, which taught me a lot and gave me a good foundation, but when I went to Ireland with my parents two or three times a year, it was always to Sligo, and a lot of the neighbours played, so that was my basis, really, and then I added awareness of the other styles on top of that. I was also hearing the traditional music in London, and was meeting players from all over Ireland, from the north, Kerry, Clare, Mayo, not just Sligo.

I learned a lot from all of them, but before I was old enough to go out and socialise in the pubs and stuff, I listened to records, and those records where mainly the great Sligo players like Paddy Kiloran, Michael Coleman, and Hugh Gillespie, who was from Donegal, but his style was very based on Sligo. I heard a Scottish leaning and more brilliant tone in the northern players, and down in Clare it was smoother and almost languid, and the Sliabh Luachra music was different again, and I learned to identify all these styles, and took bits and pieces from them all.

AJ: You are doing a solo show in Beauly – is that mostly Irish music?

KB: Yeah, mostly. I sometimes include a couple of tunes that aren’t Irish, but even those are traditional. That may be some Breton pieces, or some French-Canadian tunes, that kind of thing, but the bulk of it is Irish music.

AJ: You mentioned Arlo Guthrie earlier – I think the first time I heard you play must have been on his Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys album.

KB: I can tell you you’re not the first person to say that, either. A lot of people in America have said that to me, and they usually add I thought you were a really old guy!

AJ: You moved to Oregon after the Bothy Band broke up – why was that?

KB: The Bothy Band had been over there to play, and I always had it in the back of my mind that people in America would really like Irish music if they got a chance to hear it, but they hadn’t really been exposed to it, outside the hard core Irish community there. The Bothy Band made tentative moves to play there, but it was organised in a fairly amateur way. It was sort of successful, but the organisation was weak, and we didn’t do enough gigs. It was enough to confirm the potential for me, though, but we never really followed it up, and then the band broke up.

Micheal O’ Domhnaill and myself decided that we would go to America and have a go at spreading this music around a bit more. One of our tours got messed up by the petrol shortage during the oil crisis at that time, and we ended up getting stuck in Oregon unable to fulfil some of the gigs. We had to rearrange what we hadn’t done, and we based the tour in Oregon, staying with a friend of Michael’s who was involved in putting on small gigs and running a music shop there.

We made Oregon our base, and spent a bit of time there, got to like the place, and stayed, and I’ve been there ever since. Funnily enough, on that very first trip to the USA to play on Arlo’s record I met Hoyt Axton, the singer and songwriter, and he used to say me you should go to Oregon, you’d love it there! I’d heard the name and not much more, but there I was, ten years later and living in Oregon.

AJ: I’d guess that awareness of Irish music in the USA has changed a great deal in that time?

KB: It’s changed hugely, yes. The major influence in the last decade has come from Riverdance, it has to be said. A lot of people think it brought the wrong kind of attention, but there is no denying it did spread awareness of the music. When Michael and I came here first, we would call people at music clubs and when I said we played Irish music, I had ten minute conversations trying to explain what Irish music was. Now people with little interest in music know what Irish music sounds like – it’s not a foreign concept any more. You hear whistles and pipes and fiddles in ads for motor cars and soundtracks for films. Those sounds are not unusual any more.

Kevin Burke plays a solo concert at Phipps Hall, Beauly, on Wednesday 7 April 2004.
Kevin Burke spoke to Kenny Mathieson.