Folk Invasion? Andy Irvine

Could it be that Folk Music Clubs are entrenching themselves in Germany at last? Barely has the dust settled on the last Bonn bash and there’s news of another Club just a bit up the road in “Feurschlößchen” Bad Honnef. John Harrison sent us this report on a great evening in the company of Irish Folk legend Andy Irvine.

Andy Irvine is an enigma, indeed he has even been described as a legend in himself. With Andy nothing is as it should be, but everything is as it is. It is nearly half a century of stage experience and fretboard virtuosity, a songwriter of immense talent and fastidious research, a good harmonica player and sweet tenor tones to sing the sometimes incredulous, but always tantalising, tales above his musical quilt work, and yet still a man with the sprightly gait and smile of a young mischievous leprechaun.

Andy starts the first set with the song “When the boys are on parade” by the New Zealand songwriter Marcus Turner. An up tempo marching “anti-recruitment” song, which won’t be the last such song of the evening. With many artists “what you see is what you get”, but with Andy it’s somewhat different, what you think you see is often not what you’re actually getting, but more often than not what you are getting is so much more. In this song to the uninitiated it looks like he’s playing a guitar with eight strings, two more than a guitar has, but what you are actually seeing and hearing is a guitar-bodied bouzouki made by the English luthier Stefan Sobell. This has eight strings but in four courses of double strings, so really it has if anything, two strings less than a guitar, rather than two more. Furthermore, although it looks like a guitar it is not tuned in sevenths like a guitar, but in fifths like a bouzouki, like a mandolin, and like a violin. Just to make it easier Andy puts a harmonica in a rack to add yet another dimension to the song.

The second song is Reynardine an old traditional song in 5/8 time about a creature which is half man and half fox, a “Werefox ” that tries to seduce a fair maiden in the mountains. Bert Jansch made a popular guitar arrangement of this song, Andy couldn’t play it on the guitar as well as Bert Jansch, but would certainly give Bert a run for his money on the bouzouki and Andy does sing it better. Perhaps thinking the audience might now be bored after getting used to the musical accompaniment on the last song, Andy removes his harmonica rack and picks up his bass bouzouki, made for him by Davy Stuart in New Zealand. This doesn’t look like a guitar, but it does look like a bouzouki-shaped bouzouki, a big one! Now a normal violin or mandolin is tuned to GDAE, but if you’ve been getting the gist of things, you can probably imagine that Andy perhaps uses another tuning ? and quite right you would be too. Andy tunes the two top (thinnest) E strings down two frets, a full tone, to D, thus giving a tuning of GDAD. This gives a drone like effect, not unakin to a dropped D tuning on a guitar, where the lower E string is tuned down to D, only in this case on the mandolin, it is the highest course of strings which is tuned down to allow a constant open accompaniment to whatever melody is being played on the other strings, a little reminiscent of the bagpipes. So Andy tunes his bass bouzouki initially down four frets, before deciding it could probably stand five frets, and finally tunes it down to CGDG. This gives it a really big rich fat bass sound. ( I am reminded of speaking with a young Canadian guitarist in Bonn recently who also got a rich bass sound by tuning his Telecaster to an open E minor chord and then sinking it down 4 frets to open C minor and then playing “Summertime” with a bottle neck. Well one more fret to go Jimmy Bowskill, thicker strings and then, one more to go! Needless to say Reynardine is a masterpiece of unexpectedly deep sounds, from a man who was in earlier years a mere mandolin genius.

For the third song the harp rack returns and plays a melancholy tangent to the “Brays of Moneymore” an emigration song about a ship leaving Loch Foyle to New York. For this number he plays the smallest stringed instrument in his travelling armoury, and as it’s Andy it’s not a normal mandoline, but a mandola, which is a bit like what a viola is to a violin, somewhat larger and with an extra two frets. Slowly I’m beginning to think this guy is a genius, at an age when many men are getting into their pipes and slippers, here’s Andy with his first CD in more than a decade, released in September this year, with the name of “Abocurragh” his home hamlet in County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, and since then he’s barely seen home as he’s been constantly touring, promoting it.

Finally we have the first song from Andy’s new CD, the harmonica rack is off again, the guitar bodied Bouzouki is in his arms as Andy leaps into Bob Bickerton’s “A Close Shave” an antipodean take on “New York Girls ” and “Patrick Street” but this time the sailor awakes to find no money and no clothes, but a blond wig and a shaving kit!
We stay in the southern hemisphere and on the CD but move from New Zealand to New South Wales in Australia for George Papavgeris’s song ‘Empty Handed’ about an ex convict Australian settler who’s bank loan to work his apportioned land after serving his sentence in full, is not renewed due to drought. A little known fact is that there are so many Greeks in Australia. After Athens and Thessaloniki, Melbourne has the world’s third largest Greek-speaking population.
The sixth song of the evening is one of Andy’s and dedicated to Ronnie Drew who played with the Dubliners. Andy is back on the guitar bodied bouzouki to tell us about his varsity days between 1962 and 1968 where he partook of the university of musical life, a bowl of soup and a pint of stout, in “O’Donoghues” bar in Dublin. A man born in England, and therefore automatically an Englishman, albeit of Irish and Scottish parentage, goes to Dublin to find his roots. He went initially as a stage actor, like his mother before him. However, meeting all the musicians in O’Donohues was to change the course of his life and he left the stage to become a musician.

Next we are taken with the guitar bodied bouzouki and the harmonica rack off to southern Mexico before WW I with a chorus song by Andy called “Viva Zapata” about the revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapato, a man who would rather die standing than living on his knees.  “Kellswater” follows, with his voice and haunting lyrics accompanied only by the bass bouzouki, with a wicked choice for a daughter to contemplate. What a voice. The following song is “Come to the bower” and is dedicated to the late Luke Kelly of the Dubliners and another frequenter of O’Donohues bar.
A break is scheduled…..and Andy has certainly deserved having his whistle wetted!

After the raffle has been drawn and refreshments taken Andy kicks off the second half with another song from his new CD, his own composition entitled “The Spirit of Mother Jones” about the life and times of Mary Harris, the miners’ angel, who emigrated from County Cork to the USA and became very active for the rights of working men and women and organising a coalminers’ union at the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.
There are lots of old gems in the second half including the ultimate anti-recruiting song “Aurthur Mcbride” and the classic Sweeney’s Men song, “My Heart’s Tonight in Ireland”, ” The Blacksmith” on the mandola as well as more new ones from the “Abocurragh” CD like the “Three Huntsmen” and “Willy of Winsbury” and towards the end some of the musical fruits of Andy’s tours of eastern Europe, particularly Bulgaria in the late 1960′s but I won’t go into too much detail and “spoil” it for you, for reasons which will become clear later.

For an Irish folkie Andy plays much better harmonica than most people and accompanies himself with a racked harp in over a third of his songs and uses the more traditional for folk “first position” as well as the more traditional for blues “second or cross position” to good effect, but he’s getting some notes too effortless for my liking, especially with having the harp in a rack. My comrade this evening was Paolo an Italian forester and a very gifted blues harp player, who has not played often enough at the Folk Club in Graurheindorf. His take is that Andy is sometimes using some harmonicas in “country tuning” and upon talking to Andy afterwards, this was indeed the case. Country tuning only involves changing one note from a standard Richter major diatonic tuning- the 5 draw note is raised a semitone, from F to F# on a C harmonica, thus allowing him to play melodies with more ease in the rack than would otherwise be the case. Yet another musical quirk is that he plays the harmonica ” upside down” which some left handed harp players do, but Andy isn’t left handed. Andy plays it “upside down” because that’s the way that Woody used to play it!
You can’t really say much about Andy Irvine without touching on his teenage hero, the great American folk singer Woody Guthrie. I first found the father through the son, Arlo Guthrie, famous for his 20 minute long witty rant “Alice’s Restaurant” but Andy was totally devoted to Arlo’s father Woody who was a shining beacon of common sense in the USA during the infamous McCarthy witch-hunts. Perhaps this was why Woody didn’t like fascists and even had a sticker on his guitar which read, “This machine kills fascists” . Andy has inherited Woody’s hate of fascists and in his wonderful song tribute to Woody ” Never Tire of the Road” Andy attaches the chorus of one of Woody’s own most famous choruses to the end of his own song ” All of you fascists bound to lose” resounded as a chorus around the room, and one could feel Woody himself grinning in the wings at the irony of hearing these words in a building which was once commandeered for a short time as the local headquarters of the secret state police.

Another great follower in the Woody Guthrie tradition is the New York “Cowboy” singer and guitarist who now lives in California, “Rambling Jack Elliot”. Andy Irvine first met Jack in London in 1959 and still keeps in touch with him on the phone occasionally. Woody Guthrie once “accused” Rambling Jack Elliot of sounding ” more like Woody Guthrie than I do!”, and much later Jack paid Andy a similar compliment by telling Andy that ” you sound more like Woody Guthrie now than I do!” As if to demonstrate how small the world is sometimes, Paolo had been working in California three weeks earlier and on account of having a mutual friend, visited Rambling Jack at his home there, as was able to relate to Andy that his fellow Woody Guthrie admirer was in fine fettle.  Apart from Woody’s influence Andy was influenced in his formative years also by Lonnie Donegan and the skiffle craze. In Ireland he played with Sweeney’s Men and the legendary Planxty, but afterwards never enjoyed the mainstream success of Christy Moore. Like Dick Gaughan and Richard Thompson and Vin Garbutt with Andy Irvine you can be assured of a unique rich evening’s entertainment and more than a few lessons in history, music and song writing, and at the end of the evening wonder why such genius is not more widely known. Perhaps ours is not to reason why….but to just rejoice that in these even in these pecuniary times a few people lay more value on their musical integrity, than merely aspiring to commercial success.
So all’s well that ends well, but Andy wouldn’t be Andy if he didn’t have at least one more trick up his sleeve, and true to form he does. It’s sometimes disappointing reading a review of a concert because sadly it’s now gone, non-retrievable. One can buy a CD (and I can certainly recommend Andy’s “Abocurragh”) but somehow it’s not quite the same. However, in this particular case, thanks to Jutta’s prior arrangements even if we can’t see again, we can at least hear again, the sounds of the man with an impish twinkle in his eye and the sprightly gait.

Tune your radio (or your computer) into WDR (Westdeutsche Rundfunk/ West German Radio) Radio 3 at 20:05 hours on January 18th 2011 and you can listen to Andy Irvine’s concert again.
Thinking about it, it’s probably more relaxing just listening, rather than looking and listening, because then you are not always trying to solve the enigma that your brain is hearing things which your eyes are telling it should sound differently and certainly not as good as they do.

Andy Irvine is certainly “a man you don’t meet everyday.”

- John Harrison
Sendung: WDR 3 Konzert, 18. Januar 2011, 20:05 Uhr

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