The Late Late: Guests from Aldi, 24 Carat Diamonds Left at Home

The galling thing about the Late Late Show’s booking policy isn’t just the pool of dodos from which guests are regularly harvested, painful though that pool is. It’s that the Late Late is remiss in its duty as the cultural flagship of the nation in bringing actual culture to the people, and churns out a lot of old gas from Frances Black, Eamon Holmes and Charles Bird instead.

An Spailpín was reminded of this when buying a CD recently. The CD featured Seán Ó Sé as a guest star of the Turloughmore Ceilí Band, which is a development that An Spailpín thinks worthy of a Late Late special all to itself. Bear with me for a few hundred words, and then decide if this isn’t of greater import to the nation than Ronan Keating or Mary Byrne.

Who is Seán Ó Sé?
Seán Ó Sé is a retired schoolteacher in Cork. But in his spare time he is one of the saviours of Irish traditional music. The economy is buggered, the language has been burning diesel for over a hundred years and survives from sheer spite alone, but one thing we did do right is that we saved the music.

The rising tide of the 1960s US folk scene helped in no small measure of course, t say nothing of the huge archive at the BBC offices in Shepherd’s Bush, but the indigenous impetus to save the music came from Seán Ó Riada and Ceoltóirí Chulann. Ó Riada showed that Irish traditional music was every bit as sophisticated as the great musics of Europe if arranged in a similar style and all of a sudden the nation realised that we didn’t have to hide fiddles under the bed like they were some sign of hopeless boggery. The music took her place among the musics of the world and hasn’t looked back.

Seán Ó Sé was the singer in Seán Ó Riada’s band. Why Ó Sé didn’t move on when Ceoltóirí mutated into the Chieftains after Ó Riada’s early death in 1970 I don’t know, but Ó Sé is still an unquestioned hero of Irish music and culture and should be treated as such even if he never cleared his throat to sing An Poc ar Buile again.

But he’s done even more than that. Recently retired from teaching, Ó Sé is using his retirement to push the boundaries of music even further, and the collaboration with the Turloughmore Ceilí Band is further evidence of that.

And Why’s That?
Because although he loved traditional music, Seán Ó Riada had very clear ideas of what traditional music is and what it isn’t. And Seán Ó Riada particularly despised ceilí bands. He hated them. He said they had “all the musical integrity of a bluebottle buzzing around in a jamjar.” It was a rotten and unfair to thing to say – not least for a man who played the harpsichord himself, hardly the prettiest of instruments.

Ceilí bands had their advocates too, not least the late Ciarán Mac Mathúna, who pointed out that buy playing them at dances ceilí bands saved countless tunes that could have been lost. But there has always been that snobbery associated with ceilí bands, that that are not fully of the tradition.

Crossing No Man’s Land
And that’s what makes the Ó Sé collaboration with the Turloughmore so significant. Ó Sé has crossed no man’s land to join the opposition. In recording a CD with the Turloughmore Ceilí Band, Seán Ó Sé has declared music to be all one, streaming out from the forts of Tuatha de Danann and the other weird peoples that have lived here before us.

If that magic is captured in the nets of the Pipers’ Club or Ceoltas Ceoltóirí Éireann or the hammer men on stage at a hooley while the dancers belt the floor, what matter, what odds? Isn’t it all music all the same, and all particularly Irish, resonant and harmonious with the Irish soul?

That’s what An Spailpín thinks a Late Late Show should be about. The Chieftains and Ó Sé talking about Ó Riada and what he did. Jim McCann and Barney McKenna talking about the folk singers, now the Clancys all roam the other worlds. Planxty and the Bothy Band and Altan to bring it up to date. And then a huge band of the whole damned lot of them, Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, giving it socks on the Rocky Road to Dublin.

And what do I get instead? “Ryan Tubridy chats to Charlie Bird about his new documentary series of legendary Antarctic explorer, Tom Crean. Mary McEvoy talks about her new book, Ireland's greatest slimmer gives advice on how to shed the pounds, Ali Hewson and Adi Roche talk about the Chernobyl Children and Jessie J performs her hit single, 'Price Tag'.”

Price Tag, indeed. Go gcuire Seán Ó Sé an dea-chath fós, go gcasa sé a amhráin go binn go bráth, agus go mbronntar an ómós atá tuilte do lá breá éigin gan moil.

Ó Sé and Ó Riada Release the Record of the Year

Anyone who feels like a treat, now that St Patrick’s Day is past and we’re moving quickly towards the summer, could do an awful lot worse than investing twenty sheets in ‘Dir Cúm Thóla & Cúil Aodha, the new CD from Seán Ó Sé and Peadar Ó Riada. An Spailpín invested at the start of this month, and is listening constantly still, discovering new wonders. A shining light in these dull and vacuous times.

The story of the record is this: Peadar Ó Riada and Seán Ó Sé first performed together at the Requiem Mass for Seán Ó Riada, Peadar’s father and the father of Irish traditional music as we know it. In the ten or so years between his composition/arrangement of the Mise Éire soundtrack and his sudden and untimely death in 1970 Seán Ó Riada’s revolutionised Irish traditional music and Ireland’s attitude to her musical heritage. All we have now in music we owe in no small part to Seán Ó Riada and this new record by Seán Ó Sé and Peadar Ó Riada is a kind of acknowledgement and retrospective of those forty years that have gone by since, and the thousands of years gone by going back to the Tuatha De Danann, of course.

What a retrospective it is. In this age of prolonged record parturition, Ó Sé and Ó Riada did it old school – they performed a concert in Cúil Aodha in December 2005, Ó Riada at the piano and Ó Sé standing beside him, belting out the songs, and stuck it on tape, deciding they would stand or fall by that, and never mind the fairy dust and the reverb.

Ó Riada and Ó Sé have been planning this record, on and off, in the forty odd years since they first performed together at the Requiem for Seán Ó Riada and by God it’s been worth the wait. Seán Ó Sé replaced Darrach Ó Catháin as the singer with Ceoltóirí Chulainn, the band of traditional musicians that Ó Riada formed in the 1960s, and from whom sprang the original members of the Chieftains. Ó Sé is a long time at it now, past three score and ten years of age, and in ‘Dir Cúm Thóla & Cúil Aodha he brings the experience of those seventy years to bear in his reading of the songs on the record.

Ó Sé’s voice is loud, in the same sense that Luke Kelly’s voice was loud. It demands to be heard. In an interview on Áine Hensey’s marvellous and essential traditional music program, The Late Session, on RTÉ Radio 1 last Sunday night, Ó Sé talked about the Irish tradition of abhar amhrán, saying a song, rather than singing it. Ó Riada’s subtle and humble accompaniment gives the songs all the space they need to tell their stories, as Ó Riada steps back and Ó Sé steps forward to sing of Outlaws of the Hill, Carraigdhoun where the heath is brown, and the tragic consequences of Aughrim’s Great Disaster and Seán Ó Duibhir a’ Ghleanna being worsted in the game. The performances of Ó Sé with Ó Riada’s piano accompaniment remind An Spailpín of nothing so much as Paul Robeson with Alan Booth on piano live at Carnegie Hall, and no higher praise am I able to bestow, even though Ó Sé is not, of course, the basso profundo that Robeson was.

In the Hensey interview, both Ó Riada and Ó Sé talk about the importance of place and tradition in the CD, and that’s clear from the title – Ó Riada is from Cúil Aodha and Ó Sé from Cúm Thóla. To his shame, your faithful narrator would not be able to find either on a map, but he cannot but feel envious of anywhere that enjoys so rich a tradition as this. It behoves everybody with a heart beneath an Irish breast to buy this record, but to An Spailpín’s mind, this duty weighs especially heavily on that thirteenth tribe of Israel, the men and women from the rebel county of Cork. For no other reason if not this: Cork enjoys one of the great county songs in The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee, and here Seán Ó Sé gives a definitive reading of that truly beautiful song. “The maid with her lover the wild daises pressed / By the banks of my own lovely Lee.” If you don’t think that a simply gorgeous image as we prepare to put the clocks forward for summertime, An Spailpín suggests you send for the vet immediately, and tell him to bring every damned bottle he has, as the case is very, very serious.

‘Dir Cúm Thóla & Cúil Aodha is a fine and worthy addition to a body of work that goes back to those Ó Riada records of the sixties, now being reissued and re-mastered thank God, and the irony is that very few people would recognise Seán Ó Sé if they met him in the street. If you do, stop him and thank him – the nation owes him a debt which will never be repaid. Go n-éirí leis níos fearr arís ins an trí scór is deich ag teacht chuige, ár laoch is ár Caesar, ár nGile Mear, rí na h-amhránaí, Seán Ó Sé.





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