Ronnie Drew and Eleanor Shanley have plundered the songs of Nick Cave, Neil Young and Tom Waits with eclectic results, writes Siobhán Long
Ronnie Drew guffaws at the very suggestion that his latest CD, El Amor de mi Vida, recorded with his now regular collaborator, Eleanor Shanley, is an attempt to strike a blow at the creeping conservatism of the listening public. A kick against the pricks? A fitting riposte to an endemic ageism that would rather see him tucked safely in a snug rather than ripping it up with borrowings from Eels, Neil Young, Tom Waits and Nick Cave?
"I suppose I can understand why people would expect both Eleanor and myself to come out with a 'traditional' recording," he offers, with an obvious appetite for unpicking the threads that define an artist's public persona. "Essentially though, I'm a purveyor of songs, and it's great not to get stuck in the one genre, to broaden your horizons. We both find certain songs simply strike a chord in us, and others might make a sort of a whimsical impression on us, but that guides us towards the song selections."
Not that Ronnie Drew is a stranger to unlikely collaborations. Having shared a mic with Antonio Breschi, Rory Gallagher and Jah Wobble, it's probably safe to assume that he has no great penchant for recycling past glories in the (un)holy name of record sales.
"Eleanor and I put a lot into this," Drew explains, "so that we'd go with songs that'd complement both our voices. We weren't setting out to make a record that'd sell by the bucketload, necessarily."
There's still a certain resistance among the public to the unknown, Drew suggests, and this conservatism doesn't serve any musician, regardless of the genre of music.
"Most musicians I know have a catholic taste," Drew maintains, and it's this primal spirit of adventure that informs the wilful eclecticism of El Amor de mi Vida.
"We branched out on this album," Eleanor Shanley says, carving a sweeping arc in the air with her hand, as if to gather every musical style into her gabháil. "But you know, I sing Sé Fáth mo Bhuartha because I just love the sentiment expressed in it: this woman has everything, the milk, and honey and bees, but the one thing that's missing is the man. And we sing Nick Cave's Henry Lee, which I only realised when we decided to sing it, that it's a traditional song."
So, while Drew gives it bottle on the stalwart tradition embroiled in The Verdant Braes of Screen, both he and Shanley had little difficulty bending and stretching their vocal cords to take on El Amor de mi Vida (The Love of my Life), one of the last songs written by the late Warren Zevon. It's a song that also gave Drew the chance to relive the glories of a youth spent working the tapas bars of Spain.
"In the late Fifties we just went off and chanced our arm," he says. "I didn't want to work, basically, so I went off, and the beauty of it is that because I learned my Spanish in pubs and restaurants, my accent is quite convincing. The other part, my grammar, is arseways!"
DREW'S SOCIALIST SPIRIT is another unlikely driving force behind the pair's decisions to shake up their repertoire.
"In such a capitalist society as this, it's hard to do anything different, because people run with the herd so much," he says. "But you always live in hope, and this is Eleanor's and my contribution to changing that."
The Good Old Days, by Eels, is one of the most startling covers on the album: a plainchant yin to the yang of Gladys Knight's infamously effusive live recording, The Way We Were. With its opening couplet of "I know I'm not too much of a bargain/ You know that's not what you bargained for", delivered by Drew in a suitably life-worn growl, and countered by Shanley's flyaway vocals, the pair transform one of Eels's throwaway beauties.
"The minute we heard that, we both loved it," says Shanley . "It's a really good story for a duet, even though it wasn't that originally." It's the song's simple wisdom that appealed to Drew. "I like it because nobody's expressing any great pride or self-pity. It's saying 'everything's not perfect, but we'll get on with it'. We're not all Sharon Stone and George Clooney. We're not all millionaires. Life isn't like that. It's a reminder that life can be good, if you make the effort."
Neil Young's When God Made Me, was a must-have, according to Shanley, in light of the impact of George Dubya's right-wing stewardship. "I chose that song," she offers, drawing on her recent experience as a development worker with Self Help Development in Uganda and Ethiopia, "because I think it's a great comment on the world as it is today; that religion and God are used to create so many wars. It really pinpoints the preciousness that some people feel, as if they're the only one on the planet. I really think that's why the world is in such a mess, because religion isn't being used to create a spiritual bond between people. It's separating people. It's our job, for the short time we're here on the planet, to look after one another, not to kill one another."
As a self-confessed journeyman, Drew welcomed the arrival of such a perfectly formed gemstone as Young's to his door, its lyric crying out to be interpreted rather than simply parroted.
"You must make a song your own," he insists. "And I can't imagine singing that song without digging underneath its surface. That's what music is all about."
Drew and Shanley are no strangers to fervent musical expression, so the scathing perspective of Young's diatribe sits easily with both of them.
"I've sung The Magdalene Laundries and The Glasgow Lullaby," Shanley notes, "and they have pretty hard, striking messages, so I think audiences who know us would expect us to face right up to a subject in the way that song does."
Bob Dylan's Farewell (a variation on The Leaving of Liverpool) is an ode to the road, and to the inevitability of emigration, that might, ironically, find more resonance among young immigrants who've come to Ireland in search of work.
"When I heard that song first," Shanley recounts, "the lines that struck me were: 'With my hands in my pockets and my coat collar high/ I will travel unnoticed and unknown'. It's so true that it closely reflects this country these days. There are so many people here just trying to earn a living wage, and so many of them are invisible."
DREW HAS A different take on it, though. "I wasn't thinking of economic migration at all when I was singing that song. When I was young, nobody had any money anyway. It wasn't Angela's Ashes grinding poverty but it was just the norm. There was no question of buying houses. Pensions? Hah! I remember meeting people who'd taken the permanent pensionable jobs after school, and by 43 or 44 years of age, they were twisted and bitter. The way I looked at it was that you can't always wait for the green man to cross the road. Sometimes you have to go when it's red - to get to the other side."
El Amor de mi Vida is on the Daisy label