The CLARE SET

From here to Clare, winter 1974

Some notes by Neil Wayne

I’d always talked a better concertina than I played.

It was in autumn 1965 when I invested the first few of many pounds of student grant in a stunning 64-key Wheatstone Maccann Duet concertina  - fifty bob in the Acton junk shop, hard by Brunel College.

Couldn’t play it – but loved its bits and its style, and soon found my way to the Battersea Evening Institute Concertina Classes – The tutor was Frank E Butler (grandson of George Jones – who was Charles Wheatstone’s workshop boy in 1844 - and by 1880 was the major concertina maker and dealer in London) – and class members included Tommy Williams (last employee of Lachenals in 1935), Harry Crabb (last London concertina-maker) and various senior players who were music hall and variety stars in faded pre-war years.  All were in the venerable International Concertina Association; all played an amazing repertoire; and all told amazing tales of the glory days of the Concertina.  I learned to play Silent Night. Just.

So began many years of collecting ancient instruments, and recording & interviewing the many older players still to be found around England.  

Then came the call to ‘look up Tommy McCarthy – he plays in a great Irish style’; though a Clare Man, Tommy now lived in London, (one of the many who’d made the move in search of work, and who’d transformed the pub sessions scene in the capital) and I was able to meet him and his daughter Jackie at a little fleadh one weekend:  I had never heard such playing – and he told of his many friends and influential musicians still playing back home in County Clare, on Ireland’s far west coast.  I took down all the addresses he gave me and resolved to make a pilgrimage one day….

By late 1973, I began getting in touch with many of the Clare players, and with Sean O’Dwyer in Dublin, a great authority on the concertina in Clare, who knew many of these musicians; Diaries were inspected, letters written, maps studied, and in early 1974, sessions set up – first in Dublin at Sean O’Dwyer’s house, and then across the breadth of Ireland to Clare.

My stalwart old friend John Tams, himself a tasty concertina player, had recorded many Derbyshire-based old singers, and he volunteered to ride an invaluable shotgun to my old van, and masterminded the Nagra and the chunky Sennheisers in numerous sessions in windswept farms, bars and cottages all across the county of Clare.

Tam has written of the welcome, the friendship, the atmosphere and the music; I remember our total immersion into this gentle culture, and into the superb repertoires of all the Clare concertina players, that danced in my head day and night.

And now, we liberate those early ’70s recordings – with more from the original sessions – and thanks to Michael Tubridy, Shay Fogarty, Muiris O Rócháin, Noel Hill, Janet Topp-Fargion at the British Library, Tony Engle at Topic Records, Rebecca Brew and the Scoil Éigse Mrs Crotty for their help in adding to the tale, and for making these treasures available.