Havin' A Craic

Some four years ago, Midnight Oil/The Break songwriter, guitarist and keyboards player Jim Moginie was in Ireland rediscovering his roots – his people originally came from County Offaly – and he found himself in a pub in Cadamstown, not far from Tullamore, and a session was in progress.

“And an old guy, Paddy Heaney, who's a local historian, was presiding over the session,” Moginie remembers, “and it'd be, 'Well now, we're gonna have Seamus, he's gonna read a poem', and everyone would be quiet, you know? It's a rowdy bar, but when someone talks or sings, everyone shuts up, which, in an Australian pub would be, 'Fuckin' shut up mate, can't hear the sport!' Over there, a couple of great musicians, box players, the Irish accordion, were running the session and little kids were playing along, twelve-year-old, six-year-old kids playing the whistle, and they all knew hundreds of these songs, and Fiona Marshall, who plays the harp with The Chieftains, was playing that night and I mean it was just insanely good and I realised then I was being drawn in, seduced in a way, to the whole thing.”

He was hooked. He returned to Ireland again last year and attended more sessions and festivals and found that he had become completely bewitched by these timeless traditional melodies and the way the whole community was a part of creating that music. Thus was sown the germ of his latest little musical venture, Shameless Seamus & The Tullamore Dews.

“I was asked to play at the St Patrick's Day parade last year – funnily enough it was cancelled due to rain,” he laughs, “which is very Irish, so I put together this band for that with Alan [Healy], who I knew anyway from going into Bloomsday [the annual commemoration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce based on his book, Ulysses]. Alan's a scholar of Joyce and [playwright Samuel] Beckett and also a fantastic visual artist and a great tenor banjo player from Dublin. Evelyn Kennedy plays the fiddle – they've been playing together for years, both Irish musicians.

“And I'd been hanging around with Steve Coburn, who's the son of John Coburn, the Australian painter, and he was teaching me sculpture [chuckles] but he loves playing music as well, so he's on mandolin, and my son Sam is a drummer, so he was in and then Bird [drummer Dave Twohill] from The Mentals also joined, so Sam ended up playing percussion – Bird also plays a bodhran really nicely as well. And Pete Mackie, who was in The Cockroaches, is a friend of Alan's and just dropped in on bass.

“So we just threw this thing together, but as soon as we started playing it just sounded complete, and Christine Wheeler played a little whistle and flute on the record; she's from up in the Blue Mountains, so she sometimes gets with us when we play, so it's a big band – eight of us – and we make a bit of a racket.”

Since Moginie has his own recording studio, Oceanic, that was the obvious place to rehearse, and since all his recording gear is there, he threw up a few mics and over two days recorded the band playing live. The result was debut album Ballroom Of Romance, a collection of primarily traditional Irish songs with a version of Dylan's It's All Good thrown in for the fun of it. And that really is the point. Moginie isn't restricting his musical vision to recycling Oils tunes.

“I played with the ACO Underground, the chamber orchestra, last Sunday night at the old Kinselas, playing Paganini and Bach,” he laughs, “and for some reason they like my playing.”

Shameless Seamus & The Tullamore Dews will be playing the following shows:

Tuesday 18 December - The Basement, Sydney NSW