What traditional music means to the Irish musician pushing it forward – and interview with John Francis Flynn
By Ollie Rankine
It’s easy to get lost in the mythology that surrounds traditional folk music. Written by few but reimagined and passed down by many, its songs are reflections of the land and its people, with roots almost as old as time. For Ireland, trad music makes up the lifeblood of its community via songs that continue to hum through the valleys and echo through generations of huddled pub backroom performances. John Francis Flynn has arrived as the next in a long lineage of pop culture figures to reinterpret his countrymen’s most precious heirlooms, and he’s quick to reassure me, these traditions are still alive and well in Dublin.
“It’s been my community since I was a child,” he says, reminiscing alone in his living room. “I grew up in the trad scene.” Flynn has never known any other home than the northside of the Irish capital, having spent much of his youth cutting his teeth playing the flute and tin whistle. “I was definitely the odd one out in my neighbourhood, playing trad music, but I eventually started meeting like-minded people dispersed around the city. It’s a big community, nonetheless. These days, there’s trad sessions happening every day.”
Looking to escape the inner-city bustle, Flynn is soon heading west to stake out the winter amongst the flowing pastures and craggy coastline of County Claire. It’s a welcome change of scenery for a man who’s spent the past 18 months documenting a version of his home that is scarcely pictured within the pages of garish tourist brochures. His genre-bending new album, Look Over The Wall, See The Sky, pays homage to a real Dublin, known only to the Irish folk that live there.
It’s these hidden natives, and the centuries-old stories passed down from one lifetime to the next, that inspires much of Flynn’s music, as well as the stockpile of folk songs before him. “I’m interested in all aspects of traditional music and folklore,” he says, pondering the origin of his muse. “I’m interested in how it functions in society, in terms of how you can learn about your past and where you come from. But also in a spiritual way, in terms of how it’s evolved through people in a sense of where the music has travelled and how that can change songs over time. It reveals a lot about us as Irish people.”
The dancers, poets and musicians – or “trad heads” as Flynn likes to call them – who make up Dublin’s eclectic traditional arts scene are all frequenters of the city’s cultural hangouts, the Cobblestone pub being its fabled stronghold. “It attracts people from all over the world. It’s very real to the point that it’s a living, breathing epicentre of culture,” he says, taking me through the revolving door of Celtic troupes who travel from far and wide to make up the Cobblestone’s melting pot of heritage showcases.
The regular congregation of musicians, art lovers and barflies that frequent the pub are by no means archivists. Flynn, who is a regular face within the community, explains: “I don’t think there’s any need to go preserving anything, it’s all there for you already if you want it. Traditional music is very much a healthy being. It doesn’t really need to be revived because it’s always been around.”
But Dublin’s much-loved hubs like the Cobblestone are under threat. Inundated with tourists, and amidst a homelessness epidemic made worse by some of the highest rents in Europe, the Irish government continues to force through big business developments onto a city that’s buckling under the growing eyesore of unaffordable luxury hotels lining its highstreets.
“I think that when a city, in this case Dublin, is being bought and sold by property developers, it gets you to confront what it all means, and specifically what is more important, your home or some capitalist agenda,” says Flynn. “Dublin City has been turned into one big hotel. It’s being sold as this amazing place for music, culture, shamrocks and leprechauns, where everyone’s drinking and having the craic. But while people come to visit Ireland, the rush of tourists are pushing out those who can’t afford to live here anymore. We’re basically in a struggle to keep hold of our homes and communities.”
This painful reality is laid bare on Flynn’s recent single, ‘Mole In The Ground’ – a haunting rendition of Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1928 anti-establishment folk tune which has been expertly repurposed to articulate the plight of Irish people. Choosing to fixate on the song’s most cutthroat line, Flynn’s deep guttural repetition of the words, “Drink up your blood like wine” sends the track spiralling into the blackhearted depths of capitalist gluttony.