Gaelic hits take on pop culture

Songwriter John Spillane and poet Louis de Paor plan to grab an audience with a broad world view, writes Siobhán Long.

It's not every day that a songwriter, less still a poet, will admit to an insatiable competitive spirit. Most would opt by preference for the pastoral image of the tortured artist, scribbling away in his garret, with nothing more than a few chords and a bilingual thesaurus for company. Such flimsy flights of fancy are not the stuff of The Gaelic Hit Factory. John Spillane and Louis de Paor hijack ideas more usually encountered in industry, and make them their own.

We rendez-vous in Limerick, a halfway house for Galway-based de Paor and Cork-based Spillane, and the pair launch headlong into a grandiloquent account of their creative collaboration. Like two greyhounds out of the traps, they wrestle for enough air space to explain their grand plan for TGHF.

"We've been writing sporadically for over 20 years," de Paor offers, by way of introduction to the duo's first full-length recording together, The Gaelic Hit Factory. Densely-packed with local references to their home county of Cork, shot through with mythological pen pictures (from Deichtine's daughter in The Wounded Hero to the doom-laden fate of a mermaid's daughter), it's unquestionably a world music album, defined not so much by its bilingualism, as by its insistence on letting the song dictate whichever code fits the music best.

At times that's English, at others it's Irish, and, more often than not, it's a hybrid whose grammar is more readily defined by rhythm and syllable than by more conventional notions of language boundaries.

John Spillane puts it altogether more bluntly, as he conjures an image of two artists bursting with ideas in pursuit of that elusive thing called an audience.

"The song The Wounded Hero was one I wrote for a dance commission last year," he says, with the throwaway air of someone whose expectations of the music business have long abandoned Lennon/McCartneyesque fantasies of penning three-minute pop wonders before breakfast. The truth, he's quick to acknowledge, is different, but no less stimulating.

"A lot of these songs have a lot of history. They didn't just appear out of nowhere. We're great for commissions. If someone comes to us and asks us for a song, we say 'congratulations, you've come to the right place'. That's the Hit Factory."

"What's great about getting a commission is that somebody wants it," Spillane continues. "Add to that the fact that we both have a very strong competitive sense. When it comes to writing in Irish, I can look around to see who else is doing it, and I think, we're better than all of them, even with one hand tied behind our back."

LOUIS DE PAOR is convinced that the changing face of Ireland over the past decade has served their music well. Notwithstanding his love of language, and of the Irish language in particular (he's the director of the Centre for Irish Studies in NUI Galway), his greatest wish whenever he brought a poem to his compadre, John Spillane, was that they might forge ground previously uncharted, and delve into that netherworld where language and identity celebrate, rather than corral, the imagination.

"I remember when I came back from living in Australia 10 years ago," he smiles, "and going into a shop in Spiddal where I was served at the counter by a girl with a pierced lip, a pierced nose and perfect Irish. That was a huge cultural moment for me, recognising that these things were, in fact, reconcilable, and not mutually exclusive. That's the kind of listener we might have had in mind: the person who's equally at home in all those worlds. Increasingly, there's a much larger proportion of the Irish population that is comfortable in the Irish language, and in so many other worlds, whereas before, they were locked into a particularly narrow world view that we didn't even share. There's definitely a greater sense of possibility, and we're hoping that this album speaks to that Ireland."

At a time when Irish society is agog to the sound of countless languages coalescing, and is no longer tethered to tired old arguments about the merits or otherwise of bilingualism, The Gaelic Hit Factory is as likely to strike a cord with immigrants whose ears are tuned to the subtleties of phrasing and intonation as it is to listeners jaded by the suggestion that one language must reign supreme.

Above all, Louis De Paor suggests, their decision to record in both Irish and English is not an attempt to engage in the linguistic equivalent of mortal combat.

"This is not a rejection of English," he declares. "It's simply another possibility. It's not an either/or situation. I think, for example that the rhythmic possibilities that Irish offers are distinctly different to those which English offers."

Although de Paor admits to occasional bouts of indolence, this is a pair who rarely let the grass grow under their feet. Working with producer John Reynolds (drummer with Sinéad O'Connor's band and one of London's busiest session musicians and producers), they conjured an entire album in less than a week. It was the collective energy that did it, de Paor insists.

"There was a voltage there when we worked with John," he says, "and it was completely collaborative. While a lot of the songs had been recorded before by ourselves or by others, John just transformed what we gave him. His input was just incredible. Inghean was one of our songs that we had thought we might drop, but John liked it, and he suggested using [Egyptian English singer] Natacha Atlas's voice behind mine. It was just so right. We would never have thought of doing something like that."

With the benefit of a large record company behind them (EMI), Spillane and de Paor can hardly suppress their grins at the sight of The Gaelic Hit Factory sharing space on the front window of HMV with Johnny Cash and Beyoncé. De Paor is acutely aware of the juggernaut effect of this marketplace positioning.

"The window of HMV is perhaps a more significant cultural site now than the entrance of the National Library or the National Concert Hall," he says, "and as a result, it's much more carefully guarded and much harder to access. So for all the talk in recent years about giving people access to what used to be called élite culture, it's at the level of popular culture that money and culture interact, and there are much stronger barriers around that space. It's a protected arena. That's where we are now, and that's completely new to me. It's a struggle, and even with the support of EMI, it's going to be a battle to get the album widely heard."

FOR SPILLANE, a singer/songwriter who has carved a distinctive public persona, it's as if he can shed one skin and inhabit another, while working in The Gaelic Hit Factory. "When Louis writes a certain lyric, it gives me permission to say things which I can blame Louis for!" he smiles. "I can hide behind him. We both came through a Seán Ó Tuama/Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill UCC view of the world, which is that the Irish language is a brilliant thing: like Irish traditional music, it's a crock of gold, a huge untapped national and natural resource. Then, when I write songs in English, I feel that there's a touch of the eighth-century scribes writing on the margins, little pictures and poems. I suppose we're a bit scholarly about it really."

Louis de Paor's poetry (and in particular, his 2005 bilingual collection, Ag Greadadh Bas Sa Reilig/ Clapping In The Cemetery has been described as sure-footed and sober. Having created such an idiosyncratic outlet for his poetry in song form through his collaborations with John Spillane, he's at a loss as to why poetry is still viewed as an intimidating art form.

"I've never understood why people who read extraordinarily difficult 500-page novels find poetry difficult," he declares.

"They baulk at the prospect of reading a 20-line poem, that might have to be read twice to be understood. You forget that in the larger scheme of things, poetry was a much more popular art form than it is today. I don't think we should underestimate what audiences are capable of, and that goes for music, for journalism and for university courses, too."

• John Spillane and Louis de Paor's Gaelic Hit Factory is on EMI Records.