The CLARE SET

Notes from Clare, winter 1974

A memoir by John Tams

The four flights of stairs that led to a small office overlooking a perfect, somehow miniature Georgian square held an expectation of meeting a giant. The office of Claddagh Records, Dublin, and chiefest of all Chieftains, Paddy Moloney.   He sat behind a hugely imposing mahogany desk and seeing us sprang from his chair, a man of massive status and small stature, exclaiming ‘You are very welcome: cream cakes!’ – and was gone – leaving us in the company of the desk, a roaring fire and a mantel piece lined with last month’s Christmas cards. Curiosity overcame us – one from Peter Sellers, another Julie Christie, a third simply signed ‘Margaret’, (judging by the embossing that’ll be HRH then) – and he was back, laden with chocolate éclairs, cream horns and the second best brew in Ireland after Guinness – tea.

First stop, day one of a ten-day visit – myself and Neil Wayne.  I was Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, trying to help fulfil his dream of making a series of albums in the spiritual home of the concertina – County Clare.  But before we set off on our odyssey we needed to visit the King’s Chamber.  Duly and creamily anointed we took our leave of Dublin across the Curragh.

There is no order to the jumble of those days.  My role was to record what was presented to me – a Nagra, a crossed-pair of Sennheisers, a box of blank tapes and an enormous crate of batteries.  Location and detail deny me: I remember high in a room off Capel Street, Dublin, recording the great John Kelly; sitting in the back room of Gerald Haugh’s ancient longhouse; and by the fireside with the iconic Solus Lillis.  There’s moments that flash back but in random screeds.

I took a bed in Astacia Burke’s ‘Rooming House for Working Gentlemen’ - a matter of shillings in those days – in Ennis; a pleasant enough room with a comfortable double bed.  I settled to slumber until probably the back of 12 midnight, when the door burst open and after much banging and crashing someone of twice my weight and treble my intake of booze joined me in my repose.   I had, it transpired, only paid for half of the bed.  

Bernard O’Sullivan’s house held a splendid welcome.  The day was ice cold, snow lay on the turf, we were expected – Neil’s research was exemplary.  The ‘boys’ had turned up – seated by the range – their socked feet in the oven thawing their toes.   Drawn to the table and each of us gifted a daughter to serve our every need, we were treated to the finest ham and fresh-baked soda bread which lay just beyond the toes of the oven’s feet-warmers.  No grander chef could have prepared a better feast with its added piquancy and as soon as our plates looked the slightest bit empty, they were replenished by our personal handmaidens.  The gift of charity and welcome was beginning to overwhelm me.  There was not much to go round here, but through some age-old and simple truth what could go round would be shared equally, fairly and with great and genuine grace.  It moved me, and when I reflect it still does - for I see it so rarely thirty-odd years on.

I won’t speak of music – the players herein speak for themselves.  I would never choose one above another – they reflected their particular influence, their place in their community, their particular corner.  Let us not forget this is a mechanical instrument, in modern terms digital, and in the hands of these masters, and of the occasional mistress, a unique voice in the culture of Irish music - in the culture of County Clare.

Doolin was and remains in my memory a place of mystery. Like Brigadoon there always seemed about it a sense of the fantastical; here today – disappeared tomorrow.  Just a shout away from the Cliffs of Moher, (the next landfall is New York) where boulders the size of double-decker buses bash the base of the mountainous cliff, for those brave enough to crawl out on their bellies and look into the void.

Gussie O’Connor’s Bar lay just behind Gussie O’Connor’s Grocery, handy when a slice of cheese or ham was required to accompany the Guinness.  Served in green-hued flint glasses elegantly impressed with arched patterns around their circumference, the drinkers would call their next pint when the Guinness level dropped below ‘the chapel windows’.   Vigilant bar tenders kept watch over levels, preparing in advance the next draught to avoid a gap in the continuity and the serious embarrassment waiting might engender.  

Pakie Russell (concertina) was a regular at O’Connor’s, offering to build me a house for £1500 including advice on how to husband the turf.  His brothers Miko (whistle, flute and song) a childlike gentle innocent with a penchant for chocolate, and Gussie (flute and whistle) mostly silent, were reunited over two sessions between Pakie’s window of opportunity ’twixt a few to start and a few to follow, Miko’s chocolate intake and Gussie’s rare visit to O’Connor’s.

They were the stuff of tradition, the stuff of the Bayou, the Blue Mountains but most particularly the stuff of Ireland.  Out of time, they knew their music was old.  It had a quiet delicacy, a conversational tenderness, fragile and unlike anything I’d ever heard before or since.

The omnipresent Stack Ryan was spoken of by almost every player we recorded.  Elevated to a deity to which all musicians aspire, the mere mention of his name wrought an atmosphere of awe and wonder.    He sounded like a gunslinger, John Wayne with a concertina – Stack Ryan was the Sheriff.

Perhaps in my naïveté I thought that’s what happens now.  I go around, place to place, recording players and singers.   Little did I know that what I was hearing through the headphones at those sessions was a moment of culture held magnetically on tape, so rare that much of it was never to be heard again.  Styles change, people get old and die.  I’m glad some of those players are still about us and I mourn those that aren’t but what I celebrate most is their unique and individual spirit that brought them quite simply to play music.

John Tams