A traditional music tour of Dublin pubs comes complete with gossip about Irish musicians, writes SIOBHÁN LONG
EVERYTHING YOU n/ever wanted to know about traditional music, dance, drink and the Irish language distilled into two-and-a-half harem scarem hours. Dublin’s Traditional Irish Music Pub Crawl delivers more than it says on the tin and, at €12 (plus whatever drinks you buy), it’s probably one of the cheapest hourly rates of entertainment you’ll find this side of 1989.
Kick off, slated for 7.30pm (each evening at the Oliver St John Gogarty pub), is actually a good 10 minutes later. They start as they mean to go on: at a meandering pace through stream-of-consciousness stories, peppered by tunes and songs. With an evidently recession-proof gathering of almost 70 punters, Mark and Trish, our two musician hosts, are possibly enjoying a larger audience than any other traditional musician on a showery summer’s evening in Dublin.
The paddywhackery Oliver St John Gogarty meeting point doesn't bode well. A motley collection of cartoonish portraits of every saleable Irishman (Brendan Behan, WB Yeats, Phil Coulter et al), with ne'er a whiff of a female to be found, is quickly consigned to the subconscious though, as our hosts launch into colourful meditations on trad music. They discuss the difference between a jig and a reel; the fact that it's usually easier to remember the composer of a tune – or at least the person who passed it on – than the title; and the differences between the trad music that's played at home and away. Like Guinness, Trish insists, Irish music is produced and consumed differently at home and abroad. It's a slightly dodgy proposition, particularly when delivered in a Temple Bar pub that prides itself as being the belly of the trad-tourist beast. But the audience of mostly Americans, with a smattering of Belgians, English and Germans, ponders its merits. Many of them are clearly well versed in the bands who've carved a niche for themselves far from home turf. Doug Faraday, from California, has seen Lúnasa play live in the US, and pleads a weakness for anything Donal Lunny's involved in, so he says he's happy to listen to first-hand stories of the music, recounted by musicians who blithely acknowledge that they'll leave it up to the audience to figure out what's true and what's not.
Onwards we amble to the Ha'penny Bridge Inn, the first of two family owned pubs which offer punters a decent taste of native Dublin drinking houses, though neither have a particular reputation for traditional music. The upstairs room in the Ha'penny Bridge Inn assumes the air of a cosy speakeasy (albeit one bathed in evening sunlight). Here Trish advises us to distinguish a reel from a jig by testing the rhythm to see if it mirrors the three-syllable "butterfly" (a jig in 6/8 time) or the four-syllable "caterpillar" (a reel in 4/4 time). A veteran of Lord of the Dance, Trish is a fiddler with a colourful history and deliciously gossipy tales of life on the road with the Flatley entourage.
Mark, a guitarist and singer, has his share of tales too, of Camden Town and of the relationship between Sean Nós songs and our history. Later, we ramble on to Brannigan's on Cathedral Street where vintage Hollywood posters (such as Roy Rogers in The Arizona Kid) vie for attention amid richly told tales of the Flight of the Earls, the cost of a fiddle bow and a meditation on a Sean Nós classic, Bean Pháidín. Mark ventures that, for sheer domestic entertainment, it's every bit as bawdy as an episode of the Jerry Springer show.
This is a diverting tour that’ll tickle the interest of anyone in search of a few insider tales of life in the parallel universe of trad music.
I never knew that: to buy a concertina requires the pocket of a (modest) Lotto winner and the tenacity of Al Capone. According to Trish, every stray concertina in the country has been bought by two well-known traditional musicians, resulting in an inability to source the instrument for less than €3,500-€4,000.
