Liam Ó Maonlaí (pronounced O'Mwan-lee), the lead singer of Ireland's Hothouse Flowers, like an heroic Irish legend with a foot each in different countries, keeps each of his feet in a different musical genre. Most widely known for his rock 'n roll work with Hothouse Flowers, Ó Maonlaí comes from a background of traditional music, and has been working in that field more lately.

In November/December 1995, Ó Maonlaí toured the U.S. with the group ALT, which also included Andy White and Tim Finn (of New Zealand's Crowded House and Split Enz). ALT is a perfect vehicle for Ó Maonlaí to straddle both genres. The majority of their performance consists of rock songs composed by the band members. Yet, at the beginning of their concert, Ó Maonlaí took the stage alone to sing a song in Gaelic sean nos-style (literally "the old style" of singing). He accompanied himself with only a bodhrán. Then again, mid-program he soloed with first a slow air on low whistle, then a faster tune, and finally accompanied himself on the piano to "The Lakes of Pontchartrain." From a balcony viewpoint, watching the audience, which was mostly composed of listeners to alternative college radio, one could literally see the jaws drop and the buzzing conversation stop. People who had never seen anything like it before, were mesmerized for the first time by Irish traditional music.

"I've been playing traditional music since I was about nine, and maybe younger," Ó Maonlaí said. He learned songs from his dad, who was "a really, really beautiful singer," and he played first the tin whistle, and then the piano. Ó Maonlaí cites Seán Ó Riada as an early and continuing influence [Ó Riada was a composer in the 1950s and 60s, who blended Irish traditional and classical musics. With his group Ceoltóirí Chualann, he merged the uilleann pipes, fiddle, flute, concertina and bodhrán of traditional music, with the more classical sounds of harp and harpsichord.] Ó Riada's music was the music that Ó Maonlaí's family took on family holidays.

"It's my musical reference point," he explained. "It's my Bible, I suppose. There were so many things there that I could look at for my own playing. Sean Ó Riada was a harpsichord player, and I'm a piano player, there's that side of it, and just the arrangement on bodhrán, and all those things."

Though he grew up in Dublin, Ó Maonlaí and his family travelled often to County Kerry. "I found incredible cultural fulfillment there. The Irish language is still spoken there, everyone speaks it, kids are brought up speaking it. And it's amazing for that reason. I got my passion for that place from my dad as well."

In the 1980s, however, Ó Maonlaí began playing and singing a very different sort of music. In listening to the first two Hot House Flowers albums (People, 1988, and Home, 1991), especially songs like "I'm Sorry," "Sweet Marie," and "Don't Go," one can't help thinking of the blue eyed soul singers of The Commitments ["Soul is the rhythm of the people...The people o' Dublin, our people, remember, need soul. We've got soul"; Roddy Doyle, 1987].

After a show in San Francisco, it was 11:30pm and ALT had just finished playing, but still Ó Maonlaí was willing to talk about the beginning of Hot House Flowers. Even though the dressing room was packed, Ó Maonlaí was immediately focused. "We started in a place called The Magic Carpet. We did our first gig there. We wrote the songs the night before because we got a call from Eamon, who was my best friend at the time, and he said, 'I can get The Magic Carpet, do you want to do it?' And we were jamming and rehearsing at the time and we said, 'Okay,'and we worked out an hour-long set with a break in the middle. That went pretty well. We sort of stormed town and told everyone we knew, 'We're doing a gig tomorrow night,' and about 50 people showed up, which was good for the size of the place. We were scared, and we all ceremonially put Brillcream™ on our hair. We had Maria Doyle singing with us at the time; she was more the main singer and I was the piano player. It was quite mad. We had a real piano that was in the place; and we used a set of disco lights, and a p.a. that we hired for the night. The first night was pretty rough."The second week," he continued, "was a bit better, and the third one, we hit it. People kept coming back because something was happening on stage, and it was interesting; it was developing and unfolding. It wasn't always amazing or great, but it was always attractive. I think that's a lot to do with it. We were willing to send ourselves out a bit. We were all mad about soul and dance music, so that was the main direction of the band. I used to do a trumpet solo, use a few jazz chords.

"So, we did that for a while, and then the place got too small. Then, we decided to move into town to a place in The Pembroke Bar: We called it The Chicken Club. Instead of being our gig, it was a review, sort of, of people we happened to meet over the week. We were busking at the time, as well, so the people we'd meet busking, songwriters, poets, performance artists, they'd come and do a bit. It went very well. The Chicken Club had a name, it had a feel to it. People came, thieves came, bank accountants came, all ages of people came. It was an amazing time, it was another era. And we played at the end of the night, in this basement, with the tables lit up. They were opaque tables, lit up red. It was funky, but no one realized it, 'cause it was sort of hidden, done up like 15-20 years ago. And again, we managed to shake the place there. Again, it was getting a bit dangerous; we were starting to break fire regulations, and we were beginning to worry if it wouldn't be dangerous to continue. So we had to stop that."

Ó Maonlaí paused to catch his breath a minute, oblivious to the rising voices around him, then he continued: "Nothing came after that, in that form, until a gig came up in a place called Risk. At this stage, we were managed, and we had been shifted into a rehearsal studio, and I hated that. I resented it, and it created a bit of tension between us. But this Risk thing came up, and again something else was starting to happen where we played. This time we didn't even play a set; we just played music, we just jammed, formed grooves. I was playing clavinet with a wah-wah pad or a phaser, Stevie Wonder jive. This was about 87, 88, 89. So that was mad, it was every Sunday night again. U2 came on the Sundays, most of the time. Def Leppard was living there then, and they'd come every odd time. Mike Scott came twice. Dónal Lunny came. The first time I met him, he was standing over there, looking at me like this [Ó Maonlaí made a squinting face, and feigns looking through a crowd], playing the bodhrán. Loads of people came. Maria was still in the band; we were called The Benzini Brothers, doing that gig.

"Then, record time started coming; so we had to focus towards that. We made Don't Go, and somebody said, 'We really like that; would you like to be played on The Eurovision? We'd make a video for you.' And we thought, 'Yeah, Planxty had done it, so it's not a sick thing to do. They've done it well, it's a cultural event. It mightn't be everybody's cup of tea, but it's an opportunity to do some good art.' So, we did it. We spent a really hard-working two weeks travelling all over Europe, places we'd never, ever been before. We were playing on the streets, doing gigs, and it became almost all of the time. It was very heavy on us, but of course, the results were immediate attention from all the world. We were in America in no time. We were all over Europe in no time, we were on 'Top of the Pops,' we were on telly."

As he wound up his tale of the early days of Hot House Flowers, Ó Maonlaí preferred to cruise through the periods of success. How it all continued is of less importance to him than how it all began. "Then," he summarized, "there were all those years of touring, loads and loads of touring, the hard slog, until 1993, when my father passed on, and I said, 'It's time to call everything to a stop, and review the situation.' I said, 'I've been after this for a long time, but now I've got the authority or the strength, or the right to actually call out a year.' So, we agreed on that, and I just settled down, and did things that people asked me to. If they asked me to do stuff, I'd do it, without having to consult anybody. And I just lived at home, and saw four seasons at home; watched time go by a bit, in a more real way."

Some of the people that asked him to do things, in what became the ensuing three years, included Sharon Shannon, Luka Bloom, Altan, The Rankin Family, Dónal Lunny, Arcady, Liam O'Flynn, and Midge Ure. Ó Maonlaí is in such demand, not only because he sings so expressively in either genre, but also because he plays a horde of instruments, pianos, organs, keyboards, whistles of all shapes and sizes, guitars, bodhrán, harmonica and didgeridoo.

The last he learned from the incomparable Australian/Irish musician Steve Cooney. "Steve Cooney came to Ireland 15, maybe more years ago," Ó Maonlaí explained. "I was still in school at the time, and I remember one morning a good friend of mine, Dónal O'Leary, coming to me and saying he'd been in The Meeting Place the night before and Stockton's Wing was there, and they had a didgeridoo and bass player. And I said 'That's it,' because I'd seen Ralph Harris on television about five years before that, and I thought, 'God, that's great.' He'd explained how it was played very simply; so that I understood it, and I used to practice the breathing without ever knowing I would do it. It was like learning to juggle or cycle a bike, to balance. Then, about five years later, I was in the band [Hothouse Flowers], and Cormac Breathnach came over to the studio, and said there was a seisun on that night with Steve. So, I went along and met Steve, and got my first sound and feel and go on the didgeridoo. Then, another while passed, and I had more goes and learned it. It was through Steve really; and he gave me an awful lot of music as well."

Ó Maonlaí found the blending of musical cultures intriguing. He said, "I realized at quite a young age that I loved what Planxty were doing, playing Bulgarian music as well as traditional Irish music. Suddenly I became aware of how clear the soul of a country can be by listening to their music. I had the feeling that, what could be better than to bring musics together, or to just be exploring different music all the time, to better understand a certain amount of the people, by seeing them through their music."

And then there was ALT: Andy White, Liam Ó Maonlaí, and Tim Finn (White from Belfast, Ó Maonlaí from Dublin, and Finn from New Zealand). ALT is what can happen when you're not looking for a band. Or as Tim Finn put it: "It's exquisite imperfection. It's like wearing turquoise with lavender, or having a little bit of your slip showing. That's what ALT is all about, letting your slip show."

And Ó Maonlaí described how it all came about: "I'd known Andy for about seven years, 'cause he'd come on the first English tour. I think it was when I heard his third album, Himself, that I suddenly got turned on by his music, and just wanted to be with him, and play with him a lot, so I did. Andy moved to Dublin, and we went through a summer of playing together, being friends. I met Tim in London, through Clive Langer, who made our [Hothouse Flowers] first album. Again, we just got on well. As a result, he asked, would Peter [O'Toole of Hothouse Flowers] and myself like to play on an awards thing. So, we played on that, and I said, 'Why don't you come back and meet Andy? I think you'd really get on, and we could finish that song we started.' Just before that we went to the world uranium hearings in Salzburg, where people spoke about what's going on in the world, people who are affected first hand by it. So, we shared an awful lot on that first trip. We kind of got to know one another in the presence of something very huge and very awesome and very awful.

"We went home to Ireland," the saga continues, "and we've both a passion for swimming in the sea. So, we'd swim every day in the sea. Then we decided we'd go to record a song. We were having great fun with each others' sound, so we said, 'Let's go in and record something.' We didn't even go into the studio part; we just stayed in the control room, and we had mikes and just sang, and we did track after track, on top of track. So, we had our own sound, without thinking about it, without designing anything, which I felt was very important. I'd been longing to not calculate things for a long time, just to get it out of my system. Suddenly, there was this sound, which was very rich and very rough, but very sweet at the same time."

The original collaborations between Ó Maonlaí, Finn and White took place before Ó Maonlaí "called his year out" with Hothouse Flowers. Once that band went on hiatus, the three met up in Australia for three weeks to actually make the record. Touring there, in Europe, and in the U.S. followed. The 1995 Cooking Vinyl release Alternatives captures, in a rough way, the energy, spontaneity, and collaborative songwriting of the trio. It doesn't come close, however, to the charisma the three share on stage, as they exchange instruments, musical ideas, and leads and harmonies. Before seeing their performance, the word was out on the street that every show was different. Andy White confirmed this. "A lot of bands could say they never do the same show twice, but we never do anything like the same show twice. Every night is a challenge. We just take it as it comes. Everything influences: what's happened that day, what we're feeling like, what the hotel's like, what the food's like, the color of the dressing room, whether it's wood or plastic." White looked around the room, and with mischievous grin concluded, "Often with plastic, you get a better gig." Ó Maonlaí called playing with the trio "dangerously exciting."

White's description of the ALT experience reminds one of the early days of Hothouse Flowers. What does the future hold for that band? "We're in touch at the moment," Ó Maonlaí said. "We've been writing songs, and recording songs, very slowly. That's kind of a journey. We're three now, Peter [O'Toole], Fiachna [O Braonain], and myself. It's a journey into the unknown. At the moment, that's what we're working with. Anything could happen, anything. It's a time of huge change for us as individuals. We want to share it. We want to hold it together. But I think it's very important that we're going into the unknown. It's time for another Chicken Club, or something else to happen. That's the quest."