By Andrew Curry
Andy Irvine is one of the most consequential Irish folk musicians of the last 60 years. His influence stretches through his membership of bands such as Planxty and Sweeney’s Men, his exploring and popularising of a huge repertoire of traditional songs, and his experiments with other folk traditions, on recordings such as East Wind and with bands such as Mozaik.
So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise to discover that in his early 80s he is on a short tour of Britain and Ireland with the Swedish group Quilty. They’ve made a 30-something year career playing Irish and Swedish folk music to audiences across Europe and elsewhere.
The tour had stopped off at the Irish Cultural Centre in London en route from Sheffield to Cilgerran before playing a series of dates in Ireland from Wednesday 30th April.
The show kicked off with Irvine on stage alone for a few songs, switching between bouzouki and guitar. These included Houdini, Brackagh Hill, and Here’s A Health To Every Mining Lad. This last one came with a slightly tricky singalong chorus, but given Salut! Live’s north-eastern roots, we’re always willing to join in with a song about the 150 year struggle by miners everywhere for better wages and conditions.
Quilty is a four piece folk band that consists of Esbjorn Hazelius on fiddle, mostly, Staffan Lindfors on bass (playing bass lines on guitar here rather than standup bass), with Gideon Andersson on bouzouki and guitar and Dag Westling on guitar, banjo, and whistle. This is the same line-up they started out with 32 years ago.
And almost immediately they had arrived on stage we got another of the songs that Andy Irvine is indelibly associated with—The Plains of Kildare, in which the rich people bet on the thoroughbred mare, and the poor on Stewball the stallion.
As he went into the song, Irvine said that he didn’t want to give the ending away, but that if the poor didn’t come out ahead, they wouldn’t be playing it. Irvine learned it from Eddie Butcher.
From their repertoire Quilty contributed the murder ballad The Two Sisters, which starts with jealousy and ends up with everyone dead, but has the jolliest of tunes. Irvine followed up with an Antrim song, Come With Me Over The Mountain, apparently one of the few Antrim love songs that end well.
Esbjorn Hazelius and Staffan Lindfors closed out the half with a Swedish polska (“every Swedish musician learns to count to three”) with some gentle fills from the other musicians.
How does a group of Swedish folk musicians end up playing Irish music?
Hazelius hitchhiked to Ireland as a teenager to spend three months trying to learn as many jigs and reels as he could, and Andersson recalled that Andy Irvine had been something of a musical hero to their younger selves. As he said, had someone told them then that they’d be touring with him one day, they would have been disbelieving.
Their own repertoire has a bit of a nautical flavour to it. There are shanties and hornpipes in there, and other songs of the sea. We got some of that in the second half, with The Bonny Ship the Diamond, The Press Gang, sung a capella, and a couple of hornpipes (apparently known as fottis in Swedish, if I have the spelling right), one of which had been written with John Doyle when they were touring together.
When Hazelius finished his teenaged tour in Ireland, he went into a record shop in Galway to buy some CDs of jigs and reels to take home to Sweden with him. One of the records he bought was East Wind, which Irvine recorded with Davy Spillane in 1988.
When he got it home, he was disappointed. There is not an Irish tune on it, although most of the musicians are Irish.
Instead, it’s an exploration of Macedonian and Bulgarian music, and includes some fearsome time signatures—7/16ths, 9/16ths, 11/16ths. It’s a step away from 3/4ths time.
But he came to appreciate it, and in the show they played Dance of Suleiman.
There were more conventional songs from the Andy Irvine repertoire as well, sung in his distinctive tenor voice. These songs included Bonny Light Horseman, A Close Shave, written by Bob Bickerton, about cross-dressing gold thieves, and another Antrim love song, Kellswater, that also ended well (“you’ve had both of them now”, said Irvine.) One thing I also learned, by the way, was that it’s Irvine, rhyming with ‘wine’ with the emphasis on the second syllable.
They closed the set out with an energetic a capella version of Roll The Woodpile Down, associated with Bellowhead, which was a lot easier to sing along with than A Health to Every Mining Lad. The encore included Blackbirds and Thrushes, from Quilty’s repertoire, and the Dubliners’ Farewell to Old Ireland.
As they closed, Staffan Lindfors thanked us for turning up, as artists do, deadpanning:
Without you coming it would have been a real fiasco.
Visiting the merch stand after the show, I asked how they came to collaborate together. It happens that Quilty and Irvine share a booking agent in Oslo, and through them they were able to invite him to play at their 30th anniversary concert a couple of years ago. That led to a tour of Sweden together. For his part, Irvine seems to be enjoying the experience of playing with them. They make a good sound together.
Source: Sweden meets Ireland: Andy Irvine on the road with Quilty – Salut! Live