Traditional tunes just seem to hit a different note

Date Published: {J}

I’d love with all my heart to love traditional music, sean nós dancing, ceilis, sessions in the pub – but the awful truth is that I’d actually have a more enjoyable evening sticking needles in my eyes.

And I can only envy those who rub their hands in anticipation of another evening spent listening to six people playing fiddles, bodhrans, banjos and – the most evil of all instruments – tin whistles while supping pints on a pub with a big open fire.

I just don’t get Irish music and I wish I did because there are critically acclaimed bands and artists like De Dannan or the Chieftains, who are appreciated by mass audiences without a drop of Irish blood in their veins right across the world.

I’ve always had a grá for Plaxty but only when they’re singing – the instrumental stuff provides an opportunity to make tea or use toilets.

Irish dancing is another mystery to me – why parents would want to dress their little darlings up in ringlets and what look to me suspiciously embroidered bedspreads is beyond me. And that’s just the boys.

There’s a rigidity to competitive dancing that suggests they’re modelled on the movement of a swan – utterly still on top, but pedalling manically under the waterline. You look at a child with head still and arms anchored to their sides, and at the same time their little feet pummelling like piston engines.

I loved Riverdance as an interval act at Eurovision; like everyone else, it raised the hairs on the back of my neck – but the notion of sitting through a couple of hours or it or Lord of the Dance or whatever other derivations we have now would be more pain than any man could bear.

And yet these shows pack them in across the planet, in places where they wouldn’t know Irish music or culture from a hole in the wall.

Riverdance could have half a dozen different companies on the go at any one time and still they cannot sate the international appetite for their tap dancing and choreographed steps.

And in their defence, they made Irish dancing sexy by stripping away those old costumes and ringlets, introducing bare chests for men and little minis for the girls – and at least there was movement that suggested the entire body was involved in the operation as opposed to just the parts below your two knees.

Ditto with Irish music in the competitive sphere – half a dozen people playing instruments like they were taught by Cold War Soviets in a salt mine….devoid of emotion, save for the orchestrated wink from one to the other that supposed to indicate to one and all that, behind the furrowed frowns, inside they’re actually having great craic.

The only thing that can make this worse is when foreign enthusiasts join in. And while tourists with an interest in our music and culture are to be treasured and applauded, the ones who want to join in a session with tunes they learned off the internet need to be rounded up and given a pub of their own to practise in.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.