Salut! Live

Although there are interviews where Donal Lunny talks about Coolfin as a band, it seems to have been more of a centre of gravity, a place where musicians could gather around, record together, and tour together. Either way, the name comes from a lake in County Clare that’s also the subject of an old Irish song.

There’s a lot of music on the record—the CD runs for more than 50 minutes—and broadly they split between songs from the tradition, and tunes composed by Lunny. Nollaig Casey, who plays fiddle and viola, contributes a tune; Sharon Shannon plays accordion.

One of the principles of Coolfin was to have an instrumental group and add guest vocalists for the songs. As Lunny told Niall Stokes in an interview for Hot Press,

That was a notion from the outside, to have a core band which would be instrumental and then have guests on that. Why not have different people in?.

The actual singers depended on who was available at the time.

“I thought of Marta [Sebestyen] and the fact that we'd played together 10 years before in a band that Andy Irvine had formed called Mosaic. It was a brilliant experience and I just love her singing... Eddi Reader had sung with us on Sult the previous year and it went really well, so she was one of the first people who popped into our minds. And  Maighréad (Ní Dhomhnaill) had sung with the band two or three times before.”

I’m going to pick out here some of the tracks from the record I’ve always particularly liked—which happen to be those from these three singers.

On The Lowlands of Holland Eddi Reader brings a mournful tone to the old Scots lament, in which a woman tells the story of her new husband pressed into service in the navy—only to die in a shipwreck. The Dubliners sang a version of this.

The great Hungarian singer Márta Sebestyén appears on a set of songs called Moldavian Dances. I’d heard her before—she has a haunting song on the soundtrack of The English Patient, and Joe Boyd’s Hannibal label had released a record by her a year or so before—but seeing her name on the record immediately created some excitement about what the collaboration would sound like.

But the favourite track on those car journeys —it would sometimes get played repeatedly—was False Fly. The vocals are by Maighréad and Triona Ní Dhomhnaill.

The source material for the song seems to be the Child ballad False Knight on the Road, recorded by Steeleye Span and many others, but this seems to be a slightly different version that’s come down through an Irish tradition.

The song has the feel of an old ballad, but was probably written in the early 19th century. In the version on Coolfin, it tells the story of a young girl who is accosted on the road by the devil (in disguise, obviously, but that’s a completely different song), but is able to outwit him. Which, let’s face it, is quintessentially Irish. Jane Siberry covered this version on Hush a couple of years later.

But picking out individual songs doesn’t really do Coolfin justice as a record. From the slight syncopation on the opening track, Spanish Point, to the final track, a Lunny tune called Lucky, Lucky, Day, Lunny brings all of his experience as a musician, producer, and arranger to the sound and the sequencing. He’s at the top of his game, and the record feels all of a piece.

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A shorter version of this article first appeared on the Salut!Live Facebook group. This link will take you straight there.