John Sheahan, noted fiddle and tin whistle player is, sadly, the last surviving member of iconic trad band The Dubliners. Now in his mid-80s, the man with a reputation as the calm amongst a quite substantive storm shows no signs of slowing down. As well as recent collaborations with the likes of Declan O’Rourke and Colm Mac Con Iomaire, Sheahan has been right at the heart of recreating The Dubliners’ tale, delivered through a stage show entitled ‘The Dubliners Encore’, a show celebrating the lives of one of our cities finest music stories.
In this interview, the Gazette take a step away from our usual interview format to offer an extended chat with Sheahan, on his musical life, past and present, and the production of the new stage show. In it, Sheahan happily jaunts from past to present, showing a knowledge of the contemporary Irish music scene we suspect would surprise nobody who knows of his reputation.
“I was seen as the quietest of an unruly mob sometimes,” Sheahan laughs, looking back at his Dubliners days. “I used to refer to myself as the mortar between the bricks, keeping the building steady. They also said I was steering the ship past dangerous watering holes.”
That was then, and this is now. “I released my first solo album at the age of 80,” he says of his recent output. “It wasn’t all that different from what I’ve done before. I became known for writing a song called ‘The Marino Waltz’ that was used on a Bord Na Mona ad maybe 15 years ago. When a tune like that becomes popular you’re almost typecast, like an actor.”
“In the background I’d written 50 or 60 tunes over a long period, and used a couple of them on various Dubliners albums. I only worked with the engineer in the studio on the album, I wanted to keep it to myself a bit. A lot of the tunes have this kind of baroque, classical feel to them, so I’ve had a few arranged for string quartet or orchestra.”
“‘Marino Waltz’ was recorded in Marino casino among friends, including Colm Mac Con Iomaire, of The Frames. We did some gigs together. So there were a lot of ideas to bring into the studio, and I was very pleased with the results. I’m still working on notions of maybe doing a few more tracks, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m not in any great hurry to get a second album out but I am working slowly towards it.”
The broader scene, including several of its key protagonists, still inspires Sheahan, who references acts including Cork rock icons Whipping Boy alongside rising trad stars when he talks music. “I think trad is very strong at the moment, with some marvellous players, people like Zoe Conway and Maura Branock,” he says, acknowledging that the progress of women in the scene is a stark and welcome contrast to his earlier days. “They can both play on the trad scene or with an orchestra. I see music as an international language, a universal language, so I don’t really categorise it too much. I think quite often the style in which you play a tune counts for more than anything else.”
“For the craic at parties sometimes, I have played ‘Hey Jude’ with a tin whistle and traditional embellishments. There are some lines in there that are quite similar to a couple of lines in Mná na hÉireann, which I find quite interesting. I’m working on some ideas to combine the two.”
Taking a step back to glance at The Dubliners’ legacy, Sheahan is both modest and proud. “We get portrayed as the godfathers of Irish folk,” he laughs. “The first time we became aware of that kind of compliment was from The Pogues, who cited us as a huge influence on what they did. We never took ourselves that seriously or analysed what we were doing, it just came naturally to us, but it appears a lot of groups took our layout and our instrumentation as the defining way that trad music should be played. It’s nice to hear these accolades come back now from various sources, including the likes of U2, who we played with a couple of times.”
Not that Sheahan is set in the ways he helped to establish. “It’s nice to experiment a bit and try out different takes on tunes, as long as you don’t stray too far from the well. I think trad music has a natural internal rhythm of its own, which some of the old players were great at. There’s no need to force a rhythm on it. Old solo tin whistle players had this natural rhythm in the way in which they played.”
“I’d probably cite Planxty and The Chieftains as the very good groups, they were very tasteful with nice new arrangements that never lost sight of the original flavour of the tunes,” he says. “When I was growing up, some of the old musicians had very narrow viewpoints about what you could and couldn’t do, and shunned other styles of music. I remember I got caught playing a bit of a Beatles song on the fiddle, and told me not to mind that foreign jazz, to stick with my own style of music. Some people back then saw music as traditional Irish music and everything else.”
“I remember being down in Tipperary playing at a parochial home, and the hall had been opened early in the afternoon, just to set up. This guy came over to us afterwards and was obviously impressed with what we were doing, and said ‘do you read music, or are you gifted’. Which was a nice way of looking at things.”
“I’m often asked about my best moments on the road, and people expect you to say ‘I met Mick Jagger’, or something like that, but for me they’re little moments. Nothing to do with the stage production at all. About 60 years ago we were doing a gig in a little hall in Wexford, and after the gig people were coming to the dressing room looking for autographs. This couple came with a little girl, about four, and I went down on my hunkers and had a chat with her. I asked her her name, and where she lived, and she said ‘Sarah’, and that she ‘lived next door to the Murphys’.”
“She defined her world by the people next door, and I found that beautiful. Little memories of things like that just stay with you.”
“I miss them all every day, things like the Barney-isms,” Sheahan says of his bandmates. “Barney [McKenna] was once told on tour in Australia that it would be 100 degrees in the shade, and he said ‘Jesus, I’m not standing in the shade’.”
While The Dubliners have been gone for over a decade, though, Sheahan hasn’t stood still. “I’ve loved playing with the new generation of singers, like Glen Hansard and Imelda May. I did a tour with Damian Dempsey and Declan O’Rourke. We called the tour ‘The New Triangle’. Declan O’Rourke dropped by a couple of months ago and my wife had him cleaning cobwebs from the ceiling and changing light bulbs.”
Of course, those earlier days will never be forgotten. “We finished touring as a group in 2012, and a lot of people were nostalgic about it and bemoaning the end of an era, the soundtrack to their lives kind of thing,” Sheahan says. “Shortly after that my daughter came to me and asked if we couldn’t recreate that excitement and that talent from the original group, a kind of ‘true story’ live event, with songs and stories, and the craic, as well as the history.”
That idea would become ‘The Dubliners Encore’, the new stage show that announced its first dates in recent weeks. “We decided to do it with archival footage and a proper group, so we went talent scouting about the country for singers capable of reproducing the original Dubliners. We came up with five original guys, each quite capable of reproducing the sounds of the original group. Then we got Phil Coulter in to produce it musically, faithful to the original.”
“The guy, James Kelleher, who plays Luke [Kelly] in the show is very close to Luke’s voice,” Sheahan says. “We didn’t want to get an imitation, more a natural similar voice, and he’s the closest I ever heard. Similarly with Kilian O’Flanagan, he has the low pitched voice, and the guy who plays Barnay McKenna, the banjo player, has the same mannerisms and looks as Barney. The fiddle player, like myself, is quiet and gentle, a bit like myself. He’s a school teacher.”
“I sat in the rehearsals and gave them tips I’d picked up, techniques for accompanying songs,” Sheahan says of his involvement in the show. “We spent months on and off rehearsing and getting the shape of the show, and trying to recreate the original arrangement. Phil was a good man for the job as he produced five or six of our albums in the 70s, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. So that worked out very well.”
“We have a definite storyline running through it all. Maurice Sweeney did a documentary, and we got him involved. He’s familiar with the various aspects of the Dubliners from the documentary.”
“We took what we thought were the salient points, starting off as four individuals, then I joined about two years after the group started. There are clips of Luke leaving for England, with people getting on the old boat to Liverpool. He was gone for a couple of years. This was interspersed with songs and stories.”
The result is perhaps the closest thing to The Dubliners we’ll ever see again, and fittingly, shaped by Sheahan’s hand. Having been previewed on the Late Late Show recently, it’s all set to hit the road. Sheahan will be watching on proudly.