Planxty drew from a deep well of traditional music and set the standard for others to follow. Siobhán Long on a new book about the raggle taggle kings of trad
They belong in that pantheon populated by the few: JFK, Elvis, John Lennon - and Planxty. Their music traces a time line in the sand, with everything before it belonging to another era, and everything afterwards coming into existence with the inevitable knowledge that comparison is unavoidable. Ask any traditional or folk music fan when they first heard Planxty, and chances are they'll be able to tell you the precise moment that the band's sound reached their eardrums. For anyone who belatedly came to their music, following their all-too-brief reformation in 2003, it was an epiphany that cast a long light across the countless musicians who'd reaped the benefits of Planxty's groundbreaking innovations ever since they first appeared together in 1972.
When groups reform after a long absence, the results are often disappointing, to put in mildly. But when Liam Ó Floinn, Dónal Lunny, Andy Irvine and Christy Moore gathered round the hearth in Lisdoonvarna in October 2003 for a reprise, they stoked the fires with a ferocity that nobody expected.
Ó Floinn's pipes had long been acknowledged as a crucial but eminently subtle force in Planxty's arsenal of sound, but now they were a veritable scaffold on which Lunny's bouzouki, Irvine's mandolin and guitar and Christy's labyrinthine lyrics could stretch and soar, anchored to infinity, yet earthed by Ó Floinn's immutable sense of self.
MUSIC JOURNALIST AND broadcaster Leagues O'Toole has conjured a world apart in his biography of this unlikely foursome, The Humours Of Planxty. For stalwart fans, it's a forensic examination of the band's past. For latecomers and the newly-converted, it traces a picaresque pathway through the byways and bothareens which lured Planxty ever-wayward.
The crucial difference between Planxty and so many who came before and after was that the whole was unquestionably greater than the sum of the parts. Way back in 1972, Dónal Lunny was, by his own admission, "a left-handed Liffeysider" who could trace his first foray into music all the way back to piano lessons from an Estonian woman who lived near his Newbridge home when he was no more than five years of age. He and Christy Moore have often been seen as conjoined twins, sharing a primary school, forming an early band, The Rakes Of Kildare (with Dónal's brother, Frank), and careening through countless incarnations that just happened to encompass two seminal line-ups: Planxty and Moving Hearts.
Andy Irvine (a former child actor who gamely yielded top billing to Gina Lollobrigida in A Tale Of Five Cities in 1950) brought a particular sensibility to the foursome that went a long way towards etching their identity as a thing apart. Although London-born and bred, his appetite for mining the subtlest seams of European folk music, from Clare to Bucharest and beyond, fuelled Planxty's repertoire with such joint-challenging tunes as Mominsko Horo and Smeceno Horo in 9/16 time. He was the one who bestowed upon Dónal Lunny his first bouzouki, the instrument itself propelling Lunny into a world where complex and challenging rhythms could be conjured and celebrated on a stringed instrument with an abandon previously unimaginable, particularly among the guitar-toting fraternity who were satisfied with three chords - and, on a bad night, the truth.
Christy Moore owes much of his musical identity to Planxty. Prior to that, he was a folk singer, heavily influenced by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem; his round-vowelled delivery of the standards, from The Four Green Fields to Mary From Dungloe never managing to do much more than hint at a singer with a tincture of talent that might set him apart from the more genteel folkies like Johnny McEvoy and, eh, Luke Kelly.
THE 2005 RELEASE of the Planxty box set was revelatory in that it depicted the musical evolution and revolution that characterised these four musicians with forensic precision. Who would have thought that, in the midst of a folk/bluegrass revival courtesy of the Coen Brothers' O Brother Where Art Thou?, an a capella reading of Down In The Valley would emerge, having been recorded by this famous four some 25 years earlier, replete with Liam Ó Floinn's singing, and not his piping? And only a genius or a prophet could have anticipated the combustible energy that would be released when Planxty married Raggle Taggle Gypsy with a regal version of Tabhair Dom Do Lámh, Ó Floinn's pipes swooping in to catch the melody line like an eagle in pursuit of its prey.
From there, the most natural thing in the world seemed to be the absorption of (selectively chosen) English folk songs into Planxty's repertoire. Moore embarked on the epic voyage around Little Musgrave in all its 26-verse glory, recounting a murderous tale of skulduggery, betrayal and forbidden love, and featuring a haughty Lord Barnard, his errant wife and her lovelorn suitor, the eponymous Little Musgrave, secreted in the romance-laden Bucklesfordberry. Lunny and Irvine stitched their trademark filigree pattern through the lyric, underscoring here, shading there, with Liam's pipes idly presaging the hero's betrayal by the lady's foot page. Rarely does a story enjoy such a musically dense arrangement, each instrument utterly in concert with the changing mood of the tale.
Planxty came to be at a time when Dublin was a storehouse of music. Dónal Lunny's pulse was rising to the sounds of jazz, folk and rock. Andy Irvine was a long-time Woody Guthrie aficionado and was flush from the success of Sweeney's Men. Liam Ó Floinn brought a particularly refined sensibility (and an undeniable credibility among the traditional fraternity) from his years under the tutelage of Séamus Ennis (whose pipes he rightly inherited), Willie Clancy and Na Píobairí Uilleann, and Christy Moore had notched up countless road miles - and imbibed and ingested chemical infusions of every shape and hue - while touring the folk clubs of the UK. The foursome converged in Kildare for the seminal 1972 recording of Christy Moore's Prosperous, and the rest became history in the making.
THE BAND'S SECRET lay in an insatiable appetite for treading routes unknown, for testing the boundaries of the music to its very limits. As Liam Ó Floinn wisely notes, kindred spirits Irvine and Lunny "never held a tune down", nor, can it be said, did Liam himself. All four relished the veiled iconoclasm laid bare in Bean Pháidín and The Good Ship Kangaroo. All four made no apologies in their rabid pursuit of fresh interpretations of the classics, whether it was the languid Lakes of Pontchartrain or a Dennis Murphy polka set. What Planxty did was re-oxygenate the blood of the tradition, rejuvenating haggard tunes and re-interpreting jaded songs for the listening ears of a new generation. Little did they anticipate that the music would continue to challenge listeners decades after they first convened (although they've seen little of the royalties from their numerous recordings, thanks to Phil Coulter's sale of their back catalogue to Shanachie Records).
Like so many explosive creative collaborations, Planxty's path never ran too smooth. The first split came in the mid-1970s. They regrouped in 1978, sundering again in 1982. Their more recent reunion appears destined to be short-lived too. While much talk lingered on the prospect of a sojourn in the recording studio to cast their collective net over a swathe of new tunes and songs, the plans of Planxty Mark III thus far have failed to materialise. Still, luckily for their scattered audience of fans (now spanning all of life's decades), they've bequeathed a share of fine recordings that capture the magic - impeccably.
• The Humours Of Planxty by Leagues O'Toole is now out in hardback, published by Hodder Headline Ireland (€22.99)