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Ireland

Dublin neighbours, married in 1968

Gay and Terry Woods

Gay and Terry Woods grew up as neighbours in Dublin, started performing together as teenagers, and married in 1968. In those same years Terry was also playing in Sweeney's Men. Much later, in the mid-1980s, he joined the Pogues as a multi-instrumentalist, and Gay spent a stretch as an original member of Steeleye Span. Backwoods, their 1975 duo album for Polydor, was recorded at London's Marquee Studios, with King Crimson's Mike Giles sitting in on drums.

Dublin, Virgin Prunes to cabaret solo

Gavin Friday

Fionán Hanvey grew up on Dublin's Cedarwood Road, where he met Bono and Guggi as a teenager and stayed close to both for life. As Gavin Friday he fronted the confrontational art-punk band the Virgin Prunes, and after their 1985 split he turned to a solo career built on cabaret theatrics and torch-song melodrama. With his longtime collaborator Maurice Seezer, and alongside Bono, he wrote music for the 1993 film In the Name of the Father, which earned a Golden Globe nomination.

Fairfax, California, freak snow, 1973

Van Morrison

"Snow in San Anselmo" opens Van Morrison's 1973 album Hard Nose the Highway. He wrote it after an unusual snowfall, the first in over thirty years, hit Marin County, California, while he was living nearby in Fairfax and recording at his own Caledonia Studio next door to his house. He called it "just a sketch," and it does sound like one. A hushed piano figure swells near the end into a full backing choir from the Oakland Symphony, with singer Jackie DeShannon added to the mix, and a small-town snow day starts to sound almost like church music.

Dublin, louder than the pub session

The Bothy Band

Dónal Lunny left Planxty in 1975 to start something louder. The Bothy Band's first concert, that February at Trinity College Dublin, showed a group playing reels and airs at a speed and volume closer to rock than to any pub session. Lunny on bouzouki, Matt Molloy and Kevin Burke, uilleann piper Paddy Keenan, and siblings Mícheál and Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill cut their self-titled debut that same year on the small Mulligan label. They lasted only four years and three albums, splitting in 1979. Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Emmylou Harris all counted themselves fans, though, and the band's alumni went on to seed half a decade of the Irish folk-rock that followed.

Dublin, The Dubliners' voice, 1962–84

Luke Kelly

Luke Kelly co-founded the Dubliners in 1962, and the band became known for his booming voice and shock of red hair as much as for anyone's playing. Fellow singer Ralph McTell put it this way: "this red-headed Irishman got up with a banjo," he remembered, "and pinned us all to the wall." Songwriter Phil Coulter trusted him with deeply personal material, and he kept recording with the Dubliners through albums like 1970's Revolution. Kelly died of a brain tumour in 1984, at forty-three. Dublin mourned him publicly and on a huge scale.

Dublin schoolgirls, one album, 1972

Mellow Candle

Clodagh Simonds and Alison Bools were still schoolgirls, fifteen and sixteen, when Mellow Candle released their first single in 1968. By the time the full band recorded their only album, Swaddling Songs, for Deram in 1972, guitarist Dave Williams, bassist Frank Boylan and drummer William Murray had joined the two songwriters. It sold poorly and the band split within a year. Decades later it turned into one of the most sought-after cult records in British and Irish progressive folk, and original vinyl copies now change hands for far more than anyone paid for the LP when it came out.

Prosperous, County Kildare, 1970

Planxty

Christy Moore, Andy Irvine, Dónal Lunny and uilleann piper Liam O'Flynn started out in July 1970 with an informal run of sessions above a pub in Prosperous, County Kildare. No amplification, no fixed songbook, mostly playing for each other. The group that grew out of it, Planxty, stood apart because of an instrument that had no place in the tradition at all. Irvine and Lunny had been bringing home Balkan and Greek bouzoukis, and once those went into Irish dance tunes, within a few years the sound counted as part of the tradition itself. Their self-titled 1973 debut, recorded in London and nicknamed the Black Album for its cover, was produced by Phil Coulter, the same songwriter who turns up in Luke Kelly's story elsewhere on this page.

The Collection