Novelist J.G. Ballard once wrote that we all come evolutionarily kitted out with a kind of village-sized capacity for making friends and acquaintances - a certain fixed number beyond which we tend to get confused. It's a notion which often comes to mind when you look at Altan, and the Donegal band's tightly-knit way of going about their business, life and loves.
The latest album is a country-drenched, song-heavy affair - recorded on their own £40,000 32-track Mackie digital studio, and mixed by Nashville producer Gary Paczosa, whom they befriended some years ago while mixing their live album, Heartsongs with Dolly Parton in Parton's theme-park complex, Dollywood. The new album title, Another Sky, refers to the fresh horizons opening up for the band since the tragic death of founder-member, Frankie Kennedy, partner to Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh. And they've had a rash of weddings in the last year or so: bouzouki player Ciaran Curran tied the knot recently, as did Ni Mhaonaigh to the band's brilliant young box-player Dermot Byrne. Yet the pair had bereavement in common - Byrne lost both a lover and a brother in a horrendous car crash in 1990.
Before that, the 32-year-old fiddler Ciaran Tourish, from Buncrana on the Inishowen peninsula, married his wife, Siobhan, in a church on a little island in Lough Swilly. They now live in Dublin, where Siobhan works for the Buncrana-born property developer, Pat Doherty.
Interestingly, the pair were in the same class in secondary school, although there apparently wasn't a whiff of romance until three years ago. "Och, you know, it just happened over the Christmas period. Her folks have a bar-restaurant bar up outside Buncrana called the Railway Tavern, and we just got chatting. And a couple of nights later we were doing a gig, and she came on down . . . I suppose you could say we were always childhood sweethearts, but we never knew it," he says in a burst of laughter.
I caught up with Tourish in the pair's apartment in Ballsbridge in Dublin, with paintings like Emer O'Connor's of Sinead O'Connor and her daughter, Roisin, and a drawing by Catherine Kingcome of the great Donegal fiddler, Tommy Peoples.
Indulgent with the tea and the time of day, Tourish is an compact, affable chap, the daft, easy laughter and the deceptively sleepy-looking eyes partly resulting from jetlag after finishing the first leg of the US tour last week. They play the Killarney Folk Festival tomorrow night (Saturday) before heading back out to the US for another month of sell-out gigs in 2000- to 3000-seater venues.
A level-headed, hard-working guy, Tourish has been both the road-driver and part-manager (especially since Frankie's death) for the band, yet he's also an incendiary musical ingredient - the drowsy, wayward ould beginning to a tune building up into wild, needle-point fingerwork, superb bow-work and a faster-than-thought handle on baroque arpeggios, in a style which is more than touched by the spectre of bluegrass.
`I don't really play in what's called the Donegal style, but being taught by Dinny McLaughlin" - a local teacher and musician of some renown - "I would have picked up his influences. Which would have been Michael Coleman, and the Sean Maguire end of things - and you couldn't classify that style geographically - more mentally than anything else.
"That, coupled with the improvisation that comes with bluegrass - just the way you would hear the same tune played. Like we've a few out-takes from the Dolly Parton project, like the McCloud Reel, and Alison Krauss and her band playing the same tune called Did You Ever Meet The Devil, Mr Joe? The same tune but all these variations . . .
"But I don't go completely crazy on a tune. There's nothing worse than starting off a tune that's recognisable and then going into something else that's completely, like, `Jesus, what's this?' When I'm playing solo, I wouldn't deviate that much. It's only when I've somebody else to bounce off that I would just do an odd wee thing here and there."
I wouldn't have minded being a barfly in Baltimore recently, when Tourish did a solo gig in a pub with Paul Brady. Tourish is now looking at a solo album in six months' time: "Everyone has their own pet projects. Dermot has his album, so I'll be doing the same, and come the time, doing bits of promotion for it, and gigs with whoever's on the album - just to have it out there, and for the record type of thing. But the main aim has to be the band . . . "
Of Inishowen in general, Tourish says: "There wouldn't have been a lot of music when I was growing up there, but in generations gone by, there would have been a lot of street players and Travellers, and a lot of Scottish influence." His own music is the product of "two generations of fiddle playing. Pat Mulhearne picked his up his music from those Travelling musicians, and he went on to teach Dinny McLaughlin, who played with Aileach. Dinny taught everyone in Inishowen and he taught dancing as well, and he's still playing away, but teaching is his main income."
Tourish started on the whistle when he was six years old, and moved on to the fiddle three years later: "I never found it hard work, - you know the way, like, your parents would be saying `come on, you have to do your practice'. For me it was the opposite. I was at it day and night; I had everybody in the house tortured.' "
He attended weekly sessions in the local Comhaltas branch, Craobh na hInse, and he went the competition route, even coming "second or third in a solo fiddle competition, I can't remember . . . but it was more about the crack, and getting out there and meeting other musicians."
He bumped into the band a decade ago, playing sessions in Hiudai Beag's pub in Bunbeg, Co Donegal. "Nowadays they only have a session of a Monday night, which Mairead's father conducts. But back then, it was every night, with some of the best players in the country would call in there. But I suppose, like anything else in life, people and musicians move on."
At this stage, the US is Altan's biggest market, although Britain, Europe and Australia make up annual tours, while they've built up a huge following in Japan in the last three years: "The last time we were out there we had Seamus Begley and Jim Murray with us. The Japanese couldn't figure Seamus out at all - he'd just strike into a song at any given time, in the middle of a restaurant, anywhere."
I have to ask the inevitable question about the time Frankie died: "It was always Frankie's wish that the band would continue, and I suppose it was Mairead's call after that. But there was no crisis meeting, we didn't take time out, we were back out on the road within a month after Frankie died, but that's the nature of the work.
"Frankie had been off the road for a while anyway, and he didn't want Mairead hanging around at home while he was sick, so he was pushing her to go on the road because he was looking at the bigger picture. But a couple of times Mairead had to come back from Germany or the States if he had taken a bad turn, and I'm sure that must have been a long journey home. But that's the way it goes. She's a strong woman."
ABOUT a year after Frankie died, she and Dermot Byrne got together: "Sure, it surprised people, but in a nice sort of a way after something so tragic." What about the inevitable glare of publicity? "That's part of the game - but och, there was all sorts of stupid headlines in the tabloids, like `Mairead Hides Secret Lover' and all this bullshit."
Before I left, I had it in mind to ask him to play a tune, maybe one of his own or something like The Green Fields of Glentown, a tune written by one of Tourish's big influences, Tommy Peoples. His fiddle was there in the corner, perched on its special little stand, looking for all the world like an ornament. And at one stage he had said: "Coming off a tour, the last thing I want to do for a week is play. I have to get it out of my system for a while, because you can overdo that side of it too."
Instead, as I was going, we chatted about Peoples's music: "Tommy was a Garda at once stage, you know that? And he never even once issued a parking ticket. I don't think you'd get away with that now . . . "
Another Sky is on release from Monday on Virgin Records
