Gaughan's Irish tour Epistle, Part the Fourth
Cork, 12.00 noon, Sunday 14th Oct 2001

Well, that was Cork. Had a superb time and I'm pretty hoarse this morning as proof. I'm glad I have the night off. The only place in the world I consistantly get voice problems is touring in Ireland; it's a combination of the damp air off the Atlantic coupled with packed, hot, sweaty, smoky venues and getting carried away and doing twice as long a second set as I intended. So I try not to do more than 3 nights in a row without having a night off to rest my voice.

The great thing about singing in Ireland or Scotland is that, in general, most people still have an understanding of what songs are and what they're for. That might sound a bit odd so let me expand.

In many places in the so-called developed world, song content has been diluted to the extent that anyone who sings about anything other than sex is regarded as a bit of an oddity. Almost the entire canon of popular music - in which I momentarily include for the purpose of this comment those variations labelled Jazz, Country, Singer-Songwriter, Rock, AOR etc - consists of songs dealing in one way or another with sexual relations. However amongst the children of the Gael song still has a more complex relationship with life. For centuries it was our primary means of recording our lives and history and so songs were written on every detail of our experiences, from songs about Mrs-Ginty-across-the-road's cat falling into the poteen through the sad songs of unrequited love to the struggle for self-determination. Don't make presumptions about what I'm saying here. I'm not wearing any rose-tinted spectacles; we are as prone to falling into the same trap as anyone else. This is evidenced by the periodic rejection of our cultures and languages as being indicative of poverty and ignorance and jumping on whatever happens to be the current bandwagon whether that be Victorian parlour songs or the Spice Girls. But the legacy of our past is still closer to the surface than in most places in the northern hemisphere and so it is not really necessary for the singer to explain why they sing songs with a wider subject matter.

Anyway, I can imagine nothing more absurd than the sight of a 53 year old standing publicly bleating songs of adolescent angst. I could do it with some authority when I was an adolescent but I couldn't do it now without feeling like a complete prat.

In spite of the routine misrepresentation of what I do by people who seem to think that a singer should be totally detached from everyday reality, the broad content of the songs I sing has remained pretty much the same throughout my life. The "political" songs my family had as a natural part of their repertoires were not historical relics - they were about things they had lived through or things which had consequences they had lived through. Had someone asked them why they were singing "political" songs, the question would have been as meaningless to them then as it is to me now. I sing about things which have had some effect on my life and that, almost of necessity, includes events classed nowadays as "political".

So last night was superb. We did have one small group who thought it was acceptable to sit yacking at the back of the room and ignore the other audience members' requests for them to "Wheest!" I ran through the usual repertoire of decreasingly subtle hints but they paid no attention until I eventually stopped in the middle of one song, gave them a long, hard stare and said something to the effect that my contract contained nothing about my being employed to provide accompaniment to their conversation. There wasn't another cheep out of them for the rest of the night. I'm told I do a good hard stare so I'm not sure if it was that or being singled out for a targetted blast of ire from the stage which shut them up but they did and we had a fine time of it after that and I eventually got off-stage at half past midnight. Thank you, Cork, and thank you Pat Conroy who does such a superb job of running the Lobby.

I'm going to stick around tonight and go back to the Lobby to see Andy Irvine who is playing there with Chris Wood. That should be a very interesting combination so I'm looking forward to it.

Tomorrow's Monday so it must be Galway.

25th January 2005

Tour Dates - last update 30 August 2005

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