Liam O’Flynn: The Quiet Man

15/03/2018 at 13:30

‘It was a glimmer in Christy’s eye, which developed into whatever it is that glimmers in eyes develop into,’ says Bill Leader, the man who recorded Prosperous (which, as a title for anything related to people hoping to make a living in folk music, is beyond parody). ‘It was an idea, and I think it probably exceeded the original intention. In fact, it did exceed it.’

Christy Moore, an Irish singer/guitarist who had been making a solid living on the thriving folk club scene during the late 60s, primarily in the North of England, had made one album thus far, produced by Dominic Behan, which had not been a satisfactory experience. He had an idea to bring together, as his backing band, Andy Irvine and Dónal Lunny on double-course stringed instruments and Liam O’Flynn on pipes. Three others would contribute to the sessions, but this would be the core quartet.

Liam: ‘Christy and Dónal are originally from Newbridge, which is about eight miles from where I’m from originally, but growing up we didn’t have any contact. But there was a little pocket of musical activity centred around the village called Prosperous in County Kildare, and in later years a gang of us used to meet there every Wednesday evening – sometimes Christy would be there, sometimes Dónal.’

‘I can’t say exactly what was in my mind,’ Christy admitted many years later. ‘But … it had to have pipes … Liam was the first piper I ever got in close to, and I’ve always found a deep and moving soulfulness about his playing. Even as a young man, I heard that, and without knowing much about the instrument or its history, it still touched me deeply.’38

Christy had also been deeply inspired, in 1968, by the first of two albums for Transatlantic by Sweeney’s Men, recorded in London by Bill. With Andy Irvine on mandolin and Johnny Moynihan on bouzouki, the first Sweeney album would be the wellspring of the interweaving double-course instrument sound that would be resurrected on Prosperous, with uilleann pipes added to the gumbo for the first time.

Christy Moore’s loose vision and Bill Leader’s similarly vague but noble progress
– neither man terribly well suited to the business of making money, but each one digging deeply into something that seemed to have a higher purpose – would coalesce in a London pub on the recommendation of Mike Harding, a Northern comedian with a guitar:

Bill: ‘Mike Harding was the connection. Christy spent a lot of time in the mid-Pennine area between Manchester and Halifax. He was not that happy with [his first LP] Paddy On The Road, and talked to Mike about it. And Mike, who I think had just finished recording his own album for Trailer, said, ‘Get in touch with Bill Leader, see if you can’t do something there.’ So he did that. We met up in some Irish bar in Fleet Street – Mooney’s, that was the place – and by the end of the conversation I’d agreed to go across to Ireland.’

Bill Leader had been producing folk and traditional records for Topic, Transatlantic and Decca from the late 50s onwards. Based in London, living in Camden Town, he had been sucked into this hand-to-mouth profession through the London-Irish music scene, with the duo of Margaret Barry & Michael Gorman his earliest prey. As of 1969, Bill had established his own binary star of labels: Leader (for pure traditional music) and Trailer (for folk club artists). He had a vague idea that the one would pay for the other.

‘I would like eventually to have the whole of the traditional culture on record,’ he had mused in 1970.39 Over the next decade he would give the ambition a serious attempt. With the recording of Prosperous, at a rambling old house of that name, in the summer of 1971, Bill had unconsciously notched up his fifth uilleann piper in 10 years.

From one end of the ‘long 60s’ to the other, Bill had recorded: the McPeakes in 1962; Willie Clancy in 1967; Finbar Furey in 1968–69; Séamus Ennis in 1969; and now Liam O’Flynn in 1971. He’d notched up a few Northumbrian pipers during that period, too. The albums by Willie Clancy (The Minstrel From Clare) and Séamus Ennis (Masters Of Irish Music Vol. 1) remain the best albums they made in their lifetimes. The album with Liam would be the appropriately subdued starting point of a stealthily illustrious career.

Bill: ‘I wanted to produce some of the things that were happening around that seemed to be important. The economical way of doing it was to sell directly to the customer by mail order. That way, we could cut out the retailer and the wholesaler and all the people who took the money for doing little or no work. Our first two releases, simultaneously, were: one Leader, Jack Elliott of Birtley; and one Trailer, [The Fate o’Charlie: Songs of the Jacobite Rebellion, by] Archie Fisher and Barbara Dickson.

‘Neither of them sold particularly well. We did have a lucky break because – having set all this up and [having] thought, ‘Right, if we sell them direct to the public we can get enough to finance the next release’ – as soon as we started releasing, Transatlantic wanted to take over the distribution. Well, we could have happily said no to that, because we’d just have been paying them to do the good or bad job of distribution, but they’d just done a deal with HMV/EMI. Transatlantic were going to retain their own wholesale distribution, but EMI were going to press the records.

‘One of the problems that we’d suffered at Topic, and looked as if we were going to carry on suffering as a small label, was the inability to get competent presses to press the records. We were always driven to backstreet abortionists to press out records, with inferior materials and no technique at all. So the opportunity of being pressed [properly], the records actually sounding like they should sound, was terribly attractive. So we fell for that. And of course immediately we lost our margin – but we did sell in reasonable numbers into Transatlantic’s wholesale section, and an early bonus was that EMI said to Transatlantic, ‘Well, we’ve never handled this sort of crap, er, product, before – how many do we order?’ They came to the conclusion that how many they would take on and put into the warehouse at Hayes, Middlesex, or wherever it was would be the same as what Transatlantic ordered. So if Transatlantic ordered 1,000 copies, EMI would order 1,000 copies. So there was a honeymoon period when we were selling bloody loads of these things – only at wholesale price, of course, but at least we were selling in quantities. Then EMI woke up one morning and realised that they were heavily overstocked with all this folk nonsense, and they started unloading. And I think you can still find warehouses in the depths of the Indian subcontinent where you can buy boxes of Leader/Trailer records for bugger all, if you know who to ask.’

Christy, luckily, had approached Bill less for his business acumen than for his availability and his reputation: ‘There’s more to him than meets the eye,’ he reflected.40

‘I liked Bill a lot,’ says Andy Irvine. ‘I always thought Bill was a very wise man – because he didn’t say very much.’

‘He made the business of recording, for an inexperienced recording musician like myself, a very enjoyable thing,’ said Liam. ‘There was something of the Ciarán Mac Mathúna [A] about him.’41

Bill: ‘[Prosperous] was a reasonable bit of space where they could rehearse and we could record them without being disturbed. Actually, we didn’t realise it then, but we were on the verge of being disturbed by the Garda, looking for an illicit still. … It was done on virtually no equipment. I carried my trusty Revox to Ireland with a couple of not terribly expensive, nor particularly good, microphones, strung them up the best I could to capture the sounds … The trick was, it was a sort of vaulted cellar we were doing it in and it had a rich acoustic, so the natural sound … We messed about a bit, but not too much; we didn’t need to. … That may be the secret, you know. Less is definitely more. I discovered later when having to teach this as a subject that it goes in phases. There was a time when you put as many microphones around a drum kit as you possibly could, but I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘the fewer microphones, the better’ is actually quite a good slogan.’

Dónal Lunny: ‘The way Bill balanced it was by moving us around. He put Liam down the back, because his pipes were louder than any of the guitars or bouzoukis or other instruments. … Then it was just a recording of a situation, of an environment, really. … He actually got a great result.’42

Andy was working with Dónal as a duo at the time and saw no particularly fabulous future with the album to which they had all contributed: ‘I enjoyed it very much, but I didn’t see the potential in it.’

Liam was quietly confident, however: ‘I knew it was going to make a huge impact. I really did. It was a different sound.’43

Released on Trailer, in Britain, in March 1972, it might have been a different sound – the opening track alone, ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy/Tabhair Dom Do Lámh’, daringly marrying the Irish vocal and instrumental traditions – but nobody was listening.

‘It didn’t sell for me at all,’ says Bill. ‘It sold for Tara [to whom we sold it on], and we sort of gifted it to Christy, cos there was nothing we could do.’

Prosperous was ‘gifted’ to Christy by being sold to Jack Fitzgerald, who owned Ireland’s Golden Discs chain of record stores. Jack and Bill each gave Christy £1,000. It was the most money he would see from music for years. Tara Records was initially a store on Dublin’s Tara Street; they used the name as the label for their vinyl acquisition. The retail end was at that point transitioning into a chain called Golden Discs. Over in the Rathfarnham Shopping Centre, John Cook, a former hotel industry accountant, had been running his own independent record store. Cook would become involved with both Tara Records and, before the 70s were out, the band that had debuted on Prosperous.

John Cook: ‘[Young people in Ireland at the time] were not particularly buying Irish music. I think the youth of Ireland were buying your end-of60s rock, and buying it in preference to any Irish music at all. Jack Fitzgerald did very well – specialising in American imports. There was maybe up to a two-month delay between an American release and UK release and … he would bring in the likes of Charley Pride and Elvis Presley stuff and built up his business that way. I knew Jack all through those years [in the 60s] while I was in the hotel business and he was in the record store, for no other reason than [that] I used to be a particularly good customer.

‘[Prosperous] was only available in Ireland as an import. … But [it] was continually going out of stock as demand was increasing. It was the breaking album, if you like, that started to turn the whole direction of Irish music around, because the four members of Planxty were on that album and it was the precursor of the band. Jack Fitzgerald did a deal with Bill Leader … and released it as the first album on the Tara label, in 1972.’

In between the album being recorded and appearing on Trailer and then on Tara, Liam O’Flynn had spent five months in America, memorably gigging on one occasion with blues icon John Lee Hooker and singer-songwriter Patrick Sky, who would himself take up the uilleann pipes and enhance the discography of Séamus Ennis in due course – as would Tara Records. Ennis, for his part, would be a notable influence on the band that became Planxty: Christy Moore, Andy Irvine, Dónal Lunny and Liam O’Flynn. But whether there would be any band at all was a moot point. Andy Irvine, running a weekly gig with Dónal Lunny at Slattery’s on Capel Street at the time, recalls being doubtful:

Andy: ‘Liam’s always been an enigmatic fellow. I remember when Christy said, ‘What about forming a band?’ after we’d made Prosperous. And I’d been playing with Dónal. I said, ‘What does Dónal think?’ ‘Oh, he’s heavily into it.’ And I said, ‘Ah, yes, but what about Liam?’ And he said Liam was in, and I was really surprised because Liam was a teacher. I would not have foreseen that he would give up a safe job to take to the road. He has a certain reserve. But he was very much into Planxty at the time.’

Christy was interviewed by Melody Maker in March 1972 (‘I’m fed up with being a solo singer … I think Andy feels the same way’), on the cusp of both Prosperous being released on Trailer in Britain and a first Planxty single, ‘Three Drunken Maidens’, on Des Kelly’s label, Ruby Records, in Ireland. The new band was clearly exciting him:

Christy: ‘This is really a solo LP, although from the solo LP we got the idea for the group. … I think that Dónal particularly will make a big impact over here. I think the two most important members of the group will be Liam and Dónal, and [yet] it’s Andy and myself that are best known. … Liam has received some criticism from fellow musicians for coming into the group. The other three of us were a bit worried that Liam wouldn’t become immersed in the group, but he has done. We don’t want to lower his standards. We don’t want him to do anything that would go against his musical ideals.’44

Liam (2002): ‘We had one rule in the band: if there was any one individual within the band who really didn’t want to do this, that or the other, that was respected and there was no further argument about it. And that was, to me, a terrifically important thing.’45

Forever doomed to be described as ‘mild-mannered’, ‘cautious’ and, yes, ‘enigmatic’, Liam O’Flynn may lack the braggadocio or colourful lifestyles of other ‘big characters’ involved in Irish traditional music, but his decision-making has always been daring, and over nearly 45 years he would accumulate a discography both eclectic and immense. If uilleann piping were a race, one would be tempted when talking about Liam O’Flynn to cite the fable of the tortoise and the hare. Other people have done a lot of haring around; Liam has quietly and consistently covered the ground – and not always the ground one might expect.

Planxty had debuted live at Slattery’s in Dublin on January 30 1972. Within weeks, they had a single out on Des Kelly’s Ruby Records – Des being a former manager of Sweeney’s Men and an old friend of Andy’s. Despite their ramshackle stage presentation (similar to that of Sweeney’s Men before them), Des could see the magic. As he explained to Planxty biographer Leagues O’Toole: ‘Put the four of them on stage and I believe there’s a presence there they don’t have individually.’46

It was just like The Beatles: the ‘folk Beatles’. More or less single-handedly, with perhaps a little help from Horslips (also formed in 1972, a rock band with traditional music overtones as opposed to Planxty, a folk/trad band with a kind of rock music appeal), Planxty created a sizeable youth market for Irish traditional music. Their music – drawing from Liam’s Irish instrumental repertoire, Christy’s wealth of songs from the British folk scene, Andy’s cache of intriguing confessionals from a sojourn in the Balkans during 1968–69 and compound rhythmic ideas from the same region, plus a dash of Americana – was a unique and exotic concoction, yet still felt passionately ‘Irish’. It had the air of authenticity about it whilst simultaneously feeling wholly new.

Neil Martin, then a young piper who would go on to work with Liam O’Flynn from the mid-80s onwards, puts his finger on the intangible as well as anyone:

Neil Martin: ‘I think they made traditional music ‘cool’. And part of that was the rhythm instruments, what Dónal was doing, the songs Christy was singing and Andy’s glorious filigree work on his machine. It broadened it. It wasn’t the standard straight melodic thing. The bandwidth had got bigger. Planxty brought a particular colour to it.’

In one sense, black was the colour. The Beatles had had their ‘White Album’; within a year of starting, and kicking off with a re-recording of ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy/Tabhair Dom Do Lámh’, as heard first on Prosperous, Planxty had their ‘Black Album’. [B]

‘The arrangements are identical,’ wrote one commentator shortly after the ‘Black Album’s’ release in 1973, ‘and in both they manage the tricky bridge from the song to the harp tune, changing tempo from 2/4 to 3/4 so smoothly that Liam’s pipes are well into the first phrase of the second tune before you’re aware of it. Nevertheless, the second recording has a togetherness that was not there the first time round. The first is obviously a pick-up group of musicians who have got together for the occasion, playing supremely well but with all the rough edges showing. The second is a band. That is the difference.’47

Liam: ‘When we started Planxty, we said we’d give it three months and if nothing was happening, then fair enough. By three months, the thing had really taken off. It was like a runaway train. You couldn’t get off.’48

‘Wherever you go in the burgeoning Irish contemporary folk scene, where electric folk bands are springing up all over like shamrocks in the night,’ wrote Karl Dallas in August 1973, ‘you will find one bunch of musicians have the unanimous approval of all, whether you are talking to the most conservative of traditionalists or the most electric of folk rockers. The band is Planxty …’49

Planxty had begun touring in Britain by April 1972, Christy having worked his contacts on the British club scene to string together a number of club dates shared with Mike Harding, Martin Carthy, The Watersons and others. They would make their first of many live and in-session appearances on BBC radio on Country Meets Folk on May 6. As he was with the Furey brothers, John Peel was a particular supporter. Back home, RTÉ were similarly supportive, with appearances on the prime-time Saturday night Late Late Show at both the beginning and the end of their first year, the December appearance being on a bill with The Chieftains and Séamus Ennis, the chaotic godfather of Irish piping, with whom Liam O’Flynn was by then sharing a domestic environment.

The ‘Black Album’ had been recorded in London in September 1972. Under a production deal with Eurovision songwriter Phil Coulter and his business partner Bill Martin, it would – like the subsequent two albums of the band’s original lifespan – be leased to Polydor for Ireland, Britain, Germany and France.

‘I reckon that Bill Martin made more money out of Planxty than I did,’ said Christy in 1979, ‘and y’know something? If he walked in now, I wouldn’t know what the fuck he looked like.’50

They may all have come to regret the long-term financial implications of the production deal, but partly through it, Planxty had very swiftly become an international act.

‘One of the most significant comments upon Planxty’s development of their music,’ concluded Dallas, 18 months in, ‘is the way that piper Liam O’Flynn has retained the respect of his fellow pipers, possibly the most conservative of the guardians of the Irish tradition. … [T]hey have had to acknowledge that he still remains the master they thought he was before he joined the band.’51

By that point the group’s second album, The Well Below The Valley, was in the can. It would be released before the year was out.

Christy: ‘The pressure on the second album was ridiculous. We finished an Irish tour and we went over to England to record, and at the time it wasn’t even rehearsed … and yet that second album is my favourite.’52

‘Once a band becomes a permanent operation, it’s immediately limited,’ Liam mused, wisely, during the same interview session, in 1979. Those limitations – constant travelling, little time to develop new repertoire and remain interested as musicians – soon caught up with Dónal Lunny. Not long after an appearance at the Cambridge Folk Festival in July 1973 (with Breton folk-rocker Alan Stivell’s fiddler René Werneer standing in for an ill O’Flynn), Dónal decided to move on. He wanted to work with singer-songwriter, Fine Art graduate and future orchestral composer Shaun Davey, who had enjoyed the British release of a duo album, Davey & Morris, with James Morris, future founder of Dublin’s Windmill Lane Studios, in 1973. While the venture failed to yield any recorded work, with Dónal moving on again to create a new unit, The Bothy Band, it would not be the last time a Planxty alumnus would work with Davey.

Andy’s former Sweeney’s Men colleague Johnny Moynihan came in on bouzouki, and a ‘difficult third album’, Cold Blow And The Rainy Night, was recorded at Island Records’ London studio in August 1974, not long after another appearance at the Cambridge Folk Festival. [C] A singular character, Johnny brought a fresh wit and joie de vivre to the band, coupled with an exasperating obsession with lengthy tuningup sessions onstage and indecision about arrangements. Dónal Lunny was asked back in temporarily to help pull the third album together. Pressures of the road and resentment over the financial arrangements with Coulter and Martin were taking their toll. By the end of the year – after a couple of months of transition, with singer/ guitarist Paul Brady as a fifth member – Christy had bowed out. [D]

Liam: ‘I remember a period of time when it seemed desperately difficult to just continue, because the lifestyle was affecting everybody. But it didn’t really affect performance. There was tremendous pride in the work, and for that reason the notion of going on stage plastered was a no-no.’53

Andy: ‘When Paul joined the band, we got the ‘engine room’ back [which Dónal had been]. But just the three and a half years of permanent gigging began to get to us … Liam called a meeting and we knew what it was going to be: ‘Aha, this is it …’ When we were all there, he said, ‘I’ve called this meeting because I want to leave the band.’ And everybody else said, ‘Yes, I do too! Me, me, me, me, me!’ So we all left the band and came over here [to O’Donoghues] and got plastered, I’m sure. And by the end of the night we were probably saying, ‘Oh God, it was a great band – should we really do this?’’54

Planxty played a final British tour in October 1975, followed by a tour of France. Their last gig was in Brussels, Belgium, on December 5. A huge tax bill hadn’t helped, but everyone was just exhausted. It was time to do other things, with fewer people and overheads. For Liam, that was easy: he got an agent and became an entirely solo performer.

‘I’m not really very interesting to talk to,’ Liam had said, having just given an interview to the man from Folk News in 1978. The interviewer, Tomás Mac Ruairí, begged to disagree:

‘He is in reality most interesting to talk to. He is somewhat unique, being one of very few, if not the only, full-time professional Irish traditional musicians (not including singers) working a solo career. … Seven years a full-time musician, he is optimistic for the future, not only of the music, but of his own career and admits to no over-riding personal ambitions, other than that everything should keep going as at present for him. … His advice to young pipers is to first of all become ‘good listeners to good music’ and to strongly ‘resist all attempts to be spectacular by playing too fast’.’55

A prospective solo LP on promoter Kevin Flynn’s Ogham label had been mentioned, but nothing came of it. Nevertheless, in 1979 Liam was the featured performer on a Decca single, ‘David’s Song’, by composer Vladimir Cosma, from a series called Kidnapped. It would be the first of many soundtrack and session recordings, across diverse genres, over the coming years.

Artistically, by this point Liam was on the cusp of two significant developments:
one, a daring orchestral project with Shaun Davey; the other, a more obviously lucrative reunion of Planxty.

Andy Irvine explained the situation to Colin Irwin at Melody Maker in March 1979, ahead of two months’ worth of major concert hall dates across Britain, Europe and Ireland, beginning at London’s Hammersmith Odeon and finishing at Dublin’s
National Stadium: [E]

Andy (1979): ‘After we broke up I thought, ‘Thank Christ that’s over,’ and then the next moment I thought, ‘Jeez, I wish Planxty were still together.’ I can remember talking to Liam about it a couple of years ago and being amazed to find he was into it. I was into it five minutes after we broke up.’56

Being an enigmatic fellow of few and careful words, Liam had given his own view on the reunion subject to Colin Irwin a year before: ‘I don’t really have any feelings about whether it should or shouldn’t happen.’57

Nevertheless, by September 1978 the four original members of Planxty plus, at Liam’s suggestion, flautist Matt Molloy from the then-crumbling Bothy Band (in which Dónal was also involved) convened to rehearse. Rumours went quickly abroad, and this time round there was no problem getting record labels interested.

John Cook, who had been running Jack Fitzgerald’s Tara label, was determined to acquire the inevitable Planxty reunion LP. The label had released a handful of albums in the intervening period, some licensed from other labels and some originated, most notably two Séamus Ennis albums, but it would only build a head of steam as an active originating label during 1978–79, with releases including two albums from Christy Moore, the first Stockton’s Wing album and the Paddy Glackin & Paddy Keenan album Doublin’. A new Planxty album would put it on the map:

John Cook: ‘Planxty started a whole strain of Irish music that was coming more into the centre, was more crossover. When the band decided to get back together, they put themselves up for a record deal, and we were basically competing against Polygram and some other major. We decided that if we were going to start a label [in earnest], the best way to do it, even if it’s costly, is to get a big album and a recognised artist. So after protracted negotiations we got a two-album deal with Planxty.’

After The Break was recorded in June 1979, straight after the reunion tour. The gigs had started off shakily, but the omens were still good. After rueful reminiscences of past struggles, and the determination to get it right this time round, Colin Irwin painted an upbeat picture of the new five-piece. He concluded his piece, with layers of portent and metaphor (intentional or otherwise):

‘A few of us make it back to O’Flynn’s flat. ‘Fancy a drink?’ says Liam, pouring himself a generous red wine and playing Eric Clapton’s new album rather loudly. A picture of Willie Clancy shudders on the wall. ‘It’s great to be back with the boys,’ muses Liam. ‘It’s already good crack.’’58

After The Break (1979) would be followed by The Woman I Loved So Well (1980) before things became complicated. Christy and Dónal, wanting to work with a rock rhythm section and to have a vehicle for politically charged material, formed Moving Hearts in 1981. They remained simultaneously in the essentially part-time Planxty for a period. Other people began coming into the ranks. A 12-inch single on WEA in 1981, of new member Bill Whelan’s ‘Timedance’ – performed by Planxty as the interval music to that year’s Eurovision Song Contest – began the new era. Bill would have monstrous success a few years later, in the same slot, with ‘Riverdance’, which had as its ultimate origin the marriage of Balkan rhythms with the flavour of Irish music birthed on the ‘Black Album’ back in 1973. A third and final album, Words & Music (WEA, 1983) followed. Christy and Dónal left, more people came in and the band limped on for a period, earning the Irvine sobriquet ‘Planxty-Too-Far’.

‘History will tell you it was a mistake to call it Planxty,’ Andy mused to the band’s biographer, ‘but it wasn’t a huge mistake, because no one remembers it and it didn’t do very well, so that’s okay.’59

Andy summarised the whole Planxty experience in a 2002 RTÉ documentary, which ironically itself inspired a third and surely final reunion during 2003–05:

Andy: ‘The first three albums have a lot of youthful energy about them, a novelty, etcetera. … I prefer the second three albums. Musically they’re more intricate. We had evolved musically quite a long way by that time, and I just prefer the music, I think it’s more interesting to listen to. But when I think of the times we had, 1972 through to the end of ’74 was magic; ’74 till Brady joined the band was kind of a struggle; and then it was great for a while with Brady until we were just too tired to continue. ’79 onwards was okay. … The music was better, but more was expected of us at that point. There was more responsibility to do well, and when we didn’t get the reaction we wanted there was a slight feeling – with me, anyway – of paranoia.’60

Everything has its season. Even if The Beatles had succumbed to pressure and reunited, it would never have been the same. Why should the folk Beatles be any different? Yet during all this initial excitement and gradual fizzling out, Liam had been quietly pursuing a typically unexpected path with a man who wrote jingles for a living and had form for failed projects with Planxty people: Shaun Davey.

John Cook: ‘The Brendan Voyage (1980) was the next album [on Tara] after the second Planxty album [The Woman I Loved So Well]. At that time Shaun and Bill Whelan had the advertising market cornered – they did an enormous amount of jingles for radio and TV, and that’s how both of them got their first experiences of orchestration. The Brendan Voyage came about by Shaun being approached by Harry Bradshaw from RTÉ, who asked him to write a piece for the RTÉ orchestra and base it on Tim Severin’s book, which Shaun had just read. It was a kind of commission, performed by the RTÉ orchestra, after which the question of recording it came about. There was a gap between performance and releasing a record, and Shaun was actually talking to a couple of different companies … Looking back at the catalogue, it was the album I agonised over more than anything else, as it was such a departure from anything else that had been recorded up to that date, in putting pipes together with an orchestra and with a rhythm section, plus one [that] had very high costs [involved]. I agonised for many days over that, but of course I don’t regret it. We went ahead and recorded it, and it’s still a great album. In fact, it’s interesting that its 10th year of release was its second highest year of sales within those 10 years, so that’s a good example of a consistently selling album. Liam only performs it maybe once or twice a year, but it doesn’t date.’

Tim Severin had spent part of 1976–77 (re)-enacting the legendary sixth century voyage of St Brendan from Ireland to Newfoundland in a small currach, writing a best-selling book on the adventure in 1978. It provided Shaun Davey with a subject to get his teeth into, bringing together the uilleann pipes with an orchestra to create a musically descriptive suite. It would be Shaun’s first of several suites on Celtic themes, all of which would feature Liam O’Flynn and most of which would be recorded for Tara. The key works, which, like The Brendan Voyage have all been performed periodically and to consistent acclaim in the years since, are The Pilgrim (1984; revised and expanded in 1994), Granuaile (1986) and The Relief Of Derry Symphony (1990).

Shaun Davey: ‘That year [1973], when I formed a band called Bugle with Dónal Lunny – we only did four gigs, in Dublin, and we did some demo recording. It was a very experimental band. He took a year out of Planxty to pursue these things, and it was very good of him to have done that. … But there was only one way for me to go at that stage: a combination of formal composition and a lesser amount of music by ear. … I was very keen to cross certain boundaries and arrange meeting points between certain instruments and traditions, [and] that had to be thought out on the page.

‘When I was working on The Brendan Voyage, I figured that I was trying to write music for people like me, who wanted to hear something like it but who hadn’t, up to that point, heard it. … In a sense, I’m not qualified to write just for an orchestra, because I have no formal training, and I’ve largely made it up as I’ve gone along. What I’m equipped to do is arrange meeting points between what I can do for an orchestra – which is by no means everything an orchestra can do – and what I can enable other people to do, who don’t normally work with an orchestra. This is typically what I’ve done, and it’s typically what I’ve enjoyed doing most – staging these meeting points.’

Liam O’Flynn: ‘Shaun was very much in love with the sound of the uilleann pipes, and when he first approached me with the idea of writing a piece of music for the pipes based on The Brendan Voyage [book], we sat down and discussed the instrument and the difficulties and strengths that a composer would come up against. During the whole process of the writing Shaun learned very well indeed, as he says himself, the ‘inner workings of the instrument’ – what was possible and what wasn’t.

‘I had a basic knowledge of [music notation], but I would never be comfortable having to perform music and reading it at the same time – coming from the tradition, you learn music by heart. So I would only be comfortable with these pieces once I’d committed them to memory and had a bloody good idea what the orchestra were up to as well. [There’s room for improvisation], but you wouldn’t want to overdo it – otherwise the conductor would begin to wonder what the hell your man was up to! It would throw a serious spanner in the works.

‘One of the biggest difficulties I found with The Brendan Voyage wasn’t a musical thing; it was finding oneself within a totally different performing environment. The formality of the concert hall, an absolutely quiet audience out there in front of you – that puts some pressure on a traditional musician.

‘The whole concept of The Brendan Voyage was wonderful, with the pipes telling the story of this little boat and the orchestra telling the story of what the little boat encountered. It was certainly ground-breaking and it seems to me, as time passes, that the impact it made is an ongoing thing. It made a huge impact at the time, but it’s growing, because [in] every new territory I go into with the piece, people are amazed by this new creature, as it were.’

The ongoing partnership between Liam and Shaun effectively also created the solo career Liam currently enjoys. His first solo album, Liam O’Flynn, was released by WEA Ireland in 1988, but his current career as a solo artist – with lavishly arranged albums on the one hand and live performances, replicating the luxuriant sound of the albums, as far as possible, in a trio context, on the other – really began during the 1990s, with a series of solo albums on Tara, produced by Shaun Davey: Out To An Other Side (1993), The Given Note (1995) and The Piper’s Call (1998). Along with traditional material, the albums would include some of Shaun’s music for Trevor Nunn’s Royal Shakespeare Company stage productions:

Shaun (1995): ‘I put my heart and soul into something, whether it’s ephemeral [like theatre music] or not; otherwise, the whole thing is pointless … Some things are going to have an extended life and other things are not. The very good tunes I think it is possible to have recorded. For example, the big tune in The Winter’s Tale RSC 1992 production Liam took for Out To An Other Side. It’s a grand tune and it actually has, funnily enough, been recorded by at least two other artists [since]. Similarly, Liam has taken the main theme from [1995’s] RSC production of Romeo And Juliet to record for [The Given Note].’
The quality of Shaun’s material, alongside his skills as an arranger and producer, contributed hugely to the longevity of Liam’s albums for Tara. I recall once meeting Liam by chance at a bar in Donegal, where the notion of a solo ‘best of’ was on his mind. I mentioned it, as Liam had suggested, to John Cook, but he was having none of it: a ‘best of’ would immediately mean the rest of an artist’s catalogue becoming redundant to retailers. While Tara has become semi-dormant as an originating label in recent years, as music retail outlets have all but disappeared, it remains pro-active in keeping existing catalogue available online. The 1990s works of Liam O’Flynn, now including a period video release of The Piper’s Call band upgraded to DVD, are consequently enjoying the same ‘long tail’ as the works of Shaun Davey.

In 2003, The Poet & The Piper, released on Claddagh, saw a smaller-scale collaborative recording between Nobel Laureate Séamus Heaney and Liam, with a version of his live trio (Steve Cooney and Rod McVey). Since then, Liam has contributed to two further orchestrated Shaun Davey albums, both on Tara: May We Never Have To Say Goodbye (2006), mopping up several of Shaun’s hitherto unrecorded pieces; and Voices From The Merry Cemetery (2010), a suite inspired by Romanian grave inscriptions.

There have, since the mid-80s, been numerous guest and session appearances on a remarkable array of albums, from Kate Bush to a Led Zeppelin symphonic tribute by a man from Killing Joke via Mike Oldfield, Elmer Bernstein, Sinéad O’Connor and The Everly Brothers.

There have also been a few appearances on 21st century albums by Andy Irvine, most recently Andy’s CD/DVD release 70th Birthday Concert At Vicar Street 2012 (2014), performing with the band LAPD. Named, as Planxty almost was, after the initials of its members (Liam, Andy, Paddy Glackin and Dónal Lunny), LAPD was an occasional spin-off from the 2003–05 Planxty reunion, which had been somewhat happier than the 1979–83 comeback. [F] It was, in effect, a valedictory parade. This time, when Christy stopped, the job having been done and done well, the name wisely stopped with him.

LAPD was a happy solution to the three others wanting to keep playing, hampered only by Liam’s desire by now not to tour abroad. Andy’s birthday album would be its only record, for Liam decided to call it quits at the end of 2014. With the admirable pragmatism of a man who never tires of the road, and never runs out of people to join him on it, Andy (with Lunny and Glackin) recruited piper/flautist Michael McGoldrick and guitarist John Doyle:

Andy: ‘When Christy decided he couldn’t play with Planxty anymore, Dónal and I thought it a real shame to let the whole shooting gallery go down the drain. Dónal had been playing quite a lot with Paddy Glackin, and of course Liam and Paddy knew each other from way back. Dónal suggested the name LAPD, and we played, off and on, for a couple of years – festivals and biggish concerts. It was a great success, and we three were very sad when Liam decided to call it a day. I suggested John and Mike as replacements, as I had played a bit with John and [had] always admired Mike’s playing. After numerous attempts at finding a name, we finally settled on Usher’s Island, the name of a quay in Dublin. We played a couple of warm-up gigs in Ireland and then Celtic Connections in Glasgow [in January 2015]. The acclaim was very promising, and we hope for a rosy future.’

At this stage in the game, Liam O’Flynn – now aged 70 and purportedly comfortably off – can pick and choose what he wants to do. He grew up learning from the best; he became one of the most prominent uilleann pipers of the 1970s; he brought the instrument into the orchestral world in a significant and thrilling way; and he has graced dozens of albums by artists far beyond Irish traditional music, aside from creating a body of solo work in the 1990s that will remain amongst the most sumptuous and polished settings for the instrument in an era that will come to be seen as the last hurrah for a well-funded record industry. The rustic solo instrument of the baroque era finally became, at the end of the ‘rock era’, the lead voice in a new kind of chamber music, however briefly. Liam O’Flynn’s recorded works stand for themselves, and he can be assured of an audience wherever and whenever he chooses to perform. As he put it to Leagues O’Toole in The Humours Of Planxty (2006):

‘To this day when I’m on tour people continually come up and say that it was through Planxty that they were first introduced to Irish traditional music. Or that their first contact with uilleann pipes was through Planxty and it changed their life. To me, that’s fantastic. That’s the greatest reward any musician can be given …’61

FOOTNOTES:

A – Ciarán Mac Mathúna was the presenter of A Job Of Journeywork on Radio Éireann from 1955 onwards, actively seeking out and broadcasting regional traditional musicians.

B – ‘The White Album’ was actually called The Beatles, a name by which no one ever refers to it. Likewise, ‘The Black Album’ was called Planxty, and no one ever refers to it as that, either.

C – Planxty were filmed for BBC2’s Old Grey Whistle Test at the 1974 Cambridge Folk Festival, with ‘The Blacksmith’ being broadcast in late September. Anglia TV filmed a documentary on the festival that year, although Planxty were not featured.

D – The five-piece Planxty of September-October 1974 made no commercial recordings but did perform a TV concert for BBC Northern Ireland.

E – The National Stadium had been the scene of an atmospheric televised concert for RTÉ, viewable online, a mere six years earlier.

F – Planxty were almost called CLAD: Christy, Liam, Andy, Dónal.

ENDNOTES:

38 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
39 ‘Start Following The Leader’, Jeremy Gilbert, Melody Maker, 7/2/70
40 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
41 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
42 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
43 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
44 ‘Moore the merrier’, Andrew Means, Melody Maker, 11/3/72
45 No Disco Planxty documentary, RTÉ, 2002
46 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
47 ‘The Celtic Sound: Planxty’, Karl Dallas, Melody Maker, 11/8/73
48 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
49 ‘The Celtic Sound: Planxty’, Karl Dallas, Melody Maker, 11/8/73
50 ‘The Easter Resurrection’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 17/3/79
51 ‘The Celtic Sound: Planxty’, Karl Dallas, Melody Maker, 11/8/73
52 ‘The Easter Resurrection’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 17/3/79
53 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
54 No Disco Planxty documentary, RTÉ, 2002
55 ‘The quiet man of the pipes,’ Tomás Mac Ruairí, Folk News, 8/78
56 ‘The Easter Resurrection’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 17/3/79
57 ‘The Enigmatic Piper Supreme’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 25/2/78
58 ‘The Easter Resurrection’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 17/3/79
59 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
60 No Disco Planxty documentary, RTÉ, 2002
61 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole

Comments

Colin H says

15/03/2018 at 13:30

‘It was a glimmer in Christy’s eye, which developed into whatever it is that glimmers in eyes develop into,’ says Bill Leader, the man who recorded Prosperous (which, as a title for anything related to people hoping to make a living in folk music, is beyond parody). ‘It was an idea, and I think it probably exceeded the original intention. In fact, it did exceed it.’

Christy Moore, an Irish singer/guitarist who had been making a solid living on the thriving folk club scene during the late 60s, primarily in the North of England, had made one album thus far, produced by Dominic Behan, which had not been a satisfactory experience. He had an idea to bring together, as his backing band, Andy Irvine and Dónal Lunny on double-course stringed instruments and Liam O’Flynn on pipes. Three others would contribute to the sessions, but this would be the core quartet.

Liam: ‘Christy and Dónal are originally from Newbridge, which is about eight miles from where I’m from originally, but growing up we didn’t have any contact. But there was a little pocket of musical activity centred around the village called Prosperous in County Kildare, and in later years a gang of us used to meet there every Wednesday evening – sometimes Christy would be there, sometimes Dónal.’

‘I can’t say exactly what was in my mind,’ Christy admitted many years later. ‘But … it had to have pipes … Liam was the first piper I ever got in close to, and I’ve always found a deep and moving soulfulness about his playing. Even as a young man, I heard that, and without knowing much about the instrument or its history, it still touched me deeply.’38

Christy had also been deeply inspired, in 1968, by the first of two albums for Transatlantic by Sweeney’s Men, recorded in London by Bill. With Andy Irvine on mandolin and Johnny Moynihan on bouzouki, the first Sweeney album would be the wellspring of the interweaving double-course instrument sound that would be resurrected on Prosperous, with uilleann pipes added to the gumbo for the first time.

Christy Moore’s loose vision and Bill Leader’s similarly vague but noble progress
– neither man terribly well suited to the business of making money, but each one digging deeply into something that seemed to have a higher purpose – would coalesce in a London pub on the recommendation of Mike Harding, a Northern comedian with a guitar:

Bill: ‘Mike Harding was the connection. Christy spent a lot of time in the mid-Pennine area between Manchester and Halifax. He was not that happy with [his first LP] Paddy On The Road, and talked to Mike about it. And Mike, who I think had just finished recording his own album for Trailer, said, ‘Get in touch with Bill Leader, see if you can’t do something there.’ So he did that. We met up in some Irish bar in Fleet Street – Mooney’s, that was the place – and by the end of the conversation I’d agreed to go across to Ireland.’

Bill Leader had been producing folk and traditional records for Topic, Transatlantic and Decca from the late 50s onwards. Based in London, living in Camden Town, he had been sucked into this hand-to-mouth profession through the London-Irish music scene, with the duo of Margaret Barry & Michael Gorman his earliest prey. As of 1969, Bill had established his own binary star of labels: Leader (for pure traditional music) and Trailer (for folk club artists). He had a vague idea that the one would pay for the other.

‘I would like eventually to have the whole of the traditional culture on record,’ he had mused in 1970.39 Over the next decade he would give the ambition a serious attempt. With the recording of Prosperous, at a rambling old house of that name, in the summer of 1971, Bill had unconsciously notched up his fifth uilleann piper in 10 years.

From one end of the ‘long 60s’ to the other, Bill had recorded: the McPeakes in 1962; Willie Clancy in 1967; Finbar Furey in 1968–69; Séamus Ennis in 1969; and now Liam O’Flynn in 1971. He’d notched up a few Northumbrian pipers during that period, too. The albums by Willie Clancy (The Minstrel From Clare) and Séamus Ennis (Masters Of Irish Music Vol. 1) remain the best albums they made in their lifetimes. The album with Liam would be the appropriately subdued starting point of a stealthily illustrious career.

Bill: ‘I wanted to produce some of the things that were happening around that seemed to be important. The economical way of doing it was to sell directly to the customer by mail order. That way, we could cut out the retailer and the wholesaler and all the people who took the money for doing little or no work. Our first two releases, simultaneously, were: one Leader, Jack Elliott of Birtley; and one Trailer, [The Fate o’Charlie: Songs of the Jacobite Rebellion, by] Archie Fisher and Barbara Dickson.

‘Neither of them sold particularly well. We did have a lucky break because – having set all this up and [having] thought, ‘Right, if we sell them direct to the public we can get enough to finance the next release’ – as soon as we started releasing, Transatlantic wanted to take over the distribution. Well, we could have happily said no to that, because we’d just have been paying them to do the good or bad job of distribution, but they’d just done a deal with HMV/EMI. Transatlantic were going to retain their own wholesale distribution, but EMI were going to press the records.

‘One of the problems that we’d suffered at Topic, and looked as if we were going to carry on suffering as a small label, was the inability to get competent presses to press the records. We were always driven to backstreet abortionists to press out records, with inferior materials and no technique at all. So the opportunity of being pressed [properly], the records actually sounding like they should sound, was terribly attractive. So we fell for that. And of course immediately we lost our margin – but we did sell in reasonable numbers into Transatlantic’s wholesale section, and an early bonus was that EMI said to Transatlantic, ‘Well, we’ve never handled this sort of crap, er, product, before – how many do we order?’ They came to the conclusion that how many they would take on and put into the warehouse at Hayes, Middlesex, or wherever it was would be the same as what Transatlantic ordered. So if Transatlantic ordered 1,000 copies, EMI would order 1,000 copies. So there was a honeymoon period when we were selling bloody loads of these things – only at wholesale price, of course, but at least we were selling in quantities. Then EMI woke up one morning and realised that they were heavily overstocked with all this folk nonsense, and they started unloading. And I think you can still find warehouses in the depths of the Indian subcontinent where you can buy boxes of Leader/Trailer records for bugger all, if you know who to ask.’

Christy, luckily, had approached Bill less for his business acumen than for his availability and his reputation: ‘There’s more to him than meets the eye,’ he reflected.40

‘I liked Bill a lot,’ says Andy Irvine. ‘I always thought Bill was a very wise man – because he didn’t say very much.’

‘He made the business of recording, for an inexperienced recording musician like myself, a very enjoyable thing,’ said Liam. ‘There was something of the Ciarán Mac Mathúna [A] about him.’41

Bill: ‘[Prosperous] was a reasonable bit of space where they could rehearse and we could record them without being disturbed. Actually, we didn’t realise it then, but we were on the verge of being disturbed by the Garda, looking for an illicit still. … It was done on virtually no equipment. I carried my trusty Revox to Ireland with a couple of not terribly expensive, nor particularly good, microphones, strung them up the best I could to capture the sounds … The trick was, it was a sort of vaulted cellar we were doing it in and it had a rich acoustic, so the natural sound … We messed about a bit, but not too much; we didn’t need to. … That may be the secret, you know. Less is definitely more. I discovered later when having to teach this as a subject that it goes in phases. There was a time when you put as many microphones around a drum kit as you possibly could, but I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘the fewer microphones, the better’ is actually quite a good slogan.’

Dónal Lunny: ‘The way Bill balanced it was by moving us around. He put Liam down the back, because his pipes were louder than any of the guitars or bouzoukis or other instruments. … Then it was just a recording of a situation, of an environment, really. … He actually got a great result.’42

Andy was working with Dónal as a duo at the time and saw no particularly fabulous future with the album to which they had all contributed: ‘I enjoyed it very much, but I didn’t see the potential in it.’

Liam was quietly confident, however: ‘I knew it was going to make a huge impact. I really did. It was a different sound.’43

Released on Trailer, in Britain, in March 1972, it might have been a different sound – the opening track alone, ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy/Tabhair Dom Do Lámh’, daringly marrying the Irish vocal and instrumental traditions – but nobody was listening.

‘It didn’t sell for me at all,’ says Bill. ‘It sold for Tara [to whom we sold it on], and we sort of gifted it to Christy, cos there was nothing we could do.’

Prosperous was ‘gifted’ to Christy by being sold to Jack Fitzgerald, who owned Ireland’s Golden Discs chain of record stores. Jack and Bill each gave Christy £1,000. It was the most money he would see from music for years. Tara Records was initially a store on Dublin’s Tara Street; they used the name as the label for their vinyl acquisition. The retail end was at that point transitioning into a chain called Golden Discs. Over in the Rathfarnham Shopping Centre, John Cook, a former hotel industry accountant, had been running his own independent record store. Cook would become involved with both Tara Records and, before the 70s were out, the band that had debuted on Prosperous.

John Cook: ‘[Young people in Ireland at the time] were not particularly buying Irish music. I think the youth of Ireland were buying your end-of60s rock, and buying it in preference to any Irish music at all. Jack Fitzgerald did very well – specialising in American imports. There was maybe up to a two-month delay between an American release and UK release and … he would bring in the likes of Charley Pride and Elvis Presley stuff and built up his business that way. I knew Jack all through those years [in the 60s] while I was in the hotel business and he was in the record store, for no other reason than [that] I used to be a particularly good customer.

‘[Prosperous] was only available in Ireland as an import. … But [it] was continually going out of stock as demand was increasing. It was the breaking album, if you like, that started to turn the whole direction of Irish music around, because the four members of Planxty were on that album and it was the precursor of the band. Jack Fitzgerald did a deal with Bill Leader … and released it as the first album on the Tara label, in 1972.’

In between the album being recorded and appearing on Trailer and then on Tara, Liam O’Flynn had spent five months in America, memorably gigging on one occasion with blues icon John Lee Hooker and singer-songwriter Patrick Sky, who would himself take up the uilleann pipes and enhance the discography of Séamus Ennis in due course – as would Tara Records. Ennis, for his part, would be a notable influence on the band that became Planxty: Christy Moore, Andy Irvine, Dónal Lunny and Liam O’Flynn. But whether there would be any band at all was a moot point. Andy Irvine, running a weekly gig with Dónal Lunny at Slattery’s on Capel Street at the time, recalls being doubtful:

Andy: ‘Liam’s always been an enigmatic fellow. I remember when Christy said, ‘What about forming a band?’ after we’d made Prosperous. And I’d been playing with Dónal. I said, ‘What does Dónal think?’ ‘Oh, he’s heavily into it.’ And I said, ‘Ah, yes, but what about Liam?’ And he said Liam was in, and I was really surprised because Liam was a teacher. I would not have foreseen that he would give up a safe job to take to the road. He has a certain reserve. But he was very much into Planxty at the time.’

Christy was interviewed by Melody Maker in March 1972 (‘I’m fed up with being a solo singer … I think Andy feels the same way’), on the cusp of both Prosperous being released on Trailer in Britain and a first Planxty single, ‘Three Drunken Maidens’, on Des Kelly’s label, Ruby Records, in Ireland. The new band was clearly exciting him:

Christy: ‘This is really a solo LP, although from the solo LP we got the idea for the group. … I think that Dónal particularly will make a big impact over here. I think the two most important members of the group will be Liam and Dónal, and [yet] it’s Andy and myself that are best known. … Liam has received some criticism from fellow musicians for coming into the group. The other three of us were a bit worried that Liam wouldn’t become immersed in the group, but he has done. We don’t want to lower his standards. We don’t want him to do anything that would go against his musical ideals.’44

Liam (2002): ‘We had one rule in the band: if there was any one individual within the band who really didn’t want to do this, that or the other, that was respected and there was no further argument about it. And that was, to me, a terrifically important thing.’45

Forever doomed to be described as ‘mild-mannered’, ‘cautious’ and, yes, ‘enigmatic’, Liam O’Flynn may lack the braggadocio or colourful lifestyles of other ‘big characters’ involved in Irish traditional music, but his decision-making has always been daring, and over nearly 45 years he would accumulate a discography both eclectic and immense. If uilleann piping were a race, one would be tempted when talking about Liam O’Flynn to cite the fable of the tortoise and the hare. Other people have done a lot of haring around; Liam has quietly and consistently covered the ground – and not always the ground one might expect.

Planxty had debuted live at Slattery’s in Dublin on January 30 1972. Within weeks, they had a single out on Des Kelly’s Ruby Records – Des being a former manager of Sweeney’s Men and an old friend of Andy’s. Despite their ramshackle stage presentation (similar to that of Sweeney’s Men before them), Des could see the magic. As he explained to Planxty biographer Leagues O’Toole: ‘Put the four of them on stage and I believe there’s a presence there they don’t have individually.’46

It was just like The Beatles: the ‘folk Beatles’. More or less single-handedly, with perhaps a little help from Horslips (also formed in 1972, a rock band with traditional music overtones as opposed to Planxty, a folk/trad band with a kind of rock music appeal), Planxty created a sizeable youth market for Irish traditional music. Their music – drawing from Liam’s Irish instrumental repertoire, Christy’s wealth of songs from the British folk scene, Andy’s cache of intriguing confessionals from a sojourn in the Balkans during 1968–69 and compound rhythmic ideas from the same region, plus a dash of Americana – was a unique and exotic concoction, yet still felt passionately ‘Irish’. It had the air of authenticity about it whilst simultaneously feeling wholly new.

Neil Martin, then a young piper who would go on to work with Liam O’Flynn from the mid-80s onwards, puts his finger on the intangible as well as anyone:

Neil Martin: ‘I think they made traditional music ‘cool’. And part of that was the rhythm instruments, what Dónal was doing, the songs Christy was singing and Andy’s glorious filigree work on his machine. It broadened it. It wasn’t the standard straight melodic thing. The bandwidth had got bigger. Planxty brought a particular colour to it.’

In one sense, black was the colour. The Beatles had had their ‘White Album’; within a year of starting, and kicking off with a re-recording of ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy/Tabhair Dom Do Lámh’, as heard first on Prosperous, Planxty had their ‘Black Album’. [B]

‘The arrangements are identical,’ wrote one commentator shortly after the ‘Black Album’s’ release in 1973, ‘and in both they manage the tricky bridge from the song to the harp tune, changing tempo from 2/4 to 3/4 so smoothly that Liam’s pipes are well into the first phrase of the second tune before you’re aware of it. Nevertheless, the second recording has a togetherness that was not there the first time round. The first is obviously a pick-up group of musicians who have got together for the occasion, playing supremely well but with all the rough edges showing. The second is a band. That is the difference.’47

Liam: ‘When we started Planxty, we said we’d give it three months and if nothing was happening, then fair enough. By three months, the thing had really taken off. It was like a runaway train. You couldn’t get off.’48

*

‘Wherever you go in the burgeoning Irish contemporary folk scene, where electric folk bands are springing up all over like shamrocks in the night,’ wrote Karl Dallas in August 1973, ‘you will find one bunch of musicians have the unanimous approval of all, whether you are talking to the most conservative of traditionalists or the most electric of folk rockers. The band is Planxty …’49

Planxty had begun touring in Britain by April 1972, Christy having worked his contacts on the British club scene to string together a number of club dates shared with Mike Harding, Martin Carthy, The Watersons and others. They would make their first of many live and in-session appearances on BBC radio on Country Meets Folk on May 6. As he was with the Furey brothers, John Peel was a particular supporter. Back home, RTÉ were similarly supportive, with appearances on the prime-time Saturday night Late Late Show at both the beginning and the end of their first year, the December appearance being on a bill with The Chieftains and Séamus Ennis, the chaotic godfather of Irish piping, with whom Liam O’Flynn was by then sharing a domestic environment.

The ‘Black Album’ had been recorded in London in September 1972. Under a production deal with Eurovision songwriter Phil Coulter and his business partner Bill Martin, it would – like the subsequent two albums of the band’s original lifespan – be leased to Polydor for Ireland, Britain, Germany and France.

‘I reckon that Bill Martin made more money out of Planxty than I did,’ said Christy in 1979, ‘and y’know something? If he walked in now, I wouldn’t know what the fuck he looked like.’50

They may all have come to regret the long-term financial implications of the production deal, but partly through it, Planxty had very swiftly become an international act.

‘One of the most significant comments upon Planxty’s development of their music,’ concluded Dallas, 18 months in, ‘is the way that piper Liam O’Flynn has retained the respect of his fellow pipers, possibly the most conservative of the guardians of the Irish tradition. … [T]hey have had to acknowledge that he still remains the master they thought he was before he joined the band.’51

By that point the group’s second album, The Well Below The Valley, was in the can. It would be released before the year was out.

Christy: ‘The pressure on the second album was ridiculous. We finished an Irish tour and we went over to England to record, and at the time it wasn’t even rehearsed … and yet that second album is my favourite.’52

‘Once a band becomes a permanent operation, it’s immediately limited,’ Liam mused, wisely, during the same interview session, in 1979. Those limitations – constant travelling, little time to develop new repertoire and remain interested as musicians – soon caught up with Dónal Lunny. Not long after an appearance at the Cambridge Folk Festival in July 1973 (with Breton folk-rocker Alan Stivell’s fiddler René Werneer standing in for an ill O’Flynn), Dónal decided to move on. He wanted to work with singer-songwriter, Fine Art graduate and future orchestral composer Shaun Davey, who had enjoyed the British release of a duo album, Davey & Morris, with James Morris, future founder of Dublin’s Windmill Lane Studios, in 1973. While the venture failed to yield any recorded work, with Dónal moving on again to create a new unit, The Bothy Band, it would not be the last time a Planxty alumnus would work with Davey.

Andy’s former Sweeney’s Men colleague Johnny Moynihan came in on bouzouki, and a ‘difficult third album’, Cold Blow And The Rainy Night, was recorded at Island Records’ London studio in August 1974, not long after another appearance at the Cambridge Folk Festival. [C] A singular character, Johnny brought a fresh wit and joie de vivre to the band, coupled with an exasperating obsession with lengthy tuningup sessions onstage and indecision about arrangements. Dónal Lunny was asked back in temporarily to help pull the third album together. Pressures of the road and resentment over the financial arrangements with Coulter and Martin were taking their toll. By the end of the year – after a couple of months of transition, with singer/ guitarist Paul Brady as a fifth member – Christy had bowed out. [D]

Liam: ‘I remember a period of time when it seemed desperately difficult to just continue, because the lifestyle was affecting everybody. But it didn’t really affect performance. There was tremendous pride in the work, and for that reason the notion of going on stage plastered was a no-no.’53

Andy: ‘When Paul joined the band, we got the ‘engine room’ back [which Dónal had been]. But just the three and a half years of permanent gigging began to get to us … Liam called a meeting and we knew what it was going to be: ‘Aha, this is it …’ When we were all there, he said, ‘I’ve called this meeting because I want to leave the band.’ And everybody else said, ‘Yes, I do too! Me, me, me, me, me!’ So we all left the band and came over here [to O’Donoghues] and got plastered, I’m sure. And by the end of the night we were probably saying, ‘Oh God, it was a great band – should we really do this?’’54

Planxty played a final British tour in October 1975, followed by a tour of France. Their last gig was in Brussels, Belgium, on December 5. A huge tax bill hadn’t helped, but everyone was just exhausted. It was time to do other things, with fewer people and overheads. For Liam, that was easy: he got an agent and became an entirely solo performer.

*

‘I’m not really very interesting to talk to,’ Liam had said, having just given an interview to the man from Folk News in 1978. The interviewer, Tomás Mac Ruairí, begged to disagree:

‘He is in reality most interesting to talk to. He is somewhat unique, being one of very few, if not the only, full-time professional Irish traditional musicians (not including singers) working a solo career. … Seven years a full-time musician, he is optimistic for the future, not only of the music, but of his own career and admits to no over-riding personal ambitions, other than that everything should keep going as at present for him. … His advice to young pipers is to first of all become ‘good listeners to good music’ and to strongly ‘resist all attempts to be spectacular by playing too fast’.’55

A prospective solo LP on promoter Kevin Flynn’s Ogham label had been mentioned, but nothing came of it. Nevertheless, in 1979 Liam was the featured performer on a Decca single, ‘David’s Song’, by composer Vladimir Cosma, from a series called Kidnapped. It would be the first of many soundtrack and session recordings, across diverse genres, over the coming years.

Artistically, by this point Liam was on the cusp of two significant developments:
one, a daring orchestral project with Shaun Davey; the other, a more obviously lucrative reunion of Planxty.

Andy Irvine explained the situation to Colin Irwin at Melody Maker in March 1979, ahead of two months’ worth of major concert hall dates across Britain, Europe and Ireland, beginning at London’s Hammersmith Odeon and finishing at Dublin’s
National Stadium: [E]

Andy (1979): ‘After we broke up I thought, ‘Thank Christ that’s over,’ and then the next moment I thought, ‘Jeez, I wish Planxty were still together.’ I can remember talking to Liam about it a couple of years ago and being amazed to find he was into it. I was into it five minutes after we broke up.’56

Being an enigmatic fellow of few and careful words, Liam had given his own view on the reunion subject to Colin Irwin a year before: ‘I don’t really have any feelings about whether it should or shouldn’t happen.’57

Nevertheless, by September 1978 the four original members of Planxty plus, at Liam’s suggestion, flautist Matt Molloy from the then-crumbling Bothy Band (in which Dónal was also involved) convened to rehearse. Rumours went quickly abroad, and this time round there was no problem getting record labels interested.

John Cook, who had been running Jack Fitzgerald’s Tara label, was determined to acquire the inevitable Planxty reunion LP. The label had released a handful of albums in the intervening period, some licensed from other labels and some originated, most notably two Séamus Ennis albums, but it would only build a head of steam as an active originating label during 1978–79, with releases including two albums from Christy Moore, the first Stockton’s Wing album and the Paddy Glackin & Paddy Keenan album Doublin’. A new Planxty album would put it on the map:

John Cook: ‘Planxty started a whole strain of Irish music that was coming more into the centre, was more crossover. When the band decided to get back together, they put themselves up for a record deal, and we were basically competing against Polygram and some other major. We decided that if we were going to start a label [in earnest], the best way to do it, even if it’s costly, is to get a big album and a recognised artist. So after protracted negotiations we got a two-album deal with Planxty.’

After The Break was recorded in June 1979, straight after the reunion tour. The gigs had started off shakily, but the omens were still good. After rueful reminiscences of past struggles, and the determination to get it right this time round, Colin Irwin painted an upbeat picture of the new five-piece. He concluded his piece, with layers of portent and metaphor (intentional or otherwise):

‘A few of us make it back to O’Flynn’s flat. ‘Fancy a drink?’ says Liam, pouring himself a generous red wine and playing Eric Clapton’s new album rather loudly. A picture of Willie Clancy shudders on the wall. ‘It’s great to be back with the boys,’ muses Liam. ‘It’s already good crack.’’58

After The Break (1979) would be followed by The Woman I Loved So Well (1980) before things became complicated. Christy and Dónal, wanting to work with a rock rhythm section and to have a vehicle for politically charged material, formed Moving Hearts in 1981. They remained simultaneously in the essentially part-time Planxty for a period. Other people began coming into the ranks. A 12-inch single on WEA in 1981, of new member Bill Whelan’s ‘Timedance’ – performed by Planxty as the interval music to that year’s Eurovision Song Contest – began the new era. Bill would have monstrous success a few years later, in the same slot, with ‘Riverdance’, which had as its ultimate origin the marriage of Balkan rhythms with the flavour of Irish music birthed on the ‘Black Album’ back in 1973. A third and final album, Words & Music (WEA, 1983) followed. Christy and Dónal left, more people came in and the band limped on for a period, earning the Irvine sobriquet ‘Planxty-Too-Far’.

‘History will tell you it was a mistake to call it Planxty,’ Andy mused to the band’s biographer, ‘but it wasn’t a huge mistake, because no one remembers it and it didn’t do very well, so that’s okay.’59

Andy summarised the whole Planxty experience in a 2002 RTÉ documentary, which ironically itself inspired a third and surely final reunion during 2003–05:

Andy: ‘The first three albums have a lot of youthful energy about them, a novelty, etcetera. … I prefer the second three albums. Musically they’re more intricate. We had evolved musically quite a long way by that time, and I just prefer the music, I think it’s more interesting to listen to. But when I think of the times we had, 1972 through to the end of ’74 was magic; ’74 till Brady joined the band was kind of a struggle; and then it was great for a while with Brady until we were just too tired to continue. ’79 onwards was okay. … The music was better, but more was expected of us at that point. There was more responsibility to do well, and when we didn’t get the reaction we wanted there was a slight feeling – with me, anyway – of paranoia.’60

Everything has its season. Even if The Beatles had succumbed to pressure and reunited, it would never have been the same. Why should the folk Beatles be any different? Yet during all this initial excitement and gradual fizzling out, Liam had been quietly pursuing a typically unexpected path with a man who wrote jingles for a living and had form for failed projects with Planxty people: Shaun Davey.

*

John Cook: ‘The Brendan Voyage (1980) was the next album [on Tara] after the second Planxty album [The Woman I Loved So Well]. At that time Shaun and Bill Whelan had the advertising market cornered – they did an enormous amount of jingles for radio and TV, and that’s how both of them got their first experiences of orchestration. The Brendan Voyage came about by Shaun being approached by Harry Bradshaw from RTÉ, who asked him to write a piece for the RTÉ orchestra and base it on Tim Severin’s book, which Shaun had just read. It was a kind of commission, performed by the RTÉ orchestra, after which the question of recording it came about. There was a gap between performance and releasing a record, and Shaun was actually talking to a couple of different companies … Looking back at the catalogue, it was the album I agonised over more than anything else, as it was such a departure from anything else that had been recorded up to that date, in putting pipes together with an orchestra and with a rhythm section, plus one [that] had very high costs [involved]. I agonised for many days over that, but of course I don’t regret it. We went ahead and recorded it, and it’s still a great album. In fact, it’s interesting that its 10th year of release was its second highest year of sales within those 10 years, so that’s a good example of a consistently selling album. Liam only performs it maybe once or twice a year, but it doesn’t date.’

Tim Severin had spent part of 1976–77 (re)-enacting the legendary sixth century voyage of St Brendan from Ireland to Newfoundland in a small currach, writing a best-selling book on the adventure in 1978. It provided Shaun Davey with a subject to get his teeth into, bringing together the uilleann pipes with an orchestra to create a musically descriptive suite. It would be Shaun’s first of several suites on Celtic themes, all of which would feature Liam O’Flynn and most of which would be recorded for Tara. The key works, which, like The Brendan Voyage have all been performed periodically and to consistent acclaim in the years since, are The Pilgrim (1984; revised and expanded in 1994), Granuaile (1986) and The Relief Of Derry Symphony (1990).

Shaun Davey: ‘That year [1973], when I formed a band called Bugle with Dónal Lunny – we only did four gigs, in Dublin, and we did some demo recording. It was a very experimental band. He took a year out of Planxty to pursue these things, and it was very good of him to have done that. … But there was only one way for me to go at that stage: a combination of formal composition and a lesser amount of music by ear. … I was very keen to cross certain boundaries and arrange meeting points between certain instruments and traditions, [and] that had to be thought out on the page.

‘When I was working on The Brendan Voyage, I figured that I was trying to write music for people like me, who wanted to hear something like it but who hadn’t, up to that point, heard it. … In a sense, I’m not qualified to write just for an orchestra, because I have no formal training, and I’ve largely made it up as I’ve gone along. What I’m equipped to do is arrange meeting points between what I can do for an orchestra – which is by no means everything an orchestra can do – and what I can enable other people to do, who don’t normally work with an orchestra. This is typically what I’ve done, and it’s typically what I’ve enjoyed doing most – staging these meeting points.’

Liam O’Flynn: ‘Shaun was very much in love with the sound of the uilleann pipes, and when he first approached me with the idea of writing a piece of music for the pipes based on The Brendan Voyage [book], we sat down and discussed the instrument and the difficulties and strengths that a composer would come up against. During the whole process of the writing Shaun learned very well indeed, as he says himself, the ‘inner workings of the instrument’ – what was possible and what wasn’t.

‘I had a basic knowledge of [music notation], but I would never be comfortable having to perform music and reading it at the same time – coming from the tradition, you learn music by heart. So I would only be comfortable with these pieces once I’d committed them to memory and had a bloody good idea what the orchestra were up to as well. [There’s room for improvisation], but you wouldn’t want to overdo it – otherwise the conductor would begin to wonder what the hell your man was up to! It would throw a serious spanner in the works.

‘One of the biggest difficulties I found with The Brendan Voyage wasn’t a musical thing; it was finding oneself within a totally different performing environment. The formality of the concert hall, an absolutely quiet audience out there in front of you – that puts some pressure on a traditional musician.

‘The whole concept of The Brendan Voyage was wonderful, with the pipes telling the story of this little boat and the orchestra telling the story of what the little boat encountered. It was certainly ground-breaking and it seems to me, as time passes, that the impact it made is an ongoing thing. It made a huge impact at the time, but it’s growing, because [in] every new territory I go into with the piece, people are amazed by this new creature, as it were.’

The ongoing partnership between Liam and Shaun effectively also created the solo career Liam currently enjoys. His first solo album, Liam O’Flynn, was released by WEA Ireland in 1988, but his current career as a solo artist – with lavishly arranged albums on the one hand and live performances, replicating the luxuriant sound of the albums, as far as possible, in a trio context, on the other – really began during the 1990s, with a series of solo albums on Tara, produced by Shaun Davey: Out To An Other Side (1993), The Given Note (1995) and The Piper’s Call (1998). Along with traditional material, the albums would include some of Shaun’s music for Trevor Nunn’s Royal Shakespeare Company stage productions:

Shaun (1995): ‘I put my heart and soul into something, whether it’s ephemeral [like theatre music] or not; otherwise, the whole thing is pointless … Some things are going to have an extended life and other things are not. The very good tunes I think it is possible to have recorded. For example, the big tune in The Winter’s Tale RSC 1992 production Liam took for Out To An Other Side. It’s a grand tune and it actually has, funnily enough, been recorded by at least two other artists [since]. Similarly, Liam has taken the main theme from [1995’s] RSC production of Romeo And Juliet to record for [The Given Note].’
The quality of Shaun’s material, alongside his skills as an arranger and producer, contributed hugely to the longevity of Liam’s albums for Tara. I recall once meeting Liam by chance at a bar in Donegal, where the notion of a solo ‘best of’ was on his mind. I mentioned it, as Liam had suggested, to John Cook, but he was having none of it: a ‘best of’ would immediately mean the rest of an artist’s catalogue becoming redundant to retailers. While Tara has become semi-dormant as an originating label in recent years, as music retail outlets have all but disappeared, it remains pro-active in keeping existing catalogue available online. The 1990s works of Liam O’Flynn, now including a period video release of The Piper’s Call band upgraded to DVD, are consequently enjoying the same ‘long tail’ as the works of Shaun Davey.

In 2003, The Poet & The Piper, released on Claddagh, saw a smaller-scale collaborative recording between Nobel Laureate Séamus Heaney and Liam, with a version of his live trio (Steve Cooney and Rod McVey). Since then, Liam has contributed to two further orchestrated Shaun Davey albums, both on Tara: May We Never Have To Say Goodbye (2006), mopping up several of Shaun’s hitherto unrecorded pieces; and Voices From The Merry Cemetery (2010), a suite inspired by Romanian grave inscriptions.

There have, since the mid-80s, been numerous guest and session appearances on a remarkable array of albums, from Kate Bush to a Led Zeppelin symphonic tribute by a man from Killing Joke via Mike Oldfield, Elmer Bernstein, Sinéad O’Connor and The Everly Brothers.

There have also been a few appearances on 21st century albums by Andy Irvine, most recently Andy’s CD/DVD release 70th Birthday Concert At Vicar Street 2012 (2014), performing with the band LAPD. Named, as Planxty almost was, after the initials of its members (Liam, Andy, Paddy Glackin and Dónal Lunny), LAPD was an occasional spin-off from the 2003–05 Planxty reunion, which had been somewhat happier than the 1979–83 comeback. [F] It was, in effect, a valedictory parade. This time, when Christy stopped, the job having been done and done well, the name wisely stopped with him.

LAPD was a happy solution to the three others wanting to keep playing, hampered only by Liam’s desire by now not to tour abroad. Andy’s birthday album would be its only record, for Liam decided to call it quits at the end of 2014. With the admirable pragmatism of a man who never tires of the road, and never runs out of people to join him on it, Andy (with Lunny and Glackin) recruited piper/flautist Michael McGoldrick and guitarist John Doyle:

Andy: ‘When Christy decided he couldn’t play with Planxty anymore, Dónal and I thought it a real shame to let the whole shooting gallery go down the drain. Dónal had been playing quite a lot with Paddy Glackin, and of course Liam and Paddy knew each other from way back. Dónal suggested the name LAPD, and we played, off and on, for a couple of years – festivals and biggish concerts. It was a great success, and we three were very sad when Liam decided to call it a day. I suggested John and Mike as replacements, as I had played a bit with John and [had] always admired Mike’s playing. After numerous attempts at finding a name, we finally settled on Usher’s Island, the name of a quay in Dublin. We played a couple of warm-up gigs in Ireland and then Celtic Connections in Glasgow [in January 2015]. The acclaim was very promising, and we hope for a rosy future.’

At this stage in the game, Liam O’Flynn – now aged 70 and purportedly comfortably off – can pick and choose what he wants to do. He grew up learning from the best; he became one of the most prominent uilleann pipers of the 1970s; he brought the instrument into the orchestral world in a significant and thrilling way; and he has graced dozens of albums by artists far beyond Irish traditional music, aside from creating a body of solo work in the 1990s that will remain amongst the most sumptuous and polished settings for the instrument in an era that will come to be seen as the last hurrah for a well-funded record industry. The rustic solo instrument of the baroque era finally became, at the end of the ‘rock era’, the lead voice in a new kind of chamber music, however briefly. Liam O’Flynn’s recorded works stand for themselves, and he can be assured of an audience wherever and whenever he chooses to perform. As he put it to Leagues O’Toole in The Humours Of Planxty (2006):

‘To this day when I’m on tour people continually come up and say that it was through Planxty that they were first introduced to Irish traditional music. Or that their first contact with uilleann pipes was through Planxty and it changed their life. To me, that’s fantastic. That’s the greatest reward any musician can be given …’61

FOOTNOTES:

A – Ciarán Mac Mathúna was the presenter of A Job Of Journeywork on Radio Éireann from 1955 onwards, actively seeking out and broadcasting regional traditional musicians.

B – ‘The White Album’ was actually called The Beatles, a name by which no one ever refers to it. Likewise, ‘The Black Album’ was called Planxty, and no one ever refers to it as that, either.

C – Planxty were filmed for BBC2’s Old Grey Whistle Test at the 1974 Cambridge Folk Festival, with ‘The Blacksmith’ being broadcast in late September. Anglia TV filmed a documentary on the festival that year, although Planxty were not featured.

D – The five-piece Planxty of September-October 1974 made no commercial recordings but did perform a TV concert for BBC Northern Ireland.

E – The National Stadium had been the scene of an atmospheric televised concert for RTÉ, viewable online, a mere six years earlier.

F – Planxty were almost called CLAD: Christy, Liam, Andy, Dónal.

ENDNOTES:

38 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
39 ‘Start Following The Leader’, Jeremy Gilbert, Melody Maker, 7/2/70
40 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
41 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
42 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
43 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
44 ‘Moore the merrier’, Andrew Means, Melody Maker, 11/3/72
45 No Disco Planxty documentary, RTÉ, 2002
46 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
47 ‘The Celtic Sound: Planxty’, Karl Dallas, Melody Maker, 11/8/73
48 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
49 ‘The Celtic Sound: Planxty’, Karl Dallas, Melody Maker, 11/8/73
50 ‘The Easter Resurrection’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 17/3/79
51 ‘The Celtic Sound: Planxty’, Karl Dallas, Melody Maker, 11/8/73
52 ‘The Easter Resurrection’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 17/3/79
53 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
54 No Disco Planxty documentary, RTÉ, 2002
55 ‘The quiet man of the pipes,’ Tomás Mac Ruairí, Folk News, 8/78
56 ‘The Easter Resurrection’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 17/3/79
57 ‘The Enigmatic Piper Supreme’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 25/2/78
58 ‘The Easter Resurrection’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 17/3/79
59 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole
60 No Disco Planxty documentary, RTÉ, 2002
61 The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole

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retropath2 says

15/03/2018 at 13:39

Thanks, Col.

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Vulpes Vulpes says

16/03/2018 at 18:08

Great stuff! Thanks for posting Colin – a good read, as always. If you speak to Andy anytime, ask him why I can’t buy a copy of “Rainy Sundays, Windy Dream” anywhere without taking a second mortgage?

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Tiggerlion says

16/03/2018 at 20:23

Lovely work!

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Colin H says

18/03/2018 at 19:18

Thanks both!

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