Interview with Barry Egan (09/11/08)

Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh was recently interviewed by Barry Egan about her influences, Altan and her lifestyle. Let us know what you think in the guestbook afterwards!

Mairéad to the music

9th November 2008

FAR FROM (JOHNNY) ROTTEN: Yet the on-stage energy of Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh's band Altan in their early days drew comparisons with punk group The Sex Pistols.

I was lucky enough to sit next to Moya Brennan at a friend’s wedding in London last month. Earlier, when the Clannad chanteuse sang in the church in Notting Hill, you couldn’t help but be inspired by the swooping dynamics of her voice in all its gael-force glory.

Three weeks later, in Eddie Irvine’s Cocoon bar in Dublin, Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh is outlining how fellow Donegal girl, Moya inspired her to want to sing in a band. Mairead, who uses her own gorgeous voice in Altan, remembers “the likes of Clannad were starting when I was getting interested in music. There was also The Bothy Band,” she says.

“And that was all very influential because they were local people and I was thinking, ‘They are from here and are able to do that.’ It gives you encouragement in your dreams.”

Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh thought all her dreams were fulfilled when, on April 4, 1981, in the Derrybeg Hotel in Gweedore she married her “very first boyfriend” (“I was a very young bride,” she giggles), Belfast flute-player and musician Frankie Kennedy, and they started a band together, Altan.

“Altan seamlessly blend dazzling instrumental prowess and the gorgeously delicate vocals of Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh,” enthused the Chicago Weekly.

The New York Times, meanwhile, described how the band’s “special strength is the clarity and coordination of its textures”. In 1991, that strength was severely tested when Frank was diagnosed with cancer. Frankie continued to play with Altan throughout his treatment until he died on September 19, 1994.

“The news of the death of Frankie Kennedy is simply unbearable,” wrote Kevin Myers in his An Irishman’s Diary column in the Irish Times that dark September for Irish music.

“One can say all the usual things about a great traditional musician at his death yet, though true, in Frankie’s case, they would not even begin to capture the beauty of the man, radiantly evident even when he was undergoing chemotherapy. I know it’s all very well saying that the dead live on, when it is quite obvious that they don’t. But in Frankie’s case it is true at one manifest level, that in his music, of Mairead’s, and of Altan, he has not left us.”

Fourteen years down the line, Mairead doesn’t believe it ever will. She says Frankie, a completely selfless man on every level, saw the growing public awareness of the band when he was being treated and insisted that Altan kept playing, even if he couldn’t always come along. She says she never considered stopping Altan after Frankie died.

“No, because music never stops,” she adds. “What really does help is that music can help you express things that words can’t. You can express things at a deeper level without having to put words on it in the music. You see, words are to do with what you explain yourself with: it is something you know. But then, when something you don’t know or something you have never experienced before happens to you, it is very hard to put words to it or to explain where you are at emotionally. But with music you can.”

And where are at you emotionally now?

“I’m getting there,” she smiles through her beautiful eyes. “I feel I’m quite positive. That’s a very hard question. It is all learning. That’s what makes the wheels of the world go around: it is adventure and you are never going to get to that point where you can say I am complete.”

Mairead says she has come to live with Frankie’s death. “You never get over something like that. You never get over loss. The trick is to live with it.”

Asked how she healed herself, she smiles through those radiant blue eyes once more and says that you just keep going. “Someone asked me one time, ‘Oh it must be terrible, isn’t it?’ It is terrible. But what you do is, you have to look at it in a relative way. I always say, ‘He’s just taken an earlier bus than the rest of us.’ It is an inevitable thing in all our lives that we’re all going to die. So, you know. Let’s make the most of it while we’re here. That’s how I look at it anyway.”

At the time of Frankie’s sad passing, however, it was difficult to look at it with anything other than mounting gloom. She can remember the day her husband received the terrible news. She couldn’t believe it: Frankie Kennedy had never had a day’s bad health in his life. He never had anything wrong with him “and then he was diagnosed with cancer. There was no hope from the word go but he battled on. He had 18 months’ remission, then it came back full blast. And that was it. We knew as soon as it came back full blast that it was just containing something then.”

I ask her what she learned about life from Frankie’s death.

“Oh, Jesus — everything!” she smiles. “You think, ‘This isn’t fair.’ And you go through all the ‘why is it happening to him?’ It was a lonely existence. For him, it must have been very lonely…”

The internationally celebrated star is currently mixing her solo album, which will be out before Christmas. She describes her own upbringing as “very simple. There wouldn’t have been family holidays every year. It was just based around being at home. It was kind of earthy. There wasn’t too much emphasis on anything. You had to discover it for yourself. We weren’t forced to take up music. I took up the fiddle when I was 10. That was late”.

You were practically an old woman at that age, I joke.

“I was an old wan, yes! It was late enough, by comparison though.”

Does everyone who was born in Donegal end up in a traditional Irish band at some stage of their lives? “It seems like that, doesn’t it?” laughs Mairead. “But no, most of my friends thought it was very weird that I played the fiddle. ” Her father, a local teacher at primary school, played the fiddle, as well. In 1979, Mairead moved to Dublin where she gained a degree in Education. She became a primary school teacher in Malahide for six years before she packed it in to concentrate on music and Altan.

“It was a traditional Irish upbringing — loads of music,” she says. “Music always brings out the best in people. It is uplifting in every way.” Sufficiently uplifting for her A&R man at Virgin Records to describe Altan, remembers Mairead, as “the Sex Pistols of Irish music”. “It was to do with the energy that we play with on stage,” says Mairead. “We play Irish music and there are no apologies about that. There is lot of traditional Irish music around. So it is really hard to bring that back to Ireland. Because most Irish musicians like The Chieftains, Clannad and ourselves have to leave the country, which is ironic, to make a living. That is the irony of playing traditional Irish music for a profession in this country.”

She orders another cup of coffee in Eddie Irvine’s swanky bar. Somebody said that Irish traditional music is like a pint of Guinness when you are not used to it, she says. You drink it initially and it is a little bit bitter but then when you get used to it you can’t let it down again.

After Frankie died, Mairead married Altan musician Dermot Byrne on October 1, 1999 in Donegal. They broke up last year. “It just wasn’t working out. We just decided to go our separate ways,” she says adding that “we are able to work together”. She has a daughter from that relationship, a five-year-old named Nia, who lives with her in Donegal. “Nia means goddess of brightness,” she explains.

Nia’s gruaige, however, is not quite golden. “She has dirty- blonde hair like me,” smiles Mairead. “I’d say she’ll go darker, though, because I was darker than her when I was her age. She is a really happy little child. I became a mum when I was older, so I really do appreciate her, so it is great.”

The singer with the gorgeous voice says that she has no plans to marry again. “No, not in the immediate future,” laughs Mairead who is happily single. “I’m enjoying my independence. I haven’t even thought about getting married, to be honest. Looking after Nia is my main aim.”

Was it difficult to have another relationship when Frankie was probably the love of your life? “I think my mother put it very well when I met my second husband, ‘Your first love must have been really good.’ That means that it is so easy to love. And you know that you were so open for love. But you know it wasn’t a compare and contrast thing. It is a parallel thing. Love is just…” she breaks off. “You have to just carry on and love.”

The point I’m trying to make is that if you had broken up with your first husband, it would have been different. But because Frankie died, that relationship was almost enshrined forever?

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” she says. “It is enshrined but that is a completely different, separate box. That is my other route. I am on a parallel route. Do you know what I mean? A few people have asked me that and there was never any conflict in own head with it at all. When someone dies, the love is so still there.”

And you can feel the love for yourself when Altan play The Button Factory in Dublin’s Temple Bar over three nights in November with some special guests.

Tonight: Liam O Maonlai, Seamus Begley and Jim Murray; November 16: Eddi Reader; November 23: Tommy Peoples and Paul Brady

Original article >

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