Donal Lunny on reforming the Bothy Band for Celtic Connections: 'It's an opportunity we did not expect'

The first tune to be heard on the Bothy Band’s debut album, back in 1975, was the Kesh jig, opening what became a signature set for a group that, over its short lifetime, was immensely influential within and beyond the Irish traditional music explosion of the Seventies.note-0

The Kesh was heralded by an introductory rhythmic thrum of bouzouki strings joined by a pipe drone – giving, as I recall, a sense of something marvellous on the way, before the melody sang in on flute, pipes and fiddle, guitar and keyboard bolstering the drive. There was a fleet elegance about it all as tune flowed into tune, tempered by songs in Irish and Scots Gaelic as well as English.

Audiences will hear the Kesh and other tunes of fond memory later this month as this legendary outfit appears at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival, to play its first public concert since 1979.

“I think 1979 was the last performance,” agrees the band’s co-founder, bouzouki player and producer Donal Lunny, speaking from his home in Dublin. Now 76, he laughs: “We were so bereft of energy at that time we didn’t even notice it was the last performance. We just kind of trickled into the sand. We’d had a tough few years and that was just in terms of rigorous touring and not making a great deal of money from it.”

The Bothy Band took shape in 1974 after Lunny had left another seminal Irish group, Planxty. He joined siblings Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill and Mícheál Ó Dhomhnaill, who brought to the mix clavinet and guitar as well as songs from their Donegal Gaeltacht heritage, flautist Matt Molloy, uilleann piper Paddy Keenan and, in the earliest incarnation, accordionist Tony MacMahon and fiddler Paddy Glackin.

They initially called themselves Seachtar – “seven” – but MacMahon soon left to work on TV production and Glackin a little later, to be replaced by the legendary Donegal fiddler Tommy Peoples. Lunny reckons it was during a conversation between Ó Dhomhnaill and MacMahon that the topic of bothies emerged, the often inhospitable buildings that housed immigrant Irish labourers working in Scotland.

Peoples left after a year of frantic touring, to be replaced by Kevin Burke, who remained with the group for the remainder of their meteoric five-year, four-album life. Post-Bothy, members continued on distinguished paths of their own, Lunny going on to establish such other notable groups as Moving Hearts, Coolfin and Usher’s Island.

The group have been described as “a rock ‘n’ roll band in folk clothing”, which may be simplistic, but certainly they played with formidable drive and fluency, the front line of fiddle, pipes and flute powered by that rhythm section of bouzouki (an instrument which Lunny, along with Planxty colleague Andy Irvine, had extruded into Irish music), guitar and clavinet keyboard. “I can’t say that we had any musical philosophy per se,” reflects Lunny, “but we had an effect on each other and, as is the way with most good bands, the result was a combination of individuals.

The Bothy Band, with Donal Lunny second-left PIC: Molly Keane

“Pipes, fiddle and flute was an obvious combination in that they were three distinct voices, but then you had guitar, clavinet and bouzouki and that was another fortuitous combination. So you had six elements in basically a front line and a back line, and whatever Tríona, Mícheál and myself did, there was the additional advantage of there being some very solid bass end of the clavinet under the guitar.”

Many tune sets owed their arrangement to flautist Molloy, who, says Lunny, “had a beautiful instinct for sequencing tunes in such a way that they enhanced each other”.

Ó Dhomhnaill passed away in 2006, Peoples in 2018. The Celtic Connections line-up will feature Keenan, Molloy, Lunny and Ní Dhomhnaill, with fiddlers Glackin and Burke. They’re joined by guitarist Seán Óg Graham.

The reunion was initiated last autumn for a documentary by Irish national broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann. “The RTE documentary was really the trigger,” says Lunny. “And, yeah, we were all, if you like, very pleased at this opportunity which we did not expect, to get back together again.”

The overriding factor which had militated against a reunion for so many years was Ó Dhomhnaill’s passing. “Ten years back a reunion would have been unthinkable following the death of Mícheál, who was so pivotal to the whole thing”

Tríona, however, had got to know Seán Óg Graham who, in Lunny’s words, “has chameleoned into Mícheál’s role; his absorption into the band has been seamless in terms of his guitar playing”.

With so many disparate personalities within the old band, were there differences? “We had but they were never really a problem. There were various degrees of irresponsibility, if you like, mostly drink-related, but we managed by and large to stay the right way up.

He recalls, wryly, “one notoriously unprofessional performance” at Inverness Folk Festival in 1976. In fairness, this writer was at that self-same, uproariously bacchanalian event, but still remembers the band creating a sensation, despite some members exhibiting signs of overenjoyment. Lunny laughs: “Inverness was kind of a nadir, I think, of our trajectory. I remember us fighting our way through the lobby of the Douglas Hotel when we arrived: it was mayhem from the word go.”

We can doubtless expect an older, wiser but every bit as powerful Bothy Band in Glasgow later this month. The sleeve notes on their 1975 debut album commented on those titular bothies: “How many an unnamed migrant worker they housed. And the bothy bands – the nights they had, the tunes and the songs. The music played here is for them.”

During early discussions about the bothies and the conditions endured by their occupants, Lunny recalls, the topic came up of an infamous incident in 1937 when ten young migrant workers from Achill died in a bothy fire in Kirkintilloch.

In saluting these unsung figures, the Bothy Band burned a kinder, brightly creative fire of their own that, for many, elevated Irish traditional music to a new level.

The Bothy Band play Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 22 January as part of Celtic Connections, see www.celticconnections.com