Seán Tyrrell

INTERVIEWS

Sean already enjoyed notoriety for the artistry with which he fuses poetry and music long before launching his first solo recording – ‘Cry of a Dreamer’ in 1994. The album served to confirm the belief of his legions of loyal followers, that he is a truly inspired singer of lyrically driven songs.

A native of the slower moving West of Ireland, Sean took his time before committing himself to record. It was time well spent, exposing himself to the experiences of different cultures, musical genres, and literary heritage. Sean was surrounded by music all his life, coming from a family immersed in the musical traditions of his native Galway. During the sixties he performed in the city’s premier folk club – the Folk Castle, honing his vocal and instrumental skills, while rubbing the shoulders with a host of celebrated artists who performed there.

Sean emigrated to New York in 1968 and slotted into the folk club scene in Greenwich Village. The early seventies took him west to San Francisco and a diet of Irish music sessions. It was here Sean’s reputation as an exceptional singer of songs, took root. Traversing New Hampshire in the mid seventies, he co-founded ‘Apples in Winter’, a band which was short lived but well recognised.

He returned to Ireland in the late seventies, where he continued to compose, but seldom played in public. In 1978 he accepted employment with the University of Galway, based in the heart of the Burren in County Clare. It’s hard to avoid music in this part of Ireland and soon Sean was lured back into the music scene. His ability was recognised and appreciated, even amidst a host of legendary musicians. With a growing reputation, he was invited to ‘guest’ on several recordings, including two albums with the ex-Moving Hearts uileann piper, Davy Spillane. Swapping the Burren for the sheltered Bell Harbour, close to the border of his native county, Sean divided his time juggling the demands of mussel farming and a re-energised approach to his music.

He became fascinated by the forward thinking poem ‘The Midnight Court’ (all 1,206 lines of it), written during the 17th Century, by Brian Merriman. He became almost obsessed by the play and a desire to set the work to music. This feat was achieved with much success when the Druid Theatre Galway staged Sean Tyrrell’s ‘traditional music opera’ featuring Sean with a host of talented contemporaries.

' A short History of of Dreams - Patrick Brennan

Sean Tyrrell is Galway born and bred: a great city to grow up in if your interest is music.

For Sean the music was there from the start, "My mother and father were great set dancers and there was always traditional music around. My father also sang and so did my mother, under pressure and if she’d had a drink or two."

His father taught him the scales on the harmonica but it wasn’t till Sean was in his 20’s that, encouraged by friends like John and Henry Higgins, Jack Geary and Sean Conroy, he began to get really play. He bought a 4 string banjo on the ‘never never’ at Raftery’s in Galway City and it wasn’t long before he was playing gigs at places like the Eagle Tavern and the old Enda Hotel on Dominick Street along with Eddie Moloney, the Mulhares, Jimmy Cummins and the Rabbitt Brothers. "I had a hard neck so I wasn’t long playing before I was actually earning money out of it!" His first group was the Freedom Folk with John Higgins, Johnny Mulhern and a few others.

In the lat 60’s, just before the start of the ‘troubles’, Sean moved to Belfast and taught for a while. Then he started roving, wandering between Ireland and the U.S. "I played professionally in America for about 6 years. Then one night I was playing a gig in San Francisco and there were tremendous musicians in the audience. I remember coming off the stage and feeling a bit of a fraud up there. The whole thing was losing its appeal. I felt I really had to work more at it instead of just doing the same old ballads all the time."

Sean got some advice that night and took it. "Give this up. Go back to Ireland and listen to the old fellas." For the next few years that’s what he did. Keeping his ears open and learning.

Sean ended up working at the University College Galway Research Station at Carren, Co. Clare. It was here that he began work on many of the songs for "Cry of a Dreamer" and also to develop his idea for setting a translation of Brian Merrimen’s epic poem in Irish, "The Midnight Court" to music.

Living in Clare was a bonus, "On every side of me, no matter where I turned, there were the best of musicians – Tony Linane, Tommy Peoples, the Hynes brothers, Mickleen Conlon, the great Miko Russell, Chris Droney, Martin Fahey. No matter where I went out the door I was bound to find not just music, but the best of music."

U.C.G. offered early retirement and Sean took them up on it and began the music seriously again. He appeared on his friend Davy Spillane’s albums, completed his work on "The Midnight Court" and had it produced in Galway by the Druid Theatre Company and, independently in Dublin. And, at long last, after 8 years of talking about it with friend and producer P.J. Curtis, he made "Cry of a Dreamer". So, now, the rest of us can find out what Galway has known for all these years – Sean Tyrrell dreams great dreams, and sings about them even better.

All Heart, No Poses - Phil Gaston
As a long-time fan of Sean Tyrrell’s and a regular devotee of his Sunday evening sessions at the Roisin Dubh in Galway I was delighted to hear that he, at last, had an album out. I arranged to meet him at his home to talk about his music and his, I knew, long struggle to get it on record.

Sean’s house sits in a hollow among low hills not far from Bellharbour village on the south side of Galway bay. Low, spring sun lit the conservatory where we sat and talked, surrounded by Sean’s collection of beautiful old instruments. The mandocello looked wonderfully baroque and glowed wood-gold in the sunlight. In the living room a stone, open fireplace with a large Godin stove spoke of many fine winter sessions in the house working on material for the album.

Talking to Sean about a song on the album I get some idea of his general approach to material plus a little bit of history going back twenty years.

‘Johnny Mulhern’s, who wrote ‘Mattie’ was in my first group. The Freedom Folk we were called because I was so skinny people used to call me Freedom. If you remember the Freedom from Hunger campaign poster.

"I wanted Mattie as near to what I could do live. I wanted a blues harmonica. There used to be a character in Galway called J.J. Gaffey – one of the first bohemians. And it used to be if you were walking in from Salthill in the night you’d hear him walking along playing the harmonica.

"Very, very Galway song. Johnny lived there for a long time and a lot of his songs ‘Delaney Gone Back on the Wine’, ‘The Magdalen Laundry’ are very heavily influenced by Galway. Hughes’ Bar in Wood Quay is where Johnny saw Mattie going to. It stirs me and it stirs people in Galway. But it’s not provincial in that it’s only understood there. Anybody gone on alcohol anywhere in the world can easily relate to it."

He talked about singing. "Musically I don’t care what has to suffer – be it time or whatever, if the word is in the right place at the right time – that’s essential to me and always has been."

"People say to me, ‘Jeez you’re a great singer’. I never can understand because I really do not think that in terms of voice, I’m a great singer. I mean Sean Keane, Declan Burke… they’re great singers. Maybe what I do have, and I’m not saying they don’t have it as well, is look for, if a song interests me and what makes it what it is and then get that out. The writer’s idea is there, whether it be a poet or a songwriter and I’m the interpreter of those ideas. I’m the singer and I link the listener very well with the writer. I’m a communicator, a conveyor."

Taking lyrics as seriously as he does it’s not surprising to find a large number of poems set to Sean’s music on the album. So, apart from musical instruments, the other thing to note in the house is books. Sean talks with delight about finding each poem; its source, his mood of the time, how the music came about. Constantly having his ear turned to the slightest half-chance of turning a lyric into a song, or spotting a hidden classic by a contemporary songwriter, is certainly one of Sean’s strengths. So much so that he has written an entire musical based on the famous, bawdy, satirical, Irish epic poem ‘The Midnight Court’ by Brian Merrimen. It’s been performed in Ireland and he can’t wait to bring it to the U.K.

Another dream come true?
Sean’s answers mingle satisfaction that at last things are beginning to happen for him with frustration at all the years spent waiting.

With so much obvious talent to hand it really begs the question, "Why so long before a solo album?" Sean and friends and backers eventually had to set up their own company to make "Cry of a Dreamer". Nobody else interested?

It would appear not. "We tried all the Irish record companies. One had a problem because I didn’t sing everything in Irish. Another thought I might become ‘too popular’". A commercial success on their hands? Heaven forbid. Another thought they were too small and he might get too big, another that they were too big and he was too small.

Talking to Sean now you get the sense of a man who has been struck in a traffic jam for a very long time and is just now getting his first glimpse of the open road. Not so much, ‘Too Much Too Soon’, as, ‘Too Late to Stop Now." He is enthusiastic about getting on the U.K. and European festival circuit in a big way next year, maybe touring in America where he lived for quite a while.

What it boils down to is that, for all his years on the go and his local fame, practically all of Sean’s musical reputation has been based on word of mouth. There’s a whole world out there with a great big pleasant surprise called Sean Tyrrell waiting for it. Whatever happens I’ll take bets that it won’t be twenty years before he makes another album.

All material © Phil Gatson 1994

"the Quiet Man" - Alan Macintosh Brown

From Galway to Clare, with time out in the USA – Sean Tyrrell tells Alan McIntosh Brown about his musical past, present and future.

In all the articles I’ve read to date about Sean Tyrrell – and there were plenty after the critical acclaim for his last album Cry of a Dreamer – he’s talked about other people rather than his own career. So, equipped with my patented reporter’s investigative kit, I went in search of the man himself during his brief tour of Scotland. I found him seated in the kitchen of the McLaren Hall after his very successful solo spot at the Killin Traditional Music and Dance Festival and asked him how he got in the music business.

"I was born in Galway" he says. "And some friends of mine by the names of Jack Geary and John Henry Higgins – people I’d known all my life but became friends with at about 20 or 21 – they were very interested in music and gave me my interest. Jack taught me how to tune the tenor banjo and gave me my first scale and I just took off on my own after that. We had a group called Freedom Folk. Actually Johnny Mulhern, who wrote three of the songs on the album, was a member of that for a while, so Johnny and myself go back a fair while."

One of the songs on the album takes us back to an Easter time. According to the sleeve notes, ‘Jack Geary was trying to teach harmony to John Henry Higgins, Seanin Conroy and myself. Three Blind Mice were also deaf to his endeavours; Mulhern would have been the fourth blind mouse. Long live The Freedom Folk and Apples in Winter (the originals circa 1972).’ It must have been an enjoyable time?

"Yes, it was great in a way, you know. I was six months playing a banjo and actually getting paid for it. Jeez, it was good; ten bob meant a lot in those days. We were singing mostly ballads. There was a folk club in Galway called the Forecastle Folk Club in the Enda Hotel and the biggest names in the parish played there – people like Davey Graham and Paul Simon. It was a great club – an amazing place. They tore it down in the end. Now they’re spending millions sort of trying to recreate it – nouveau antique, know what I mean?"

But even the bright lights of Galway couldn’t hold him and, like one or two Irishmen before, he crossed the Atlantic. What was his time like in America?

"Jack Geary and I went there. I was teaching in Belfast for a year but I didn’t really like teaching. I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher. I’d been taught by too many frustrated something-else’s. I didn’t want to become that so I thought I’d follow my chosen love, which was music. So I went with Jack and we started off at a place in the Catskill Mountains. The first job we had was as barmen plus music. That’s where I first came in contact with a tenor guitar, from a man called Vernon Roach, a hillbilly from West Virginia."

"But one of the customers there one night introduced us to a club in Manhattan called the John Barleycorn – a typical Manhattan Irish bar, you know, as un-Irish as could be! And the fact that you played the John Barleycorn meant a lot elsewhere, so it became our calling card. We started touring all over America – out to San Francisco where I met the Joe Cooley and other great musicians."

Eventually Sean decided to come back. Surely not through homesickness?

"Well, I always said I’d never take a straight job in America. Jack and split up after recording an album called Apples in Winter. We’re still great friends but we went out separate ways."

"the Life of a solo Performer"- Alan Macintosh Brown

So how is he enjoying the lonely life of a solo performer?

"I don’t like solo performing really but it’s naked economics that forces me. I don’t mind the travelling, which other people don’t seem to like, but what I miss are the other musicians on stage because I love playing off somebody else. I get great inspiration working off somebody else."

It’s some four years since Cry of a Dreamer and it’ll be certainly be a hard act to follow, but is there something in the pipeline?

"Yes, I’ve an album finished, apart from a small remix, but we’re supposed to be releasing it in October on my own label which I started up with the aid of some great friends in Galway, financial and otherwise."

His love of poetry led him to take the words of Brian Merrimen and compose a musical version of The Midnight Court, a poem of some 1200 lines described as an epic satire of 18th Century sexuality. When the production toured Ireland a few years ago it received great critical acclaim. Are there plans to tour it again>

"I’ve been asked again if we would put on the Midnight Court. It’s supposed to be coming off again next August. I’m crossing my fingers because it takes a lot out of me. It’s a big undertaking, like twelve or thirteen people and it’ll be going on in Lisdoonvarna if it goes on an possibly in Galway. But I’d really love if that came off."

Earlier, he’d walked on to the big open stage in front of a near-capacity audience and surprised most of us by launching into a couple of guitar tunes, giving up a history lesson on the Lament for Aughrim and how Fingal whupped the Danes without the need of golden goals of penalty shootouts.

As any listener who has heard the Cry of a Dreamer album will know, Sean Tyrrell is very much at home with words but he threw me by announcing before his first song that although having a love for poetry, he was strongly prejudiced against Yeats! As I re-read my notes to see if he had actually said that, he followed up by adding "until quite recently" and proceeded to give us his very sensitive version of The Stolen Child, following it with another guitar reel.

His voice is rich in texture and thought he’s a man of words, he’s not bound by a musical straitjacket, happily twisting them to suit the mood of the piece. Next came a song about The Burren, where he now lives, co-written with Phil Gatson and called The Lights of Little Christmas on which he played the mando-cello.

A song on the theme of the destruction of the planet – The Game’s Over – followed and then he introduced a traveller’s love song which he’d got from Dublin singer Liam Welden, describing him as one of Ireland’s jewels. Such was his build-up to this song that everyone in the hall was waiting expectantly to hear this gem when he changed his mind on the spur of the moment and went into a quirky song called Square – a Robert Service poem set to music.

Staying on this tack, he sang another novelty piece – which he dedicated to aging hippos (yes , his word) everywhere – called What a Wonderful Wedding Day , before endearing himself further to the audience by announcing that in his opinion The Wild Mountain Thyme was actually a Scots song and not an Irish one. We never did get the original Liam Weldon song, but were most happy to hear another learned from the same source – Starry Night.

As we finish, I tell Sean he’s the second Galwegian I’ve interviewed for this magazine, the other being Pearse Doherty at last year’s Saw Doctors gig in Aberfeldy. "Alberfeldy" he says. "That comes into some song. I can’t remember what it was." I suggest the Lock Tay Boat Song – ‘Nighean ruadh, your lovely hair has more glamour, I declare, than all the tresses rare ‘tween Killin and Aberfeldy’ and he gets excited. "That’s it! Jeez, I’ve made Killin at last!"

If there’s any justice in this world, Sean Tyrrell will be making a lot of places in the near future and the cry of this dreamer will be much welcomed in the land.