He might be one of the music world's hardiest travellers, but Liam Clancy still has a fire in his belly about music, ageing, the Middle East and whatever you're having yourself, writes Siobhán Long
When you've jammed with Bob Dylan, jousted with Pete Seeger, duetted with Odetta and shared a stage with Robert Redford, not much can stop you in your tracks. When you've fired off the first volume of your autobiography ( The Mountain of the Women: Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour, a wily revisionism of Sliabh na mBan), cornered an unseemly fraction of screen time on Martin Scorsese's much-lauded Dylan documentary No Direction Home, and been the subject of a two-part television documentary ( The Legend Of Liam Clancy, directed by Alan Gilsenan), chances are that you've either a) disappeared inside the screaming vortex of your own ego, or b) embraced the angular perspectives that outsiders can bring to your life story. Liam Clancy has become, by stealth, the granddaddy of folk singers. He's a song maker, a purveyor of sea shanties, love songs, tales of war, infanticide and emigration, who's never been short of a back story. For years, The Dutchmanand The Band Played Waltzing Matildadefined him: a singer whose ear was more keenly tuned to the universal in the particular than most others of his generation.
He may have laid the ghost of the Clancy Brothers and his long-standing partnership with Tommy Makem to rest, but Liam Clancy still has a fire in his belly when it comes to live performance.
"I had had a belly full of it, to tell you the truth," he says at a low volume, his voice betraying the remnants of a chest infection that led to the cancellation of two of his concerts in late March. It seems that the road takes its toll, even on the hardiest of travellers. "The last few years that Tommy Makem and I played together got to be drudgery rather than fun, and that's not the way to work. But you know, you become conditioned to getting that immediate energy back from the audience, and that thing that happens in live shows, there's really nothing to beat that. It's nothing permanent, but then, nothing is. It's like a smoke sculpture. You light it tonight, and it's gone, so you remake it tomorrow night."
Going it alone has invigorated him as an artist, Clancy admits. "One of the great things I discovered about working solo," he says, with refreshing candour, "is that all my life I'd worked with other people, and I was looking over my shoulder. There had to be a certain amount of approval. There was always a pecking order, especially when you're working with family. But they all died off, and I got to the top of the pecking order, with nobody looking over my shoulder. There's a great sense of freedom about that."
Clancy's on-stage momentum rises slowly, but the vigour of his voice on stage at the National Concert Hall last Thursday, when he was accompanied by Danú (of which his son Dónal is a member), and Donovan and Karan Casey, was astonishing. While never quite reaching the unfettered gallop of old, he gloried in idling among the riches of a particular song line or a subtle melody line for longer, all the better to savour it. In conversation, he strikes an unexpectedly languid pose, pausing and reflecting, taking his time before choosing to engage with a particular question. Unlike the crowd-pleaser who was the buttress that supported the Clancy Brothers through a picaresque career path, and the charismatic linchpin that saw Makem and Clancy seduce audiences from Melbourne to Manitoba, Liam Clancy cuts an altogether more pensive figure in conversation. At the age of 71, he no longer chases laurels with the verve he once did. As the years have passed, it's as if he's grown comfortable inside his own skin, and is less inclined to buff and polish his public self. The love of recitation, the hunger for a deep-pitted line of poetry or a hand-crafted song may not have faded, but these days Liam Clancy tells it like it is.
MOSTLY WHAT HE'S SOUGHT, from his earliest days growing up in Carrick-on-Suir, was to make a song his own. "An awful lot of people start in this business because they want to be celebrities, or they want to be rich and famous," he suggests. "I started out because the very first song I realised I could sing from start to finish, as I walked up the banks of the River Suir as a teenager, was The Croppy Boy." He hugs both his arms tight into his chest. "I held it tight, as if it was a light, my treasure. Then, as you learn more songs or poems, you begin to feel like someone standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon with someone standing beside them. Inevitably you're going to say to that friend: 'Look at that!' And of course they're looking at it, but you have to say it.
"There are so many songs, poems, and so many things said, written and sung before we came along, and they're enclosed like the dead leaves in a book. They only come to life in the living voice. When I sing a song, I always try to keep an image of the story in my mind. I remember Ewan MacColl once said to me: 'Liam, when you start singing a song, you should never know how it's going to end.' In other words, it has to evolve in your head. If you're not emotionally entrapped by what you read or what you hear or what you sing, then it's not worth doing. Otherwise you're just phoning it in, and you really should get out of the business."
Clancy considers that much of his repertoire carries as much currency today as it did five decades ago. The Band Played Waltzing Matildacuts a swathe through the war-mongering in the Middle East today with just as much precision as it did through the butchery of Australian soldiers in Gallipoli during the first World War. He makes no secret of his disgust for what prevails today in a world that has become a theatre of war.
"We as a species just cannot get past the need to kill each other," he declares with venom. "I was in America at the end of the Korean War and I saw fools going into Vietnam, doing the same thing again. And then when Bush came along, they made the same mistake of history all over again. Do they not learn anything? They talk about 'accomplishing the mission'. What was the mission? The mission was to grab the oil belonging to another country, to establish US bases there, and for Halliburton to reap the rewards of all the development. They'll never accomplish that mission. Now they're pretending that getting Saddam Hussein was the goal. They hanged him, and it was as if George Bush pulled the lever himself. He descended to the barbarity of the man that he executed.
"I was appalled that there was no anger in this country at seeing Bertie Ahern shaking hands with George Bush on St Patrick's Day," Clancy continues, warming to his subject. "I was appalled to see planes in Shannon, scrapping habeas corpus, taking people off to be tortured in countries where America could do it with impunity. I mean, what kind of a country are we?"
THIS ISN'T THE SMILEY, happy Liam Clancy of the Aran jumper, but it is the same man who played countless benefit gigs for the civil-rights movement in both the US and Northern Ireland, the same man who, to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, lured Karan Casey on stage last Thursday so that she could sing Strange Fruit, a searing tale of racial hatred, made famous by Billie Holiday.
One thing Clancy relishes about the road (or indeed the ocean, where he can at times be found entertaining the masses on cruise ships bound for Hawaii) is its ability to put life in sharp perspective.
"Standing on the rim of an active volcano [ in Hawaii]," he recounts, "and looking over at Mount Kilauea spewing out over 2,000 rivers of lava at night: an extraordinary sight. We felt we were at the dawn of time. My vision of the planet changed in the sense that I realised that our little ball of earth is like an egg, this little shell, and inside is the ball of fire that was thrown off the big bang. But standing on that mountain, looking down on the valley where the towns aren't even distinguishable, you see this little infestation of human beings and you realise that each one of them, with their own problems, visions, hopes and dreams, seems so transient and so fragile. It's a humbling experience. You can never be cock sure or arrogant again, after experiencing that."
Clancy makes no apologies for the ways in which the passing years have affected his thinking. "Yeats's epitaph was 'Cast a cold eye on life, on death/Horseman pass by'," he notes, "and as I get older - I think this happens in your seventies - you begin to distance yourself a little bit from humanity.
"That's reflected in the last poems of Yeats: 'sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal/It knows not what it is; and gather me/Into the artifice of eternity' [ Sailing To Byzantium]. I think that in the end Yeats saw the transience of it all, the fragility of the existence of the human species. I don't think the cosmos would shed a tear over the extinction of this species.
"The ambivalence that I have about ageing is that while I recognise the transience of things, nonetheless, things matter to me, now. When I'm in the middle of a song, life matters."
Clancy dismisses any notion that he might hanker after some kind of immortality. "As Robbie Burns said, 'When you're dead, you're out of date'," he laughs, "and yet one of his songs, Auld Lang Syne, is sung in every country in the world, in an unintelligible language, every New Year's Eve."
Liam Clancy launches Age and Opportunity's Bealtaine Festival today, which celebrates creativity in older age, and is touring to Castlebar, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Sligo, Dún Laoghaire, Killmalock, Kilkenny, Waterford, Blanchardstown and Naas until June. www.liamclancy.com
