Dónal Lunny, who is celebrating his 60th birthday, looks back at Planxty and Moving Hearts, and forward to new Celtic jazz sounds. He talks to Arminta Wallace
Here's something you maybe didn't know about Dónal Lunny. Once upon a time, when he was an impoverished art student, he crafted silver jewellery and sold it on the street.
Now, think of the stuff you do know about Dónal Lunny. He's a founder- member of seminal trad bands Planxty, the Bothy Band and Moving Hearts. He has worked with everybody who is anybody on the music scene in Ireland, from Altan through Bono to Elvis Costello, Mary Black, Frank Harte, Sinéad O'Connor and Sharon Shannon, to name a few. He has set Seamus Heaney to music. He gave us the first, and perhaps the only, trad boy-band ever, Emmet Spiceland. He's a composer and producer as well as a consummate performer on keyboards, bodhrán, mandolin, guitar and his trademark bouzouki. He's also a member of Aosdána. Silver, schmilver. For most of his adult life, and he celebrates his 60th birthday this month, Dónal Lunny has been a craftsman who spins musical threads of pure, intricate gold.
Yet he is the quiet man of Irish music. Scanning the lobby of the Westbury Hotel in Dublin, where we've arranged to meet, I can't see him. Wait, though. There he is, tucked into an unpretentious corner by the window, dressed in jeans and an anorak. It's only later, when we get up to leave, that I realise he is also equipped with two bouzoukis and a laptop, tucked even more unpretentiously away behind the oversized Westbury sofa. It's a bit like the way he behaves on stage. He never does the "look at me, I'm a rock star" thing. He's not a singer and he's not a showman. Once the music is up and running, however, you'll find Lunny at the very core of it.
Though he was born in Tullamore and grew up in Newbridge, Co Kildare, Lunny's father came from Enniskillen and his mother from the Donegal Gaeltacht. The family spent long summers in Rannafast, where the many Lunny children - including Dónal's brother, Manus, who is also a highly respected musician - were steeped in traditional music and song.
Back in Kildare there were lessons in classical piano, which young Dónal flunked in spectacular fashion.
"The teacher was a local woman who used to come to the house," he says. "I drove her demented, and eventually was allowed to give it up, which was pretty unusual at the time." He shrugs, abashed. "It seemed easier to learn it off by heart than to read the music."
His sisters report that when they were struggling through Mozart sonatas, their brother, having heard any given piece once, would sit down and reproduce it with note-perfect accuracy.
Lunny, meanwhile, settled on the guitar. Why? A huge grin.
"The guitar was as cool as denim jeans," he says. Those were the days of the folk revolution. People used to buy guitars on the way to the fleadh ceoils and turn up with them slung across the shoulder - hey presto, I'm a musician.
"That wasn't so bad," recalls Lunny, "because while you could pose with a guitar over your shoulder, you had to know something about it to actually play it. With the bodhrán you could just bang away, and it made its way into sessions and did terrible damage. The piper Seamus Ennis was once asked: 'Should the bodhrábe played?' 'Yes,' he said. 'It should be played - with a penknife.' "
Such was the state of the traditional scene when Lunny came to Dublin, ostensibly to study art. He shared a flat with his childhood buddy from Prosperous, Christy Moore.
"We were an odd couple," Lunny recalls. "Christy went off to work in the bank every day and I went to art school. Eventually, we set up a regular gig at Slattery's in Capel Street. It was called the Mug's Gig, because only mugs would play it. Nobody had any money. But that turned pretty quickly into Planxty."
PLANXTY TURNED INTO a legend. Recognised both here and abroad as one of the most successful ensembles in the history of Irish music, it's easy to forget how innovative the band was.
"Andy Irvine was one of the biggest influences on me at that stage," Lunny says. "He was interested in all kinds of avant-garde stuff: Terry Riley, Soft Machine, music from the Balkans. He played me a tape of La Mystère des Voix Bulgares 25 years before everyone else discovered it."
Another new sound was that of Liam O'Flynn's uilleann pipes, being used in arrangements of songs such as The Cliffs of Dooneen and The Raggle Taggle Gypsy for the first time. And then there was Christy Moore.
"Christy went off to England for five years and gigged around, travelling around in a van and singing 363 nights of the year," says Lunny, with a chuckle. "That's how he learned to think on his feet with audiences. If somebody puts their head up at one of Christy's concerts, he takes a pop at them. That was what made Planxty - that very real link with the audience."
Typically, Lunny has analysed the elements of Planxty's success while ignoring his own considerable contribution. One day he was experimenting with the exotic instruments Irvine had amassed on various voyages through central Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, when he happened to pick up a long-necked lute.
"I loved the sound of the bouzouki from the first moment," he says. "I played it for three hours - so much so that Andy said: 'Here, take it and leave me in peace'. Which was incredibly generous, when you think about it."
In less than a month Lunny had abandoned the guitar and was working full-time on the bouzouki, adapting the instrument to his own specifications.
There can be no doubt that the bouzouki brought something quite new to the trad scene.
"It's a simple, clean sound," says Lunny. "A cleaner sound than the guitar. It has just four strings, and so chords don't have a third."
He holds his hand out, making the shape of chords in his fingers, singing the notes. Wasn't he, though, also affected by the bouzouki's slightly metallic, very Balkan soundscape?
"Ah. Well, that's a whole different subject," he says. "Because what that meant was that for me, very quickly, it became a percussion instrument."
Lunny wasn't just using a different instrument - he was using it in a different and wholly idiosyncratic way.
The topic of accompaniment in traditional music is a complex and sometimes vexed one, in an art form whose roots lie deep in unaccompanied song. But art forms, as Lunny points out, don't remain static.
"Céilí bands were revolutionary in their day," he says. "Some of them had a sax, and the piano was there, pounding away. It must have given a solid sound for dance music which was, in its early days, quite new."
THERE ARE THOSE who say we have Dónal Lunny to thank - or blame - for the sound of traditional music as we now hear it in Ireland. Others maintain that, as with the French Revolution, it's far too early to tell. Looking back over his career, is there anything in particular which pleases him?
"I've been lucky enough to follow some things through to their conclusion and say: 'Okay, nailed. Sorted,' " he says. "Some of the Planxty things, I'd feel like that about."
It doesn't always happen, he admits. Recordings are especially tricky, and he knows plenty about recordings. An online discography lists a whopping 84 albums that feature Lunny's name - and notes that the list is "probably incomplete". He's busy adding to it, even as we speak. In fact, as soon as he gets a chance he directs the conversation away from himself towards the singers and bands with whom he is currently working. There's a woman called Eivør from the Faroe Islands - mention of Eivør inspires a detour into an animated discussion of Icelandic DNA - and a Celtic jazz outfit from Bristol called Carmina.
"Very, very sweet music," Lunny says. "Very tender. And they're brilliant musicians. It's nice to be working on things like that."
He shades his eyes against the sun and laughs. "It's nice to be working, for God's sake."
With any luck, he'll be working for a long time to come. Happy birthday, Dónal Lunny.
• Dónal Lunny is the subject of an Arts Lives documentary, Follow the Music, to be screened on RTÉ1 on Tue at 10.15pm