Paddy Keenan: Rakish Paddy Blues

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1. Colin H says

   13/09/2026 at 15:33

   Chapter 5: Paddy Keenan: Rakish Paddy Blues
   From ‘The Wheels of the World: 300 Years of Irish Uilleann Pipes’ (2015) by Colin Harper with John McSherry

   Paddy Keenan: ‘In the beginning it was my brother Johnny who put the whistle in my mouth and forced me to learn it. And he was like my dad – he probably got it from my dad – a fierce, tough tutor. He would use all sorts of methods to get you to play what he wanted to hear. If he hadn’t have done that maybe I wouldn’t have taken up the pipes one day, when my dad was out fishing – and when he came back he caught me with his pipes. And I was terrified he’d beat me up or slap me around, having his pipes – not that he was that rough with us. [But] in those days you wouldn’t even give your pipes to another piper.

   ‘That reminds me of something in London, when I gave my pipes, at ‘A Sense Of Ireland’ [in London, 1980], to a little black lad. People were very hostile to me later not only for giving my pipes to someone else but giving them to a black lad. To me, this big festival thing was [supposed to be] an awareness of the Irish and their culture and their music and whatever else but when I saw the reaction it really, really shocked me.’

   And there, in one illustration, is the essence of Paddy Keenan: scion of a proud family, pre-ordained keeper of the Traveller piper tradition, and in the end a truly free spirit – not in the sense of a catch-all descriptor of the Travelling community ethos, but more specific. Paddy Keenan is an individual, a one-off, with an inspirational gentle spirit. He’s a mixture of Irish Traveller heritage and the values of the 1960s counter-culture. For a long time he wasn’t so much a combination of these ideals but a confliction: ‘I’m a Traveller – which I was very, very ashamed of years and years back, because it was like being black in Ireland.’

   He does what he likes, when he likes, with whom he likes and with as little negative impact on the world around him as possible. ‘I’m not a rock star, I’m a piper,’ he quipped, when I suggested he would be, inconveniently, mobbed by fans directly after a 2014 gig in Belfast, a time he had reckoned suitable for an interview (albeit only if he felt like it). And yet, of course, the show ends and he is mobbed by fans, just like a rock star. For he is the closest Irish traditional music has to one. Everyone wants to shake Paddy Keenan’s hand or pass him a jazz woodbine. It is the worst time and environment possible for an interview and yet, after an hour of glad-handing and with the faithful milling around expectantly to take him off to a pub session, he can, instantly, apply total focus to the embattled interviewer’s questions. His answers, during the 45 minutes of what he had said would be five, were almost all nuanced, sensitive and sometimes profound. He was in the moment, leaning in close to the microphone, while the event horizon of the crowd’s plan for a late night’s fun hovered but a few feet away. Other people might grasp at the opportunity to feature in a book; Paddy Keenan doesn’t really care. It holds no sway over him. The sublime fiddle player Martin Hayes once told me, ‘The muse has no interest in press cuttings’; Paddy Keenan is a man in constant search of that muse.

   If you hire him for a concert it might be the best thing you’ve ever heard or it might, though much less likely now than was once the case, be a shambles. He does the unexpected. He wears a cowboy hat, all the time. He’s never been much good at turning his genius into a career as big and as financially successful as it might have been. But then, if he could do that he would lose his essence.

   ‘I do excite myself with mistakes! For me it’s happening automatic – I sometimes don’t know split seconds before what’s coming next. But I want to change it to me; I’m not trying to change Irish music. Riverdance, The Chieftains – they’re all brilliant and there’s a reason why they should be there. They’re creating work for the likes of me, for people who want to see the platform where it came from. I don’t hate commercialism – because it helps people who are not so well known.’

   Solid people have solid careers; geniuses have lives that career all over the place but leave a monumental footprint of influence and affection in their wake. He is, in a way, a living last hurrah – or, at least, is perceived as such – for a lifestyle and spirit in music that we associate with the 1960s and 70s. Like most musical heroes of those times, his fame outstrips his wealth. He has, though, despite views on the pension prospects for Irish cultural ambassadors, no really obvious hang-ups around this dichotomy, which is probably as good a way as any of dealing with the ongoing weight of people’s expectations: ‘I’m really lucky and rich in health – in health!’

   Despite a slender discography, Paddy’s impact in the piping world has been immense.

   John McSherry: I remember hearing The Bothy Band for the first time, on tape. I’d already been introduced to The Chieftains, The Fureys and Planxty but this was something quite different. Raw energy and power wrapped up with a great sensitivity. It was fresh and exciting. And, of course, Paddy was right at the centre. His piping was smooth, intricate, precise and full of soul. It drew me in. Whether in a band or solo setting, Paddy is always exciting to listen to. You never know what he’s gonna do next.

   Paddy’s performances are as capable of being as electrifying today as they were in the 70s, his ‘moment’ as a member of The Bothy Band. The key word is ‘capable’ for, as many well-travelled anecdotes attest, there have oft been times when he wasn’t. He admitted as much, and highlighted the consequences of being a larger than life figure, back in 1997, when we met during what was perceived as a comeback period, after some years trying to find something to do outside of music:

   ‘I do have a bit of a reputation, I know. And the more you’re known of course the bigger the reputation grows. If something happens it might be minor but by the time it gets back to you its huge! Here’s an example: I was over in Los Angeles with Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt and when I came back, maybe six months later, this guy came up to me in the street and said, ‘Hey, Paddy, is it true that when you were over with Dolly that you ran up and felt her boobs to see if they were real?’ Another one was when this guy came to me and said:

   ‘Hey, didn’t we have a great time in Lisdoonvarna?’

   And I said, ‘Well, I wasn’t there…’

   ‘Aww, you were – sure we were drinking together!’

   ‘Damn it, I wasn’t there!’

   And you know something? The worst part of it was, when this guy was finished and I was blue in the face saying I wasn’t there, he walked away saying, ‘Ah, well, you must have had a better time than I did if you can’t remember it!’ I mean, what can you do?’

   *

   Paddy Keenan was born in 1950, to a Traveller family. Around 1956 the family settled in Ballyfermot, Dublin, near the Furey family, the two patriarchs, John Keenan senior and Ted Furey being firm friends. John Keenan had also been a friend of the late Johnny Doran:

   ‘Keenan subsequently was determined that he would have a piper in the family, such was his infatuation with Doran. He designated Paddy as the piper, but Paddy readily admits that his brother Johnny was a better piper. The Doran mantle, however, fell to Paddy simply because Johnny was quicker on his feet getting out to play when not prepared to dedicate the time required to learn the intricacies of the instrument.’ [1]

   Paddy was nine when his father decided he was to become the keeper of the Doran flame. He was already schooled on tin whistle and had tinkered with other instruments.

   Tómas Ó Canainn: His father made him a bag, bellows and chanter and gave it to him one morning, saying: ‘If you can play a tune when I come back tonight, I’ll see what I can do about getting you the full set of pipes.’ Paddy could play part of the reel ‘Rakish Paddy’ on the chanter that evening and his piping career started forthwith, under his father’s tuition. [2]

   Ó Canainn, in went on to quote at length, in Traditional Music In Ireland (1978), a neighbour of the family, John Connors, describing how uncompromising John Keenan’s teaching regime was. It was a tough time, and molly-coddling was no friend of ambition:

   Paddy: I wouldn’t like to magnify it out of proportion. My dad was a gifted musician, multi-instrumentalist, who’s responsible for a lot of young pipers today through tutoring or inspiring. They loved him for it. The one lad who’ll come out and say that, and I’m really proud of this lad, is Martin Nolan from Dublin. He’ll say, ‘I learned everything I have from Johnny Keenan.’

   According to Paddy, Finbar Furey (four years older) had moved in with the Keenans around 1961/62 and would stay for a few years, until Finbar and Eddie Furey made their fateful trip to Scotland in 1967. Finbar has a slightly different recollection:

   ‘I didn’t live with Paddy; Paddy didn’t live with me. He lived about 300 yards up the road. It was sort of that we had two fathers and two mothers. My best friend, of all time, was Johnny Keenan, his brother – he was a month older than I was. Johnny was a great Travelling piper. To this day I’ve yet to meet his equal. He was incredible. Not just as a player but talking about it, understanding exactly what he’s playing. Paddy is a brilliant musician but Johnny was something special. My father would have helped Johnny [senior] get the house in Ballyfermot when they moved there first. Mary [Keenan] was my mother’s best friend. The two families were always locked together.’

   Paddy: ‘Our house was called at one time Radio 116 Oranmore Road, because the music was going all through the night. There was the Sweeneys, the Ryans, some of the Fureys, and we’d be playing till school time in the morning. I’d have a plate of porridge, my mum would be doing my homework – that’s how it was. And then, of course, the neighbours would sometimes complain about so many of us being in there playing. That’s why I got into making elder reeds for the pipes just to soften the sounds so we didn’t bother the neighbours.’

   Fortuitously, there was an elder tree in the Keenan’s garden. John senior had been as good as his word and had bought his son a set of pipes:

   Paddy: ‘I first had a John Clark set – and I never found much out about John Clark; I’d love to find out more. They were lovely pipes, very much like the Crowley pipes [I later acquired], so he was probably influenced by Crowley. But then I got a full set of Rowsome pipes when I was 12: 1962.’

   Curiously, John Keenan senior, who knew Leo Rowsome, never took Paddy to Leo’s Pipers’ Club nor introduced him to the great man. There were, though, a couple of Rowsome-related incidents during the period of Paddy’s apprenticeship as a piper:

   Paddy: ‘My dad [had] me under pressure once to record for him a reel-to-reel tape. And he spent days with me to get, as he thought, the best. And this was his introduction of me to the Rowsome club, to The Pipers’ Club, in 64. I remember it well. I was 14. It was a tough thing to do, to sit in front of him and try to give him what he wanted – he was such a perfectionist. He wanted what he believed was going to impress those people, and eventually he did. He brought the tape in, gave it to Leo – [our neighbour] Johnny Connors, actually, was with him. He was husband of Johnny Doran’s sister, he used to bottle for Johnny Doran when he busked, and played the whistle as well.

   ‘So he brought the tape to Leo Rowsome and all the students were coming in – like, Garech de Brún was there, Paddy Moloney, Peter Browne, maybe Ronan Browne, probably Brendan Behan and Maggie Barry and all those old characters were there. Rowsome put it on, it’s playing, he’s listening to it, the students are saying, ‘Leo, who’s that?’ And Leo goes quiet and says nothing. After a while he finished the tape – which my dad was over the moon with, that he’d even listened to the whole thing – and he turned round to his students and said, ‘That’s this man’s son, and we haven’t heard a trill like this since the late, great Johnny Doran.’

   ‘But do you know what the weird thing was? Many years later, in the 90s, in Belgium with Peter Browne and Mícheál [Ó Domhnaill] we did this benefit for the Omagh bombing. And during my time there I mentioned this thing happening and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Shit! Did that really happen? Did Rowsome really say that?’ So I spoke to Peter and he said to me, ‘Paddy, I remember that well. I was one of the students. But here’s the thing: when your dad and John Connors went out of the room and down the stairs someone said: ‘Isn’t that amazing? There’s two Travellers who have a tape recorder. And not only that but they have recordings of Johnny Doran that we never knew existed…’ Now, if my dad had heard that he’d have been over the moon! But at the same time he’d be pissed that they didn’t believe him!’

   Garech de Brún, one of Leo’s students, had been born (in 1939) into the Lordship of Oranmore, and would marry into the wealthy Guinness family. (Footnote: The death in 1967 of Garech’s brother, Tara Browne, in London partly inspired The Beatles’ ‘A Day In The Life’.) A devotee of traditional music, he had co-founded Claddagh Records in 1959, specifically to record Leo Rowsome. By the middle 60s, the business had Dublin retail outlets, one of which, in Capel Street, would be significant in the Paddy Keenan story. In the window was an impressive looking set of pipes:

   Paddy: ‘I went in. The guy took the pipes out of the window, I put them on and I said to my dad, ‘I like them’. My dad said, ‘I’ll get them for you’. But he had no money, he wasn’t working at the time, he was on the dole. The following morning my dad went into the shop. He wasn’t too sure they were for sale. It was a record outlet, it was ‘Mr Guinness’, he doesn’t need money – so why would they be for sale? So my dad’s there first thing, goes inside and the man’s there on the phone talking to Garech de Brún and he’s going:

   ‘But the gentleman’s here… he wants to buy the pipes…’

   And I didn’t know it then but, of course, Garech is going, ‘The pipes are not for sale…’ They were just for display.

   ‘Well,’ my dad said, ‘it’s surely better to have someone play them? And not only that, tell him I left a deposit yesterday.’

   And then Garech supposedly said, ‘Well, does he play the pipes?’

   The man said, ‘I don’t know, but his son is making reasonable sounds with them….’

   ‘Okay,’ says Garech. ‘Sixty pounds.’’

   John Keenan’s chutzpah had gained his son a set of pipes from the renowned Crowley brothers, of Cork, which had been made for Garech himself. (Footnote: Tadhg Crowley (1899-52), with his brother Denis (1908-66), came from a War Piping/Pipe Band background before developing an interest in uilleann piping. Tadhg established the pipe-making business in Cork in the late 1920s.) Paddy retained the chanter from his Rowsome set, preferring its sound, and this would be the set he would use for the remainder of the 20th Century, before commissioning Dave Williams to make him a new set modelled exactly on the Crowley set. The acquisition of the Crowley pipes probably happened around 1966, when the Keenan family’s circumstances changed:

   Paddy: ‘My dad had left the house after we’d been there for maybe 10 years. We moved in when I was six, he moved out when I was 16. So we moved out to the side of the road, where my dad had a new van. He’d had an accident at a job, got some money out of it – back then £1500 was like a million today, and he did well with it. He bought a new bus, started really seriously collecting scrap with John Connors, and they made a great living out of it. But he was too generous. He was giving away and giving away. Whatever he had he’d be helping people. But we moved [then] into the first settlement ever for Travelling people and it was a chalet, a one room thing.’

   Aged 17, in 1967, Paddy finally rebelled against the expectations that had been placed on him and, as with most teenagers, the strictures of his parents, and went to London:

   ‘I really wasn’t interested in Irish music in the late 60s. I left home at about 17 and my father was very strict about music … he wanted to mould me as the piper of the future. I suppose I loved them in the beginning, then rebelled and ran away. So I wasn’t in touch with Irish music for a while. … I actually went off the pipes altogether. I fell in love with the blues and for three years I tried to pawn my pipes in London for less than two shillings at the time and they wouldn’t take them. … In the end I got so frustrated I dumped them in a trash can outside a pawn shop! (Footnote: As Paddy explained in the notes to The Long Grazing Acre (Hot Conya, 2002), a friend retrieved them and kept them safe until his world-view changed.)

   ‘I was playing more guitar at the time, and harmonica and singing – I was making a living busking. Then about two years later a friend of mine wrote to Paul McCartney. She was mad to get me back on the pipes … It was at the time that The Beatles were making their last records and were all looking for new instruments, new religion, new whatever. So she wrote and said, ‘I’ve got this friend who plays a very unusual instrument and he’s the top guy at it’, and so on. And she did actually get a reply from him and I was supposed to go and meet him. But I was hippying around London, having a great time and I didn’t want to play the pipes. I swear to God I was kind of embarrassed about them. But after three years I did take them out, took them into St James’ Park and tuned them up and there was a crowd of people around me throwing money in the box and I thought, ‘God, what have I been missing?’

   Paddy’s recollection of being in London for three or four years is a compression of a more fluid period of comings and goings between London and Dublin. During the middle 60s he had been playing with his father (pipes), brother Johnny (banjo) and others, including Liam Weldon (vocals) and George Furey (guitar), in The Pavees. This continued whenever he was home from London during 1967–69 or into the 70s. Several reels of tape privately recorded in Dublin during November and December 1967 by Alan MacWeeney, in domestic settings, are preserved at the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA), featuring Paddy playing pipes with his father and in combinations including his brother Johnny and Liam Weldon. Similarly, amateur recordings of The Pavees proper, at Slattery’s on Capel Street during 1968-69, all involving Paddy on pipes, are also preserved at ITMA, as is a Radio Éireann concert recording made at O’Connell’s Hall, Dublin, on November 22 1969. (Footnote: The line-up on the RÉ recording is: John Keenan (pipes), Paddy Keenan (pipes), Johnny Keenan (banjo), Mick Moriarty (flute, vocals), Liam Weldon (vocals) and George Furey (guitar). Guitarist/vocalist Johnny Flood had previously been a member of the band and is present on one of the 1968 Slattery’s recordings. A handful of undated photos at ITMA, taken at the Slattery’s club by organiser Chris Corlett, add Paul Furey to the Pavees’ fluid line-up.)

   Paddy: ‘For years we played together, and actually did some professional recordings for an Irish American company but they were never released. They’re still there waiting for my ‘okay’, so you never know. Liam Weldon was one of the first members of the band, himself and Johnny Flood. That went on for quite a few years but we just played locally. The instrumentation was pipes, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, guitar and vocals.’

   Putting guitars as an accompaniment to uilleann pipes was still a novelty, with only the Furey brothers and The Pavees known to have been doing so during the 1960s. The guitar was the instrument of the present, and Paddy, culturally, was immersed in that present, much to the potential embarrassment of his father:

   Paddy: ‘I’d just come back from London. … And my dad actually passed me walking down the street with Leo Rowsome, myself and my brother. I had a top hat and an old leather case for the top hat – I used to sit on it when I was busking in subways in London, with a guitar. So I’m walking with that, with pink cords, top hat, hair to my arse, possibly barefoot – and of course he didn’t want to introduce me to Leo Rowsome like that. So he passed us in the street! And we passed him out of respect as well, ‘cos we knew…’

   Paddy did, however, meet Willie Clancy. Once again, John Keenan wanted to show his son off to one of the greats of the older generation:

   Paddy: ‘I was up the canal line with my 60s long hair, drinking a few beers with the lads, and one of the kids came up and says, ‘Daddy wants you, there’s people there to see you…’ I was 18. I wandered down and it was Willie Clancy and Martin Talty. They had me play a few tunes and he loved it, he really did like it. I was shy and I’d had a couple of beers but I did what I could to please my dad, with offering a little of myself. Even though I was that age I still had this thing of using music to present myself. ‘Cos being a Traveller, having all those insecurities about being inadequate towards education and stuff like that at the time – I would keep my mouth closed and the music was my language, really. So that may be the reason why I experiment and move around so much with it.’

   (continued below…)

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2. Colin H says

   13/09/2026 at 15:34

   *

   At some point in 1970 Paddy returned to Dublin, fully re-engaged with his pipes, and set about the path that would lead, by 1975, to The Bothy Band. As he looks back on it: ‘I came back to Ireland and got together with Tríona and Mícheál [Ó Domhnaill] and then Tony MacMahon and Paddy Glackin and that was the beginning of The Bothy Band.’ But it was, naturally, rather more circuitous than that. The people Paddy mentioned above came together in 1974 in a seven-piece grouping known as Seachtar (of which seemingly no recordings survive), but there had been a kind of false start before even that:

   Paddy: ‘In 1969 or 1970 Tony MacMahon asked me if I’d like to join a band called 1691 with Peter Browne, Matt Molloy, Tommy Peoples – most of the people who ended up in The Bothy Band, actually! (Footnote: The band 1691 (or Sixteen Ninety-One) made one LP, issued only in France: Irish Folk Songs (Arfolk, 1973). The personnel: Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, Matt Molloy, Tommy Peoples, Liam Weldon and piper Peter Browne.) I remember touring with Mícheál Ó Domhnaill and Mick Hanly around that time. They were playing in Brittany and I’d decided to hang around with them for a month. And I suppose that’s where I got to know Mícheál and then The Bothy Band later came out of that. I think that was 1972.’

   Even at that time there was occasional Pavees activity. (Footnote: There is one stray 1972 amateur recording of The Pavees at Slattery’s held at ITM, along with a January 1971 domestic recording by Alan MacWeeney of four of the members (Paddy and Johnny Keenan, Liam Weldon and Mick Moriarty).) By 1974, though, the two focuses of Paddy’s attention were Seachtar and the opportunity of a solo album with Gael Linn. The album, Paddy Keenan, was solo by credit and features some purely solo piping, though Paddy opted for sonic variety by involving his brothers John and Thomas, on banjo and whistle respectively, and Paddy Glackin on fiddle. Séamus Ennis provided a fulsome sleeve-note, comparing Paddy’s style and repertoire often and favourably with Johnny Doran, whom he had known. The album remains a cornerstone in Paddy’s slim discography.

   (Footnote: Paddy’s discography was unwantedly expanded in 1974, in the wake of his solo album, as he explains: ‘I’d recorded an album a year or two before [the solo album] with a skiffle band who were busking around Grafton Street. They called themselves The Blacksmiths, because we couldn’t think of a better name in the studio… [It’s not a lost gem] it’s a load of crap! The guy who had us do it was a freelance producer and we’d signed a contract for one album, and he went on and sold it to EMI. I released [the] solo album of piping on Gael Linn in 1974, that got great reviews and then of course EMI brought out The Blacksmiths Featuring Paddy Keenan, which was terrible. But I was having a load of fun drinking, playing, having a great life and in fact that’s really the way it continued with The Bothy Band. We were having such a great time we didn’t think enough about money.’)

   Almost entirely traditional in content, Paddy had still debuted one of his own compositions, ‘Paddy Keenan’s Jig’. ‘Far be it from me to praise or criticise it as a piece,’ wrote Ennis, ‘but that I like it very much.’ [3]

   Nevertheless, Paddy’s immediate future lay in a group setting. Seachtar, sponsored by Diane Hamilton, also featured Paddy Glackin (fiddle), siblings Mícheál Ó Domhnaill and Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill (guitar/vocals and clavichord/vocals respectively), Roscommon’s Matt Molloy (flute), Clare’s Tony MacMahon (accordion) and Planxty veteran Dónal Lunny (bouzouki).

   Tríona: ‘Mícheál was the one who enticed Paddy into the band and it was a really big thing from the Travellers. Mícheál went out to Ballyfermot and officially asked John Keenan – like asking for his hand in marriage – could we spirit Paddy away to join us, settled people, in the band. That had to be done. They sat down and talked and he convinced John. It was unheard of at the time. We were lucky to get Paddy on board. We took the risk because we didn’t doubt it for a moment. The music was so strong and so special. There were certain moments where you almost levitated.’

   Mícheál Ó Domhnaill had recently worked as a collector for the Irish Folklore Commission, as Séamus Ennis had 30 years earlier, and had recorded an Irish language album for Gael Linn with the Pentangle-influenced Skara Brae in 1971. From Seachtar initially getting together loosely to play at a week of Gael Linn 21st anniversary events, things took on a momentum of their own:

   Mícheál: ‘Interest in the band was immediate and things began to escalate. It was at the back of our minds to become full-timers but the commitment was slow in coming because nobody wanted to leave what they were doing already. I was with RTÉ and so was Tony, who was very much tied to his production work. Tommy was doing craftwork down in Clare, Matt worked for Aer Lingus, Dónal was producing, and Tríona was working in a shop.’ [4]

   Tríona: ‘Tony McMahon encouraged me to phone around: ‘Where, this weekend, could we do a small gig and meet other musicians?’ I organised a few like that, like in Clare. It was [for] whatever we took on the door. I’d get in touch with somebody who was good at making tea and sandwiches and we’d invite the audience afterwards to stay for a chat and then, of course, repair to the pub with the [local musicians]. Of all of us I think it was Matt who had the most to consider, with his job. The rest of us were just surviving on air!’

   When it came to the crunch, Paddy Glackin opted to marry a succession of day jobs (with RTÉ and the Irish Arts Council) with recording and performing opportunities on his own terms. Tony MacMahon, similarly, prioritised his RTÉ job; indeed, he initiated the series The Long Note – a radio programme for which Paddy Keenan was recorded performing solo, in Slattery’s, in November 1974, promoting the solo album.
   Thus, seven became five. Donegal fiddler Tommy Peoples came on board and five became six. With Seachtar translating as ‘the seven’, the name had to change. Sé being Irish for five, and both incomprehensible and unpronounceable to non-Irish speakers, it was surely wise to seek an English name if the band aspiration was to take their music beyond Ireland, and it was. ‘The Bothy Band’, as a name, referenced informal gatherings of musicians in rural Scottish communities, a bothy being a cottage in which such sessions might happen. It captured something of the spirit of this particular gathering of earthy, tradition-hardened warriors. For Matt Molloy, looking back, none was earthier than Paddy Keenan:

   Matt: ‘What a great player, an earthy player! Even if you’d never heard or understood Irish music and you heard Keenan on a hot night, you knew there was something special happening. He had that power! He could be temperamental at times and the music would be okay, but on a night when the stars aligned and Keenan bag, bellows, chanter, drones and regulators immersed into one… magic happened! He was a force to be reckoned with, a powerhouse player. Music coming from the soil in the great Travelling piping tradition … An earthy, passionate player who had learned from the playing of those masters [the Cashes and the Dorans] and made it his own. He took no prisoners. We took no prisoners. Everybody just got fired up! They were some of the nights I remember.’

   The Bothy Band, sometimes known as 1975, was recorded in Dublin in October 1975 and released before year’s end on Mulligan Records. It was the second release on a label newly established by Dónal Lunny with business partner Séamus O’Neill. Throughout the band’s life, Dónal would give close involvement, as player or producer, to many of the records by other artists on the label. In November, The Bothy Band took the plunge and became professionals.

   Matt: ‘I got leave of absence [from my job]. The group was very powerful. We gelled very well in spite of all the pundits and critics who said it was going to blow apart at any given moment. It lasted four or five years, though we never really got ourselves organised from a managerial point of view. We were too busy having a good time. I was new to the whole thing, fresh out of a secure pensionable job and I didn’t know what hit me. I thought I was on permanent holidays for the first two years.’ [5]

   In early April 1976, Polydor released the album in Britain and in France; the recently launched Green Linnet released it in America. The whole thing seemed to spiral within weeks. As Colin Irwin, at that time a staff writer at Melody Maker, would later recall:

   ‘Memory of their first British appearance is … vivid and treasured. It took place at Hammersmith Town Hall and their impact was staggering – when they let rip the effect was like being in a jet when it suddenly whipped into full throttle along the runway. I just couldn’t believe the ferocity with which Paddy Keenan attacked the uilleann pipes … Tommy Peoples was equally startling. I’ve still never heard a fiddle performance like he played that night in Hammersmith: unorthodox, unpredictable and utterly breathtaking.’ [6]

   That first appearance, along with a few dates at Irish clubs, took place in November 1975. On February 22 1976 the band headlined a concert, supported by Scottish ‘revival singer’ Ray Fisher, at the end of a week-long traditional music festival at Trinity College Dublin, Éigse na Tríonóide.(Footnote: Ray’s husband, High Level Ranters’ piper Colin Ross, gave a talk on Northumbrian pipes at the festival a couple of days earlier.) Earlier that week Paddy Keenan, along with Liam O’Flynn, played solo at a piping concert and lecture, with Breandán Breathnach.

   During March 1976 the group toured Britain seriously, returning for a handful of dates in mid-April. On March 9 they had recorded their first (of three) studio sessions for BBC Radio 1’s John Peel. It was the start of a significant relationship with the BBC: there would be at least six broadcasts of exclusive session and concert material on BBC radio during 1976 alone.

   Tommy Peoples would not last long with the touring lifestyle. Nevertheless, for Paddy this line-up of The Bothy Band, with himself, Tommy and Matt as the front-line, was the most special. Having said that, he never thought at the time that it was, or would become, the stuff of legend:

   Paddy: ‘I don’t think we thought it was anything special. We didn’t do anything to the roots of the tunes. The lovely thing about it is it’s very, very rare that you would get a collaboration of musicians – lead musicians – who could sit onstage and work off each other. It wasn’t even work: we gelled in moods and answered and spoke to each other through the music onstage. You didn’t have to listen to the musician beside you because you knew for a fact that guy was capable of playing straight with you, staying with you, and you had great confidence in him. And between the three of us we thought the same way. You had the freedom to do what you wanted – and the three moods miraculously met. You don’t get that very often.’

   Matt: ‘Tommy Peoples one side of Paddy and I the other, we just went for it, no quarter given or taken. Then you had the rolling thunder from Tríona, Mícheál and Dónal’s mesmeric accompaniment. Though accompaniment is the wrong word – it was integral to the music, it was different and unique at that time. It was new and it appealed to a younger audience who would not normally have listened to traditional music. That was the Bothy Band.’

   The print media in Britain were as responsive as the BBC. With promotion by Polydor, the group were afforded substantial coverage during that first 1976 tour in both NME and Melody Maker, from Fred Dellar and Colin Irwin respectively. Fred Dellar’s piece, published in April, put their rapid rise in context:

   ‘For some considerable time now, a new “underground” music situation has been developing. Not one concerned with any aspect of rock, but rather one that’s found its way into this country via such Guinness-stained record labels as Gael-Linn, Claddagh, Mulligan and Tara.

   ‘There’s always been a fair sized market for Irish traditional music here, and in recent years bands like Planxty have acquainted us with a whole range of Shamrock-tinted jigs, reels and beautiful slow airs — while fringe benefit units such as Horslips and Spud have also played their part.

   ‘But the real breakthrough has been a long time coming, witness the years it’s taken for The Chieftains to be accepted as a major band.

   ‘And though Paddy Maloney and his minstrels have managed to reach a wide public through a couple of enterprising record and film deals, plus some prestigious concerts, general acceptance of Irish music in its traditional form still has some way to go.

   ‘However, there’s no doubt that the audience is steadily growing and the current tour of The Bothy Band must be adding converts by the hundred if the scenes at some of their concerts are anything to judge by.’ [7]

   Tellingly, Dellar observed during his interview, with Mícheál and Dónal, that ‘the remarkable Paddy Keenan … plays pipes with the kind of dexterity John McLaughlin demonstrates on guitar’. Too often and too easily pipers are referred to as ‘the Jimi Hendrix’ of their instrument. (Footnote: Dónal Lunny referred to Paddy Keenan in this way in at least one interview during the band’s tenure. Finbar Furey would have the comparison before him, John McSherry has had it after.) But drawing a comparison between Paddy Keenan and John McLaughlin, at that time at the pinnacle of his art in The Mahavishnu Orchestra, visiting worlds of rhythm and mood with virtuosity beyond mere speed for the sake of ‘flash’, was more apposite. There was, and has remained, great subtlety and sensitivity in Paddy’s playing as well as huge rhythmic complexity and improvisational brilliance made to sound effortless. Dónal agreed with Dellar’s observation:

   ‘Yes — his style is full of fast playing. But though it sounds very wild, everything is totally controlled. Paddy nearly gets to the brink with his improvisations but he never quite crosses it because he’s always thinking about one eighth of a second ahead. The skill is in retaining the character of a tune throughout such an improvisation.

   ‘Some players will play a tune a customary couple of times and leave it at that, but there are other musicians, such as Paddy, who can take a melody, and play a reel five or six times, embellishing it differently on each occasion. But the thread must never be lost, the tune must always survive the embellishments as far as we’re concerned.’ [8]

   Being perceived ever since as a speed merchant, like a gunslinger riding into town, acts as a magnet for young guns, which can be somewhat wearying:

   Paddy: ‘Some of the young kids today believe, as it was with Finbar, [that they should play fast] ‘because I can’. And in the end they couldn’t. Because there’s very few people who can do that, very few people who can play at record speed and hold the tune. And I’ve had competition people competing with me with that [in sessions] and I could see that they would even split a phrase of the tune to pass me! I’m thinking, ‘This isn’t fucking music – it’s a race!’

   ‘Whenever I play fast you’ll find that the tune is held onto, nothing is lost from the tune. Everything is happening faster in my head so you’ll get a very different representation of me simply because it’s happening faster. If I’m playing at normal speed, normal rhythm – and my rhythm is a very new thing, before that it was a mood, like [Clare fiddle maestro] Martin Hayes. Martin doesn’t play rhythm, he plays mood – not to say that he cannot play rhythm – and that’s why [his accompanist] Dennis Cahill has to be very sparse and follow moods. If you played a straightforward rhythm with Martin Hayes, you’d ruin him – and it’s the same here [with me]. But then if you’re playing with people they can’t climb inside your mind and find out what you’re going to do next, because you don’t know yourself for that matter.’

   The decades during which Paddy Keenan could explore mood and subtlety, after the fiery music of those early Bothy Band days, lay ahead. Back in 1976, that first Bothy Band album appeared to lay down a gauntlet. The members, though, were thinking of reining it in a little for their next record, as Dónal Lunny mused at the time:

   ‘We produced The Bothy Band album together — but if we did it again tomorrow it would turn out very different. It wouldn’t be so frantic. It’s all very high-pressure and not really balanced from a material point of view. Ninety per cent of it goes at 90 miles an hour. But we’ll just have to take the long view and temper things with the second album, which we’ll probably do around May or June.’ [9]

   Shortly after those aspirations were expressed, something happened which would ensure the next record really would sound different. The Inverness Folk Festival show on April 18 was to prove Tommy Peoples’ last with the band. (Footnote: Presumably the one scheduled show after this, at Dingwall’s, London, was cancelled.)

   Colin Irwin: ‘Kevin Burke slotted in smoothly in his place, though his inclusion gave them a softer, more mellow approach which pleased as many as it disappointed. Initially, their second album Old Hag You Have Killed Me seemed weaker as a result, though it stands up well in retrospect … The stage favourite ‘Fionnghuala’, a nonsensical burst of Scots Gaelic mouth music, even momentarily threatened to be a hit single.’ [10]

   *

   Kevin Burke was born and raised in London, and had been brought up with a European art music education and a fondness for the London-Irish music scene. Having debuted dazzlingly on record, through a chance meeting, with Arlo Guthrie in 1973, he had then played in a band called Lazy Reel in England before drifting into Christy Moore’s loosely-organised road band in Ireland, which occasionally included Dónal Lunny. Kevin and Dónal had also both played on the Pumpkinhead LP which had launched the Mulligan label. Being influenced by the Sligo fiddle tradition and having had formal training, Kevin certainly had a slinkier, more lyrical style and sweeter sound than Tommy’s visceral Donegal tones.

   Matt: ‘Kevin was a great addition – a laid back easy going character with a lovely, lilting Sligo style. I particularly liked his style, influenced like myself by the great Sligo fiddle players, especially Paddy Killoran who was a family friend. But make no mistake, when the fire was up Kevin was in there to be reckoned with. A great, talented player and a gentleman!’

   Kevin: ‘There was no animosity to me in the band about taking [Tommy’s] position, but I don’t think that was the public perception. I think people felt it was much more hostile than it really was. I heard rumours that Matt had said, ‘Well, I’ll play with Kevin Burke but don’t expect me to talk to him’. But it was actually Matt who came round to ask me to join!’

   As Kevin admitted a couple of years in: ‘I was a bit nervous about it because I was a real fan of the band, and then I thought, ‘Jesus, it’s just a matter of playing the bloody tunes as I thought best,’ and after about three days it was mighty.’ [11]

   The band were back in Britain for three folk festivals in late July and early August: Cambridge, Sidmouth (their set recorded for Radio 2) and Durham. Before those shows, on July 15, there was a BBC Radio 1 concert broadcast from the Paris Theatre, London, revealing six sets of tunes and songs that would appear on the second album, Old Hag You Have Killed Me – which was itself recorded that same month at Rockfield Studios in Wales. It was a productive time. Peter Browne was filling in on pipes for Paddy at the Paris Theatre concert, though Paddy would be back for the Festival shows. (Footnote: Kevin Burke: ‘There was a period where Paddy had hurt his ankle and there was another time he’d hurt his wrist and both of those injuries knocked him out for a while. Peter was the natural choice to fill in.’)

   Shortly after this, the band embarked on what would be their only tour of America:

   Tríona: ‘It was great. It was organised by a friend of Matt’s, Mick Casey, who probably said, ‘If you were to come out I’m sure I could get you a few gigs’. We began in the States in, I think, Chicago and then New York and then into Canada. I think we played a university in New York. [But] it was [mostly] to Irish-American audiences.’

   On reflection, Kevin Burke has more sobering view, of both the American expedition and the band’s free and easy approach in general. He also had a canny instinct there was a potentially great untapped market:

   Kevin: ‘At the time I just went along with what was going. I didn’t really feel there was a proper direction – we just went along with whatever presented itself. That was part of the problem. There was no one to steer us. We had a couple of people who gave us great advice. But we didn’t take it!

   ‘[The American tour] was very, very amateurish. We used a friend of Matt’s, a really great guy but he didn’t know the music business at all. We were playing, say, St Mary’s Church Hall organised by St Patrick’s Hurling Club and stuff like this. If we’d had someone more established we’d have been playing different venues and thinking in terms of a second tour.

   ‘I had played in America previously with Arlo Guthrie and I met a bunch of American musicians saw what they did with their folk music – what the Byrds did, what Ry Cooder did, what Arlo did. The folk music was altered to contain contemporary sounds. And I remember thinking at the time, ‘I wonder if there would ever be an Irish band to do that?’ And then, of course, five or six years later there am I doing exactly that. When I was over that first time I was amazed on two levels: one, I was amazed that these people seemed to have no idea that this kind of music even existed. Irish music to most of them was The Clancy Brothers; they had no idea of the instrumental tradition – outside of the Irish communities, the American version of Kilburn. There seemed to be no knowledge of it even among bluegrass players. My other amazement was how much people seemed to enjoy it when I played, even though they’d never heard it before. I was convinced American people would really enjoy Irish music if they only got to hear it.’

   Old Hag You Have Killed Me would be released in the UK in November 1976. The group had headlined at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in September, supported by Paul Brady. (Footnote: Brady’s first solo LP, Welcome Here Kind Stranger, had been produced by Dónal Lunny and would be released on Mulligan the following month. How Dónal was managing to be apparently everywhere at once remains a mystery, but the recorded history of Irish music is surely the better for it.) They were back for a full tour spanning mid-October to at least December 12 (a show at the Shaftesbury Theatre), recording two more BBC radio sessions on the trip. A week before the tour Matt Molloy had performed at a Comhaltas Ceoltoirí Éireann silver jubilee concert at the Royal Albert Hall. This was all a long way from the boozy back rooms of pubs.

   A single with, unusually, both the arresting close-harmony ‘Fionnghuala’ and the ‘Music In The Glen’ tune set on the A-side was released on Polydor on November 26. It would be a few years yet before a Gaelic hit single in Britain. (Footnote: Clannad’s ‘Theme To Harry’s Game’, 1982.)

   Where The Bothy Band had been gritty and straight-ahead, Old Hag had seen greater thought go into arrangements and production values, with greater variety of mood and dynamics throughout. Mícheál’s Gaelic song ‘Farewell To Erin’, backed with great sensitivity by all concerned, was a masterpiece. Elsewhere, there was plenty for fans of Paddy Keenan’s piping to savour.

   The Bothy Band had made remarkable progress in their first year. To an extent, they must have been pushing at an open door – a question of the timing being right for a predominantly instrumental band playing Irish music to excite the British media so much and to gain such traction as performers, moving from clubs to concert venues within the year. Nevertheless, the impression is sometimes given, with the broad brush-stroking of hindsight, that The Bothy Band swept all before them. This wasn’t the case: they would always, certainly in Britain, be less successful (and viewed as less successful) than The Chieftains.

   One snapshot, however imperfect, of the way things were is found in the results of Melody Maker’s first ‘Folk Poll’ at the end of the year, with The Bothy Band third in the ‘instrumental band’ category behind The Chieftains and Scottish band Five Hand Reel. While The Bothy Band are surely more influential today on other musicians than either of these, at the time they were still in the ‘fast rising’ or ‘almost breaking through’ stage. The trouble was that they would never quite get beyond it.

   Kevin: ‘We were never comfortable with any of the managers or agents we worked with. … [But] we managed ourselves very badly, it’s not simply that the managers or agents were at fault. At that time we were an anti-capitalist group of people just like every other person wearing jeans and playing music. And yet we wanted to enjoy the fruits of capitalism!’

   There was a feeling in those days, however true, that the international market for Irish music groups could only sustain two or three at any time. In Britain, 1977 would be a breakthrough year for Galway instrumental group De Danann and Donegal vocal/instrumental group Clannad. It was perceived that they were after The Bothy Band’s market. Still, as Colin Irwin observed in Melody Maker:

   ‘The rise in popularity of De Danann over here is likely to be less spectacular than that of The Bothy Band, in that they don’t have quite the same sense of drama or immediacy. For one thing they don’t have a piper.’ [12]

   (continued below…)

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3. Colin H says

   13/09/2026 at 15:35

   *

   In February 1977, The Bothy Band played at an exciting new venue on London’s Kilburn High Road: the National Club, run by Kevin Flynn. Gabriel McKeon, future head of Na Píobairí Uilleann, then a London-based solo piping sensation, was one of several support acts. The venue would feature in the group’s itineraries thereafter. In Melody Maker, this first performance was judged ‘an unqualified success both commercially and artistically, for despite the absence of Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, due to the death of her father, the Bothies played exceptionally well, returning to top form after the marginal disappointment of the Shaftesbury Theatre concert in December.’ [13]

   The group headed off to Germany and worked extensively in Europe for the next few months. One press report in May promised possible British dates in late summer, also revealing that work was soon to begin on filming a Bothy Band documentary for the BBC’s Omnibus strand. It was to be a project of much gestation.

   Come June, the group were among a dazzling line-up of mostly British and Irish artists at a week-long Dutch Festival, ‘Rotterdam Folk ‘77’. (Footnote: The Rotterdam 1977 bill was a virtual Woodstock of the British Isles folk world: The Watersons, The Bothy Band, Fairport Convention, Five Hand Reel, The Battlefield Band, Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick, Andy Irvine & Paul Brady, The Tannahill Weavers, Albion Dance Band, Ralph McTell, June Tabor and more. Alan Stivell, from Brittanny, seemed to be there representing the rest of Europe.) They had played the event’s predecessor the previous year, specifically then a ‘Celtic’ festival, alongside a possibly unique European appearance by Séamus Ennis. On this second occasion they shared a concert with English unaccompanied vocal group (and 60s legends reunited) The Watersons and the duo Andy Irvine & Paul Brady. For Melody Maker’s Colin Irwin it was ‘the most magical event of the week’. [14]

   July 12 saw a return to the National, on a bill including Midnight Well and, once again, Gabriel McKeon. ‘The Bothy Band brought the evening to a fitting climax with a rousing performance,’ wrote Mary Hardy in Folk News. ‘They also managed to completely silence the [very noisy] audience, no mean achievement.’ [15]

   A few days later, in and around working on a third album, they were back in Dublin for a week-long festival of Irish music, playing at Liberty Hall with special guest Séamus Ennis. A couple of weeks after that, it was off to Sligo for the first ‘Boys Of Ballisodare’ Festival, a new event run by Kevin Flynn from the National Club which would, along with a similar festival at Lisdoonvarna, come to define this late 70s/early 80s boom era in Irish folk and traditional music. It was almost as if the youth culture and festivals bug which had gripped England for a few years at the end of the 60s was arriving, 10 years after, in Ireland.

   (Footnote: Low-key folk festivals, of which Cambridge was one, had emerged in Britain early in the 60s but I’m referring here to a more general explosion of music festivals between 1967-70, culminating in the colossal third and final Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 (subject of Murray Lerner’s epochal film Message To Love). The National Jazz & Blues Festival, beginning in 1961 in Richmond, then relocating to Windsor, Sunbury and Plumpton before moving to Reading in 1971 where it became the ‘Reading Festival’, was the template for all the late 60s English festivals. Mostly a rock and blues event by the late 60s, a number of acoustic-based performers were given platforms, including Pentangle, Donovan and Roy Harper. The Lisdoonvarna and Ballisodare Festivals were like an inversion of these: beginning as purely folk festivals but bringing a handful of rock acts onto the bills after a couple of years. By 1981 even Chuck Berry was playing Ballisodare.)

   The band returned to Holland on September 4 1977 for an Irish-themed festival in Leiden with The Boys Of The Lough, The Woods Band, Clannad, Liam O’Flynn and others. Back in England, late-night listeners to classical music station BBC Radio 3 might have been surprised to encounter a half-hour programme on The Bothy Band from Tony McAuley, who had produced a TV concert featuring the band for BBC Northern Ireland earlier in the year. Towards the end of 1977 they appeared on Broadsides on Harlech Television, serving Wales and the West Country, although they would be absent from the British touring scene in the latter half of the year. Still, if The Bothy Band were struggling financially, it wasn’t for any lack of publicity.

   Warning signs could be found in an interview Dónal gave in February 1978:

   ‘We found all the business stuff completely overwhelming, simply because we weren’t interested in it. We couldn’t summon up the interest to organise the tours or make decisions about gigs. Two years ago things were pretty frantic anyway. It was like… frenzy. Kevin’s a much more laid-back person and a more laid-back player – I think his playing has become more positive, more aggressive since he’s been in the band. …

   ‘Essentially it’s still about just playing an instrument and you do it for enjoyment. Having to get up for sound-checks with a hangover and all the peripherals can be hard but it’s a question of self-discipline. You use up a lot of energy outside the gigs.’ [16]

   The third album, Out Of The Wind, Into The Sun, had been released towards the end of 1977. In Britain, it would be promoted with a tour during February/March (coincidentally, at the same time Liam O’Flynn was touring folk clubs) with Peter Browne standing in for Matt Molloy, hospitalised with TB. Matt managed recuperated enough to rejoin the band for the tour climax at London’s prestigious Rainbow Theatre. The Rainbow was a rock temple, and playing there represented a wider aspiration within the band to broaden their market. During his February 78 interview, Dónal had conceded as much:

   ‘The policy of the whole band is not to stay in the confines of traditional circles. Personally I like aggressive music, I like a lot of rock music. I like to think that the same elements are contained in traditional music – it’s just that a lot of … people don’t bring it out. We’re still playing pure music, but we’re putting a lot of balls into it.’

   Dónal also revealed that the band had made a conscious decision to up their game as performers as well, with the addition of a light show and a synthesizer:

   ‘We’re pretty static on stage. Two years ago we were a non-show, it was just f****** music. But people like to see something visual. We’re using lights to accentuate the subtleties of the music more and make things more memorable for people. We’re not the sort to leap around on stage – I can’t see a time when Paddy leaps about with the pipes – there’s plenty of leaping about after the show, though.’ [17]

   Being back in Britain allowed for the opportunity to record another session for John Peel’s Radio 1 show. This time, they featured two pieces from the new album but also a couple of items that indicated the constituent parts of the band: ‘Lord Franklin’, based on the 1970 Pentangle recording, would become Mícheál Ó Domhnaill’s signature song, released on the album Promenade and as a single in 1979, both credited to himself and Kevin Burke as a duo (within the lifespan of The Bothy Band, with Tríona and Dónal also contributing); and ‘O’Neill’s March’, which would feature on Poirt An Phíobaire, an album released by Paddy Keenan in 1983.

   The solo and duo capacities within the band were, in a way, both an asset and a constant low-level tension: there was no reason people couldn’t enjoy solo or duo recording opportunities outside the band while the band still remained the mothership, as had been the case with Pentangle; but likewise there needed to be a clear incentive to keep that mothership afloat rather than members going off to pursue such solo or duo opportunities more fully. (Footnote: Pentangle members Bert Jansch and John Renbourn had each enjoyed a series of solo LP releases within the lifespan of the band, 1967-73, often featuring other members of the band, while dedicating almost all of their time as performing musicians to the band. The Bothy Band followed this template exactly, although Kevin recalls that in Ireland duo and trio combinations would occasionally take bookings when a promoter’s budget could not stretch to the whole band. The default duo would usually be Mícheál & Kevin, who conveniently shared a house at the time.)

   Matt Molloy had already released a solo album, Matt Molloy, on Mulligan in 1976 (with both Dónal and Mícheál involved) and would follow this up early in 1978 with Matt Molloy, Paul Brady, Tommy Peoples, also on Mulligan. (Footnote: The Melody Maker of 28/5/77 reported that Matt had signed a solo deal with RCA and planned to record an album with European art music maestro James Galway. While Matt and James, with Dónal Lunny accompanying, did make at least one Irish TV appearance in 1977 the RCA deal seems to have disappeared. Ten years later, as a member of The Chieftains, Matt finally got to make a record with James. And, funnily enough, it was for RCA.)

   Shortly after Matt’s trio album, it was Kevin Burke’s turn for a Mulligan album: If The Cap Fits… (with Dónal and Mícheál involved) was released in May 1978, gaining UK release on Sandy Roberton’s Rockburgh label. (Footnote: presumably the cap did fit: Kevin seemed to traverse the 1970s with one on his head, usually at a raffish angle.) Colin Irwin, at Melody Maker, had Kevin in for an interview on the back of it, during which Kevin made an observation which seems prescient and profound:

   ‘I’ve a feeling a lot of the kids starting now do so because they want to do tours of Europe and make records … You go on the telly in Ireland and they think you’re a star and earn millions. I just hope that kids today are learning the music because they like it, not because they like the life, or at least what the life looks like.’ [18]

   A couple of weeks after Kevin’s wise words appeared in print, life began to look very strange indeed to grass-roots Bothy Band fans: their heroes were on prime-time British television with a man in a rocking chair, crooning to swaying lovelies sat around him. For an act determinedly hoping to connect with rock audiences, The Bothy Band’s appearance on The Val Doonican Music Show flirted with serious Light Entertainment cheese. But it could have been so much cheesier:

   Dónal: ‘I remember the Val Doonican show rather vividly. Val wanted to tootle along with us on his tin whistle for our closing number, which we found unthinkable, and we declined as graciously as his punctured vanity would allow. The very formidable – female – producer [Yvonne Littlewood] appeared, and assured us we’d never work in London and/or on the BBC again.’

   The idea of Val Doonican’s producer exerting any sway over the booking policies of John Peel, Kevin Flynn or anyone else certainly raises a smile, but this was merely a momentary oasis of kitsch in a touring regime that was not for the faint-hearted, as Kevin had affirmed in his Melody Maker interview:

   ‘I tell you, the touring gets me down. If The Bothy Band broke up and I was asked to join another group, the touring might put me off. English f****** highways. Your head’s in bits after a week, and you’ve got to go out and do a show.’ [19]

   By June 1978 the band were back in Britain, in concert at BBC Broadcasting House for Radio 2. During the same month they recorded for a prospective live album in Paris. On July 7 they appeared, with Paul Brady, Liam O’Flynn, De Danann and Christy Moore, at the Royal Albert Hall. A couple of weeks later they were in more familiar territory, recording a concert at The National (broadcast in March 1979). Paddy Keenan’s pipes solo on the night, comprising ‘Garrett Barry’s/The Bucks Of Oranmore’, remains tremendously exciting in its rhythmical twists and rough-edged beauty, however much alcohol may have been consumed beforehand.

   In early August some members of the band could be seen around the Dublin Folk Festival: Dónal Lunny, for instance, performed in a duo with Andy Irvine. The BBC Omnibus documentary received a debut screening during the festival. In fact, it was so popular it received three screenings, the third ‘in front of an audience that included a wise-cracking running commentary from Kevin Burke’. [20]

   Eventually broadcast as an Arena film in 1980, in edited form, Paddy’s moments of the limelight are a solo ‘Bucks Of Oranmore’ and a trip through ‘Rakish Paddy’ with his family. While every other member of The Bothy Band speaks in the film, Paddy is silent throughout. It was a trait that sometimes led to frustration in the band:

   Kevin: ‘More communication would have been better. He was a quiet guy until he had a few drinks and then he’d get very talkative – often in the wrong way or in a way that was surprising. And you’d think, ‘Why didn’t you say that last week?’’

   On August 13 the band headlined (above De Danann, Andy Irvine, Liam O’Flynn and Tom Paxton) the Sunday afternoon bill at Kevin Flynn’s 2nd Ballisodare Festival. Clannad headlined the Sunday evening; Matt and Kevin had also performed in a Sunday morning concert of Sligo music. As one reviewer put it: ‘The Bothy set was nostalgic, considering current doubts about the band’s future.’ [21]

   The following weekend, August 18-20, The Bothy Band gave what was all but envisaged, though not publicised, as their final concert, at an Anti-Nuclear Power free festival at Carnsore Point, Wexford. Organised by Christy Moore, the bill included all the key names at the professional end of Irish traditional music: De Danann, Clannad, Paddy Glackin and many more.

   For all the acclaim, all the air-time and all the perceived success, The Bothy Band were not succeeding in a financial sense. They were also frayed at the edges from the lifestyle.

   Dónal: ‘I think it was like being on a rollercoaster. We were touring, then coming back to Dublin and trying to live a normal life. And that was difficult because sometimes it was like a non-stop party. … We were touring without making much money from it. So there was no incentive.’’ [22]

   Indeed, as Andy Irvine later quipped: ‘I would’ve loved to [have been] in The Bothy Band but I’m not quite sure I could have afforded it!’ [23]

   As a member of Planxty between 1972–75, Andy had already experienced the difficulties in making ends meet, while trying to attain a sustainable level, in an Irish music band. The 1970s was an era without an existing text book for this sort of thing: the nature of professional, full-time bands playing Irish music was itself new; the international touring business was still in its infancy; and the ‘Eureka’ moment of professional Irish traditional musicians realizing they should be splitting their time between a number of different performing units on an overlapping, ongoing basis (the norm in subsequent decades) rather than grinding one act into the ground had yet to be happen.

   The lure of cracking England, an idea which was a kind of left-over from the notion of the 1960s pop industry (where Irish bands like Them and Eire Apparent would take a ferry over and sleep in vans around London waiting for something to happen in the crucible of the world’s popular culture), could be particularly merciless on the pocket. As Christy Moore reflected, in an interview coincidentally given just as The Bothy Band were embarking on their open-ended sabbatical:

   ‘The big thing that happened to Planxty – and the same that happened to various bands – is that everyone said how important it was to do well in England. So you do tour after tour without getting any money just to try and establish yourselves in England. Planxty went over to support Steeleye Span at the Royal Albert Hall and got £50, and it cost £250 or something just to travel across … Do one good tour in Germany and that’s it, you’ll get established and you get good money, but in England you do tour after tour and still not earn any money.’ [24]

   Mícheál expanded on the decision to take a break, for six months before then assessing whether to bring the group back, in an interview later that year:

   ‘The whole impetus for getting new material and keeping the set fresh is very different if you’re having problems in other directions. I think we realised last Easter that it was time to stop, and Carnsore was to be our last gig. And once we’d decided to take a break the difference was amazing. I think the best gigs we ever did were the last couple of things, at Balllisodare and Carnsore. There was a big sigh of relief from everyone when we took the decision to break and we could get back to playing music again.’ [25]

   The Bothy Band didn’t announce the sabbatical at the time, but it didn’t take long for rumours to fill the void. Even in the week before their Ballisodare appearance, the Melody Maker could report on ‘widespread speculation’ of a split:

   ‘[Nevertheless] official sources have denied any knowledge of the split, and attempts to get a concrete statement have failed. However Molloy … is thought to have grown tired of the trudge involved in touring and the restrictions on playing to a disciplined set. … This isn’t the first time rumours have spread about an intended departure by a member of the band, though this time there would appear to be more substance in these than most.’ [26]

   The next few weeks brought bits of news which appeared to support this. Firstly, it was announced under the headline ‘Solo tour for Molloy’ that Matt’s two Mulligan albums were being distributed in the UK and that he would be taking part in a ‘Mulligan Roadshow’ tour before the end of the year. Then in mid-September it was reported that, while an expected ‘farewell’ announcement hadn’t materialised at Ballisodare, ‘the group have … come off the road for the time being perhaps to consider their future’. [27]

   While all this conjecture was going on, back in Ireland on September 19, the four original members of Planxty (Dónal Lunny, Andy Irvine, Christy Moore and Liam O’Flynn) met at Matt Molloy’s house for a first rehearsal towards a planned comeback, as a five-piece. Under Kevin Flynn’s management, it would involve a huge tour of Britain, Europe and Ireland spanning April to June 1979 though, for the moment, everyone’s individual activities continued. Nonetheless, an ‘anonymous caller’ to Melody Maker spilled the beans in early October, fuelling more speculation that The Bothy Band would surely have to cease, given that two members would be Planxty-bound.

   Over at Karl Dallas’ monthly Folk News the forthcoming Planxty resurrection was being referred to as ‘strictly a once a year thing’ rather than a full-time reunion: ‘[R]eports that The Bothy Band is about to cease operations are premature, to say the least. Although Matt’s future with the Bothys is still uncertain, mainly because of health problems…’ [28]

   In late November 1978, Kevin Burke, Mícheál Ó Domhnaill and Matt Molloy joined guitarist/vocalist Paul Brady on a UK tour named, as Melody Maker had foretold, ‘The Mulligan Roadshow’. Kevin, Paul and Matt were all promoting their recent solo albums on Mulligan, and the tour was a one-off grouping. Sponsored by Folk News, publicity was substantial: aside from print coverage there would be a concert recorded for Folk 78 at Broadcasting House and sessions for Radio 1’s John Peel Show and Radio 2’s Folkweave. The last date of the tour was at The National on November 28:

   Matt: ‘I was having a drink [there] with Kevin [Flynn] and telling him the sad story of The Bothy Band. I quoted fees that we were getting for gigs and he was shocked and he said, ‘Jaysus, I know I could do ten times better than that’. So he did some costings and booked a tour. The Bothy Band ended the break after four months and, true to his promise, financially it was the best tour of Ireland and England that we ever did. That was our last ever tour.’ [29]

   Flynn wasted no time in getting the news out. Melody Maker could report on November 11 1978: ‘The widely held belief that the Bothies would never play live again has been dispelled with the news that a tour is being set up in Britain and Ireland next year.’ [30] Camden Town Hall was already confirmed, on March 3 1979. The writer, Colin Irwin, speculated that Polydor would surely now issue the live album recorded back in June in Paris, held back during the sabbatical.

   Colin lanced the boil during the Mulligan Roadshow tour when Matt Molloy (‘currently a somewhat reluctant centre of attention’) and Mícheál Ó Domhnaill swung by for a chat. Matt’s position was that The Bothy Band would continue but in ‘a much looser arrangement’, as a part-time entity: ‘We’ve been confined to one other for four years and it can get a bit much’. Mícheál talked of expanding things through writing original material and possibly adding electric instruments. He revealed that one step towards this had happened at the Paris concert from which the forthcoming After Hours live album (now edited down to a single LP) was derived. One piece had been performed with organ, synth, drums and three bombardes:

   Mícheál (1978): ‘That was a big sound … On closer scrutiny it was perhaps a bit too heavy to put on the album. But certainly I think more could be done in that direction. … I think somebody will eventually crack it.’ [31]

   Tríona (2015): ‘There was so little time to work anything out [in Paris]. It was literally a few hours before we played. There wasn’t time to work out all the kinks. That was the direction, maybe, we were headed.’

   Kevin (2015): ‘The drummer didn’t really work out. He was the wrong kind of drummer – actually we might have had two drummers, four-square rock’n’roll drummers. Everything was too strong on the down beat. Dónal moved on to Moving Hearts and Coolfin and I’m sure we’d have all been up for that. We were willing to try anything and if it didn’t work we’d toss it, like the drums. We didn’t reject drums: we just rejected the way they were played [in Paris].’

   After Hours would be released early in 1979. A single from it, ‘The Death Of Queen Jane’, a vocal feature for Mícheál, was a tentative step in the direction he spoke about. It was unusual in being an original composition, from Mícheál’s former Skara Brae colleague Dáithí Sproule. A stately piece, Paddy’s solo fitted its vaguely baroque feel perfectly – the uilleann pipes being a child, after all, of the last days of the European baroque age in the 18th Century. The song had been Mícheál’s featured piece on the Roadshow quartet’s John Peel Show session, with Kevin airing his stunning version of ‘Farrell O’Gara’, previously recorded in 1973 as a cameo on Arlo Guthrie’s Last Of The Brooklyn Cowboys.

   Mícheál reckoned, in 1978, that Irish music may yet still ‘hit the jackpot’:

   ‘I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet. At one stage I thought it was going to sweep the whole thing and be as big as reggae. Maybe it’s something to do with the make-up of the people involved in it. When you consider it’s only seven or eight years since Ó Riada was doing his stuff … how long was reggae going before it broke out? And the whole music industry is so unspecified, and it’s such a young industry there are no hard and fast rules about making it. I don’t even know what that means.’ [32]

   (Footnote: Seán Ó Riada (1931-71) was an art music composer, broadcaster and advocate of traditional music. His music for the 1959 film Mise Éire made his name. He ran an Irish traditional music chamber ensemble, Ceoltóiri Chualann, during the 60s from which emerged The Chieftains while his 1962 Radio Éireann series Our Musical Heritage was influential in stoking the popular revival of Irish music. Reggae, in its earlier guise as ska, was an influence on some British pop acts (e.g. Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames) during the 1960s and, with Millie Small and Desmond Dekker, enjoyed a couple of British hits on its own terms. Nevertheless, it took an individual with singular charisma, Bob Marley, for it to ‘break’ as a significant international genre within popular music. Irish traditional music has not produced a figure of similar appeal.)

   By January 1979, Dónal Lunny was reported to be busy working on the music for a Turkish film, and he and Matt were putting in time on Planxty rehearsals. The Bothy Band tour, not advertised as a swansong, had taken shape and would now begin at Belfast’s Ulster Hall on March 1, finishing at Dublin Stadium a couple of weeks before the rejuvenated Planxty tour began at London’s Hammersmith Odeon on April 15. Kevin Flynn had secured venues at City Hall level up and down the country. All it took was one man with the right amount of energy, ambition and nous.

   People in the band were already setting out their stalls for future careers. Aside from his forthcoming Planxty adventure, Matt Molloy was announcing a duo tour of Britain, with Liam O’Flynn, for October. Mícheál Ó Domhnaill and Kevin Burke’s duo LP Promenade would be out soon, heralding a move to the USA to continue that partnership. Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill would also move to the States in due course to pursue a musical path of her own. Paddy Keenan, meanwhile, had a duo album, Doublin’, with fiddler and old friend Paddy Glackin, coming out on Tara.

   ‘Undoubtedly, both players are not just the finest, but the most exciting young musicians in Ireland,’ wrote Colin Irwin, in his review. ‘Hearing Keenan play you get some measure of the discipline that working in a band context has imposed on him … Such is the fervour stirred between them that it transcends the normal limitations in appeal of instrumental albums’. [33]

   Keenan had used the opportunity to record as duets two piping favourites he had only ever performed, sometimes on radio, with The Bothy Band – ‘Garrett Barry’s Jig’ and ‘The Bucks Of Oranmore’ – as well as a piping solo on ‘The Bunch Of Keys’, forever associated with Johnny Doran. Stepping down a rung in the billing, he promoted it with solo performances in July and early August at the Dublin Folk Festival and Ballyshannon Folk Festival – the latter with his oldest friends The Fureys topping the bill.

   The Bothy Band bowed out at the Ballisodare Festival in Sligo, August 1979, on the Friday night. They had squeezed another year out of the wounded beast. Colin Irwin, travelling by boat from England, missed their set. He caught the ‘amazing’ Keenan and Glackin, as a duo, the next day: ‘Supreme musicians … there’s undoubtedly an empathy, a spark between them that lights fires all over the place when they start playing’. [34]

   Even this Ballisodare event wasn’t necessarily the last hurrah; it’s just that nothing more happened and everyone drifted off on their own paths:

   Kevin: ‘I wasn’t sure that it was the last gig. I seem to remember Mícheál and I went to the States and we came back to the realisation that the band had finished. … We were completely disorganised. … . I was definitely disappointed when The Bothy Band wound down but I wasn’t depressed. It was just a realisation of opportunities lost. But on the other hand, you do what you can and move on.’

   Tríona: ‘It was mixed feelings. We were tired, we were broke but we still loved playing together. It kind of was inevitable. It wasn’t a falling out, it just kind of petered out. We were all thinking of fresh pastures, other things.’

   (continued below…)

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4. Colin H says

   13/09/2026 at 15:36

   *

   Paddy Keenan made one more record, Poirt An Phíobaire, with guitarist Arty McGlynn, in this phase of his life as a professional musician, but his heart wasn’t really in the lifestyle any more:

   Paddy: ‘Since The Bothy Band split I played a lot on my own – solo stuff, occasionally with another musician if we could afford it, a guitarist or a singer. I did some tours of Europe and then I decided in 1982, I think, after doing a short stint with a group called Last Night’s Fun, with Johnny Moynihan, Tommy Peoples, Eddie Stack and myself, to get away from the music altogether. I renamed that Tomorrow’s Hangover. But it was a great time. We spent a month or two in the States and then I came back to Ireland and took a couple of courses – one in general engineering, one in furniture restoration – and I got into antiques.

   ‘So I bought a place in Clonakilty, West Cork, and opened an antiques shop where I bought and sold stuff. The reason for that was to get away from the whole club scene – the booze, the hangovers… And also so I would have some other business to fall back on, so I could pick and choose what gigs I wanted to play. Because, before that, some of the bread and butter gigs were becoming a bit strenuous. Also, after a number of years with The Bothy Band and various other bands and various situations with record companies and bad management, financially it just wasn’t that great.

   ‘Around 1989/90 I went over to Germany and did a tour with Oisín and then I travelled around Europe for a bit and went [back] down to West Cork and lived for a year on my own, to get away from everything. … It’s difficult to settle down … when you’re travelling all the time and it’s in your blood. … I get itchy feet all the time. In 1991 I went to the States, did a short tour and it went so well, with venues asking me back, that I stayed six months. I did have an indefinite visa so I could stay on if I wanted and I had a Green Card for work reasons. So then I decided I’d move to the States and live there for a while…’

   Paddy moved to Boston and gradually got back into performing music. Ná Keen Affair was his most personal statement to date: co-produced, arranged and mixed by himself, released on his own label and including his own ‘Johnny’s Tune’, a tribute to his late father John Keenan. The album was largely an ensemble project featuring several musicians from Newfoundland and Ireland, including Tommy Peoples.

   Paddy was hoping to put together a small band, make more records and get back to live performance in a more concerted fashion: ‘I’d rather do something that I’m happy with than worry about it selling even one copy,’ he said at the time. ‘I hope I can make it in the next three years ‘cos that’s about all I’ve got left in me, I think!’

   Paddy was wrong on several counts: he never did get a band together; his rate of recorded works did not increase; and he had, and has, much more than three years left in him. A 2002 album, The Long Grazing Acre, self-released as a duo project with guitarist/vocalist Tommy O’Sullivan is, at the time of writing, his last commercial release. Recorded, in terms of the pipes, with a less processed, more vibrant and natural sound than its predecessor, the album’s instrumental content ranks among Paddy’s best on record and hinted towards how a truly Keenan-focused album with 21st Century recording technology might sound – not air-brushing or compressing the pipes but capturing in rich ambience every nuance of the instrument’s qualities, in the hands of a master.

   The album debuted Paddy’s new pipes, commissioned from Dave Williams as a faithful copy of his Crowley set, though he still used his Rowsome chanter. It also boasted more original pieces of music than any of his previous recordings, and bore witness to a reflective mood – thinking about his time in London in the 60s, his late brother Johnny (who had passed on in 2000) and saluting the fortitude of his mother when times were hard. His notes to the album also reflected his pride in the Traveller heritage which had once sat uncomfortably on his shoulders.

   Like Ná Keen Affair before it, The Long Grazing Acre included many other musicians, which has always appeared to be the context in which Paddy feels most comfortable, however much people might wish to hear him perform or record solo. The man himself remains pragmatic on the matter: ‘People say, ‘If Paddy played solo we’d have him tomorrow and we’d fill the place for him’. But, do you know something, will it fill the next place?’

   *

   Interviewed for this book towards the end of 2014 Paddy made a passing reference to having wished he had recorded more, but it’s hardly something, one felt, that would keep him awake at night. (Footnote: Paddy played in Belfast in late 2014 accompanied, for the first time in many years, by guitarist Steve Cooney (a similarly brilliant, mercurial musician). Afterwards, Paddy mused that the pair of them should perform again and record it. A splendid idea.)

   Paddy Keenan’s towering brilliance as a performing musician is in direct disproportion to the frequency of his recorded output. But that’s just the way it is. He is a free spirit with a mind uncluttered by the mundane and capable of assailing, in the moment, the gates of ecstasy.

   Kevin Burke: ‘Just to stand beside him and hear the pipes start with the strength of tone, the clarity, the precision, the strength of the rhythm, the mental strength. The tune is presented in a way that’s unquestionable, unassailable. When you hear other pipers there’s hesitation, there’s certain weaknesses here and there. There’s very few people who give you the comfort that Paddy does – from the first few notes of a tune you can rely on it completely.’

   Tríona: ‘There’s other pipers but there’s something wild and free and unpredictable and lonesome [with Paddy] – it’s hard to put into words. It’s more a feeling. It could be only coming out in one or two notes. I’ve heard him play to the point of almost collapsing on the floor. It’s not the speed of it. He’s one of a kind, a gorgeous guy. I can’t even put into words what he means to me as a friend. There’s a special connection between us all from those days [in the 70s].’

   Kevin: ‘We bump into each other now and again. The last five or six years or so it’s always been really nice to see Paddy; the previous five or six years I couldn’t really say that. You’d never know if you were going to meet Paddy the good guy or Paddy the difficult guy. The last few times I’ve met him it’s been great.’

   Paddy may never have become a rich man through music but he knows that his association with The Bothy Band is to an extent his meal-ticket, a reputation with a long tail.

   Paddy: ‘I remember Paul Simon said once, ‘The song I’d like to see make it to No.1 is the beautiful ‘Streets Of Derry’ sung by Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill in The Bothy Band, with that haunting pipes solo’. Now, when you hear something like that from someone who is as huge as he then you have to start realising the influence that band had in America. The children today are still, through their parents of course, looking at that and following that.’

   What those people are following was a body of work and a way of doing things that was in no small part created by Paddy Keenan, the man in the middle of the stage who never said much, never stood up and played better than anyone had a right to expect.

   To an extent, the 21st Century Paddy Keenan is burdened by a certain weight of responsibility, given his unique knowledge and skills, as a traditional musician, reed-maker and innovator of piping techniques let alone his image as a kind of last great gunslinger from the pioneer days of Irish music’s ‘Old West’ in the 1970s. (Footnote: Detailed descriptions of Paddy’s technical innovations can be found in Tómas Ó Canainn’s Traditional Music In Ireland (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).)

   Paddy: ‘It’s sometimes a little overbearing. It’s hard to take all this [adulation]. … [But] I would say it’s water over a duck’s head. … The good thing for me is no matter how subtle the tune, no matter how many times I play it, five minutes later there’s going to be something else in it because my mind is thinking differently. It’s purely an expression of me at that moment. And it’s that individuality that stands out.’

   Tríona: ‘I can remember the first time we got him to speak into a microphone, to introduce a set – and probably nobody heard it. He leaned forward, his head almost to where the mic was in front of the drones and muttered. But that was Dónal and Mícheál pushing him to do that. He would have been terrified. He was very shy of the mic. We got to know him bit by bit. It was very funny. Now, of course, he’s been all over the world. He called me once, out of the blue, a good many years back. I was surprised to get the call:

   ‘It’s Paddy here!’

   ‘Jesus, where are you?’

   ‘I’m in Timbuktu.’

   ‘You’re joking?’

   ‘No, I am. I’m sitting at the base of an oul’ monument. There’s some kids here and I’m playing a tune…’

   You could just imagine it! He had that knack – he could take off and never be lost.’

   Part of Paddy’s irrepressible freedom these days is his unapologetic favouring of a cowboy hat, as totemic to his image in recent years as Kevin Burke’s raffish cap was in the 70s:

   Paddy: ‘I like wearing a hat. But the other side of it is I have tinnitus; I have this buzzing in my ear constantly. And I drive a bike as well in the States. I’ll have to get a quieter bike. Any piper who doesn’t believe it should wear a hat and the wider the brim the easier it is to hear the drones and the regulators and the easier it is to tune up. You’ll get a better buzz from everything with a hat than you will without a hat.’

   As we made our way out of the venue, with a crowd of acolytes arranging to meet Paddy at a late-night pub session nearby, I asked one last question: ‘Do people still expect you to turn up and be the riotous character you were in the 70s?’ To which Paddy answered: ‘It’s quite possible. But you know what? I couldn’t do it again – if I did I’d be dead!’ And with that, we left the venue and dropped Paddy at Madden’s after midnight, where he was welcomed with open arms. As John McSherry, already lining them up at the bar, told me the next day, Paddy pressed the flesh, had the craic… and then wisely drew the line at one pint. But with Paddy Keenan the excitement, the frisson of danger, is that you just never know.

   ENDNOTES:

   [1] Free Spirits: Irish Travellers and Irish Traditional Music (MPO Productions, 2011), Tommy Fegan and Oliver O’Connell

   [2] Traditional Music In Ireland (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), Tómas Ó Canainn

   [3] Notes to Paddy Keenan (Gael Linn, 1974), Séamus Ennis.

   [4] ‘The Bothy Band: Guinness Brigade in Nescafé experiment’, Fred Dellar, NME, 10/4/76

   [5] The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole

   [6] Notes to The Best Of The Bothy Band (Mulligan, 1980), Colin Irwin; later reprinted, incongruously, as notes to the Mulligan CD issue of the first album, The Bothy Band.

   [7, 8, 9] ‘The Bothy Band: Guinness Brigade in Nescafé experiment’, Fred Dellar, NME, 10/4/76

   [10] Notes to The Best Of The Bothy Band (Mulligan, 1980), Colin Irwin; later reprinted, incongruously, as notes to the Mulligan CD issue of the first album, The Bothy Band.

   [11] ‘Kevin the great’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 13/5/78

   [12] Melody Maker, 4/12/76

   [13] Melody Maker, 22/2/77

   [14] Melody Maker, 25/6/77

   [15] Mary Hardy, Folk News, 9/77

   [16, 17] ‘Tripping the light fantastic’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 18/2/78

   [18, 19] ‘Kevin the great’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 13/5/78

   [20] Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 8/78

   [21] ‘A great weekend of music and ecstasy’, Tomás Mac Ruairi, Folk News, No.16, 1978

   [22] An Bothy Boy – in omós do Mhícheál Ó Domhnaill (2011), TG4

   [23] The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole

   [24] ‘Moore The Merrier’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 19/8/78

   [25] ‘Mulligan Stew’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 2/12/78

   [26] ‘Molloy to quit Bothy Band?’, Melody Maker, 19/8/78

   [27] Melody Maker, 9/9/78

   [28] ‘Matt joins reformed Planxty’, Folk News, No.17, 1978

   [29] The Humours Of Planxty (Hodder Headline Ireland, 2006), Leagues O’Toole

   [30] ‘Bothies to tour UK’, Melody Maker, 11/11/78

   [31, 32] ‘Mulligan Stew’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 2/12/78

   [33] Melody Maker, 1/9/79

   [34] ‘Beatific Ballisodare’, Colin Irwin, Melody Maker, 25/8/79

   (APPENDIX below…)

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5. Colin H says

   13/09/2026 at 15:36

   APPENDIX
   BOTHY BAND: MELODY MAKER BAND BREAKDOWN
   COLIN IRWIN, MM 1/5/76

   One of the foremost characteristics of Southern Ireland has always been its abundance of excellent traditional musicians, receiving and seeking no fame or acclaim outside of their immediate environment.

   Recently, The Chieftains and Planxty have proved it’s possible to achieve much more widespread popularity for Irish folk music without aborting it seriously, and The Bothy Band are in the process of achieving much more than that – attempting to transplant the fire and informal spirit of the spontaneous crack in its entirety to a concert platform.

   They came together about 15 months ago with Mícheál Ó Domhnaill, his sister Tríona, Dónal Lunny and Paddy Glackin were invited to play at the 21stbirthday celebrations of the Irish record label Gael Linn. Further sessions ensued, RTÉ television producer Tony MacMahon sat in with them on melodeon and slowly the informal sessions developed into something more lasting. Their reputation spread so rapidly that they decided to turn professional, resulting in the departure of MacMahon and Glackin for Tommy Peoples, an old friend of Matt Molloy, who had already been incorporated along with Paddy Keenan.

   They obviously owe much to The Chieftains and Planxty for opening the way, and certain parallels can be drawn in their music, though their style has more drive and gut appeal. The Domhnaills and Lunny provide a solid rhythmic base (and occasional vocals), and Keenan, Peoples and Molloy do the rest, weaving pipes, fiddle and flute in arresting in electrifying fashion. Mícheál O’Domhnaill indicated the atmosphere of music they had in mind by naming them after the old bothy bands – those unplanned sessions enjoyed by migrant Irish workers.

   Their rise has been astonishing; the excitement they created in Ireland caused much anticipation in England before they arrived. When they came for the first time at the end of last year [1975] they played to mainly Irish communities, and fulfilled all the promise. When they returned for their first full British tour they’d made great strides. Dónal Lunny formed his own label, Mulligan, to issue their first album in Ireland, which has now just been put out in Britain by Polydor.

   Over Easter they were at the Inverness Folk Festival and this summer they are set to appear at the Cambridge, Sidmouth and Durham festivals. The one thing that seems capable of holding them back would appear to be within their own character and lifestyle.

   Dónal Lunny
   Initially the temptation was to think of the group as Dónal Lunny’s band – he was, after all, the one member who had a big reputation outside Irish traditional music circles. Lunny’s standing as one of the most imaginative and fertile minds involved in folk was born when he became a founder-member of Planxty contributing substantially to the spirit that made their first album such a classic.

   Lunny left Planxty in 1973 to form a new band which spent six months rehearsing but never got off the ground. In the time before The Bothy Band came together just over a year ago, Lunny concentrated on production, working on the first Spud album, Tommy Makem’s Ever The Wind and Christy Moore’sWhatever Tickles Your Fancy.

   ‘Andy Irvine influenced me a lot. Before Planxty I gigged with him and started playing bouzouki rather than guitar and I began to look at things from a different angle. The reason I left Planxty was to play with someone else – the pull from another direction was stronger. I had certain regrets about it after but I tend to accept the inevitability of a situation.’

   He missed playing, however, and was delighted with the promise shown by the early Bothy Band gigs, and when they decided it was time to make an album Lunny formed his own record label, Mulligan, based in Dublin, to do it.

   ‘There are some really excellent singers and players in Ireland who would do very well on an album. We’d like to record some of them. It’s worth it to have your own label, there isn’t the problem of album deadlines and all that. Keep it simple is my motto, and I have the advantage of bitter experience.’

   He says The Bothy Band intend to keep to their policy of playing their own interpretations of traditional music. Their approach to traditional music is a natural development of their own backgrounds – ‘It’s fine to add influences as long as the essence remains undiluted. We are very happy with the way things are going.’

   Mícheál Ó Domhnaill
   ‘I never got into groups like Fairport or Steeleye at all… people like Swarbrick, Renee from Stivell’s band, Peter Knight… there are boys of seven or eight years in Ireland who could have them for breakfast.’

   Forthright views from Mícheál Ó Domhnaill, the guitarist/vocalist who is often considered the mastermind behind The Bothy Band, although he strenuously disputes it. That myth has arisen, he says, because he was in at the very beginning and, working at Gael Linn, was in a position to do much of the organising.

   Born in Dublin but brought up in County Meath, and the son of a collector of wax cylinder recordings, he spent 13 years studying classical piano with little exposure to traditional music – the influence of musicians like Jansch and Renbourn was more profound. He joined a group called Skara Brae with his sister Tríona and cut an album with them for Gael Linn (‘We were really successful only with the Irish speaking population’) and then joined Monroe, who had the distinction of gigging with Planxty for six months in Ireland.

   They went to Brittany where they were quite successful, and Mícheál came back to collect songs for the Folklore Commission:

   ‘They were looking for collectors and my brief was Donegal. They had the text but not the melodies. Tom Munnelly in Dublin has collected 6000 songs but there are countless airs, and I had to try and find them. I suppose I found about 300 or 400, some of them from my aunt.’

   Having left Monroe, he missed playing but stayed in touch by doing some radio work with Tony MacMahon and doing freelance work at Gael Linn. He was full of ideas of how to treat traditional music by the time The Bothy Band were born.

   ‘I’d love to be in a rock band. During the two-year period where I was doing nothing but listening to traditional music I found myself completely closed off from everything else. Recently I’ve been listening to records made in ’73 like early Little Feat albums, which I think are amazing, and all the Clapton and Derek & The Dominoes stuff. I also always had a hankering to get an electric traditional music group going because I don’t think any band has done it properly yet. There haven’t been bands with good traditional music players in them. There hasn’t been an ace fiddle player or piper among them, that’s why the treatment of the music hasn’t really come off.’

   Matt Molloy
   Molloy, a softly spoken friendly man from County Roscommon, has established himself as one of Ireland’s finest traditional musicians – he’s a former all-Ireland champion. Now that the controlled drive of his flute playing and his striking blend with Keenan and Peoples has lifted The Bothy Band to a position of some eminence, Molloy is somewhat bewildered that Irish traditional music is so much in demand and it’s possible to make a living out of playing it.

   ‘I wouldn’t have thought it possible four or five years ago,’ he says. ‘I’ve no idea why it is, although The Chieftains have done great work, they are fine musicians – particularly Seán Keane. But if this thing fell in the morning, I’ll still be playing traditional music, if I make money at it or not.’

   He started playing whistle when he was seven and graduated to flute a couple of years later having been taught by his father (the whole family were traditional musicians). He became an aircraft technician with Aer Lingus, spent the rest of his time playing at informal sessions, appearing at the fleadhs, and putting on small concerts with other likeminded musicians, which led directly to the Bothy Band.

   ‘We were all quite well-established as traditional musicians and we’d advertise these concerts in the local paper, and the profits from the concert would pay for the crack which would go on all weekend. There was a lot of drinking involved.’

   That’s how it was at the beginning of the band, and though it’s grown rapidly and has become much more than the means to a crack, he says there’s still a lot of fun involved. ‘I suppose there’s a certain amount of discipline once you’re in a group but we still have sessions after concerts and wreck ourselves staying up all night.’Naming Willie Clancy and Séamus Ennis as his most admired and influential musicians (‘I’ve always had a fascination for the pipes’) he makes an additional point about the current popularity of traditional music. ‘There are folk-rock bands who don’t impress me. They are supposed to be progressing but the sad part about it is they have no traditional background to progress from. They just can’t play the bloody stuff.’

   Paddy Keenan
   It had been a heavy night (and I mean really heavy), and Paddy Keenan appeared to be suffering the worst – the combination of his strong accent and the obvious discomfort of struggling to coax his brain into working order resulting in a largely incomprehensible mumble in answer to my questions. Certain facts were gleaned, however: he’s 26, was brought up on an unrelenting diet of traditional music, coming from a long line of travelling musicians, and learnt to play the pipes from his father while a young boy.

   He was 16 when he started playing a full set of pipes and played regularly at informal sessions and concerts with other members of his family. He admits to a period when he became attracted to the rock revolution, and briefly concentrated on guitar when he heard Dylan and Donovan and fancied himself as a singer-songwriter. But he met up with Matt Molloy and became enmeshed in the Dublin folk scene.

   ‘It’s the wild excitement of Keenan’s playing that contributes so much electrifying edge to the Bothy Band – on the two occasions I’ve seen him he’s won standing ovations for astonishing solos. Keenan – tall, swarthy and youthful looking – shrugs aside awed enquiries about his attitude to playing and how he acquired such venom in his piping. He names his greatest influence as the late Johnny Doran, also stating his admiration for the playing of Patsy Touhey and Leo Rowsome. He can’t see anything extraordinary about his own playing: attributing his style to the influence of these pipers.

   ‘Rowsome did more than anyone for the pipers,’ he says. ‘I’m only learning.’ He rates Paddy Moloney as ‘quite a good player,’ adding that the only piper he really listens to now is Séamus Ennis. ‘There’s a lot of good young pipers coming up in Ireland now though.’

   The impression gained is that Keenan is a naturally informal musician who would be just as happy playing in Dublin pubs as he would be travelling around playing in concert halls with the same musicians. Keenan maintains he prefers it this way, though. ‘I like playing with a permanent band, I always wanted to play with musicians like Matt.’

   Tríona Ní Domhnaill
   The diminutive Tríona was, like her brother Mícheál, born in Dublin but brought up in Meath, and studied classical music and piano. She got into traditional music through Tony MacMahon, who had the idea of presenting a series of radio programmes involving 10 musicians from different backgrounds.

   This was her first experience of playing with traditional musicians, and after a period with Skara Brae, went to Brittany (she recently married a Breton). On returning to Dublin she worked at Gael Linn ‘answering the phone and dealing with the public’ and not playing herself until The Bothy Band arose. Now she generally concentrates on adding to the rhythms on clavinet, although she also sings a bit with a vast repertoire she learnt from her aunt, Nelli Ní Domhnaill, of Donegal. She’s recently made a solo album.

   ‘My aunt’s style of singing has influenced me an awful lot. I used to listen to The Beatles and Pentangle and people like that but I got out of touch – I was always more interested in things like Rumanian and Bulgarian folk songs.

   ‘My aunt is amazing though, she has about 300 songs she could give you in the space of a week and she doesn’t jealously guard them or anything like that. Donegal was a big immigration county and the seasonal workers would go off and come back with these songs as presents.’

   She’s had experience of songwriting and arranging, as well as being involved in radio and television music programmes, but now considers herself irretrievably immersed in traditional music. ‘I’d have to start again from scratch to play classical music. There was a lot of advanced stuff I could play which I couldn’t even attempt now.’

   Tommy Peoples
   As aggressive as is the piping of Keenan, it’s matched all the way by the robust fiddling of Tommy Peoples – the two of them blend together in breath-taking fashion when they cut loose. Peoples hails from Donegal, an area of strong fiddle traditions – ‘in Donegal you rarely saw another instrument’ – and was taught to play by his family as a young boy.

   Peoples – a man of burly, rugged physique – moved to Dublin in his mid-teens and had a long succession of jobs ‘doing anything and everything, building work mainly’, and spending most of his free time playing in the Dublin clubs. His reputation grew as he came into contact with other traditional musicians and he moved to Clare, joining the celebrated Kilfenora Ceili Band and playing on their 1974 album for Transatlantic (TRA 283), and he stayed with the Kilfenoras for about four years.

   He returned to Dublin about nine months ago and ‘fell in with this lot’, being enlisted as the replacement for the departing Paddy Glackin. He’d known most of the band for several years and had played with them informally on various occasions and was a natural choice, despite his horror about being part of a disciplined line-up.

   ‘Discipline always came hard to me,’ he says, ‘but I enjoy playing with the other people in the band, and everybody has enough material to keep it interesting. I don’t find it that hard to rehearse.’

   Like Keenan, he’s dismissive when you refer to the fire in his playing and ask him who he admires. He pays tribute to The Chieftains’ Seán Keane. He and Keane have played together on various occasions, in fact he’s played along with most of the traditional musicians of note at some point. He’s never been exposed to any great degree to other forms of music – traditional music has always dominated his life and he’s happy to keep it that way.

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6. Blue Boy says

   13/09/2026 at 16:32

   Colin’s Wheels of the World is clearly a labour of love, and its a beautiful book; an invaluable record of the history of the uilleann pipes – am proud to have a signed copy on the bookshelves.

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   • Colin H says

     13/09/2026 at 16:59

     Thank you, Blueser!

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7. Vulpes Vulpes says

   13/09/2026 at 18:02

   That’s tonight’s listening sorted:

   

   Thanks for the above chapter Colin, very much enjoyed reading that.

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   • Colin H says

     13/09/2026 at 21:04

     You’re welcome, Vulpmeister!

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     • Vulpes Vulpes says

       16/09/2026 at 12:15

       @colin-h
       I have to say that The Wheels Of The World is an extraordinary thing. I’ve my copy here in the office room, a sure thing to dip into and escape the madness of work when moments of delight are called for. It’s not just a tome of reference, it’s a cornucopia of delight that I can pick up at any time for the rich vein of quotes and anecdotes that are scattered across the four hundred or so pages; the discography alone has sent me off in happy pursuit of obscure records. Ten minutes reading from it make me ache to come back over the water once more. Thanks, you.

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       • Colin H says

         16/09/2026 at 12:54

         Thank you, Vulpmeister – that’s most kind. It’s one of those books that I glance at now and think, ‘How did I do that?’ However, I did, I’m glad I did. 🙂

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8. Twang says

   19/09/2026 at 14:53

   Excellent stuff Colin, thanks!

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9. Colin H says

   19/09/2026 at 17:16

   Thank you Twangmeister!

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10. ger_the_boptist says

    22/09/2026 at 08:40

    It’s been many moons since I posted to THEAFTERWORD, Colins masterwork has forced me out of retirement.
    What a brilliant piece on Paddy Keenan and the world of the Bothy Band.
    I saw them several times when living in Dublin in the 70s. In fact, they were the soundtrack to my courtship with my lady wife.
    Without a doubt they were the Stones of Irish music – they rocked.
    I first saw them in their early days when Paddy Glackin had the fiddle seat.
    Alas, never saw ver. 2 with Tommy Peoples.
    Saw them with Kevin Burke many times.
    They have never been surpassed – great memories.
    I had tickets to see them in 2024, but concerts were cancelled due to Donal Lunny’s illness.
    Alas, with Paddy’s passing, I guess I will need to cross the Great Divide to see them again.

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    • Colin H says

      22/09/2026 at 09:34

      Thank you, Gerardo! I’ve never seen them myself, but I was at a pub session with Kevin Burke in Milltown Malbay in 2015 and this loud American woman with a bodhran turned up and said ‘Hey, you guys aren’t about to stop, are you? Every session I join stops…’ (There was a clue there…) She sits in, thumps away and after a few tunes says to Kevin, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good – how long ya been playing?’ – at which everyone holds their breath and looks at Kevin. ‘Oh, a few years,’ he says, with his permanant cheery smile.

      It was quite a moment.

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      • ger_the_boptist says

        23/09/2026 at 09:47

        In 2024 RTE and I think the BBC showed a documentary on the Bothy Band.
        On guitar was Seán Óg Graham, in place of Mícheál Ó Domhnaill, who passed away in 2006. Sean Óg is a fine guitarist who I have seen previously, fitted in seamlessly.
        Really enjoyed this excellent documentary, in rehearsal for a live show which featured in the 2nd part of the program.
        Brought me back to the live gigs in the 70s.
        To me, Planxty & the Bothy Band were like the Beatles and Stones of Irish music.
        Planxty were widely loved, but the Bothies were hardcore roots, and they rocked.
        I had tickets to see them in the 2024 cancelled concerts at the National Concert Hall.
        Having seen them in small venues back then, I wondered how they would translate to the sedate surroundings of the NCH (I suspect fine), now I make do with rewatching the documentary and thank TG4 for producing it.

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        • Colin H says

          23/09/2026 at 11:54

          Yes, I saw the documentary. Very well made, I thought. I have no emotional connection to the Bothy Band or Planxty – I wasn’t there at the time – and I’m always a bit suspicious of the veneration they get. But I’m a huge fan of Andy Irvine solo and his pre Planxty band Sweeney’s Men, and I was a great fan of Paddy Keenan’s solo playing and of Kevin Burke’s solo playing.

          Not many Bothy buffs will be aware of his two fabulous pieces on Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys’ (1973) album. ‘Farrell O’Gara’ by Kevin alone opens the album – genius:

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          • ger_the_boptist says

            23/09/2026 at 12:52

            Sitting in front of me is the new Andy Irvine album, “Songs of Woody Guthrie,” waiting to be listened to later, perhaps with a glass of malt.

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            • Colin H says

              23/09/2026 at 15:19

              Likewise… although I’m currently basking in waves of 60s/70s Archie Fisher recordings, while trying to pursue economic activities.

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