| As a dabbler in the black art of bodhrán playing myself, it was with great enthusiasm that I accepted the task of interviewing a true master of the instrument, Flook’s John Joe Kelly. I finally managed to catch up with him at this year’s Wimborne Folk Festival where he was performing as part of the Mike McGoldrick Trio along with fellow Flook member, guitarist Ed Boyd.
John Joe was born in Manchester in1975, although both his parents come originally from Ireland.
“My dad, Hughie, is from Tyrone in the North, while my mum, Kathleen, comes from Meath in the South. They were both into music when they were young, but I never really heard them play much myself. It was a friend of my dad’s who first introduced me to the bodhrán when I was about seven. I’d been denting all my older sister Grace’s tin whistles by using them as drumsticks, so this friend of my dad’s brought round a small, ten inch bodhrán to see if I’d take to it, and I did. The stick I was given with the drum was too long for me to play in the traditional two-ended style, which is why I developed my habit of playing mainly with just one end of it. A year and a half or so after that I moved on to playing the céilí drums, which consist of just a bass and a snare. I tried out a full kit later, although I never really played in a band situation.”
As far as bodhrán playing was concerned, John Joe’s progress was pretty much self-directed. The main advice on offer about what to do with a bodhrán was of the type sometimes given to incompetent and/or insensitive players at sessions e.g. “Have you tried playing it with a penknife?” or, “If you put numbers on it, it’ll make a good dart board!”
“Although my parents took us to the local Comhaltas music classes, there wasn’t really a bodhrán specialist there. A guy called Eamonn showed me a few basics, but he wasn’t really a bodhrán player himself. Basically, I was self-taught, picking things up as I went along. It felt a bit weird at the time as I didn’t know anyone else with the instrument. I never saw the few older guys who played as I was too young to get into the pubs.”
Involvement with the Comhaltas movement (Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, roughly translated as, “Gathering of the Musicians of Ireland”) inevitably led to John Joe’s participation in competitions, or fleadhs. Winning the North West England Fleadh got him into the All-Britain Fleadh, where further success qualified him for the All-Ireland championships. There he faced competition from France, America and, of course, Ireland as well.
“I won the first of my six All-Ireland titles for bodhrán playing in 1985 at the age of ten. In fact, that was the beginning of a good little spell for me as I won the title three years on the trot. A big benefit of qualifying for the All-Ireland fleadhs was that I got the opportunity to see loads of other bodhrán players from many different age groups, not only in the competitions but in sessions as well. You can learn a lot by watching experienced players that you can’t learn so easily by just listening to recordings. For example, when I was nine or ten my dad had given me a tape of some early DeDannan stuff with Johnny McDonagh on bodhrán. I’d been amazed at some of the sounds he managed to produce - rim shots and so on - and I’d tried in vain at home to work out how he did it. It was only when I actually saw him playing live at one of the fleadhs that everything fell into place for me. I don’t think I ever came away from a fleadh without some new idea or inspiration.”
Having heard that some Comhaltas judges could be a bit resistant to anything they saw as “non-traditional”, I wondered how John Joe’s more innovative playing style had been received.
“When I was in the Under-12s category, most of the stuff I was doing was quite traditional, using the low-sounding end of the drum. From about the age of thirteen onwards I began listening to other styles of percussion, such as funk drummers and Indian tabla players. I tried playing along to these different kinds of music, finding new beats and asking myself if they’d fit to jigs and reels. Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. Although I enjoyed experimenting, I didn’t start incorporating these new ideas into my competition playing until I reached the 15-18 category. By then a lot of people had started using the top end of the drum more, working their way round the skin as if they were going round a full kit, so it seemed to be becoming more acceptable. However, when I entered the competition for the last time in 1991, people were telling me that I should change my style if I was to have any hope of success. The main adjudicator, an oldish guy, steeped in the Tradition, had made it perfectly clear from earlier judgements that he favoured basic, no frills playing. My attitude was, ‘Well that’s not what I do. If I don’t get anywhere, then so be it. It’s not just about winning anyway.’ The final was due to take place in Sligo Town Hall at 10 o’clock on a Saturday night when everyone’s usually down the pub playing tunes. I didn’t expect many people to be there at all, but when I arrived there were about three or four hundred in the audience, including some big name bodhrán players like Gino Lupari and Colm Murphy! Anyway, I got up and played my usual stuff and, although I didn’t think the adjudicator would like it, it went down really well with the audience. Consequently, when it came to announcing the results, the adjudicator felt compelled to give me first place. ‘I’m not going to get out of here alive if I don’t!’ he admitted.”
Having now won the All-Ireland bodhrán competition for a sixth time, not to mention his successes with the céilí drums and lilting (tune singing), John Joe was feeling ready to make a break from the Comhaltas scene. An opportunity then arose via Peter Carberry, who’d founded the well-known Manchester trad-rock band, Toss the Feathers, which featured John Joe’s friends Mike McGoldrick and Dezi Donnelly.
“On the boat back from the 1991 fleadh, Peter approached myself, my sister Grace and a fiddle player friend, Andrew Dinan, to see if we’d be interested in starting up a more tradition-based outfit. As a result we formed a little group called Good Tradition which stayed together for about a year and a half, playing mainly at weekends in a pub called The Asperley Cottage in Manchester. Although some people disapproved of the direction I was going in musically, I was at the age when I really just wanted to do my own thing. It actually turned out to be one of the best periods of music making in my life so far.”
Following his time with Good Tradition, John Joe accepted an invitation from fiddle player Dezi Donnelly to join another band called Quare Craic.
“I was a member of Quare Craic for about three years. Eventually though I got fed up with that as we just seemed to be stuck in pubs every night going nowhere.”
It was in the break following his departure from Quare Craic that John Joe received his first phone call from Flook.
“They were due to go out to Hungary where Brian Finnegan had been teaching English for a while, and the woman organising the tour felt it would be good to have some percussion in the band. I did that weekend and another gig a bit later with the so called ‘Flook Big Band’ featuring Shooglenifty’s Conrad Ivitsky on bass.”
Despite that early involvement, John Joe didn’t become a full-time member of Flook until Mike McGoldrick decided to leave towards the end of 1997 due to the mounting pressure of his other work with such people as Lúnasa and Capercaillie. In the meantime, Smallworld Music’s Becky Morris asked him if he would take a couple of friends over to Belfast for a weekend of gigs, which eventually led to the recording of a CD entitled “Before the Flood”.
“I did the Belfast gigs with Andy Dinan and ex-Toss the Feathers singer-songwriter Steve Finn. A month or so later, Becky asked us if we’d like to go to Hong Kong as the band Tamalin (basically, piper John McSherry and siblings), who’d originally been booked for the trip, could no longer make it. Part of the deal was that we had to make a CD. It was a bit of a rush job, recorded live in only two days, and I’m not really happy with the way it came out. Anyway, it’s a nice thing to have, and we never really intended the trio to be a long-term project. I think we only did about ten gigs altogether.”
One of the highlights of “Before the Flood” is John Joe’s own solo bodhrán composition, “Countdown”, named after the television programme whose recurring musical theme partly inspired it.
“I’d sometimes played along to the bit in Countdown where the clock’s ticking and I started using the final little phrase of that music in my solo. There were bodhráns all over the house and I’d often just pick one up and jam along to a tune that came on the radio or the tele. Funnily enough, most new ideas seem to come to me like that. If I sit down with a bodhrán and deliberately try to come up with something it very rarely works.”
The “Before the Flood” project overlapped with John Joe finally joining Flook full-time. Although this brought contemporary traditional music’s rhythmic “dream team” - namely, Ed Boyd and John Joe - together on a more permanent basis, it was not the only context in which they collaborated.
“Ed had originally moved to Manchester from Bath to study French and Spanish. He’d ended up sharing a house with Mike McGoldrick and some other local musicians and that’s how I got to meet him. When Mike brought out his solo album, “Morning Rory”, in 1996, he couldn’t get the musicians who’d played on it - people like Manus Lunny and Alan Kelly - to do any gigs. Instead, he asked me and Ed to help him play the stuff live in a trio. We’ve always managed to juggle touring with Flook and doing other things in between, either separately or together.”
In addition to their ongoing work with Mike McGoldrick, John Joe and Ed have recently found time to play live with some members of the originally all-female band, The Bumblebees (with whom John Joe also featured on mandolin, banjo and lilting, and with whom a joint CD, ‘Stevie’s Kitchen’, has been independently produced), and the duo, Mirella Murray and Tola Custy (on whose CD, “Three Sunsets”, they also both appear). How does John Joe account for the success of his partnership with Ed?
“If you play with someone for a certain length of time you start to cotton on to what that other person does. When I started playing with Flook they already had arrangements for most of the sets, so I was just listening to Ed and trying to complement what he was doing. Now it’s more of a two-way thing, with Ed listening to me as much as I listen to him. We don’t sit down and work out patterns consciously in advance. What usually happens is that we get the melody players to play the tune and we just start tinkling along. Gradually, ideas come up which we like and we decide to stick to them. We’re always careful, as backers, not to take over from the melody, although in Flook there are moments in some sets where the flutes drop out and Ed and I just play some kind of groove on our own.”
Talking of grooves, it’s probably not every bodhrán player who would cite funk legend James Brown’s band as an influence.
“There’s an idea I use on Mike McGoldrick’s ‘Fused’ album which I got from James Brown’s drummer. In fact, the track has the name James Brown in the title. It’s a kind of funky beat which I find works really well with a lot of marches and reels as it’s in the same sort of time signature.”
Another previously mentioned influence on John Joe’s playing is that of Indian tabla players.
“They’re definitely a massive influence. Although I liked them before, I’ve only really been listening to them properly in the last two or three years. Zakir Hussain is probably the greatest percussionist I’ve ever heard in any musical style, and I’ve listened to loads, from jazz drummer Buddy Rich to The Who’s Keith Moon. Obviously, there are things that can be done on a two drum, finger-played tabla set which are impossible on a bodhrán, but you can still get a lot of great ideas from listening and jamming along to such music.”
I’ve always found that the black insulating tape around the rim of the deep Seamus O’Kane bodhrán which John Joe uses gives it something of the appearance of an over-sized tabla drum. I wondered if this had influenced his choice of instrument in any way.
“It was at the fleadh in 1990 that I first met Seamus. I’d played loads of different drums and there was a particular sound that I’d been looking for which I hadn’t yet found. When I heard Seamus playing his drum I knew that this was it. A friend of mine introduced us and, when I found out that he’d made the drum himself, I asked him if he would make me one as well. He was a bit reluctant at first as he didn’t really see himself as a professional drum maker, but he eventually gave me his address on a piece of paper, which I then went and lost! It took me another whole year to track him down, but finally I got the drum I wanted. It was Seamus’ idea to put insulating tape around the rim. It takes the ring off it when you play it open without any damping from the left hand. Another thing which gives his drums a lovely bass sound is that he uses skins which are most often found on the lambeg, a big, heavy drum used in marching bands.”
Much as John Joe loves his Seamus O’Kane instrument, he also uses another even deeper-rimmed drum, which he calls “the beast”!
“I was giving a workshop in London before a Flook gig and a guy, whose name I’ve now forgotten, asked me if I’d like to have a look at this drum he’d made. He was actually a djembe maker who had tried his hand at making a bodhrán for a change. At first I thought I’d never be able to hold it properly due to the enormous rim, but I then noticed that he’d made a hole in it for the arm to go through. It sounded fantastic and, to cut a long story short, I bought it from him. The only thing I’ve had to do to it is swap the original thick gaffer tape around the rim for insulating tape as it didn’t allow me to get the higher pitched sounds so clearly.”
Someone had once told me that John Joe deliberately tunes his drum down so that the skin is slack enough to reproduce some of the note-bending effects of tabla players. Was there any truth in this I wondered?
“I don’t have the skin excessively slack. In fact, I have it fairly tight, but still with enough give in it to allow me to bend notes. I don’t have a bar to push against on the back of the drum like some people do. I do all the work with my left arm. Some people think I tune the skin tighter at the top to get higher pitched sounds, but I actually tend to have the same tension all over.”
Of course, the type and condition of the skin is only part of the equation which adds up to the sound a drum makes. Just as important are the implements used to hit that skin. John Joe told me about his two favourites.
“I often use something a bit like what kit drummers call ‘hotrods’. I was going to do a gig with some friends in Manchester and the hard stick I had didn’t really seem right for their predominantly song-filled set. We’d been talking about hotrods and someone suggested I try using some plant sticks which he had out the back in his shed. I took a handful of the sticks, snapped them down to about nine inches long, put some tape around them and started playing. They worked okay, but I now use a bundle of thinner bamboo sticks which are sold as skewers in most kitchen shops. This gives a softer, tickier sound. When I want a harder, toppier sound I often use a thin, ebony stick which an instrument maker friend of mine made especially for me (see the inside cover of Flook’s latest CD, ‘Rubai’, for an illustration).”
On the Flook website (www.flook.co.uk), John Joe was recently pictured playing the bodhrán with a pink blusher brush that any make-up artist would be proud of. I just had to find out the story behind that!
“We were recording a slow track called ‘Rosbeg’ on our latest album, and even the bamboo sticks weren’t sounding right with it. Then our engineer, Mark Tucker, came up with the idea of using the blusher brush. It worked really well, giving a nice bass sound, and since then I’ve been using it for the same set at gigs. I’ll have to get a red one though as the others just love taking the mick!”
I’m sure all aspiring bodhrán players will share my excitement at the news that John Joe is planning to produce some kind of video tutorial in the not too distant future.
“It’s not fully worked out yet, but it’ll probably start with me talking about different drums and sticks, before demonstrating a variety of rhythm patterns, from basic to more advanced. I’d like to get Mike McGoldrick and my sister Grace to help with the demonstrations by playing some tunes. I’d also like to show how I work together with Ed Boyd and Ewen Vernal, the bass player in Mike’s Big Band. I could even get a kit player to demonstrate the James Brown beats on the hats and snare before showing how I transfer those ideas to the bodhrán. Alongside the demonstrations it would be good to have some footage of gigs to show how things work in a whole band situation. I won’t be doing all this purely for the money. I just feel it’s the easiest way for me to pass on what I know. I’ve never been very comfortable doing group workshops where the participants are usually of quite different abilities. With the tutorial, people will be able to go at their own pace as if they were having a private, one-to-one lesson.”
As my own one-to-one with John Joe came to an end, I wondered if he had any general advice for bodhrán players to be going on with until the tutorial appears.
“Have fun, don’t be afraid to experiment, but remember to be sensitive at sessions. If you can keep a steady pulse without taking over from the tune, you’ll be welcome.”
If you can’t, of course, don’t be surprised when someone suggests a game of darts. Good luck!
Julian Gurr
Folk On Tap
October 2002
Reproduced by permission |
