Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #127 (December 2006/January 2007).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Flook

Look, It's Flook!

by Kerry Dexter

Sarah Allen looked back over almost 11 years of making music with Flook. "I think you wouldn't stay together and carry on making music that long if you weren't quite good," she said. "And people start noticing you're there."

The BBC has noticed, naming Flook the best group at the 2006 folk awards ceremony. Flook has filled venues in England, Ireland, the United States, Australia, and Europe. It all started when a friend of Allen's wanted to do a one-off series with three flutes. Allen brought in two other players, Michael McGoldrick and Brian Finnegan, and Three Nations Flutes was born.

"It was supposed to be someone from England, someone from Ireland, and someone from Scotland, which we didn't have. Brian would be Irish and I'm English, but Mike [who was born to Irish parents in Manchester] definitely isn't Scottish, and we used to chuckle at that," Allen recalled. "But anyway, I don't think it was ever intended to go beyond two weeks; it was just us on the three flutes and me playing a little bit of accordion. In the last gig, I think, it was Ed [Boyd] showed up and sat in with us at a little folk club in north London, and we quite liked that."

Boyd would soon come onboard playing guitar with the group. The sound of the three flutes proved quite popular and unique, and they got asked to do more and more gigs. "We changed the name very early on, after the first few gigs,"Allen said, "because obviously Three Nations Flutes didn't give a very accurate idea of what we were."

At first, they used the more conventional spelling Fluke, because it sounded similar to flute and also because the band members regarded it as a bit of a fluke that they'd gotten together. As it happened, though, they found out that there was a techno band from Liverpool by that name. They decided to keep the idea but change the spelling, and so the band Flook was born.

In the early years, the sound would undergo a change, too. McGoldrick began to get more and more involved with playing with the established Scots group Capercaillie, and also working with the musicians with whom he'd founded the Ireland-based trad band Lúnasa. He decided to leave Flook.

"When Mike left, we thought about different flute players we could try to replace him with, and he was a bit unreplaceable. So we thought, 'Okay, we've got two flutes, we don't really need another one. We'll try something else.' " What they tried was asking John Joe Kelly, an accomplished bodhrán player who had sat in with Flook once or twice, to join the band as a full-time member. For the sound of the music and for the working relationship of the band members, it proved an inspired decision and one that's lasted over time.

"Since then, we've been very, very, completely and utterly consistent, the four of us, for the last seven or eight years," Allen continued. "That's the real Flook sound, and these days Brian will tend to be playing his high whistles, and I'll tend to be playing my alto flute. We're working as a team, and Ed and John Joe really lock in together with the guitar and the bodhrán, and then these two teams work together as a real tight four-piece group."

Each came to the band by a different route, however.

[cover #127]