Iarla Ó Lionáird
Iarla O Lionaird was born into a world of song in Cuil Aodha, a small, Irish-speaking enclave in west Cork. His mother and grandmother were all known singers in the sean nos, unaccompanied style. His grand aunt Elizabeth Cronin was recorded in the 1940s by Alan Lomax, the American archivist of folk and blues. He was one of twelve children of the local schoolmaster, and his brothers and sisters sang too. The patriot Padraig Pearse called Cuil Aodha "the capital of Gaeldom - where every rock conceals a poet's grave". Nearly everyone there sings songs that connect Cuil Aodha to the rich grandeur of that ancient world. Singing is the dominant form of expression, in the way that fiddle music is in County Clare.
"I grew up in a hive of song," he says. "There were singers everywhere. The singing was marked in a certain way by the house you grew up in. You could close your eyes and know a person's family by his way of singing. There was an intactness to the societal function of song. When they died you sang for them, when they were born you sang for them and when they married you sang for them. Singing marked the passages of life. You could have been in Africa. There was the saying, 'We sang laments, and we made those we sang about great in the singing.' This in itself took away my fear of death. It was normal to sing of great men who had passed away. It was normal to think of the greatness of people. Even in death there was something exalted."
If any one person could be said to be responsible for the survival of native Irish music and its being known in the world, it was Sean O Riada, a man of great passion, industry and musical sophistication who gathered the music from wherever he could find it, recorded it and on occasion orchestrated it. He composed the great orchestral psalm to the nation 'Mise Eire' and founded The Chieftains. O Riada came with his family to live in Cuil Aodha and was often in the O Lionaird home. He started a choir there, which Iarla entered in childhood and remained in into his early twenties. He first performed publicly when he was five and was recorded at seven.
"I was a serious child, I think. My brothers and sisters sang, but I knew I was somewhat different. I was marked out in some way. My parents made it all right for me to be this way. They nurtured it. Singing may be a gift, but it's also a craft. It's difficult. It needs ritualistic endeavour, dedication over a long period of time. That's ideal for a child who needs something like that. It's a challenge to make them more expressive, to get out of themselves. I began to sing these songs which were way beyond me in experience. Vision songs. Love songs, made bigger by the fact that they weren't only about the love of a man or woman, but also about love of country. I sang 'Aislin Ghael', which describes a woman in all her naked glory. It was the wrong song for someone so small and that's why it's so good. I was recorded at seven singing a song of a woman giving advice to young girls. The believability was high, but I was very small at the same time. I was recorded another time singing into the mouth of a grand piano. Sean O Riada died when I was very young, but the choir was taken over by his son Paedar and I stayed on with him. He came out of the same world I had, hearing the same sounds - wind, rain, cows, birds, songs. He came to do some of the things I was to do with my own music, sampling ambient sounds, tunes, voices. Those things were in you. That was what made up your life."
Iarla went to Dublin to study literature, then qualified and worked as a teacher. He brought his music with him. Some in Dublin held him in awe, for others he was a curiosity. He had offers to record, but there was something discordant between his sense of the music and the expectation it generated in others. He turned down the offers. "They wanted to treat it as folk music," he said. "But sean nos is darker, more passionate and ancient than that. It has never been about strutting your stuff. You stand there and hold it. It's all about empathy."
He stopped singing then, thinking that perhaps the true sense of this music didn't exist outside his own parish. Then the renowned accordion player Tony McMahon invited him to sing at a concert in Armagh. He went, and felt again the spirit of the music igniting within him. He began again to sing. He heard Peter Gabriel's 'Passion' and wrote a six-page letter to his record label Real World, enclosing a tape and asking for a chance to record. They invited him to their studio.
While there he met Simon Emmerson, who was putting together a fusion dance band which would be called the Afro Celt Sound System. Iarla joined them. They went on to play at festivals all over the world and record five albums, which sold in the hundreds of thousands. Then Real World put him together with the producer Michael Brook, and together they made Iarla's first solo album, 'The Seven Steps to Mercy', Iarla's sean nos singing layered with drones, synthesizers and samplings. "'Genius' is the operative word here," said Time Out. "...One of the most dramatic voices in contemporary music," said The Guardian. And Tony McMahon, who'd brought him back to the music, said, "This is new and unique work. It demonstrates understanding and respect for the tradition out of which it came - majestic, defiant, heartbreakingly beautiful." Bono, Nick Cave and Sinead O'Connor were among its many admirers.
Sinead O'Connor joined him, the guitarist Dennis Cahill and the great fiddler of his time, Martin Hayes, for a concert at the Shepherds Bush Empire built around the novel 'I Could Read the Sky'. The show toured and eventually led to Iarla composing the music for the film that was made of the book. Real World released an album based on this music, which was a highly ambitious attempt to do musically what the book had done in photographs and words: to follow the life of an emigrant labourer from the west of Ireland into the factories and building sites of England, from the comprehended into incoherence, from the sounds of nature and home into the jarring racket of traffic, rivet guns and jackhammers. Song appears on it too, perhaps most notably Iarla's agonized recreation of the song 'Stretched on Your Grave'. He'd found a way to transport the music from Cuil Aodha into the world.
"A man named Freeman was in Ireland collecting music a little under a hundred years ago. He met a woman named Peg O'Donoghue, who was seventy-eight at the time. Infirm, he says, and emotional, as well as the best natural musician around. She would sing snatches of songs for him, always in perfect pitch, but then he says, 'When singing a complete song she became ecstatic.' I remember reading that, particularly that word 'ecstatic'. I wondered why he said that, what she would have looked like, what she was going through. There were a lot of people singing in Cuil Aodha, but I never saw that. I wanted to know if I could get there. A song is a thing in itself, but it's also a tool. It can take you somewhere else, lift you into another area, open an experience. I would be guilty of taking a large dose of influence from that idea. A song is a small place, but it's also limitless. You lift off, your soul and heart lift off. The only singer I saw doing that was Darach O Cathain. He had bigness, great power. Sean O Riada singled him out and championed him. He could live within the structure of the song, but there was also ecstasy. He was from West Meath but like many others he had been forced to emigrate. He was an artist trapped in the body of a labourer. I met him. 'All I ever wanted to do was sing,' he told me. He cried when he said it.
I look for what he had when I sing myself - scale, power, going the extra distance that the song can bring you. The ecstatic. Music ought to be able to do that."
Iarla met Emer Vize, a medical journalist, in 1996. They married two years later, lived in Dublin for a time, and then built a house in the country outside of Thomastown in County Kilkenny, where they now live with their three children. The house has its own music studio. 'Invisible Fields', his first solo album since 'The Seven Steps to Mercy', was recorded there.
