Tom’s many memories from 50 years of Shaskeen

Lifestyle – Tom Cussen founded Shaskeen in London in 1970, where it gained many fans among the Irish community. It was revived in Galway when he settled here a year later. Since then, it has been at the heart of the trad music scene and its members have included some of the country’s top performers. As a new album is released, he talks to JUDY MURPHY about friendship, gratitude and loss.

Anybody wanting to carry out a study of social life in Ireland from the early 1970s onwards could do worse than take a peek at Tom Cussen’s booking diaries for the trad band Shaskeen.

These give a glimpse into how rural Ireland went from being a place where people socialised seven nights a week in newly-built lounge bars of the 1970s, to one where discos took over from the singing lounges, and to the current time where nobody is going anywhere at all.

Tom has witnessed it all from the unique position of 50 years with Shaskeen, the group he founded in London in 1970 after being asked to do so by the owner of the Oxford Tavern in Kentish Town, at a time when London was full of Irish people.

Tom, from County Limerick, was one, having moved there in 1968.

“I was able to a play a bit of music before going over, but it was harmless enough,” he says. “I had a great interest in it – céilí, old-time and country.”

Tom bought his first banjo in a London pawn shop shortly after emigrating and learned to play it, using a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

A tee-totaller who didn’t go to pubs, Tom lived near Finsbury Park, and wasn’t part of London’s Irish scene.

Then, a friend who was also into music, told him that he’d heard Irish music coming from a local house on Sundays. They followed the sound one day and came to a bed-sit where a few people were playing. They asked Tom if he played and he told them he was learning banjo.

The musicians invited the young immigrants to join them for a Sunday session in a local pub that night, a mix of tunes and ballads. Tom loved it and found he was able to keep up. Afterwards a pound note was pressed into his hand. Bewildered, he asked what it was for and was told that each musician received a pound. It was his first paid gig, he says with a laugh, and he was hooked.

The banjo was coming into popularity in the folk and Irish music scene at the time, thanks to groups such as The Clancy Brothers and once Tom started playing publicly, he became part of a growing network.

He teamed up with fiddle player Maureen Minogue and flute player Seán McDonagh, both from Galway, for Sunday-morning sessions in the Oxford Tavern in Kentish Town. For the first few weeks, the clientele was made up of a few mainly English people, reading newspapers and accompanied by their dogs. After a while, the word got out and “the Paddys and Biddys were coming in”, he recalls with a laugh.

The owner then asked if Tom could put a band together for Friday nights, and he called on Maureen’s husband, accordion player Johnny Minogue, and Benny O’Connor, a Galway drummer whom he’d met at a Fleadh in London – they’d been in a band together for a competition.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

Get the Connacht Tribune Live app

The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.