Andy Irvine on Dónal Lunny: ‘He glued Planxty together and made the structure work’

In the basement of the International Bar in Dublin, Andy Irvine, of Sweeney’s Men, Planxty, Mozaik, LAPD and Usher’s Island, is playing me the songs of Woody Guthrie while wearing an Industrial Workers of the World T-shirt.“This is all good practice for tonight, because I’m playing in Tower Records and I’m not quite ready,” he says, and his wife, Kumiko, laughs.They met in 2000, when she was roped in to help organise a tour for Irvine and the late Dónal Lunny in Japan. Irvine is 84 years old and about to go on tour once more. He is holding his guitar-shaped bouzouki and has a harmonica upside down in the harness in the same style as Guthrie. He recently released Devoted, a record made up of Guthrie songs and one of his own that’s a tribute to the American singer.“I discovered Woody Guthrie when I was about 16,” Irvine says. “First of all, I was fascinated by the music he played, and I took that on board. And then gradually, as I got to know more and more about Woody, I took his politics on board as well. I took everything on board in the end.”READ MOREGuthrie’s music speaks remarkably well to the current age, with songs warning against fascism, decrying injustice, lamenting the plight of refugees and urging the people to unite against the tycoons who exploit them. “Woody wanted to see a more equal world,” Irvine says. “In the 1940s, when he was travelling around in the south [of the United States], there was segregation. Woody used to play with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, two black men, and he insisted that they all go into white places.”Irvine was obsessed with Guthrie as a teenager. “I met Pete Seeger in London” – Irvine’s family lived there – “and I asked him where Woody was, because there was no way of finding out these things in those days,” he says. “There was no internet or even an encyclopedia to tell you.“So I found out that he was in hospital in New Jersey with Huntington’s disease, which he had inherited from his mother, and he was no longer able to sing and play.“He couldn’t write, but a lovely woman called Sid Gleason, who lived in East Orange, New Jersey, with her husband used to take him out at weekends.Andy Irvine. Photograph: Enda O'Dowd “Sid was great with me. We became really close friends. She was the one who called me Andy first. She said, ‘Oh, Andrew sounds so formal. Do you mind if I call you Andy…?’“The letters to Woody Guthrie were all discovered about 10 or 15 years ago, when they knocked down Greystone Park” – a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey – “and they’re all now in the Woody Guthrie archive…“I was 16 or 17, and the things I said … I shiver with embarrassment.”One evening at Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl’s club in London, Guthrie’s friend Ramblin’ Jack Elliott played. [ Peggy Seeger: ‘I met Bob Dylan before he was Bob Dylan. He came for my autograph’Opens in new window ]“People rushed towards Jack, all these extrovert people, and I thought, well, there’s no point in me joining them, because I’m not one of them. So I stalked him all the way back to his house and noted the address. I went home and wrote him a letter with my phone number, and he rang me up the next day and said, ‘Come on over,’ and I couldn’t believe my luck.“I rode over on the bicycle. I was 17. They didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for. I’d go over every morning. I’d get there about 9.30 or 10am and I’d bang on the door. And June, Jack’s wife, would get up and she’d come to the door and go, ‘Oh, it’s you! Come in…’Woody Guthrie in 1943. Photograph: US Library of Congress “Jack was hanging out of Woody when he was about my age or a little bit older, so I don’t know if that’s the reason he accepted my friendship, but we became really good friends.” He plays Ramblin’ Round, a song Guthrie wrote about dust bowl refugees in the 1930s. He plays a bit of another Guthrie song, The 1913 Massacre, about a real attack on miners and their families by a mine owner’s goons. “It’s a great last line,” he says. “‘See what your greed for money has done…’ Everything wrong with the human race is in that line.”Next Irvine plays Wallace Taylor Train/Bet on Wallace, a hybrid of two campaign songs Guthrie wrote for Henry Wallace, Franklin D Roosevelt’s vice-president before he was ditched in favour of Harry Truman. This meant Truman was the man in office when Roosevelt died. So Wallace ran independently for president as an out-and-out socialist candidate. He lost. “That was the end of any chance of progressive politics [in the United States]. The reason [Wallace] didn’t get the vice-presidency of 1944 was because a lot of the Democratic senators and House representatives from the south disagreed with his policy of ending segregation.“It would have been interesting to see how he would have managed if he had been president of the USA.”Irvine also plays Mister Charlie Lindbergh, an attack on the fascism-curious American aviator. It contains the line, “They say America First, but they mean America Next.” “That song was not released on record until the 1960s,” Irvine says. “I imagine it might have been something to do with libel possibilities.”In his own Guthrie tribute song, Never Tire of the Road, he also quotes the singer’s refrain “All you fascists bound to lose”. “I sang that at the end of [an American] show, and everybody joined in with gusto.” Irvine laughs. “There probably wasn’t one Republican in the audience.”What is he thinking as he plays this music? “At this moment I’m probably thinking, ‘What’s the next verse and where am I on the fingerboard?’” He laughs. “They become more dramatic and emotional as time goes on.”Guthrie’s egalitarianism is what attracted Irvine, he says. “When I was quite young I used to get up early and travel around the block of flats that we lived in with the porter. He’d be emptying the bins, and I’d be fascinated by what [would] be in the bins. I collected things… “I really liked Jack very much, but my parents were saying you shouldn’t really be hanging around with this working-class man, and I didn’t understand that. So I think I had it in me anyway. But, yeah, Woody shaped it.”His mother was the musical comedy performer Felice Lascelles, and Irvine became a child actor. “My mother was very showy. A couple of drinks and she’d sing at the drop of a hat. And everybody loved her except her miserable 10-year-old son, who was embarrassed by almost everything she did.”[ Phil Coulter: ‘The song Congratulations has fed, clothed and educated my children’Opens in new window ]Irvine doesn’t seem particularly showbiz. “No, I absolutely hate showbiz.”Is his more earthy and introverted musical career a response to that? “It could be … I’m not an extrovert at all, and in fact I get very nervous on stage, which is why I’m having a drink now. If I’m playing well I love it. I love myself … I think I want to be loved, you know? And if the audience loves me and loves my music, I’m brought back up to self-confidence zero.” He smiles. “I’m usually below that.”Why? “I don’t know. I’m a nervous man. It’s no hardship. Ronnie Drew [of The Dubliners] was also really nervous. He’d get sick before going on the stage.”Irvine met Drew when he came back to Dublin at the age of 20 and found a new ballad scene around O’Donoghue’s Bar. Sweeney's Men: Andy Irvine (centre) with Johnny Moynihan and Terry Woods. Photograph: Brian Shuel/Redferns “At that time almost no pubs allowed music. Even in O’Donoghue’s, a year or two before I arrived, Johnny Moynihan [who became his bandmate in Sweeney’s Men] would play the tin whistle under his coat and Maureen O’Donoghue would be going, ‘Who’s playing music there?’ I think by the time I arrived O’Donoghue’s allowed music, and that was the big attraction of it.”He loved The Dubliners. “They were very kind to me, and welcoming, and when they were away on tour O’Donoghue’s wasn’t quite the same,” Irvine says. “Ronnie giving out yards to people…“In the early 1960s Dublin was a very conservative place. And people were very much ruled by the Catholic hierarchy. Sometimes if you went out in the street with your jeans and a beard, people would look at you and go tsk-tsk.“O’Donoghue’s was a planet where you were among your own people.” The toilet there even made a musical drone that Irvine liked to sing to, he says. “I was very disappointed when I went in last year and the drone wasn’t there any more.”Why did he leave acting? “I hadn’t enjoyed it since I was about 14 or 15, when the dreaded puberty hit me and I suddenly became a lot more self-conscious… When I played music with Johnny and other people it was a lifestyle. I didn’t have any ambitions. We very rarely played for money. Johnny had a set of rules by which he lived, and I kind of agreed with him.”Moynihan brought the bouzouki to Irish music. “One weekend he came over with a bouzouki, and that was the beginning of it. We didn’t like it at all. It was a Greek bouzouki, and I can’t remember what we didn’t like about it. But he then was told of a flat-back instrument of the same type available from a maker in London, and he flew over there and he bought it, and that was the beginning of the Irish bouzouki.”It became Moynihan, Irvine and, later, Lunny’s go-to instrument. “The trouble with the guitar, if you played a G chord, it had too many thirds in it. And thirds were not good if you were accompanying reels and jigs.”When did Irvine realise he was a “professional musician”? “Sweeney’s Men was formed in 1966. The summer of 1966 was magnificent. We travelled around Ireland… I keep diaries quite often but never when things are going really wonderfully. “It’s a great shame I can’t remember too much about it. We came back to Dublin at the end of the summer of 1966, and we shared a house in the North Strand, and we got almost no work and we were really rat poor. “I think that’s when I decided I was a professional musician, in the attic with nothing to eat.” They were managed by Des Kelly, the leader of the Capitol Showband, who got them gigs. They often played at the interval during showband gigs with terrible sound set-ups. “I remember singing our hit song The Old Maid in the Garret… I set off in a key hoping it was the right one. At the end of the first verse I discovered it wasn’t.”Why did Irvine leave that band? “Along with the rest of European youth, I got this buzz to get out on the road, hitchhiked to Bulgaria and Romania, and the rest is history,” he says.“A ‘sunburnt thumb’ was what Woody used to call it. As Galway Joe Dolan [another Sweeney’s Men founder] wrote, ‘Why we’re travelling, I don’t know, just pack up your bag and get up and go.’ “The realisation that one could go to all these places and see them without having a load of money, young people all over Europe in 1967, 1968 all discovered that at the same time.”Irvine has always been an internationalist, happy to play Irish music, American music, Scottish music and Balkan music on this Irish-Greek instrument. He’s surprised it wasn’t more controversial among the purists. “In 1970 I worked up this song, which I’d learned most of from Eddie Butcher, The Plains of Kildare… Part of [the arrangement] is in seven-eight [time] … I remember playing a gig in the Neptune rowing club, and I thought ‘God knows what they’ll think. People like [the accordion player] Tony MacMahon might come up and hit me.’”He laughs. I tell Irvine that I find those time signatures difficult to play and that I’m more comfortable in four-four or three-four time. He laughs. “Good for you. I’m not that good in four-four.”Andy Irvine. Photograph: Enda O'Dowd Planxty first came together to accompany Christy Moore on his album Prosperous; then Moore had the idea that they should form a permanent ensemble. There was a magic to it. “I think Christy and Liam [O’Flynn] and myself just did what we did when we played solo, but Dónal [Lunny] glued it all together and made the structure work … We were just chemically the right four people.”Irvine and Lunny subsequently worked together on many other projects. Lunny “just gets into everybody’s brain”, he says. “Whoever he’s playing with, he plays exactly what they would like to hear.”Lunny, who is unwell when Irvine and I talk – it was announced on Friday afternoon that he had died, at the age of 79, after a long illness – was the subject of a moving documentary, In Time, by Nuala O’Connor. Irvine saw Lunny recently. “He was in great form ... The number of bands on hold because of Dónal [being ill] is in the millions.”[ Siobhán Long: Dónal Lunny’s legacy will be his openness to new ways of interpreting old musicOpens in new window ]Irvine is heartened by the way younger people keep finding his music. In 2005, when Planxty re-formed, they benefited from a No Disco documentary and book about the band from the writer and promoter Leagues O’Toole. “I remember playing in the National Concert Hall and the first two rows were all people under 25 who wouldn’t have been born the first time we played.” Some of Irvine’s oldest material still gets the best response. “The West Coast of Clare, the first song I ever wrote, continues to be the audience’s favourite of my songs, which is a little bit annoying.” He laughs. “I sang it with John Doyle in North Carolina quite recently, and the audience actually gave it a standing ovation.”Does he consider the rearrangements he does of songs from the traditional canon to be a form of writing? “I might change the odd word. I might even change the odd tune… I’m not averse to meddling.” When Irvine is working on a song, he says, he goes “to a different dimension.” Of the current wave of young Irish trad acts, he particularly likes Daoirí Farrell and Ye Vagabonds. He still plays with the Swedish group Quilty; they’re about to tour Ireland together. “My latest excitement became Swedish polskas and fiddle music. It’s very odd. A polska seems to go on about four bars longer than it should.” Does he have any thoughts on the music industry? “I’m not a fan of the music industry. One hopes for success. But it’s not the most important thing.”What is the most important thing? “Doing it and loving it.” He laughs. “And getting loved for it.”Why do this album now, almost 70 years after first discovering Guthrie? “I was always a little bit aggrieved that the powers that be recognised so many people as being Woody Guthrie fans and not me. So that might have been one of the reasons. I thought, ‘Right, f**k this. I’m weighing in.’” Andy Irvine and Quilty begin their tour of Ireland at Belfast International Arts Festival on Wednesday, November 4th, followed by dates in Dún Laoghaire and Naul, Co Dublin; Newbridge, Co Kildare; Kilmacow, Co Kilkenny; Galway; Limerick; Cork City; and Clonakilty, Co Cork. Andy Irvine also plays with Oisín Leech in Navan, Co Meath, on Saturday, November 21st. More details on andyirvine.com. His album Devoted: Songs of Woody Guthrie is released by the Last Music Company