Guest Post by John Byrne
I hope that the late Dónal Lunny was comfortable with this sobriquet bestowed upon him. After he hit his full flush of firing with ubiquitous creativity in the 1970’s, I regularly heard this expression bandied about by the peerage of his generation. And apt as rapt it clearly was. But we must delve deeper. Why is it the fate of innovators to not always see a full universal understanding of their legacy in their own time? Don’t answer that … but instead follow us on a delve that gives homage to one of Ireland’s truly great cultural architects of the last century.
Perhaps the first really concrete innovation that Dónal helped foster was the proliferation of the Greek bouzouki into Irish music. After Sweeney’s Man, Johnny Moynihan brought this new axe to the fray. Dónal, Andy Irvine and Alec Finn – these were the very first floor exponents of refining a compatible technique for the instrument. This made the bouzouki the rhythm strings of honorary Irish instrumentalism, and in very short order.
Outside of triangulating the kind of technique that would fit into the progression of Irish folk and traditional music, it was Dónal’s idea to colloquialise the design of the instrument away from the round-backed Greek instrument. He conceived the native flat-backed model. Everyone here ubiquitously uses that flat-back ever since.
Dónal’s next innovation was the wielding of his string technique to drive the engine rooms of Planxty and The Bothy Band, the two lightning flashes of the 1970’s progressive trad/folk boom. Both units were justly famous for the brio they brought to the table. Dónal’s instrumental arranging flair was a large part of that. He had been doing this since the start of his own recording career, just out of his teens in 1968.
‘Musician’. Sure, nobody could ever take that as any manner of a put down, could they? But it really needs to be said that Dónal was a much grander kind of augurer than that descriptive could ever begin holding to.
‘Backroom Boys’ is an odd expression often used to describe music industry puppet stringers. But Dónal was the biggest back roomer in Irish acoustic sound. The part that is scarcely understood is the endemic and multi-coloured nature of what Dónal really did behind those scenes.
The first of Dónal Lunny’s producer’s credits appeared in 1969, a short few months after this writer’s birth. This was on the debut 45 by one of the vanguard Dublin rock bands of its day, Skid Row. Dónal got into the first of his record label ventures shortly before that with the manager of his then-current band, Emmet Spiceland. Their label, Song Records, gave the world its first taste of Phil Lynott, Gary Moore, Sonny Condell, Brush Shiels and Noel Bridgeman. All this on a label with a number of releases so small you could count inside one hand!
From here onwards Dónal Lunny took a production credit on more and more recordings: these became more frequent every year during the 1970’s, as he grew more adept at wrangling each studio dream.
If he is remembered as a music producer at all, it is usually considered to be in the realms of folk and traditional music. However, Dónal oversaw a vast array of recording projects – from medieval music to new wave and punk rock, with several other genres on the journey. In the end, this was Dónal Lunny’s largest cultural contribution across his lifetime. He was behind the controls for literally thousands of Irish recordings…
The best, however, was yet to come. The next of Dónal’s label ventures came about in order to record his newly struck Bothy Band in 1975: he was one of several principals involved in the founding of Mulligan Records. Because he was a master producer by this point, Mulligan became the ultimate gold-standard by which an Irish acoustic music label could be judged.
Dónal used every tool that the 1970’s studio could offer to make a modern, progressive, acoustic sound that yet could still be built upon the traditions as they had been. Experimenting with physical recording set ups, microphone placement, studio effects and splice editing, these and more became part of the arsenal to make true music production advancement with the Mulligan recordings.
Irish folk and traditional music cut to record had a couple of small stalwart precedents before Mulligan, but outside of this the music that was generally recorded tended to be of a pop-folk, ballad or an aspic nature – or less authentic. Mulligan exemplified Dónal and his progressive generation of players, who were getting somewhat ignored by the existing record labels up to that time.
Mulligan began to issue unparalleled modern folk and traditional albums with the same kind of frequency a pop music label would. Dónal was at the helm of producing and playing for very many of these: ‘The Bothy Band’, Mick Hanly’s ‘A Kiss in The Morning Early’, ‘Andy Irvine & Paul Brady’, Kevin Burke’s ‘If the Cap Fits’ and Paul Brady’s ‘Welcome Here Kind Stranger’ are just some of his productions for the label. Recordings for the ages, all.
It might seem incongruous, but a great deal of the early use of synthesisers in Irish music came about on folk and traditional recordings. This was largely because Dónal took a shine to Robert Moog’s creation, the ‘Minimoog’, which arrived at the corner of Eamonn Andrews’s recording studio in Dublin at the start of the 1970’s. He started at the technology on sight.
Would the purists have rebelled if they knew that the ‘portative organ’ credit on Planxty records was Dónal wielding an electronic synthesiser? They certainly poured the boiling oil over the parapets for far less! We should mention here a particular recording that Dónal played on, a collaboration with Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill and her siblings on a ‘Pan-Celtic’ song contest entry in 1975.
‘Faoileán’ features a twin electronic keyboard attack, with Donal’s Moog weaving a sonic evocation of a seagull around Triona’s rambunctious clavinet. This heavily anthemic clarion of a piece was drum-driven by Dónal’s bodhrán playing. This is a somewhat lost recording, but no less a very signal annal in the history of Irish recording for that.
Dónal entered the 1980’s with his first full fusing of folk and traditional along with rock music in the juggernaut of Moving Hearts. It seemed just as much of a surprise as Planxty had been a decade earlier, these folk guys jumping into another zone. But Dónal had helmed quite a few recording projects of a variety of rock-related genres across the decade leading up to that.
The man was a producer and performer at the forefront of Irish music for almost half a century after this until his passing last week. We would be bountifully grateful to the cultural philanthropist who compiles the list of all the different recording projects that he made better because of his involvement across the last six decades. Feck, it could even be me!
Yesterday my friend Ben told me about finding a Bothy Band 45 with Dónal’s autograph on it and we had a brief chat about the man behind the signature.
In the vast world of artistic practice, I consider it normal to hit all sorts of cosmic coincidences, and all the time. They are, as you can see, not always positive coincidences.
This particular demise happenstance with musicians has hit Ben and me at impossibly close quarters on several occasions in very recent times. I try to hold this kind of collision as a part of life and not be unnerved by it, but it’s a bloody hard thing to do. If you’re a fan of this country’s music, the chances of you not possessing a recording that Donal Lunny birthed or played on are slim. How about digging it out tonight – or even several more to celebrate his memory?
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