Irish recession is music to Londoners' ears

IRELAND’S DIFFICULTY is England’s opportunity. The London Fleadh, the Irish music festival whose rise and fall marked the flow and ebb of the previous wave of Irish emigration, is to be revived this summer to entertain a new generation of Irish in the city.

Bob Dylan, who headlined the last fleadh in 2004, is to top the bill again on June 18th in Finsbury Park, supported by top Irish acts on three stages. While the promoter, Vince Power, is the same, the event will have a new name, the London Feis.

Power, who left Kilmacthomas, Co Waterford, for England at 16, sold the rights to the London Fleadh name along with the rest of his stake in his Mean Fiddler music empire in 2005 for £20 million (€23 million).

He said it was ironic his festival was being revived in the teeth of another Irish downturn. “The best years of the fleadh were during a recession. It’s the 21st anniversary of the original fleadh, and there’ll be a whole array of Irish acts, from The Chieftains, to Christy Moore and The Pogues, but at the moment the only one I can confirm 100 per cent is Dylan.”

Dylan will also play the Live at the Marquee festival in Cork.

Power added: “There’s a fondness in my heart for the fleadh. It gave a great credibility to Irish music here in Britain because we had the cream of the Irish acts. That’s something that I’m still very proud of.”

He began the fleadh in 1990, a year after proving himself as a promoter by rescuing the Reading Festival, a trick he would later repeat at Glastonbury. In 2006, he became an honorary CBE for his services to the music industry, but recalls opposition from the authorities over the first fleadhs. Times, however, have changed.

“We’ve come a long way since 1990. The licence was originally opposed. There were police in the bushes with video cameras concerned at the thought of 30,000 Irish people gathering.

“The Tube stations near by were closed because they thought there would be fights. They didn’t understand that this was a music festival, a cultural event.

“I remember the police had to march 6,000 people all the way to Leicester Square so they could get a night bus home, and they sang all the way.”

The fleadh ran for 14 years to 2004, with a break in 2003, and quickly became the biggest Irish cultural event after St Patrick’s Day. A number of factors led to its demise.“We did 14 years of it and I’d recycled the acts so much, I was going to give it a break,” he said. “The Mean Fiddler had moved on, we were doing huge festivals like Glastonbury. When I sold out, it was so much part of me that there was no one in the new organisation to take it on. Also the Irish economy had obviously picked up enormously by then.”

Next month he plans to float his new Music Festivals company, which includes Benicàssim, Spain’s biggest music festival; the Hop Farm festival in Kent, which this year will be headlined by the Eagles and Morrissey; and Pop Farm, a new pop festival in Tunbridge Wells.