Woman’s Heart still beating brightly after three decades

Groove Tube with Cian O’Connell

Alongside glittering solo careers, Mary Coughlan, Sharon Shannon and Frances Black have been performing together for the guts of thirty years – under the instantly recognisable guise of Woman’s Heart. It is a relationship that dates back to the initial release of A Woman’s Heart in 2022 – an album that featured Sharon and Frances, and a project that included Mary on subsequent tours.

And it remains an iconic body of work in the Irish canon, and it has held a major influence on Irish music for decades, as have each of the women that contributed to it.

For all of that experience sharing stages, it is three years since Mary, Sharon and Frances have performed together in front of a packed crowd – until late last month, when they kicked off a national tour in a sold-out Tullamore Court.

On March 11, they will play the Shearwater Hotel in Ballinasloe in a venue that is likely to house a significant percentage of Galway native Mary Coughlan’s relatives.

“We’re rusty old nails!” she jokes ahead of the tour’s opening night in Tullamore.

“We’ve just been doing a soundcheck and running through the tunes. It’s been an awful long time. The gig we’re doing now is not like our own normal gigs. We’re doing different tunes and we do a few together. It’s just having to run them all again.

“[It’s been] three years [since we performed together]. We had a tour scheduled for 2020 but that didn’t happen so 2019 was the last tour. Now, we did two gigs during lockdown – one down in a carpark in Kerry and one with absolutely no people if you remember those ones. It was an absolute nightmare.”

The prospect of playing in front of a sold-out crowd is one that Mary has been coveting for a long time. The trio have played in all manner of acts and guises over the years, but it is special to see them together.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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