Making Beautiful Music Together

Cormac MacConnell - The West's Awake

Making Beautiful Music Together

June 28, 2007

By Cormac MacConnell

THE summer pell-mells into a welter of long days mostly sunlit, sometimes showery, always beautiful both in their dawnings and twilit departures. Last week it was the solstice, the year turning on its axis again, so I enjoy every hour of what we have left as fully as I can. Recently I awoke in a tent in Doolin coming quickly awake like an old cat. It was after Father’s Day actually, and I’d spent the morning and afternoon with my sons, the evening with Ciara and her boyfriend.

When I moved out about the campsite I quickly saw I was at least twice as old as anybody else I saw! To blazes with that. You are as old as you feel and I felt young.

The previous night I spotted something which maybe catches that special magic of the west of Ireland in summer. We started off in Gus O’Connor’s fabled pub in Fisher Street, where everybody starts and many finish, and then, for a change we moved a mile down the road to McDermott’s Pub.

It was a Sunday evening and Doolin was pleasantly full of tourists and locals, but not overcrowded and feverish the way coastal Saturday nights so often can be in June and July. There was music sounding from about every window, not just from the pubs.

It was bright and warm. You could faintly hear a contented sea beating time to the music.

I’m not a hack that takes notes rarely but, when

we found a table in McDermott’s I was so quickly jig-footed by the quality of the four musicians on the small stage that I sought their names. The guitarist was Paul Stafford, the two teenage girls on the flying fiddles were Eimar Howley and Maeve Kierse, and the group leader and flute-player was the extremely lively Peadar Reilly from Dublin.

They were playing the old music on that kind of frequency which is perfect in that it has enough qualify to satisfy the trad purist, but also features the populist touch that also engages the tourists. That’s an art in itself.

The Reilly pounded the stage with his foot ever and anon in a fashion which caused the whole pub to tap their feet too. All of the artistes could sing a song too, and did, and called up regulars from the bar to perform their party pieces.

Sometimes some of the locals got up spontaneously and danced half-sets and sets with abandon. You could see the faces of many of the tourists mainly continentals that this was the first time they’d seen that kind of atmosphere.

And their cameras flashed it all up and their eyes and ears lapped it all up. When singers sang there was that rapt hush which is music in itself.

But anyway to that moment I mentioned earlier. Going outside for a cigarette close to midnight after having heard the Reilly announce, “This is your last chance to dance a set we’re going to knock the knickers offa these tunes!” I found myself standing at the parapet of the humpback bridge a few yards down the road.

It spans the river running down to the sea and also the hundred yards between McDermott’s and McGann’s equally famed musical pub on the other bank. Leisurely groups of walkers were walking in both directions to catch the best of the sessions in both establishments.

All the languages of Europe and the Orient were there, all blending together into another kind of music altogether, the footsteps providing the percussion.

And then it happened that I got a kind of stereo sensation because, incredibly, the groups of musicians in both pubs lashed into exactly the same set of tunes, the group in McGanns, further away from me, just one beat ahead of their fellows. They had a banjo player whose lively plinkety-plonk gave something special to the whole sound.

At least 20 people around me heard the same effect, stopped in their tracks, listened. And a big American man, at the end, said “wow!” in the way that only Americans can.

And I’m sure the name of one of the tunes I heard was “The Lady’s Pantaloons” which was maybe what the Dublin fluter was referring to. It was a special interlude, more than a little magical.

If I were not an Irishman, but a visitor, I think the whole of that five minutes, the whole of that night indeed, would be something I’d remember for a long, long time.

I hope all you fathers out there had as good a day, wherever you were, as I had. Like the cosmetic advertisement on TV keeps saying over here, “We’re worth it!”

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