Kíla
Top Bananas of Celtic Music, or Twinkling Tribal Hernia?
by Steve Winick
If you want to know what "Kíla" means, ask the seven members of the band. You'll get a different answer every time. Now that the band has toured the world, they've found plenty of meanings for the humble little word. According to Kíla's piper, Eoin Dillon, "In Indian it means a fort, or something like it; and in Scots Gaelic it's a girl's name which means something like 'whose beauty can't even be described by poets.' " Other meanings they claim for Kíla: in Finnish it means "wedge," in Hindi "banana," in Japanese "twinkle," and in Czech it means "hernia."
It wasn't always like this. "When we came up with the name," Dillon told the Irish Times, "we didn't have a meaning for it at all. We were just toying around with sounds." (In fact, the name of the band had been "Rónán, Rossa, Eoin, Colm, and friends," which is not quite as catchy as "Kíla.") "Then after a gig at the Brazen Head," Dillon continued, "this Frenchman asked us did we have a name, and Rónán came out with Kíla and it stuck."
Whatever it means, in whatever language, the name Kíla is quickly becoming synonymous with one of the most innovative, unusual, energetic configurations of internationally influenced Irish music. For some, like Billboard, they are "the cutting edge of progressive Gaelic-language music…positioned to be the biggest thing on the world music scene." For others, like Dublin's Hot Press, they represent "the most vital incarnation of Irish traditional music around," or even "the future of Irish music." Many words have been used to describe Kíla's music, too, from "acid céilí tribal groove" to "Celtic Caribbean." But none is as popular as "tribal," a label the band members don't much like.
"That's a very easy label," Kíla member Colm Ó Snodaigh said in a March 2000 interview. "I don't know what tribal is. Does that mean Native American powwow? But there's no powwow in our music." Offered the suggestion that it might have to do with all the international percussion instruments they play, Ó Snodaigh was still skeptical. "The djembe is an African instrument," he explained, "and the darrabukka's a Turkish, or middle-eastern instrument. The bodhrán is essentially Irish, but there's loads of different bodhráns all around the world. Shakers are just shakers. There was an old metal shaker 3,000 years ago in Ireland. So, tribal...I don't know. I think it's a bit easy, and it's actually something I don't understand."
What Ó Snodaigh does understand are the various musical influences that contribute to Kíla's energetic, world-music feel. None of them, he thinks, is "tribal." For him and several other of the members, for example, it all starts with Irish rock bands and traditional groups. He first mentioned Moving Hearts, then the Dónal Lunny band and its Sean Ó Riada retrospective album. "I mean, it's 13 years on, and I still listen to it constantly," he mused. "Later on," he continued, "we discovered the Bothy Band.
"Similarly, we love bands like John McLaughlin and Ravi Shankar [with the Mahavishnu Orchestra]. So Moving Hearts are very obvious; you're looking to them, but you're looking to hordes of other people. Like I was a big U2 fan, Thin Lizzy fan, Undertones fan. Again, it's the spirit of the music." Groups mentioned by other band members include AC/DC, ABBA, and Queen; Colm's brother Rossa Ó Snodaigh, who founded the band with Dillon, claims he learned to play the bódhran by drumming along with Status Quo records!
This is an excerpt. Read the full article in Dirty Linen #89 (Aug/Sept '00).
