Ron Kavana RIP: 'no-nonsense, rock'n'roll, colourful, wild …. and great'
May 08, 2024
Colin Randall remembers Ron Kavana ….
Saturday night out in Belfast. It was easy to work out from looking at the dance floor that the audience for Ron Kavana's band was predominantly from nationalist areas of the city. Young men and women had perfected a blend of club dancing and Irish steps. To the two English reporters looking on, it was a striking spectacle.
My companion that night was Nick Watt, then the impossibly youthful and accomplished Times correspondent for Ireland (now the impossibly youthful and accomplished political editor of BBC Newsnight).
As I was not only a Daily Telegraph news reporter, on a two-week Belfast stint, but also its folk music correspondent, I was the driving force for the choice of that club for an evening's entertainment. Nick may have forgotten it but vivid memories flooded into my mind as I learnt of the death of Kavana, after a long illness, at the age of 73.
Ron Kavana: photo supplied by his family after his death
Back then, in the 1990s, a Ron Kavana gig could take one of two forms, the acoustic version to which I was more accustomed or electric, and this was the latter.
Nick and I were both impressed by his and his band's musicianship, energy and stagecraft. Irish music has lost an important figure with Kavana's passing.
He was born Ronnie Kavanagh in Fermoy, Co Cork, the son of an Irish father. Joe, and an American mother. Dolores, from Chicago with Cajun roots.
He became a multi-instrumentalist and excellent songwriter, comfortable in a variety of styles including Irish music, folk and folk-rock and British-style blues and R&B, very active on the London pub rock scene.
Kavana played with the Pogues (he co-wrote, with Terry Woods, Young Ned on the Hill and took mischievous pleasure in getting English audiences to sing along with gusto to its anti- Cromwell lyrics: he’d have loved to know he had Times and Telegraph journalists in that Belfast audience). There was also a long list of other bands he formed - the Wizards, the Radiators From Space, Kavana's Krisis Band and Juice the Loose.
He also joined bands including Panama Red, the Thunderbirds, the Balham Alligators, the Alexis Korner Band and, with Charlie Watts on drums and Jack Bruce on bass, the Boogie Woogie Band. Other artists with whom he collaborated ranged from Memphis Slim and Champion Jack Dupree to Clarence "Frogman" Henry, from Elvis Costello to Sinead O'Connor.
With some reason, New York's The Village Voice once called him a "hard-hitting, no-nonsense realist".
The song of his I know best is Reconciliation, which I place among the best to be inspired by the Troubles and, for all its sentimentality, is certainly no-nonsense.
Here it is performed by another of his bands, Alias Ron Kavana. "Best live act in the world," said a writer at fRoots magazine.
In the Cork Echo newspaper, Brian O'Neill, who decades ago cast Kavana in the lead role for his Celtic music stage production
The great Cork singer-songwriter Jimmy Crowley told the Echo: “Ron was just great company, he was rock’n’roll, he was wild, but I loved him very much. He was a great songwriter.”
A death notice in Fermoy said Kavana "passed away peacefully in the exceptional care of the staff at Cork University Hospital after a long illness bravely borne". He outlived his wife, Breda, but leaves a daughter, Georgia,and three grandchildren.
Salut! Live adds it own condolences and leaves readers with his solo version of Young Ned of the Hill ....
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