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Tír nA nOg in the news   

Tír Na nÓg interview - Galway Advertiser - 11-9-2008
Category: Music

By Kernan Andrews

TÍR NA nÓg are experiencing something of a revival and for the first time in several years the duo of Sonny Condell and Leo O'Kelly join forces to play The Crane Bar, Sea Road, on Thursday September 18 at 9pm.
In the early 1970s, the folk revival and the impact of rock music inspired a new generation of Irish musicians to produce some of the richest and most innovative music ever made in this country. It was the era of Planxty, The Bothy Band, Clannad, Midnight Well, Mellow Candle, Paul Brady, and Tír Na nÓg.
Tír Na nÓg was a duo of Wicklowman Sonny Condell and Carlow's Leo O'Kelly. Their music was mostly acoustic based, drawing on Irish folk as well as contemporary rock. The band's eponymous debut album, released in 1971, showcased Condell and O'Kelly very different styles and approaches to songwriting. What was not in doubt though was the quality of both men's compositions.
Tír Na nÓg remains many people's entry point into the duo's music and for Leo O'Kelly, the album's opening track 'Time Is Like A Promise' is the definitive Tír Na nÓg track.
"We're just a little biased but we do enjoy the songs as much now as we did then," O'Kelly tells me. "For me the definitive Tír Na nÓg song has always been Sonny's 'Time Is Like A Promise'. We nearly always start our shows with it. It's a song I never tire of and was one of the first songs we ever played together. It still holds mystery for me and features our close harmonies...sometimes I can't tell which of us is singing which part!"
Two more albums followed - A Tear And A Smile (1972) and Strong In The Sun (1973). The albums were well received by the music press and both John Peel and Bob Harris championed them on their BBC radio shows. Tír Na nÓg also enjoyed high profile support slots with Jethro Tull, Procol Harum, Roxy Music, ELP, and The Who.
In 1974 Condell and O'Kelly called it a day. Condell would go on to form Scullion and record solo albums while O'Kelly worked as a producer and recorded a number of solo albums. However from time to time the pair re-form and tour.
"Tír Na nÓg seems to happen in cycles," says O'Kelly. "We can go for years without playing together and then play a lot in a short space of time...which is what seems to be happening now. Sonny and I always enjoy playing together, and even though we include Tír Na nÓg songs in our solo performances, there is something very special for us which only happens when we play together."
Gratifyingly for the pair, they find those attending the shows are not just long time fans, but also increasingly include new audiences.
"There is also a renewed interest in Tír Na nÓg from a much younger audience...more abroad than in Ireland," says O'Kelly. "Our Myspace site was initially set up by an 18-year-old musician and radio DJ from Toronto, Gaven, who has his own psychedelic/acid folk band, The Saffron Sect.
"They have their own considerable following, and recently came over from Canada to play at England's Green Man Festival. Our Wikipedia archivist Thibaut is a French teenager who knows more about Tír Na nÓg than we do. He came over to Waterford recently with his family especially to see us play."
As both Condell and O'Kelly remain active in music, do they plan to do any future recording together as Tír Na nÓg?
"We haven't discussed recording together again but it is always possible," says O'Kelly. "The bits and pieces I've been writing recently are more in a folky vein than previous years and it would be interesting to see how our songs sit together now. We have always written separately, but the combination and juxtaposition of Sonny's and my songs has always created more than the sum of their parts."
For more information and tickets contact The Crane on 091 - 587419 or go to www.thecranebar.com. See also www.myspace.com/tirnanogduo

Scullion In The News

After 30 years together, Scullion still possess a special place in the hearts of their fans, writes Siobhán Long

TO SAY THAT Scullion have enjoyed cult status since their inception in the late 1970s is probably akin to suggesting that Bruce Springsteen is partial to the odd marathon live performance. Next week, they will play a series of four sell-out shows celebrating their 30th birthday.

The band's founding members, Sonny Condell and Philip King, have not so much floated as careened below the radar for over three decades now, surfacing with some of the sharpest and most original songs written this side of the Brill Building. Quite why they never made their millions on the back of such perfect pop as Oh Carol, or at the very least discharged a pair of sizeable mortgages on the back of Eyelids Into Snow, remains one of the enduring mysteries of the music world, but such quotidian distractions are not the stuff of which founding member and aesthete, Sonny Condell, is made.

Scullion's early gestation took a circuitous route, against a backdrop of the burgeoning live music scene in Dublin. With a repertoire that swung from Condell's and King's original material to Lou Reed covers, they were preceded by a fleeting, colourful and quite probably motley gathering: Condell, King, Freddie White, Mick Daly, Éamon Doyle and Dan Fitzgerald, who gathered in Toner's pub under the moniker of The Sunday Night Band. That was the chrysalis from which Scullion emerged, with the line-up morphing into a quartet featuring Condell and King alongside guitarist Greg Boland and piper, Jimmy O'Brien Moran.

Following the success of Camouflage, Condell's debut recording on Mulligan records, Scullion found themselves on the same label in 1978 with a debut collection, White Side Of The Night, that sounds as fresh today as it did 30 years ago. Scullion took their name from the kitchen hands in service to one of the 15th century pretenders to the English throne during the reign of King Henry VII, Perkin Warbeck. It was a sign of things to come. This was music that simply couldn't be boxed in: contemporary songs with influences that sprang from the blues and rock 'n' roll, and, in terms of Condell's own writing during and after his time in Tír na nÓg, from the likes of Steeleye Span and Jethro Tull.

Having grown up on a farm in Newtownmountkennedy, Condell drew on what he admits was the rural idyll of his childhood to inform his writing. "My childhood experiences were heaven-sent, in a way," he offers sheepishly, almost apologetically. "Being the youngest, I went to boarding school for a bit, but even that wasn't menacing, to be honest. It was a gentle, generous sort of place. My parents were very easy going. They encouraged my imagination to develop. My father, too, had a great collection of records which he would play very loud every night, when he stopped farming. That was his relaxation and we all listened to that: to classical music and later, to Portuguese fado music. My mother played the piano and loved singing too."

With songs like White Side Of The Night, Eyelids Into Snow, The Actor and the Joycean The Fruit Smelling Shop, Condell carved out an entirely new landscape where words and images floated free of the tethers that previously bound them to terra firma. This was a world where possibilities were endless, where the sky was a different colour with every performance of the same song. Of course, Sonny's version is characteristically more modest than that. "I feel that if you have the imagination", he offers, "it's easier to write your own things than to struggle to learn how to play somebody else's music! There's a laziness there that pushes you in your own direction, maybe."

And yet, that original Scullion material didn't fit in anywhere with the music scene as it was happening in Ireland in the 1970s. "There didn't seem to be anywhere we could take it in Ireland at that time. There were ballad bars, but we weren't really that. We were always much more interested in original music, and there wasn't that patriotic, Irish thing going on in our music either. We were much more influenced by the outside world really: Joni Mitchell, Tom Rush, The Byrds, Donovan and Dylan, and The Beach Boys."

In the last couple of years, Condell has forged a reputation for himself as a graphic artist, in addition to evolving musically with his band, Radar. Somehow it fits perfectly: this languid interplay between word and image, a sleight of hand that tweaks at the viewer's imagination.

"The music and pictures seem to go nicely together somehow", Condell admits. "On a deeper level too, you learn from the unconscious: this deeper world inside you, and that's where I think the music I write comes from and that's where the pictures I make come from too. They don't necessarily make logical sense, but they portray some internal working, as the music does.

"They are definitely different worlds, but I think where they come closest to one another is in not trying to force or explain certain things. They come from the imagination and hopefully, aren't interfered with too much."

Scullion play the Triskel Arts Centre for four nights starting next Thursday. Sonny Condell's exhibition of graphic art continues in the Triskel Arts Centre until next Friday.

© 2008 The Irish Times

 

Scullion Live  Review


Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, June 2008
IT WAS a homecoming of sorts. Even though Philip King might be the only member of Scullion to claim membership of the Independent Republic, last Friday night was a 30th birthday celebration in the company of punters who spoke the same language as the trio who'd come to blow out the candles on the cake.
King was in full Groucho mode for the evening. Sidelong references to Tom and Pascal, boiled sweets and the Capuchin annual were greeted with immediate chuckles of recognition - by the punters - if not by his fellow Scullioners, Sonny Condell and Robbie Overson. Three decades equals a remarkable repertoire in Scullion's world, most of it drawn from the creative genius of Condell, whose subtle lyricism and matchless melody lines bear scant kinship to anyone else on the planet.
From the spasmodic rhythms and schizoid imaginings of The Actor to the wistful musings of Kings and the ultimate urban romance of Down in the City, Condell's canvas is as broad as it is deep, fuelled by the imagination of someone who stands gloriously askew from the world.
Overson lent intricate guitar lines, instinctively knowing how to ebb and flow between Condell and King's jousting. Somehow, special guest Freddie White's cavernous cathedral of a voice was the perfect foil to Condell and King's sibling-like harmonies.
His self-composed The Boy Talks Tough was a standout, all gangly elbows and paternalistic concern about the swamp of teenage angst: a snapshot of life as we know it, but seldom hear it sung with such world weary insight. With Sonny Condell's graphic art providing an eye-popping backdrop to many of the songs, this was a fiery marriage of sound and vision that gave licence to the limitless possibilities that have always lurked beneath his music's surface. In between, there were pristine borrowings from Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and Lowell George. Most of all, it was a reminder that great music needs no elixir of youth, just an airing in a venue as welcoming as the Triskel.

- SIOBHÁN LONG -- The Irish Times

 
 
 

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