Folk
Andy Irvine: A Beginner’s Guide
The Irish music icon tells Emma Rycroft about Planxty’s swift success, his love of Balkan music and the array of sounds he’s explored from his first days in Dublin
By Emma Rycroft
It’s hard to overstate Andy Irvine’s lasting impact on music – whether you look at Planxty, his work with Paul Brady or his solo records, Irvine was a leading figure in transforming Irish trad music in the 70s and continues to explore and surprise well into the fifth decade of his career.
Growing up in the UK, Irvine first found fame as a child actor, performing with Peter Sellers and Laurence Harvey, among others. On moving to Ireland in his early 20s, however, he left acting behind. In Dublin’s pubs, Irvine, who had learnt classical guitar while in the UK – and also plays bouzouki, mandola and harmonica – met a range of talented musicians. In 1965, he formed Sweeney’s Men, with Johnny Moynihan (credited for bringing the bouzouki into Irish music) and Joe Dolan. A few years later, he left Ireland to travel Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia, where he picked up a love of Balkan rhythms. On his return to Dublin, the now-famous band Planxty came together. “Bill Leader, who was very much in the forefront of recording folk and traditional music at the time,” Irvine explains, “asked Christy [Moore] to make a second [solo] album. And Christy said, ‘Yes, I will, but I must make it in Ireland, and I must make it with the musicians that I choose.’ So he chose his old friend Dónal Lunny… Liam O’Flynn, who came from the same county, and me, and we went down to his brother-in-law’s house which was in a village called Prosperous and there in the basement we recorded the album of that name, Prosperous… It did so well that Christy came up to me one day in Dublin and said, ‘Andy, what would you think about forming a group?’… I thought, ‘well, I can’t be left out of this!’”.
Officially formed in 1972, Planxty were soon invited to open for Donovan on tour. Irvine recalls their first show at the Hangar in Galway: “We went on and after about ten or 15 minutes, the audience was going berserk. I thought it was a fight. And I looked at the others, and they all had smiles like that,” Irvine points to his broad grin. “I gradually realised that we were going down like you have never seen anybody go down before. And when we came to the end, the audience went berserk, and they wouldn’t let us off [stage]… The whole rest of the tour, it was about seven or eight gigs, same thing happened. There used to be – I haven’t heard it for a long time – a tape of the second or third gig in Cork and at the end of every song, the audience goes mad and all you can hear from us on the stage is giggling hysterically.” Irvine chuckles, “We couldn’t believe it.” The group recorded several highly acclaimed albums that have stood the test of time. Their first, self-titled record proved especially influential (with its still oft-referenced versions of ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy’ and ‘The Jolly Beggar’). Sewn through Planxty are songs followed by tunes, a now ubiquitous format in Irish music that the group are often credited with first devising.
Each member brought unique sounds and talents; Irvine was no exception. His time spent travelling was particularly influential, he explains. “In Eastern Europe… I had eventually learned these rhythms, which were totally alien to Western minds, you know? And the first person, of course, who I played them with was Dónal Lunny, who was avid for any music… We played on the third Planxty album a song called ‘Baneasa’s Green Glade’ that I’d written in Romania. And we played this tune, which I had Balkanised. It was a Balkan tune and it went” – he taps a complicated rhythm on the table and tootles the melody – “Later on… we did a version of a piece of music called ‘Smeceno Horo’, which is in 15/16. And that became so popular that we even considered finishing the set with it… But then somebody said, ‘well hang on a second, we’re an Irish band, not a Bulgarian band.’” I marvel at an audience able to keep track of a tune in 15/16. “Oh, everybody was lost, you know”, Andy laughs, “But they loved it because it was kind of exciting and mysterious.”
Though they disbanded around 1975, Planxty reunited several times over the years, most notably in 2004/2005, to huge acclaim. “One of the reasons we got back together in 2004 was because Leagues O’Toole had made this film about Planxty”, explains Irvine, “We suddenly realised that a lot of young people who weren’t even born when we were playing in the 1970s really liked the music, so we got back together and it was great. I thought we were better than ever.”
In 1976, after the first Planxty break-up, Irvine and Paul Brady recorded their seminal Andy Irvine / Paul Brady album. “I think I can speak for both Paul and myself when I say that we are very proud of this album”, Irvine writes on his website. “It takes a long time to be at a distance from something you recorded and listen to it dispassionately. When I hear that album, I can say it’s good without fear of being thought of as conceited.” The album includes Brady’s famous, perhaps still unmatched, rendition of ‘Arthur McBride’ and Irvine’s heartfelt ‘Streets of Derry’ with its delicate guitar and pipes. The tune-playing is remarkable, too, particularly the intricate and uplifting ‘Sailing into Walpole’s Marsh’.
Beyond the work with Planxty and Brady, Irvine has consistently released solo albums, collaborated and toured. In 2002, he created his “dream band”, Mozaik: “I thought it would be great to get a band that knitted together [the] three kinds of music I really love: Irish music, Balkan music and old-time American music”, he says. “Even as I thought that, I knew the people I would love to have in the band to play that. And they all said yes.” The group consisted of Irvine, Dónal Lunny, US fiddle-player Bruce Molsky, Bulgarian multi-instrumentalist Nikola Parov and Dutch multi-instrumentalist Rens van der Zalm. “We went on tour in Australia in 2001 and made a live album [Live from the Powerhouse],” Irvine continues, “We made the second album in Budapest in 2005, Changing Trains.” Irvine’s candid, warm voice opens Live from the Powerhouse with ‘My Heart’s Tonight in Ireland’, a song he wrote celebrating Sweeney’s Men’s tours in County Clare. The whirling, sprightly tunes and songs that follow are formidably played and arranged. Throughout the album, the complicated, mesmerising Balkan rhythms that Irvine loves dance around and fold themselves into Irish and US folk (‘Romainian Horă / Black Jack Grove’ and ‘The Last Dance’ are strong examples). “The trouble with bands like that”, Irvine says of Mozaik, “is that the musicians are so good that they’re doing lots of other things… getting [them] together is the utmost problem.”
More recently, Irvine recorded two singles with Italian “chamber crossover ensemble” Viaggiatori Armonici and this year he is touring the UK and Ireland with Swedish band Quilty. He first played with the group in 2023 and they’ve tended to play Irish music, but Irvine says, “I told Quilty, it’s all very well to be playing Irish music in Sweden, but if we want to go and play outside Sweden, we’ve got to have some Swedish music.” Knowing Irvine, it’ll be an exploration worth listening to.
The Day Fairport Convention’s Bus Crashed, Killing Martin Lamble
May 12, 1969 bus crash killed Fairport Convention drummer Martin Lamble and severely injured other members of the group.
As the summer of 1969 approached, the future looked bright for Fairport Convention, as their second album, What We Did on Our Holidays, expanded the band’s audience with a more rock-inflected version of their folk sound. But an awful tragedy nearly destroyed the band just as all their hard work was starting to pay off.
In the early morning hours of May 12, as the group traveled back from a celebratory gig in Birmingham shortly after wrapping up work on their next album, their van veered off the road — and in the aftermath of the crash, Fairport Convention would never be the same. The wreck killed drummer Martin Lamble, who was just 19 at the time, as well as fashion designer and magazine columnist Jeannie Franklyn, who’d been dating guitarist Richard Thompson. Thompson suffered a broken shoulder and bassist Ashley Hutchings was sent to the hospital with assorted serious injuries, while guitarist Simon Nicol, who’d been sleeping on the floor of the vehicle when it went off the road, escaped with a concussion.
“Our road manager and sound guy, Harvey Bramham, did most of the driving although I’d do a bit to relieve him. On this particular gig, he’d been feeling peaky all day, quite unwell,” explained Nicol in a post on the Fairport Convention website. “I had a bad migraine so I wasn’t in a seat; I was stretched out on the floor with a blanket over my head trying to sleep off this terrible headache. When I woke up, the van was doing things which didn’t involve the wheels being in contact with the ground: when it stopped moving, I was the only one left. All the gear had gone out of the back and all the people had gone out through the windows and doors.”
With the release of their next album mere weeks away, the members of the group had to decide whether they could even carry on as a unit. “That was a big watershed, I think. In the aftermath, we thought a lot about what to do, whether to call it a day. It had been fun while it lasted but it took a definite effort of will to continue,” recalled Nicol. “It had given us a lot but now it had taken away a lot: was it worth it if it was going to cost people their lives?”
“We were totally fractured, in more ways than one,” Hutchings told the Guardian. “It seemed like I was in hospital for months. When I woke up at the side of the M1, I thought I’d lost my sight. As it was, it was just that both eyes were terribly cut and bruised, and eventually, that improved. But I had a broken nose, broken cheekbone, a lot of head injuries, a broken pelvis, a bad ankle injury. All of those things took a long time to heal. People were asking us about the future, but we couldn’t conceive of planning one.”
“We were very traumatized,” added Thompson. “And there was this feeling: ‘Should we carry on? Has the stuffing been knocked out of us?’ But eventually, we made a conscious effort. We got together and said, ‘Yes, we are carrying on.'” As Nicol put it, “We all felt psychologically traumatized as well as being damaged physically. But by the time Ashley’s face was back together and Richard’s bones were healing, we’d decided to rebuild the band and carry on.”
While Fairport Convention handled the last few bits of work to prepare their third LP, Unhalfbricking, for its July 1969 release, DJ John Peel hosted a benefit concert featuring Family, Pretty Things, and Soft Machine on May 25 to raise money for Lamble and Franklyn’s families. While they soldiered on, the pall of the accident continued to loom; as Hutchings later told the Guardian, he can’t even look at the cover of Unhalfbricking without thinking about the tragedy. “My memory of it is bound up with the terrible car crash. On the back cover we’re all eating around a table. The shirt and the leather waistcoat I’m wearing are what I had on when the crash happened. I can clearly remember them being bloodstained,” he explained. “You don’t forget things like that.”
In fact, although the group soon found a new drummer in Dave Mattacks and rebounded to create one of their most successful albums with Liege & Lief later that year, Hutchings was on his way out of the band. “I believe the crash hung over the band in unseen ways,” mused Nicol. “I think it was one of the unspoken reasons for the next big change, when Ashley decided to leave the band later that year after we had recorded Liege & Lief and relaunched the band to some fanfare and acclaim. Whatever the upfront reasons about musical differences and wanting to concentrate on traditional material, I think the accident was the underlying reason why Ashley felt he couldn’t continue with us.”
Fairport Convention’s lineup would continue to change quite a bit over the years, but aside from a hiatus between 1979-’85, they’ve continued to tour and record steadily — and although Nicol is the only original member left, he wouldn’t mind seeing the Fairport name continue after he’s gone. “I’d like Fairport to become the first band to be like a male voice choir, carrying on through changes of personnel but retaining its identity,” he wrote on the band’s site.
“After all, no one bats an eyelid about a brass band playing on long after all the original members are gone. Why shouldn’t there be a Fairport Convention in fifty or a hundred years?”
Source: The Day Fairport Convention’s Bus Crashed, Killing Martin Lamble
“I don’t know who I am, I don’t know what I am… but I am” Anne Briggs interviewed
In a rare and remarkable interview, the elusive folk singer talks frankly about her extraordinary life and her brief but indelible career
One of the wildest talents of her generation, ANNE BRIGGS retired from music in 1973, leaving only a handful of recordings behind her. Now, in a rare and remarkable interview, this most elusive of folk singers talks frankly with Jim Wirth about her extraordinary life, her brief but indelible career – and why it had to end so soon.
By Jim Wirth
Anne Briggs is reading the labels attached to the trees in Kew Gardens. Slight but steely, she veers off the path at every turn, silently trampling across lawns and occasionally clambering up raised beds. If she could drown out the noise of the aeroplanes coming in to land at Heathrow, she might almost be in her element. The most mythologised singer of the 1960s folk revival has lived in rural Argyll for the past few decades, and her animal instincts have been frazzled by a rare visit to London to attend Topic Records’ 80th-birthday celebrations at Cecil Sharp House. Dressed today in jeans, a red zip-up jumper and hiking shoes, she reluctantly comes out of the greenery and folds herself into a seat in Kew’s café. “I find being in the city totally devastating,” she tells Uncut, hands in constant motion. “Bad. I lose my sense of direction. I get lost. All the time, I get lost.”
Briggs was no less disoriented when she first moved to the capital aged 17, drawn south from nottinghamshire by the prospect of independence more than recognition. An instinctively brilliant interpreter of traditional song, Briggs became a subtle, elliptical writer on a par with her on-off boyfriend Bert Jansch, with a dangerous reputation to match. In a 1971 edition of Sounds, folk critic Jerry Gilbert summed the footloose Briggs up as “a female Kerouac”. However, the 74-year-old is adamant that her rambling role model was never On The Road’s Dean Moriarty, but instead the feral child of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. “I learned to read when I was about five years old and all I wanted to be was Mowgli,” she says. “Mowgli could do all of the things I wasn’t allowed to do.”
Briggs effectively retired from music in 1973, after deciding that a lone foray into folk rock – released decades later as Sing A Song For You – was not good enough to be released. Pregnant with the second of her two children, she abandoned what was left of her singing career to work in some of Britain’s remotest places with her partner, forester Pat Delap.
“I’ve always been an outside kind of person,” she says, struggling to be heard above the sound of the air conditioning. “I’ve been a professional gardener in one form and another. I’ve spent the past 20 years outdoors; I had a contract with the Forestry Commission and then with the Crown Prosecution Service, helping the guys who are doing community service – keeping their clients occupied.”
In 11 years as a singer, Briggs released an EP and two full-length albums, as well as recording tracks for two Topic Records compilation albums – 1963’s The Iron Muse and 1966’s saucy The Bird In The Bush – and 1963 and 1964’s Edinburgh Folk Festival LPs. Even factoring in Sing A Song For You and “Four Songs” – a more recent EP of pieces scavenged from old radio sessions and a live tape – her entire recorded output amounts to barely three hours of music. However, the extraordinary power of her voice, supernaturally clear and eternally distant, has given Briggs an abiding appeal like few of her contemporaries. “I love the almost dispassionate delivery of Annie, and the starkness,” modern folk polymath Eliza Carthy tells Uncut. “The directness of the delivery and the purity of her voice – it’s like a dagger. It cuts right through you.”
“It’s all there on the albums,” adds Steve Ashley, Briggs’ long-term friend and one-time collaborator. “You can still hear that magic. She was also completely unpredictable.”
On bad nights, Briggs dissolved on stage, forgetting lyrics and abandoning songs as she battled with her profoundly ambivalent attitude to performing. She always sang with her eyes tight shut, making no attempt to reach out to the crowd; her transcendent nights might be the ones when she managed to blank the audience out entirely. “I was always singing to myself,” she says, momentarily cheery. “I hated being in front of an audience. I was nervous. I was just so fucking nervous. I’m so fucking nervous being here with you. I didn’t like being watched. I didn’t like having my photograph taken. Perhaps I felt that I was never empowered to be important.”
Anne Briggs was born in Toton, Nottinghamshire, on September 29, 1944. Now one of Nottingham’s western suburbs, Briggs says it was “a little rural pocket” during her childhood. Her upbringing was no bucolic idyll, though. World War II cost Briggs both her parents; her father – a sapper – contracted tuberculosis while on active duty, and her mother – a nurse – was diagnosed with the same condition at the time that her only daughter was born, dying when Briggs was five.
“She never left hospital,” Briggs says. “I only have one memory of her, which is looking up at this lady who’d been painted. It was a big day for her and the nurses: her daughter’s coming to visit her, and they made her up, bright red. It frightened me. She was like a puppet.”