Whatever happens... Happens!

Sharon Shannon talks with Tom Nelligan

[From Dirty Linen #63, April/May 1996]

Ireland has long been known for producing writers and actors as prolifically as any country on the planet. In recent years it's been celebrating a legacy of musicians as well, as Irish music has come to attract crowds of new fans, both traditionally-oriented and otherwise. One image of contemporary Irish music involves the high-profile, mainstream commercial acts like U2, Sinead O'Connor, and the eternal Van Morrison, usually loud and rocking and plowing their way through the world of arena tours and MTV. The other image is a cluster of anonymous musicians quietly stroking fiddles and pumping squeezeboxes in a dark corner of a smoky pub.

Somewhere in between, and combining the best of both worlds, is the Sharon Shannon Band. With the energy and stage presence of rockers and the unpretentious traditional roots of pub musicians, they're as exciting a live band as you'll find coming out of post-Celtic-revival Ireland, giving a modern push to ancient jigs and reels, blending in tunes from Quebec, Scandinavia, and other lands beyond the Celtic fringe, and having every bit as good a time as the foot-tapping audience. The band's leader, button accordion (and fiddle) player Sharon Shannon, is by general critical consensus one of the finest young traditionally-based instrumentalists in Ireland, a charismatic performer whose technical skill combined with a brilliant sense of melody and style has won fans in the pop/rock world as well.

A small woman with a perpetual smile, Shannon immediately impresses just about everybody who hears her. Few contemporary musicians, traditional or otherwise, so well combine technique with such obvious enthusiasm for what they're doing, as her infectious energy reinforces her audience-grabbing stage presence. Bending over her button accordion, eyes often fixed on the floor, saying only a few words but frequently flashing that smile, she pumps out more well-chosen squeezebox notes than anyone since Phil Cunningham while leading the band through one burner after another.

In the five years that she's been touring with her own group there have been the sort of personnel changes that seem mandatory for any Irish folk group. The one constant has been bassist Trevor Hutchinson, who drives the rhythm and digs up rocking roots with his stand-up electric bass. For the last year-and-a-half guitarist Donough Hennessy has combined acoustic power-chording with fast-picked leads, and joining the band on their latest U.S. tour as the newest member was fiddler Winnie Horan, from the Irish-American group Cherish the Ladies. On a rainy October night midway through last fall's American tour, before a show at the Town Crier Cafe in Pawling, New York, Shannon talked about her music over a cup of tea, her soft voice often punctuated by a laugh. We were joined by Hutchinson, who added some comments from the band's perspective.

Shannon is a native of the village of Corrofin in County Clare, a largely rural region in the west of Ireland that has come to be strongly associated with the preservation and revival of the country's ancient music and language. Her family is a musical one. Her parents are traditional dancers, her two sisters and brother are also traditional-style instrumentalists, and she has been playing music of one sort or another most of her life. "That's the way I grew up," she recalled, "playing for ceilidhs all the time. That's how I learned, really, playing for set dancers - 'Siege of Ennis,' 'Haymaker's Jig,' and old-time waltzes, playing for about five hours for a big long ceilidh." By age 14, as a student of Clare fiddler and dedicated revivalist Frank Custy, she was a part of a touring group of young people that he organized, and shortly thereafter she was a familiar face at local sessions. Soon she moved to a town known for its musical heritage. "I was living in this place in County Clare called Doolin and musicians come there from all over the world. So I got to hear different traditional music, like Swedish music, and American old-timey music, and Cajun music. I learned traditional music from all over the world rather than rock and roll."

Playing both accordion and fiddle, her instrumental prowess began attracting attention while she was still a teenager. The pub sessions and marathon dance gigs led to accompanist work with a theater company in Galway, and then a short association with the band Arcady. By 1989, at age 20, she was ready to make an album. Already, her reputation was such that legendary bouzouki player Dónal Lunny and guitarist Gerry O'Beirne were part of the crew that gathered for the taping at the Winkles Hotel in Kinvara. "The original idea for the recording was to have it done as a live session in a pub. We were there for about four days and we recorded about 24 hours of music."

The twist turned out to be that among the visitors to the hotel were members of the rising Scots/Irish rock band, the Waterboys. "Most of the lads, the Waterboys, were around then because they were recording at the time, in Spiddal in County Galway. Mike Scott asked me to do some gigs with the Waterboys the following week! Fairly big gigs - Glastonbury and a lot of big festivals. So the following week I was off with the lads. I ended up staying with them for, I don't know, a year, year-and-a-half, and we didn't do anything more with my own recording." Shannon left the Waterboys when the band reorganized in 1990. Two of her current musical associates - bassist Hutchinson and studio drummer Noel Bridgeman - are fellow alumni.

During her time as a rocker she learned new stage skills and musical styles, and the straight traditional music she had previously been playing turned into the buoyant blend that characterizes her current sound. "Playing with the Waterboys, that's where we started mixing up the tunes. By the time we got back to doing my thing I had a completely different idea altogether about the record. So we went back into the studio and did a lot of things with Trevor. It was more rocked-up. We used two of the original tracks from the pub."

That first album, simply titled Sharon Shannon, was released on the Irish label Solid Records in 1991 and came out in the U.S. on Philo in 1993. It was something of a landmark, mostly traditional in source material and deeply Irish in feel but with an unmistakable rocking enthusiasm. Subsequent tours marked the debut of the Sharon Shannon Band, which in spite of its changing lineup has consistently been a group as tight and energetic as any on the Celtic circuit. And while Shannon's talent on accordion is well known, she deserves equal credit for her skill at selecting a compatible backup crew. "It's been just Trevor and myself as the core, I suppose, and everybody else just hopped in and out. Donough's been with us a year now. In the original lineup Steve Cooney was playing the guitar, with Máire Breathnach on fiddle. And then Steve left and Gerry joined, Máire left and Paul Kelley, a mandolin and fiddle player from Dublin joined." Fiddler Mary Custy has also toured and recorded with the band.

Shannon's second album, Out The Gap, was released in 1994 in Ireland and 1995 in the U.S. It moves the music even closer to a folk-rock sound, with drums on most tracks, as well as horns and keyboards here and there, Shannon's bright accordion always bouncing along at the head of the pack. Its creation was apparently a rather spontaneous thing. "We didn't have any plan," said Shannon.

"Parts of it were just trying things out," added Hutchinson.

"We went into the studio with us four, Trevor, myself, Donough, and Mary Custy," continued Shannon. "We had been doing gigs before that with Richie Buckley, a saxophone player. The first track that we recorded was 'The Mighty Sparrow.' That was the only tune we knew we'd play - that was the only tune that we'd practiced. We'd been doing that at the live gigs with a reggae feel, so we decided that we'd get a real reggae producer to do that track. So we booked five days in London with Denis Bovell at his studio just to do that one thing. We were saying it might not work, so... But it just happened straightaway. We got that first track done in the first day, and it went so well we decided to just keep playing, and we got five tracks done with him, mixed and everything. So by the time we got home we were all enthusiastic."

Recording resumed a couple weeks later in Dublin, with drummer Noel Bridgeman and keyboard player Brian Connor, both of whom had also played with the band in concert. "We got another four tracks done in about another five days or something. The ones we did with Noel and Ritchie when we came back to Dublin were the ones we had been doing at live gigs with drums and saxophone."

Asked about the intricacy and precision of the arrangements, both on stage and on CD, Shannon laughed and said, "It's thanks to Trevor!"

Hutchinson, in turn said, "The general shape of it will come from Sharon, really, and the guitar has a lot to do with it. Donough or whoever is going to shape up with what he's doing and I just try to fit in with that, put as much of a groove to that as possible. And then it's just people chipping in after that. It goes through levels and stages. There's no master plan - it just happens. Sometimes we do things live for a few gigs, and its fairly ropey, and gradually it comes together."

With all the claims by this very professional band that they wing it at every opportunity, the conversation turned to musical improvisation. "In traditional music it's very subtle," Shannon explained. "You can do a little roll one minute and the next time round you wouldn't do it at all. With most Irish players, people like Tommy People and Paddy Glackin, it's a real [melody] core and there's not much branching out. And at the same time, in the tune, if you listen, they're actually doing an awful lot of improvisation. But it's not noticeable; it's very subtle."

"It's probably a difference between a lot of Irish traditional music and American Irish traditional," added Hutchinson. "People here tend to take it out a bit more on a limb. People like Eileen Ivers tend to solo more, but that's not so much on the agenda at home."

The band's set list, both in concert and on CD, is hardly limited to Ireland. Out the Gap includes tunes from Quebec, Finland, and the American old-timey tradition, while the first CD listed Swedish and Cajun sources. "I never really put a label on it," Shannon said. "We never say we're playing Irish music, either. If we like the melody and the groove and whatever, we just play it. It doesn't matter where it comes from."

"A lot of things just end up sounding like 'the band'," said Hutchinson. "I think we're all turned on by the same thing really, an excitement thing, whatever it is. You just get into that and go for it."

Although known primarily as a button accordion player, Shannon plays the fiddle with the same skill and energy. "I've been playing the fiddle for about nine years now. I play it the same way all the time. At band gigs we usually do only about three fiddle sets, but in informal sessions I play either the fiddle or the box about half and half." She's also taken up the whistle again, an instrument she had played as a child. "It's for a bit of variety in the set - no other reason."

Up to this point, Shannon has been primarily an arranger and interpreter of traditional music and a few contemporary tunes by other people. "Well, I'm trying to write a little bit," she admitted, "but the tunes are very based on tradition. They're not like Waterboys records. I wrote some tunes for fiddle with Dónal Lunny, but they're traditional-type tunes, not like [Lunny's] Moving Hearts stuff. They're more like a Donegal tune or a Clare tune."

Although the Sharon Shannon Band plays its share of Irish festivals and folk clubs, their high-power music also captures audiences more accustomed to rocking. Hutchinson commented on the different expectations of audiences. "The rock venues have been pretty good. It crosses over really well. I think in the rock venues people go to have a really good time, and in a lot of the folk venues they kind of go to study things. You get a lot of people who are really into the finer details of what instruments are playing, and how they're doing this and how they're doing that. Sometimes that can get a little bit stagnant, at the extreme end of it."

Shannon has noticed the difference as well. "I think a lot of it has to do with the actual venue as well. It we're playing two gigs in one town, say Boston or New York, and we're doing it in an Irish club one night and a rock club the next night, you get two completely different audiences and two completely different reactions."

The audience reaction at the Town Crier - a friendly folk pub disguised as a Mexican restaurant, complete with a cactus on stage - was nothing less than ravingly enthusiastic. During two nonstop 45-minute sets Shannon and the band - all synchronously dressed in various combinations of black and white - were a picture of concentrated energy, jumping from fast tunes to faster ones while the audience tapped, clapped, and swayed along. Shannon appears to play effortlessly, her fingers a blur on the squeezebox buttons, occasionally looking up or nodding to signal a change to the band. Hutchinson's booming bass and Hennessy's guitar set steady rhythm and background colors, both often hitting on the off-beats for variety. And Horan didn't sound like the band's newcomer at all as she power-fiddled through her own set of counterpoints to Shannon's accordion leads.

While Shannon is now a performing and recording veteran, she is still very much part of a younger generation of traditionally-rooted Irish musicians. Asked about the current state of music at home, she said, "I think there's a lot more traditional players now, compared to forty years ago, or even ten years ago. The amount of kids under twenty playing - there's a lot more now." Asked to list some favorite contemporaries, she first mentioned a fellow box player. "There's an outstanding traditional accordion player, Dermot Byrne. He plays with Altan now - he's altogether amazing. He's about 27, but he's been playing like that since he was 14. He can play anything he wants.

"There's millions of them. I could name loads of musicians but you wouldn't have heard of any of them at all in America. Lishe Kelly, a harpist from Westport in Mayo, is really something else. The McSherrys from Belfast - a family, really good - a piper, a fiddle player, a flute player who sings as well, and a guitar player. Steve Cooney, an incredible guitar player from Kerry. He plays in a duo with a Kerry farmer, Seamus Begley, a brilliant box player and an amazing traditional singer who sings in Irish."

Now that she is known as a world-class exponent of Irish traditional music, Shannon would seem to have established a career, if not by design then by the sheer force of her talent. But she still seems to take things day by day. "This tour is going till the 10th of December," she said. "Then we're taking a break, I suppose just to get some space into our heads for what to do with the next record."

"I never have any plans about anything, and I never did," she concluded with one more shy laugh. "I never knew that I was going to be able to make a living from music. None of us decided that we were going to become professional musicians - things just kind of happened bit by bit. I just started to be able to make a bit of a living out of music and I was happy to do that. But one thing leads to another, and whether it means that you make a living out of music or that your music changes, whatever happens, happens."

"If the time ever comes that it's a pain to do it every single night, then that's when it's time to say 'Okay, time to stop touring for a while.' So I'll keep going while it's working. All you need is a few weeks break and next thing you're mad for the road again!"

Discography

Sharon Shannon
Solid Records ROCD 8 (1991)
Philo PH 1153 (1993)
Out the Gap
Solid Records ROCDG 14 (1994)
Green Linnet GLCD 3099 (1995)
With the Waterboys
Room to Roam Chrysalis F2-21768 (1990)
Selected Anthology Contributions
Bringing It All Back Home
BBC CD 844 (1991)
A Woman's Heart
DARA 158 (1992)
A Woman's Heart II
DARA 063 (1994)
The Sound of Stone: Artists for Mullaghmore
Tara 4003 (1993)

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