LATE NIGHT, DARK SKY and instruments neatly standing in the background. Long hair, beard and a half smile of welcome.
The corner of Ireland where we find Colm Mac Con Iomaire tonight is still, quieter even than the violinist and composer, who by contrast with his long-time foil in The Frames, the voluble, poetic and intense Glen Hansard, will often be the still centre of any engagement.
Maybe the subdued start is down to the fact Mac Con Iomaire is doing late nights and early mornings at the moment as he gets to the frantic moments of a film soundtrack deadline, so “it’s all hands to the pump”. The film is a documentary with the small subject of the history of Ireland in four episodes. Yes, the whole history of Ireland, covering a period from 30,000 BC to now, with the first episode finishing with the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. (For those playing at home, that’s 31,000 years in 50 minutes, though things slow down a tad from episode two.)
“It’s right up my street as regards my favourite subject,” says Mac Con Iomaire who has been composing for film and TV since the late ‘90s, and immersed in Irish music even before he learnt to play the piano and violin.
Hmm. In thinking about Irish music from 32,000 years ago I’m thinking possibly The Dubliners?
“Yeah,” he chuckles. “I think they may been in kindergarten back then.”
But what does a composer draw on musically to convey the sense of Ireland’s prehistory up to the edges of the Middle Ages? There’s a surprising connection to be made.
“You’re talking about the vernacular of Aboriginal Australia in a way, with the connection it has with Ireland,” says Mac Con Iomaire. “There is a friend of ours, Simon O’Dwyer, who went to Australia and learnt to play the didge and when he came back, he had an interest in prehistoric instruments and approached these unplayed, enormous bronze age horns with an Aboriginal sensibility and circular breathing and lo and behold they came to life. Before that, musicologists had tried to play them like a trumpet and burst a blood vessel so it hadn’t gone too well for them.
“There is an element of that [in the soundtrack he has composed], with whistles and percussion and stuff like that.”
The closeness of music from distant different cultures and continents may still surprise people, though by now many of us are aware of how you can trace the lines between the traditional music of Scotland and Ireland through the Romani and eastern Europe to the Levant and Euphrates. American songwriter/singer and musicologist, Rhiannon Giddens, the founder of the string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, who was based in Ireland for some years, is one of many who have traced a connection between African and Irish/British folk in the southern music traditions of the USA. Mac Con Iomaire understands that well.
“I didn’t speak English until I was five, so I’m a native Irish speaker and Gaelic/Irish is an Indo-European language so it comes from, hooked into Sanskrit,” he says. “My father, Liam, was a sean-nos singer, and sean-nos [pronounced shar-nos] is a tradition from the west of Ireland of unaccompanied singing, and when you listen to sean-nos you can hear [Pakistani qwaali singer] Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in there, you can hear Indian music all the way through the Balkans.
"We are very much connected, rivers of magic that made it to our shores and there was reciprocity as well that went around.”
Speaking of reciprocity, marking their 35th anniversary and first time back here since 2007, The Frames are coming to Australia to play in an Irish music festival in Sydney called Misneach, organised by the Irish singer/songwriter, Dermot Kennedy, and set for the eve of St Patrick’s Day, with Northern Ireland’s incendiary rappers, Kneecap, the calmer locals Matt Corby and Meg mac and more from both ends of the world, like Sorcha Richardson.
Irish music festival and St Patrick’s Day is a combination of words which could deter as many as it attracts with assumptions of what type of music you would hear and what kind of person would be in the space with you, much in the same way that an “Irish pub” wherever you are in the world has an assumed meaning/warning.
Does Mac Con Iomaire, does the rest of the band for that matter, see The Frames as an Irish band or is that just one strand of who they are?
“The idea of just playing on Patrick’s Day full stop is something that we’ve very much shunned because it’s not necessarily a hugely rewarding artistic experience playing to people who are sloshed,” he says. “Even in America, going there in the early ‘90s, invariably we would be booked into these Irish-American pubs and it was a kind of a mutually disappointing experience by virtue of our influences being The Pixies, later on perhaps Sparklehorse and Palace Brothers, and that sort of aesthetic.
“The idea of us turning up at an Irish pub playing that kind of music, we run away from it and turned our back on it. I don’t necessarily think that was an error at all; I think it was absolutely well-founded. Patrick’s Day is very much a marketing abomination. It’s obscene.”
But this time it’s different?
“I suppose it’s in response to that shallowness that Dermot was inspired to have some sort of an antidote with the festival of like-minded people,” he says, adding with a laugh, “albeit a kind of ribald gathering.”
For some of us “Irish music” is less the pipes and drums, Kelly green and bodhran, and more, say, Van Morrison making intense, passionate, folk and soul-driven rock. You know, like The Frames
“Definitely the Van there is a huge connection. Glen’s trinity of songwriters are Dylan, Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen, and I couldn’t disagree either,” Mac Con Iomaire says. “There is a kind of lyrics matter, and storytelling and songs taking you on a journey, and it becoming literature, and there is that element of connection that’s linked to our performance.
“When you come off stage all you have is the memory of that feeling and that’s what sustains you to go on for decades and endure the slings and arrows, the rollercoaster that is the music business.”
It certainly hasn’t been a straight line for the band over those 35 years, with a number of minor changes around Hansard and Mac Con Iomaire, solo work, films and side projects such Swell Season, and long periods apart. Yet they return, which suggests a connection goes deeper than convenience. Or as the fiddle player puts it, “we are all volunteers as opposed to conscripts at this stage”.
“It comes back to the music every time really. It’s been at least 12 months since we played, could be longer, could be 18 months, and every now and then it can stretch to 5 year anniversaries,” he says. “We are in a beautiful situation now when none of us are, as we say in Irish, duine bháite, which is a drowning man’s grip. None of us have a negative attachment to it.
“So when we decide to get together and play there is a lovely joy in that. I found that again, having got off the bus in 2013 and doing my own thing since.”
The intensity and demands and personal political nature of group life wears you down and he recalls the realisation that he needed off that bus hitting him one day when on tour he looked around and recognised that everyone else was perfectly happy and he was the one bringing unhappiness onto the bus. It was “time to ring the bell for the next stop”.
“When you step off the bus, the bus pulls away, and being in a band is like being on a train: it’s rails, it’s a routine and schedule, and if you’re not involved in those gigs and sound checks and journeys you separate. That’s why for me it was like leaving a family, getting off, and so it’s very nice to get back together and this genuine celebratory feeling of, kicking out the jams.”
Kicking out the jams without anyone saying motherfucker, because they are well brought up chaps. And anyway, Irish people don’t swear, do they?
It’s time to leave our man to his soundtrack work, or maybe sleep, but not without one final foray into the question of identity.
A few years ago, Mac Con Iomaire was asked in a TV interview a question which I first thought of as outrageously big and impossible. But today, given his soundtrack in progress, given his connective roots, given his impending appearance in the most Irish of Irish days for people who aren’t Irish, it feels suitable, maybe even necessary to ask again. Where does he see Ireland today? What is the state of Ireland now?
“It’s funny, having been in this historical documentary space I have the advantage of 30,000 years of perspective,” he laughs. “But it’s not dissimilar to the point in the fourth century A.D. where the initial wave of Christianity has been swept away, except where it stayed in Ireland and thrived.
“We haven’t fallen into the Far Right hole: we are welcoming to new Irish people, which is great; we have a government who are embracing laundry America’s ill gotten financial gains, and with that comes a sovereignty price, but hopefully we are going to work on that politically over the next couple of years and elect people who are more people-minded than corporate-minded.”
You weren’t expecting a reference to the fourth century were you? But then that was the foundation for Ireland’s exporting of religion and culture, music and stories, which 1800 years later brought us … The Frames.
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The Frames will play Misneach - The Domain, Sydney, on March 16.
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