A Drink with Shane MacGowan by Victoria Mary Clarke & Shane MacGowan

Author:Victoria Mary Clarke & Shane MacGowan [Clarke, Victoria Mary & MacGowan, Shane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330475662
Publisher: Pan Books

My Auntie Ellen was a very influential concertina player, but she was never recorded either. When I think about some of the stuff she used to play, she was incredibly fast, she had real Irish soul, when she played, she gave you the feeling that the whole of Ireland was dancing. When she tapped her foot it was as hard as a hammer, it was tighter than any drum machine, tighter than a nun’s cunt. You had this old woman in a dress and a hairstyle she hadn’t changed since the 1920s, because that was when she entered her middle ages, but you got her rocking on that concertina and every limb in her body would be shaking and the foot banging time would be like that classic rocker’s Chelsea boot, hammering out the time, like Elvis, she used to rock like a fucking bitch. She knew a few slow tunes but she wasn’t into playing that old crap, that old ethereal bollocks.

I’m going to go out one day and catch a banshee and cut her hair off and she’ll bawl and wail her fucking head off and I’m going to record it and put it out as the original Enya . . .

Well, by the time they started recording, Topic, and Grapevine, and people like that, the ballad groups had brought back interest in traditional Irish music, and people were rushing around the countryside going, ‘Everybody go to Clare! Everybody go to Clare!’ . . . know what I mean? Nobody went to Tipperary. So, my Uncle Mikey never got to record, because Paddy O’Brien left Tipperary, and went to Clare. Everybody had to go to Clare to get picked up. They thought it only happened in the west. They thought Irish was only spoken in the west. Like, have you ever heard of a famous Waterford piper? Or Waterford accordion player? Or Waterford fiddle player? You know what I mean, they don’t go to Waterford, they don’t think Waterford is . . . In fact, Waterford is a very traditional Irish county. And has a border with Tipperary, and it goes on through to Tipperary, and gets wilder as you go west. Until you hit my bit. Which is as far as you can go.

I couldn’t teach James any kind of Irish accordion style. The Tipperary one was the one I was trying to, cause that’s the one I know. And it’s very easy for a beginner, if you get him young enough. But it’s very difficult for an adult, because it uses the black notes, black buttons, as percussion. And they’d use that with a bodhran, which had been banned by Ceoltas. All the real musicians, country musicians, used bodhrans, but you wouldn’t see a bodhran in Clare. Until Sean O’Riada said, ‘Fuck it . . . I’m gonna conduct this bunch of idiots, who wouldn’t be able to play a note without my fucking genius.’ You know what I mean? He was a modest man, Sean O’Riada.

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