Traditionanlist set the tapping

Press, 16 August 1988, Page 21

Traditionanlist set the tapping

Stories:

GARRY ARTHUR

GO INTO ANY PUB in Ireland, and before the night is out, the place will be jumping with lively cheerful music, and the customers will be in full voice. It is the same in many English and Scottish pubs. Such an atmosphere is hard to find in New Zealand, but one central Christchurch pub, Warners, is doing its best to convince its customers that the “little people” have magicked them away to the Emerald Isle.

Foaming pints of Guinness stout, as dark as the waters of the Liffey, are pulled by expert hands; Irish accents are heard across the bar; and crowds flock to hear toe-tapping traditional music from the resident bush band, and sometimes from the genuine article visiting from the Quid Sod.

It is the atmosphere of an Irish pub that John McCarthy, Warners’ publican, is aiming for, and he believes that the bush bands and the visiting traditional Irish bands that he books help to achieve that.

“When I came to New Zealand from Ireland 14 years ago I hated the pubs,” he says. “They were just booze barns, with no atmosphere. In an English or an Irish pub, you get a welcome and conversation. To me, that’s what a pub should be.” When he took over at Warners three years ago he immediately renamed the main bar the Cork and Kerry after the counties bordering Clonakilty, his home to,wn, and decorated it with rows of shamrocks and empty Guinness bottles. Live traditional music completed the picture. It worked. Turnover has gone up five times, and he says the riff-raff have gone elsewhere. Traditional music has been played from Wednesday to Saturday, and on most Friday nights the doors have had to be closed at 9 p.m. because of the crowds. John McCarthy has booked Irish bands that have been touring Australia. The Sons of Roisin were tremendously popular, and so were the London-based Dingle Spike. Some play Irish music with a modern sound, but even the pure traditional sound is popular. Padraigh and Eilish (Patrick and Eileen) played pure traditional music and packed the place out.

Warners also had a Scottish traditional group playing, and John McCarthy puts out the welcome mat for talented individuals and touring groups. The Pogues (“a rocky version of the Dubliners”) gave a spontaneous performance, and sometimes Ann Coughlan comes up from Timaru and plays her Irish harp at Warners. “She’s just brilliant,” says John McCarthy.

“I personally believe that there’s been a huge revival of interest in traditional music world-wide,” he says. “Even in France and Germany, the Pogues told me.” He has a friend in Ireland at present looking for Irish musi-

cians to come out and play in Christchurch for six months, and the Sons of Roisin enjoyed their time here so much that they are coming back. Mr McCarthy says it would be easier to attract overseas groups if there were similar pubs in

other main centres, to make a tour worthwhile.

John McCarthy is not a musician himself, but he does own a “magic” set of Irish pipes, which he is looking for someone to play.

He is in no doubt about the growing popularity of the music. “There certainly is a revival in Irish music,” he says. “It’s because they play better. They’re really good.” When he has an Irish band at Warners, it often attracts members of the Irish dancing clubs to the little dance floor in front of the bandstand. Much of the success of traditional music on the local commercial scene can be attributed to one man, lan Costello. He was the founder of both the original Bushfire band, and the Mulligans. Now he is “resting between engagements” as they say in show business, and preparing for a comeback with a new band, this time with the help of an electronic sound sampler and a micro-composer.

“It’s very hard to get enough musicians to play this sort of music,” he says. “With this machine, if I have a record that I like of someone playing the Irish pipes, for example, I can record it on the sampler, which will sample any sound up to eight seconds long. It’s for recording sounds and working out arrrangements.”

He plans to start a new chapter in his musical career by playing at dances, and has five bookings already. “The music will be a mixture of what I’ve done before, and hopefully a different sound. It’s a big melting pot when you come to put the band together.” He has been encouraged by the success of Charlie Jemmett, a local musician who has a Scottish country dance band with a similar set-up, and who is getting bookings all over the country. “He’s had the same trouble that I’ve had, though,” says lan Costello, “and that’s getting musicians to play the music.

“Guitarists who are heading for a rock or a jazz band do not find playing guitar in a folk band very challenging, and fiddlers are as scarce as hens’ teeth. Most of the fiddlers available come from the concert situation of a folk club, and you have to have a very thick skin to play in hotels.

“But I think that playing in hotels and concert-in-the-park is the way the music grows. In the closet, it’s not going to get anywhere.”

lan Costello formed Bushfire in 1981, and after several attempts managed to book the band into Warners when an Irishman, Ernie Hunter, became the manager.

It was the Dubliners who revived Irish music in the 19605, and theirs was the kind of sound that lan Costello wanted when he later left and formed the Mulligans. He says the Pogues became popular by doing the same kind of thing, but with a more modern approach.

By St Patrick’s Day this year — March 17 — he felt he had achieved everything he had aimed for with the Mulligans, and pulled out to develop other ideas.

He intends to learn more about traditional Irish dance music so that he can improve his technique and his repertoire. “And if I can meet the right people, I want to move into a more contemporary sound. I’ve got to find musicians with a good ear — and corrupt them.” lan Costello also teaches what he calls bush dancing, or colonial dancing. “A lot of our ancestors brought the dances with them,” he says. "Because everything here was rough and ready, they simplified everything and we’ve got our own version of the dances, and of Scottish and Irish songs — New Zealand lyrics put to traditional tunes.”

Today, indigenous music is

familiar only to the enthusiasts, and that is why lan Costello thinks it never got any bigger. “It’s stayed in the folk clubs, and kept the same sound,” he says. Pam Boon, wife of Bushfire’s leader, Danny Boon, describes Bushfire’s music as “folk rock.” Their first album, “Bushfire,” sold out two pressings, and another album, “Bush Justice,” came out a year ago with the help of the Minister of Overseas Trade, Mike Moore, singing the lyrics of Peter Cape’s New Zealand classic “Taumaranui on the Main Trunk Line.” “The band loves traditional music,” says Pam Boon, “but the audience likes to rock it a bit.”

Danny Boon is the only original Bushfire player left in the band. After producing its first album, the band split up, and it was he who later reformed it for its return to Warners Hotel. This coming summer Bushfire plans a concert of both traditional music and their own New Zealand material, including some of of the poems of Joe Charles’ anthology “Black Billy Tea.” Although the band obviously enjoys itself, it is not making a fortune. “We’ve been able to make a living — survival money,” says Pam Boon, “but we’re battling the odds all the time.”

She believes there has to be a place for New Zealand music,

and is critical of the education system for merely touching on New Zealand music at the intermediate school level. “There’s a place for Maori culture,” she says, “but so there is for this music that was brought here bj' Irish, Scottish and English settlers. I don’t want it to die.”

The band is keen to get a school programme together to show children how the early settlers made their own music, and their instruments. Bushfire has played at Cobham Intermediate, and has researched a book called “The History of N.Z. Through Song” for the Canterbury United Council. “We take the tea-chest bass and the lagerphone to barn dances,” says Pam Boon, “and we call and teach all the old country dances. A lot of social clubs book us. We held our own country dances at the Horticultural Hall for about a year but they became so popular and so big that it was too much work for us.

“But we are threatening to do

another one, for old times’ sake. It’s a family thing. One of the most wonderful things I’ve seen was at one of those dances when an old man, he must have been 80, asked a four-year-old girl up to dance, and everyone watched. That’s the thing about this music.”

Bushfire “trips south” quite a lot, and is especially popular in the woolsheds of South Canterbury and North Otago. “At Tara Hills the band played one night from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.,” Pam Boon recalls. “People come from miles around — it was like stepping back in time. They wouldn’t let us go.” The Mulligans left Warners earlier this year and since then have had no permanent booking, but have played at numerous private functions, as well as at the Dux de Lux restaurant and the Bush Inn Hotel. Recently they went on a southern tour, playing at hotels, nightclubs and cabarets in Dunedin, Wanaka, Arrowtown, Clyde, Gore and Invercargill. They were finalists in the traditional music section of the Gold Guitar contest at Gore, and have had offers to play on the steamer Earnslaty when the ski season picks up. They have also been recorded and filmed for the children’s television programme “What Now,” and may take part in the programme “With a Bucket on Your Head.”

Modern sound, rock from Pogues

Fiddlers and guitarists jib

Plans for

school course