Ireland

Review: That They May Face the Rising Sun is a poignant rural meditation on life and friendship

by

In this adaptation of the John McGahern novel, about a middle-aged man who has returned, with his wife, to the countryside of his childhood, makeshift friendships are forged and life’s grand rhythms observed

By Phil Hoad

Does anything happen, or is it the usual?” asks a regular loose cannon in Pat Collins’ rural-set Irish drama. “Not much in the way of drama, just the day-to-day stuff,” replies his writer friend. That’s very much the lay of the land in this film, with squirely novelist Joe Ruttledge (Barry Ward) serving as a proxy for John McGahern and his early-Joycean realism, and from whose lauded final 2002 novel this is adapted. By extension it speaks for Collins too, who remains a faithful follower of that approach – almost to a fault.

At some point in the 1980s, Joe and his wife Kate (Anna Bederke) – who is from some unspecified European country – have quit London to return to the Irish countryside of his upbringing. With him racking up the pages of a never-finished book, and her twisting local plants into art creations, there’s a bohemian tint to their household that attracts neighbours to their kitchen table. There’s “the Shah” (John Olohan), the big-eyebrowed garage owner tiptoeing into a new romance; Bill (Brendan Conroy), a subdued labourer condemned to working in slave-like conditions because he was “illegitimate”; and the aforementioned loose cannon Patrick (Lalor Roddy), never short of a chippy observation but always popping by like a man who needs company.

Ever-present in this tangle of middle-aged, makeshift friendships is an undertow of faint but inexorable melancholy, occasionally articulated in words (presumably) straight from McGahern. “The rain comes down, the sun shines, the grass grows, children grow old and die – that’s the holy all of it,” reflects the Shah. Nothing too purple, which would violate the terms of the quiet stoicism in the face of life’s grand rhythms admired by McGahern; Collins, more usually a documentarian, keeps in lyrical step with simple, stirring compositions of cloud-swept hillsides, rams teeming down lanes, and one especially moving sequence when Joe lays out a deceased acquaintance for his funeral.

This reserve means the drama verges on indistinct, with bravura camerawork out of bounds and sometimes timid characterisation that threatens to blur the multiple visitors into one Irish version of Ted, The Fast Show’s groundsman. The reticence is a particular issue with Joe and Kate, whose London allegiances, artistic aims and marital state of affairs are alluded to, but never fully explored. But, despite its somewhat diffuse centre, Collins’ film still has a straightforward poignancy, with subtle and dignified performances across the board.

Source: That They May Face the Rising Sun review – poignant rural meditation on life and friendship | Movies | The Guardian

Nanci Griffith: From a Distance review – harrowing account of the country music star’s life that ended in isolation and alcoholism

by
Nanci Griffith

By Ed Power

In 1987 Nanci Griffith became a country-rock superstar in Ireland even as she struggled with obscurity back home in the United States. Something in the Texas musician’s storytelling style and the starry-eyed sadness of her lyrics connected at a deeply emotional level to audiences on the other side of the Atlantic. She sounded poetically miserable, and, emerging from the awful 1980s, we were poetically miserable, too.

That sadness was more than just an artistic device, as becomes clear in RTÉ pop presenter turned producer David Heffernan’s Nanci Griffith – From a Distance (RTÉ One, Sunday, 8pm), an engaging, if harrowing, account of her success in Ireland, the many friendships she made and her retreat into isolation and alcoholism in the years before her death in 2021 at age 68.

It’s a tragic story, and while her music will be familiar to anyone who remembers Ireland in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the film struggles to give us a sense of what Griffith was like. But perhaps that’s because she herself was never quite sure who she was: one contributor explains that, like many creative types, Griffith was insecure – a lack of confidence that intensified with age. “She would pour it out in some of her songs,” says her manager, Ken Levitan. “You see in a lot of artists. She was very insecure. The insecurity grew as she got older.”

Still, if she lacked self-belief, she had plenty of fans. Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett and Rodney Crowell are among those who express their admiration. They recall a gifted songwriter and lyricist and talk – seemingly in earnest – of how they envied her success in Ireland.

“Everywhere you went, everyone mentioned Nanci,” recollects Crowell of a visit to Ireland. “I was probably a little jealous. We’ve been slogging away. She hits the big time. But good for her.”
Emmylou Harris agrees Griffith became an Irish success story, even with her American roots. “You almost thought she was Irish,” she says. “Sometimes you forgot she was from Texas, even with that deep accent.”

Yet that success papered over profound unhappiness – a remoteness from even close friends that spiralled with age. “I didn’t know her loneliness,” says Emmylou Harris. Crowell says that even if he had reached out, he isn’t sure how much help he could have offered. Some people don’t want to be saved.
The paradox is that she has made friends easily. She was close to Heffernan, a host of Anything Goes in the 1980s, and godmother to his son, Aaron. Heffernan recalls visiting her in Nashville and being collected from the airport in a limousine.

But Griffith grew distant from even her closest acquaintances in her final years. Twice married, she struggled to connect with people at an emotional level, says a friend.
“She wasn’t capable of forming real intimate relationships,” they say. “She couldn’t let go of herself. She drove [the men in her life] away because of that. She knew it, I’m afraid. It was a source of un happiness for her.”

She died alone in 2021. If beloved by her fans, there was a perception she had been forgotten by Nashville – though with a 1994 Grammy to her name (for best contemporary folk LP), she could hardly be described as unappreciated.

Her final years were tragic, yet there are many heartwarming aspects to the story of a singer with low self-esteem and a poetic air who found success in Ireland, where people were struggling with the same sort of emotional damage. This heartfelt documentary is a worthy homage to an artist Ireland took to its heart in troubled times – but whose own troubles were ultimately too great for even the love of an entire country to heal.

Source: Irish Times

Beyond the Page: Rediscovering Sinead O’Connor

by

As two recently released books seek to uncover the truth behind the life of the late Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor, Stephanie Phillips delves into both texts to reveal why O’Connor was more than the stereotypes ascribed to her

By Stephanie Phillips

For years when I was younger, I was consistently overcome by this innate sense of unease that often occurred when the late Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O’Connor was brought up in conversation. My feelings weren’t really connected to anything O’Connor had personally done or even based on my opinion of her music, which I hadn’t heard much of at that point but I did like. No, instead O’Connor vicariously made me uncomfortable because of how the world reacted to women like her. They were stereotyped as difficult, uncompromising, complex women, whose unconventional lifestyles and unfiltered opinions made them constant targets. My teenage reactions to O’Connor weren’t because I agreed with how society viewed her, but rather because the judgement she and others like her received demonstrated how little society cared about women.

O’Connor was an iconoclast whose voice could switch between sounding akin to a lilting siren call and then transform into the primal wail of a woman scorned. In any case, her voice was always mesmerising. Her inarguable talent and enthralling personality granted her everything she needed to become famous, a fate sealed following her worldwide hit in the career defining 1990 single ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. Despite O’Connor’s musical gifts, for much of her career she was more well known for being too much. She was too controversial, too divisive, the person people roll their eyes at when they talk. Her most gossiped about ordeal occurred in 1992 during a performance on Saturday Night Live in which she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II to protest child abuse in the Catholic church. Her appearance was met with anger, celebrities like Joe Pesci threated to attack her, and her career in the US was practically destroyed.

Recently her life has been re-evaluated following her untimely passing in 2023. In scores of obituaries, her friends, contemporaries, and fans of her work have all tried to summarise who Sinéad O’Connor was. Now in death she has been commended for her rebellious spirit, her bravery in talking about child sex abuse, and her wickedly sharp sense of humour. Although her life was now given more context than merely the flurry of controversies she had previously been defined by, much of the writing about her felt like her memory had been flattened, removing all of the sharp edges and contradictions that were a huge part of who she was.

Two recent books have tried to recontextualise O’Connor beyond the black and white depictions of her that have dominated media so far. The Real Sinéad O’Connor by Ariane Sherine attempts to present a thoroughly researched version of O’Connor’s life, plodding through each event in chronological order. Although Sherine uses archival research and new interviews to construct her narrative, the book is too factually rigid to truly delve deeper into O’Connor’s mindset. As a result of this approach, The Real Sinéad O’Connor never picks up the pace to become more than a straight forward document of O’Connor’s whereabouts over the years.

Read more

Lankum’s Antidote To Alienation

by

For Dublin’s folk-doom outfit Lankum, traditional Irish music sessions are the antidote to the loneliness of the modern world. In conversation with SHANE ANDERSON, band members Cormac MacDiarmada and Ian Lynch discuss transforming ancient folk songs into haunting, contemporary ballads.

By Shane Anderson

Though just banter between songs, the interaction serves as a synecdoche for the band at large: Taking traditional ballads that occasionally date back centuries, Lankum creates pieces that explore the darkness of the human experience and go against the standard narrative of Irish music, where it’s just about getting drunk and having a good “craic.” At times, the band’s sound is as heavy as a funeral procession and at others it is possessed by a raw, primal energy—thanks, in part, to the Lynch brothers’ background in the European crust punk scene. And although they’ve traded in their electric guitars for traditional instruments, such as Uillean pipes, tin whistle, fiddle, and harmonium, the band nevertheless upends tradition, stripping down the ancient folk songs and rebuilding them with haunting harmonies and dense droning soundscapes that are sweeping festivals and stages across the world, earning them the Guardian’s 2023 best album accolades for their album False Lankum (2023). In this interview with Shane Anderson, band members Cormac MacDiarmada and Ian Lynch explain why traditional Irish music sessions are the antidote to the loneliness of the modern world.

SHANE ANDERSON: The band name used to be Lynched, which was in reference to the last name of two members in your band, but you changed it because you felt it might be offensive to some listeners. Why did you choose the name Lankum?

CORMAC MACDIARMADA: We were on tour in Europe when we landed on Lankum after talking about the name change for a good couple of years. There were hundreds of hundreds of names suggested but Lankum was the one we all agreed on.

IAN LYNCH: We were very fond of a certain recording of a ballad called “False Lankum.” The recording was made by a Traveler singer called John Reilly Jr. in the 1960s in Ireland. He sang this very elaborate, lengthy ballad and the villain of the piece is called False Lankum. It’s kind of like the bogeyman in the story and it goes to a castle to murder everyone, including the children. It turns out that the False Lankum is the one who built the castle and was never paid for his hard work.

SA: So, the song has a very political dimension to it. And it seems to me this could be said of a lot of your work.

IL: It’s just something there in the music. Folk and traditional music is the music of the people.

SA: How do you find the songs you record?

CM: There are loads of different ways. The one thing about music like this is that it’s very much a living tradition, it’s very much in a constant flow. What I mean is it’s not a relic. It’s thriving. It’s very social and vibrant. It’s in the pubs we would have gone to, all the singers circles in and around Dublin as well as in other parts of the country. In the olden days, we would go and play a session, an informal gathering of musicians, after a gig.

SA: Your sound has changed a lot over the past ten years. What brought about this change?

CM: One of the key things with the last two albums in particular was getting our producer, John “Spud” Murphy, who plays with us now, too. He was on the Dublin Irish scene for a long time and recorded a lot of amazing records. And he brought a different energy that hugely boosts our sound. When we are recording something and are making arrangements now, we’re like, “OK, this is really good, but it’s going to be absolutely stratospheric once he gets his hands on it.”

IL: I think trying to constantly evolve that element of the band’s sound that is darkly meditative is what drives us. But I do think there were certain things we were trying to do previously that were in this direction. Even tracks on Cold Old Fire, say, the middle segment of “Tri-Coloured House,” or, later on, the drone underpinning “Déanta in Éireann” or “What Will We Do When We Have No Money?” We were trying to delve more into doom and drone there and do it with our traditional instruments, but we hit a brick wall before we met “Spud” since these instruments are used in a very specific way.

SA: Another part of your process that interests me is that you decided to record a little-known version of “Wild Rover.” It’s very different than The Dubliner’s version, which feels like Ireland’s second national anthem. Could you talk about that choice and deciding to go against the grain?

CM: When we found that song, it was a bit of a revelation. We were all like, “fucking hell, this is unbelievable.” And that’s half the battle. Once you find one of those songs, it creates a collective energy and drive.

IL: I think it’s safe to say that a lot of people are very sick of that standard version of “Wild Rover.” And so, it’s really nice to bring a different version of the song and use that as an example to say, “Look, a lot of these big traditional songs used to exist in so many different variations around the world. This is only one version and there’s a lot more out there, you just have to dig deeper.” I made a podcast episode about “Wild Rover,” and there are hundreds of versions of that song that exist all around the world. But because of the nature of the recording industry in the 20th century and the nature of mainstream music, when one song is recorded and becomes a hit, it halts this very natural process of variation and evolution that happens to traditional songs when they’re allowed to just exist in their own way in the world. The way that traditional songs change and vary and evolve and travel around the world is important to talk about.

SA: So, it’s about offering a counter-narrative to the boisterous drinking song that is well known?

CM: 100 percent. And you know, the lyrics are fucking depressing. They’re about someone descending into alcoholism and having a huge degree of regret. And that’s not to say that there isn’t a place to have the contrast between the darkest, saddest lyrics with a quite upbeat and merry tune, like in the American Old Time tradition, but we wanted to recontextualize something that is very much a mainstay of the tradition and is done quite a lot and give it a different energy.

SA: What was the reaction like?

IL: I think a lot of people were like, “Holy shit, I’ve heard that song so much throughout my life and I never even realized that it was a song about a person whose life has been ruined by alcoholism and now they have all this regret of a life that’s spent away, and they wish it had been different.” I think people found that really refreshing. I don’t think it would have been the same if we had recorded the “Wild Rover” that everybody knows. The way Irish music has been packaged and sold by the industry is a very one-sided view. It’s all very happy go lucky. We’re all drunk and having a good time. And when we do that, it sounds like this.

As far as we’re concerned, that’s not true to the tradition at all. If you’ve spent time investigating traditional music and song, you find that every single aspect of life is described and comes out in the songs. There are all these other emotions that can be expressed by the music as well.

CM: There is a huge variety out there. I live in Sligo, which has a population of 50,000. A couple of musicians I never met before came to a session that we play regularly and I didn’t know a single tune they played. It’s probably indicative of how huge amount out there and how the repertoire changes from county to county.

Read more