At play in their own pub

There was a fair old lather of sweat rolling off the brand new wallpaper in Furey's bar in Sligo last Friday night. The place was packed, not only with the ebullience of a warm weekend, but also the launch of the annual mayhem of the Sligo Arts Festival, tied in for the first time with the traditional music festival - a series of headline acts like Andy Irvine and Lunasa, topping the bill in an extraordinary rash of sessions in half the pubs across the town. But more importantly for Furey's, it was the first night of the bar as the official watering hole of the local, six-piece, trad band, Dervish, some members of which had pooled a few resources and taken a four-year lease on the pub. The band are no strangers to the occasional drop themselves, but as Cathy Jordan, the puckish big-eyed singer from Strokestown in Roscommon, puts it: "Right from the beginning, it was always our dream to set up a pub where musicians would be welcomed and looked after, where there'd ideally be a certain air of respect for the music. I mean you don't have to be talking a ten on the Richter scale to enjoy yourself . . ." Mind you, considering the night that was in it, you had to listen hard to tune into the old-style session of box, fiddle and flute from, respectively, Michael Carroll, Des Collis and Harry McGowan, working men and farmers steeped in the bedrock of the local musical tradition. In fact, the pub was so packed for most of the weekend, it was hard enough to get a good look at it. Although it was pretty completely "done-up" - with new pine skirting-boards and tiled floor - it still has very much the feel of an old smoke-stained country bar.

The band's mandola player Brian McDonagh provided the few decorations: a big, ancient, touched-up photograph of three men, looking like a trio of turn-of-the century bankrobbers; a bearded Zeus-like flower-pot head with the eyes bored out and an angry looking red light burning through them, and hanging over a sofa, one of his own paintings, a Munchish female nude on a beach. Eventually, they will call the pub Sheela-na-gig.

In a sense, buying out the pub for Dervish is completing a circle, and not just in terms of the strong, organic connection between Irish music and the traditional session-fuel of drink. But Dervish box-player Shane Mitchell actually spent his early childhood living above the pub, before his family sold the business 29 years ago. "I can still remember this place clearly as the first time I ever heard music, coming down the stairs there at the back of the bar and hearing people singing and playing inside. After that I remember asking Santy for an accordion."

You might think that a pub is a licence to print money, but with five of them gone into the business - Cathy, Brian and his wife Gay, Shane and local man Stephen Oats (or Oatsey as he is better known) - it's more a facility and a base for guesting musicians who visit the town, and the band has always been involved in that side of things in Sligo. After the last three Fleadhs in Sligo (1989, '90 and '91), Oatsey and Shane Mitchell were the ones that started up the traditional music festival which is now a fixture of the town's calendar. The whole bunch of them are steeped in the music of the Sligo County, where the most common instruments are the flute and fiddle.

The big historical figures there are James Morrison and Michael Coleman, who went off to the States in the 1920s and began recording a lot of the music for the first time. Other names they mention as great influences from sessions in legendary out of the way places like Gurteen, are the late fiddler Fred Finn and Peter Horan (flute), Alfie Joe Dineen (an accordionist who gave lessons to Shane), and even Joe O'Dowd - the father of the new Dervish fiddle-player Shamie, and after whom the local branch of Comhaltas Ceolteoiri Eireann was named. The philosophy of the band is to remain very true to that tradition, although its deceptively raggle taggle session sound belies the carefully crafted arrangements which pump power into every turn of the dance-tunes. The crafting of the arrangements is probably most audible in the songs, with original melodies and harmonies woven between the verses, reprising and embellishing the melodies. Apart from the co-opting of the shy, bearded multi instrumentalist Shamie O'Dowd on old-style fiddle and guitars (in place of Shane McAleer, a brilliant young fiddler who has taken a career break), the line-up is same as it ever was: the personable, lantern-jawed Liam Kelly on the flute; the roguish-looking Shane Mitchell on the box; over the choppy, syncopated, Planxty-style rhythmic string section of Brian McDonagh's mandolin/mandola and Michael Holmes' bouzouki. Then there is the unquestioned queen bee and great strength of the band, Cathy Jordan, the beautiful lilt and charm of her high melodious voice on the songs, with a level of coy ornamentation that brings in a swooning emotional register. With her risque introductions to the old songs (about coorting behind hay-stacks and man running away with the traveller's wife etc), she brings some of that sideways Roscommon humour to the band's likeable style, and she's a hallmark of the Dervish sound since its inception. Before she ever joined the band, Dervish had its origins in sessions in Donegal and Sligo. Liam, Michael and Shane - and another fiddle player, Martin McGinley from Donegal - played together since they were teenagers. After a stint living in London, they came back to Sligo with the idea of starting up the band, and ran into Brian, a Dublin man who strayed into Sligo as an art student, and stayed. Their heyday, as they like to see it, was the trad sessions in the Trades Club of a Tuesday night, and the madness of young blood, music and drink in the long-gone pub Hennigan's, a time in the early 1980s when Sligo seemed to be teeming with bands, mostly with surrealistically tinged titles like The Rubber Clothing Company, The Strong Are Lonely, and (let us never forget) Those Nervous Animals. And while trad was not so popular in the town then, they kept belting away at it.

Shane: "We'd often end up playing the local takeaway afterwards with nowhere else to go." Dervish resolutely did it their own way, and have stuck together in business, music and friendship, which you can see in the easy confidence and unspoken closeness between them. Cathy Jordan: "Rather than being one of these bands with a kind of revolving membership, we looked at it from the point of view of longevity, like say with the Chieftains or even the Dubliners, that if we stuck with it, it would eventually pay off."

Their business is now booming. Extraordinarily, while they have no enormous profile in this country - after five years, this current Irish tour is their first - they are travelling abroad on gruelling tours for "about 60 per cent of the year", often topping the bills of international music festivals all over Europe and North America. In the big gigs in Winnipeg, Vancouver and Quebec, they regularly play to crowds of 40,000 and more.

You might think they'd develop swelled heads, but while their confidence is unquestionable, they have very much the common touch, and at times have the shy demeanour of their home town. Even more remarkable is their willingness to play music at the drop of a hat.

Extraordinarily, after coming off stage from a rare enough Sligo gig at the Hawkswell Theatre (the place was like a sauna), they went on to a mind-bending two-hour session in the private-members' Trades Club - where the band are honorary key-holders - with about 20 musicians, young and old, belting away at the tunes, alongside visitors the like of Emer Mayock and Marcas O Murchu, two very fine flute-players. As Liam said, in exhilaration, at one stage. "I tell you, these sessions are a lifeline. I think without them, we probably might have veered away from the music altogether." But, to be honest, the absorption in these marathon sessions borders on mania. Apart from the risk of eye-injury from a frisky fiddle bow-end - or the liver damage from the endless pints - you wonder how exhaustion never seems to settle in. Dervish were at it the whole weekend, from the opening of the pub on the Friday, through the mad Saturday night. By lunchtime Sunday, they were back up in the pub, beating away the hangovers with sandwiches and pints - and a session that went on whipping up fervour for another eight hours - filled with stunts like hopping up on chairs and tables as they played. After that, despite being "hoarse as a drake" that night, Cathy Jordan and the rest of them were back up on the stage to add a bit more diesel to the gig in the Southern Hotel from Sliabh Notes, the three boys from Sliabh Luachra: Matt Cranitch on fiddle, Donal Murphy (he of Four Men and a Dog) on accordion, and Tommy O'Sullivan on guitar and vocals. All this was played out to the fruits of the set-dancing workshop, the dancehall crammed with couples, and Mickey McAleer (father of Shane), like some grim gospel preacher, intoning the formalised courtship instructions into a radio mike in the broad Tyrone accent: "Couples advance"; "Change ladies;" or "Now, dance at home".

The spirits were still high afterwards, and all the musicians were back out the road to Cathy's house on the old Hazelwood Demesne for more crack, porter and music. Having blearily stumbled out her back door into a birdsong dawn that morning - to be astonished by the Sligo landscape, with all the hedgerows ablaze with hawthorn blossom, I thought I'd regretfully give it a miss. Although, as Liam Kelly admitted, "I think it's time for a serious dose of reality, and bed rest, over the next couple of days."

Dervish gigs: Killarney (Grand Hotel, Thursday); Bandon (Guinness Gig Rig, Saturday); Galway (Roisin Dubh, Monday, June 1st and Tuesday, June 2nd); Cork (An Spailpin Fanach, Thursday, June 4th); Limerick (Dolan's Warehouse, Saturday, June 6th); Dublin (Whelan's, Friday, June 12th).

The Sligo Arts Festival runs through next weekend, with shows including Sharon Murphy Harcourt Inn, Pam Laws and Randy Webster from Tallahassie at the Journeyman on Friday, Loyko and Regis Gazebo at the Southern Hotel on the same night, and Charlie Mc Gettigan at the Ship Inn on Sunday. Phone 071-69802 for information.

Aidan Dunne's visual arts column appears tomorrow.