`What it is," explains John Spillane, "is that I'm trying to be myself." And so it is that a new genre of music is being born: Cork music. While some Irish singer/song-writers happily work within American genres, Spillane has always felt "phoney" doing it: "Van Morrison took on this American soul persona and became brilliant within that. U2 took on the US rock voice. I find it exciting to think of having local Cork music."
The first song on his solo album, The Wells Of The World, which was one of the most highly acclaimed Irish folk albums of last year, is a fine specimen of the new genre, though it is unlikely to be clasped to the heart of the Second City. Here, the narrator issues a terrible warning to the fella propped up beside him at the bar: "Johnny don't go to Ballincollig". What might happen to Johnny if he ventured forth from the city to that comfortable suburb - or worse still, to Carrigaline - is not spelled out. The narrator can only come up with the reason that the suburbs always disappoint Johnny in the end, but there is worse hinted at. He might fall in love, or realise that the world is bigger than a bar in Cork city, or worst of all - he might miss his round.
The Cork-born poet Theo Dorgan wrote to Spillane when he heard the song and described it as being about the Cork tendency to not want anyone to grow, says Spillane. "It came out of me like an explosion. I didn't know what I was saying. That song, to me, operates on so many levels. I write best when I'm unhappy, and when I wrote that I was in very bad form." Spillane loves his native city, but he says there is "a negative thing" in Cork, and the song on the album which most reflects it is the last one, which has as its title that niggardly Irish answer to the question, "How are you'?" - "Not too bad".
But most of his songs, whether on the solo album, or on the two much-praised albums he recorded with the traditional group Nomos, Set You Free and I Won't Be Afraid Anymore, are gentle and thoughtful, and sometimes quite magical, beautifully delivered in a soft, traditional and, yes, recognisably Cork style. Of these, perhaps All The Ways You Wander is the best known, a typically mystical promise to wait for the wanderer "like a true friend". "If you take the long way/ If you take the long way home/ Down where the magicians and the dreamers roam/ Through the mountains of morning/ Through the valleys of night/ Searching for the island of your heart's delight." The gorgeous, cascading melody was with Spillane for years, he says, and he thought it was a classical tune he had picked up somewhere. But the inspiration for the words came from his daughter, Leslie: "I started it when she was two, when I saw her in the garden one day, looking so beautiful. I didn't finish it till she was six."
Spillane's relationship with Leslie's mother broke up when the child was four, and she and her mother then spent a year abroad. He kept a drawing she had done called "The Blue Princess" on his wall, the wild-looking woman on the cover of his album. ("She wants it to be stressed that she was four when she did it," cautions Spillane. I didn't consult with the artist herself, while checking these details over the phone, because she was in mourning over the sudden death of a gerbil, and Spillane was involved in a murder mystery. "The other gerbil is delighted with himself, whatever happened in that cage . . . ") The sudden maturing of Spillane's songwriting talent, when he was in his early thirties, coincided with the catastrophe of the break-up: "I took off five years ago. I hit the wall. I copped myself on. My relationship had broken up, and it was all very tragic, of course, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me." He joined Nomos soon after that, a group then made up of the virtuoso concertina-player, Niall Vallely, the Donegal fiddler, Liz Doherty, the bodhran-player, Frank Torpey and Gerry McKee on mandocello, with Spillane playing acoustic guitar and electric fretless bass.
The very fact that Nomos was there at all was a "positive Cork thing", if you like, and part of the vibrant culture that has developed around UCC in a way which no Dublin college has ever emulated. Because Sean O Riada had been there, you could do a B.Mus. in traditional music, and Micheal O Suilleabhain, then teaching in the department, galvanised the group with energy. "They were very young and wild and they played too fast. I thought they were brilliant, amazing," says Spillane. Their traditional sound with the energy of rock and his new songs with the traditional sound seemed, for a time, to be a perfect combination; Nomos was established as one of the top traditional bands in the country, and had a growing international reputation. Why did Spillane leave them in March? "One American critic said that Nomos was really two bands. One plays the tunes and the other, the songs. We were a bit more integrated than that, because I played bass and I influenced the sound. But we were on different wavelengths. Most Irish bands are built on the Planxty/Bothy Band model: a bouzouki, two melody instruments, songs and music. It's a formula that works, but it's not very original any more." Spillane always had his heart set on a solo career as a singer/song-writer, an ambition he describes with surprising honesty: "I was always in favour of becoming a brilliant writer. I always had great belief I would become brilliant. I'd always considered myself a slow developer.
"As a kid, I loved a tune," he explains. He grew up in the Cork suburb of Bishopstown (far, far from the fleshpots of Carrigaline and Ballincollig), but the rural background of his Bantry-born mother, he cites as a strong influence. "There was loads of singing; The Lonely Woods Of Upton, The Banks Of My Own Lovely Lee, The Old Fenian Gun." It was melody and harmony which attracted him: in time, he fell in love with the Beatles, but spurned Van Morrison. He learned to play the guitar, listening to Neil Young, Bob Dylan and James Taylor ("all the usual suspects"), and formed a rock and roll band in school. But after school, he took an unusual stop for a rock pretender, and joined the bank. Was his mother involved?
"My mother, of course, that's normal. But I didn't want to go to college. And I didn't want to open another book." As soon as he "felt the pension coming on", he left, in case he never would, bought a transit van and went on the road with a rock band called Sabre. It fell apart, of course, as all bands do, and finally Spillane was ready for college. His degree in Irish and English put him in touch which another rich seam of Cork culture. Intellectually, he came under the influence of Sean O Tuama, immersed himself in Irish in the Kerry Gaeltacht, and communed with poets like his good friend, Louis de Paor, who was part of the set which produced the famous poetry magazine, Innti.
Another strong influence was Noel Shine, the tin whistle-player, and gradually he moved from playing in Sir Henry's, a rock venue, to The Phoenix, a traditional venue, though he stresses that it is melody which interests him, whatever its form: "I remember we had albums by Cliff Richard, Donny Osmond and Planxty and they didn't seem to be any different." He began to be able to be himself: "I always had this quiet side to me which I wouldn't have thought was presentable." His songs became imbued with symbols from Irish myth, perhaps filtered through Yeats: Spillane admits the influence, and also speaks of Oscar Wilde, as well as Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Patrick Galvin, as mentors. He is really not interested in using his wonderful voice to record traditional songs: "All the good ones were done in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the 1990s, they've all been done" - but is surprised to see the likeness between that stunning song of emigration and desolation, A Stor Mo Chroi and his own song about the ambiguous relationship an emigrant has with Ireland, The Land You Love The Best.
"I was visiting an aged relative in London. She had grown up in a farm in West Cork, which she saw as the Garden of Eden. But a place you couldn't live. A love/hate relationship." A Stor Mo Chroi, he suddenly remembers, is not a traditional song; it has a known writer (though no attribution appears on the album of the mighty Keane sisters). "There are a lot of songs like that, which seem traditional, and that's what I'm doing." He was disappointed that the rave reviews his album received didn't translate into stardom - particularly as Declan Sinnott had done so much for his friend, Sinead Lohan - but he has got over his disappointment and is "writing away mad" on his next album. "I feel you're ahead of the posse," he says, "if you're happening creatively."
Music Network's Best of Irish tour features John Spillane as well as flute-player, Niall Keegan, concertina-player, Niall Vallely, and percussionist Mel Mercier; it opens in Limerick on September 10th and then goes to West Cork, Listowel, Dublin, Cahir, Skerries, Buncrana, Manorhamilton, Clifden, Kilworth and New Ross. Details on 01-6719429.
