Last Night’s Fun

On the joys of Irish Traditional Music

Last Night’s Fun was the title of a book by the Belfast poet and flute player Ciaran Carson. It is one of my favourite books, detailing music sessions in bars and back rooms, morning after breakfasts, night before craic (or crack as Ciaran maintains) and the minutiae of a flute maker’s workshop. I love this book because it encompasses everything I love about Irish traditional music. The off-stage, unadorned, pure and social music I love. As I sat last night having a drink and a chat with the renowned Irish cellist Neil Martin, it occurred to me to explain wine through the lens of Irish traditional music. And in a way I could explain the music to wine enthusiasts going the other way. It’s about terroir, the idiosyncratic particularities of an area or a person and how they make that tune, or that wine, different and personal to them. It is the human touch. The thing which cannot be produced or reproduced either by machine or by factory or by AI.

It has occurred to me recently that I don’t think Irish traditional music in its best form has any place on the stage. This may sound odd of me to say, and there are those who will think it reactionary, or even outrageous of me to say so. Particularly those of us who make a living off of putting it on the stage. But the stage doesn’t suit the music. The music must be twisted and disfigured to make it applicable to a stage. Worse still, it looses spontaneity and the participation of the audience. You see, in Irish traditional music there is no audience so to speak. There are only people playing to entertain themselves. And there is no room for the passive audience. Ideally, a song, a tune, a story or a dance can be performed by everyone in the room. And so I see the placing of the music on a stage and the creation of a passive, paying audience as in fact reactionary. An inherently democratic art form has been warped into another commercial venture. Any traditional musician will tell you that the best music is played after the gig. If you are lucky enough and determined enough to stay up til the wee hours with the doors of the bar firmly shut, or the obliging hotel barman serving the stragglers you can hear a much more pure and human music being played from the remnants of an over-produced concert. Those are the moments we all live for. The songs are sung in reaction to the company. Tunes are played with the vitality of something newly discovered, not over-rehearsed.

It is no secret to those who know me or have spent time in my restaurant when musicians are there that I care about music and the company of musicians more than anything else. Much more so than food or wine. Because for me it is a purer and more democratic form of culture and leisure. And it is wild and sad and joyous and exhilarating. Musicians are welcome in my restaurant as the old poets of Ireland were welcome in the feasting halls of the Irish chieftains. They are guests of honour. And honoured I am when they come to me. Many of the greats have came through the door in recent weeks and months and I never tire of seeing them and feeding them. But what does occur to me is the passivity of the civilized English audience who, having been asked to please give some silence to the player or singer, sit politely and wait for it to end, clapping graciously, with perhaps a kind word in the ear of the musician at the end. Never does anyone else join in the performance, nor do they offer to buy the musicians a drink, nor can they offer a contribution of their own to the day’s festivities. It is simply appreciated, thanked kindly, and moved on from. In the same way one would attend a concert or, in this case, patronise a restaurant.

But the first thing we need before we can have music is silence. And so that is why I have no piped music in the restaurant. To allow conversation to flow, and, on occasion, to allow for the spontaneous eruption of live music. Some say I am adverse to music because I do not play it in the restaurant. Quite the opposite in fact. And like my good friend Piero who makes wine in Italy and is a virtuoso musician, I love silence. Piero in fact won’t even have music on in the car. The constant noise of piped music throughout the entire day clutters our ears. And does not allow for real music to happen. The real music, made between human beings, far from the stage lights, in small bars and back room kitchens and anywhere late at night that one can get another drink and play another tune and maybe she’ll give us Lough Erne’s Shore and maybe I’ll sing you the one I got ten months for.