Tradfest honours singer-songwriters Ralph McTell and Janis Ian with lifetime achievement awards

A lifetime achievement award is usually given as a retrospective acknowledgment of greatness, but for Ralph McTell and Janis Ian, their creative journey continues.

Ian’s album The Light at the End of the Line earned her a Grammy nomination in 2022 for best folk album.

McTell, so long an honorary Irishman that people forget he is as English as the Tower of London, is getting ready to record an album, From There to Here, with a “who’s who”, as he put it, of Irish performers, including Camille O’Sullivan and Declan O’Rourke reinterpreting his songs.

“I’m looking for an Irish passport. I think a lot of us are,” he said following the presentation of the lifetime achievement award on behalf of Tradfest by Minister for Culture Catherine Martin on Wednesday.

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McTell is to play the National Stadium on Thursday. This year marks two significant dates for him – he is 80 in November, and it is 50 years since his best-known song, Streets of London, became his biggest hit.

He wrote the song in his early 20s while busking around Europe in 1969, left it off his debut album because it was considered depressing, re-recorded it and released it in 1974. It has been good to him since, but also to the hundreds of artists who have recorded what became an enduring standard of the folk canon.

“This means more to me that I can tell you. I’m overwhelmed,” he said of his award.

[ TradFest 2024: Stage times, ticket information, weather and more ]

“Irish music has been so much a part of my life and my musical development, and my spiritual development as well. I have always felt at home here. To be acknowledged like this is absolutely wonderful.”

“I can’t tell you how much Ireland has influenced the world of music,” said his fellow recipient Ian, who first visited Ireland as an aspiring singer-songwriter in the early 1970s.

[ Ralph McTell: ‘My room was like a little Catholic shrine. I had pictures of Jesus – that was the father figure I was seeking out’ ]

“At troubled times like these we cling to art to save us and to give us hope. Ireland has always been a beacon in that sense. I can’t tell you how honoured I am.”

It is 50 years, too, since Ian recorded her masterpiece, Between the Lines, which gained her five Grammy nominations. It includes one of the great teenage anthems, At Seventeen.

Vocal scarring means Ian can no longer perform, but singers will interpret her best-known work at the National Stadium on Sunday night.

This year will see TradFest greatly expand its musical footprint across the Dublin region, with 28 concerts taking place in Fingal. Performances will be staged at a variety of venues including Malahide Castle, Swords Castle Chapel, the Millbank Theatre, Skerries Mill, Draíocht Theatre and the Seamus Ennis Arts Centre, among others.

[ Janis Ian: ‘It was astonishing to realise that At Seventeen applied to boys too’ ]

On Sunday there will be the world premiere of a TradFest musical commission by composer Neil Martin and performed by actor Stephen Rea, commemorating the 170th anniversary of the tragic sinking of the RMS Tayleur, off Lambay Island, a vessel sometimes referred to as the first Titanic, as it also sank on its maiden voyage with the lives of many aboard lost.

This little-remembered disaster occurred when the Tayleur left Liverpool bound for Australia, but got lost in heavy fog on that first voyage and sank with 650 people on board on January 21st, 1854. Only 280 people survived.

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