I’ve always been interested in following the story of Irish music: What happened to it? Where did it go? Who took it? You could describe my life as a musical expedition. When you look back at the haemorrhage of economic migration from Ireland in the second half of the 19th and 20th century, those people didn’t have a large gathering of worldly goods, but in their heads and their hearts and their feet, they had something that was so rich and priceless.
When they decanted it in England and the US, particularly in the big cities of Chicago, Boston and New York, it left an indelible footprint on the making of the music of that place. The first big thing that my wife Nuala [O’Connor] and I did together was the documentary Bringing it All Back Home and it was an exploration of this. It was very strange and remarkable to end up in a room with The Everly Brothers. Without The Everly Brothers, there would have been no Beatles.
I live in west Kerry, a beautiful part of the world where many of the old traditions remain extant. There’s still a haemorrhage of migration out of here and all of the young people come home at Christmas so it’s very celebratory that way, but the corollary, of course, is that they all leave again. I have five daughters, three of them triplets, so as John McGahern would have it, I’m “amongst women”. One child is in London, three are in Dublin and one is with us here thankfully. We’re at the edge of Europe in west Kerry, and there’s something about being at the edge of some place, something about the peripherality of it that is both empowering and vulnerable. Community is important everywhere, but it’s hugely important here.
I did a degree in Irish and English at UCC and that’s where I met Sonny Condell when Tír na nÓg came to play at the university in 1971. We struck up a relationship, started to play music together and one thing led to another. We made the first Scullion record for Mulligan Music, a very famous and influential record label set up by Dónal Lunny. Sonny is just a remarkable songwriter and he has something that is uniquely his own. We fell in love musically and became a pair of people who have stayed together ever since.
We’ve played with musicians Greg Boland, who has sadly passed away, Jimmy O’Brien and now Robbie Overson. Scullion was an interesting collision musically. It was the beginning of a coming together of Irish traditional music and contemporary singer/songwriting and we’ve been playing, singing and performing together for 40 years. It’s been one of the most enriching things in my life, to sit on stage with musicians of that calibre, close my eyes and get lost for two hours. When we take to the stage, time stands still.
I grew up in a bungalow in a suburb of Cork. My mother sang and my father whistled a tune like anyone else, and my older sister and brother were both very musical, but the radio was the thing that sparked my love of music. I remember my father coming home one day, wheeling his bicycle round the side of the house and picking a brown paper parcel off the carrier, bringing it into the house and unwrapping the radio inside. I have a memory of it being plugged in and the smell of the valves heating up and the green pilot light in the left-hand corner ... then the world was suddenly revealed in a land before television.
As the world becomes more digital and immediate, there is something about the radio that is so real and personal. It seems to be an antidote to that digital loneliness many people are experiencing. So is the act of live performance on a stage; it’s warm, tactile and human and has the effect of collapsing distance and bringing us all together in a profound and powerful way.
The soundtrack to our lives is a hugely emotional historical document. I often think of the late and wonderful song collector Frank Harte, who used to say if you want to know the facts, consult the history books, if you want to know what it felt like, ask a singer. Music gives us a sense of how we feel about each other and I think that’s a very powerful tool.
Sometimes people look at investment in the arts and ask how we can justify it. I would say the arts matter for at least four reasons: firstly because creativity, culture and the arts are essential to our wellbeing and are valuable in their own right as uniquely irreplaceable human activities; secondly for the individual and personal benefits they confer by enabling us to imagine, invent, interpret and communicate diverse ways of seeing the world; thirdly for the communal and societal value and diversity they create, promote and share; and fourthly for the value they add to our reputation globally and for their potential to strengthen Ireland’s role in bilateral relationships by enriching common ground and giving us a sense of how we feel about each other.
John Tusa, former director of London’s Barbican Arts Centre, put it like this: “The arts matter because they embrace, express and define the soul of a civilisation. A nation without arts would be a nation that has stopped talking to itself, stopped dreaming, and had lost interest in the past and lacked curiosity about the future.”
Scullion perform at Dublin Castle on January 24th as part of Tradfest, which takes place January 22nd-26th. To buy tickets, see tradfest.com
