Still sharing the same wink

Reunions, hmm. They can mark the best of times and the worst of times. Hands up anyone who's looked forward to a get-together, only to have the occasion sullied by an ill-placed word or a careless gesture? Ideas that look great on paper or when they first flower in the imagination can either blossom or wither, and there's rarely any telling which way they'll go until the fatal moment.

"It seemed like the most natural thing to do", Paddy Glackin, ex-Bothy Band fiddler, radio producer, teacher, traditional music scholar and all-round lover of the music, declares. And the most natural thing he's referring to, was to re-unite with his fellow Bothy Band graduate, Micheal O Domhnaill, in the cosy confines of a recording studio.

Convening in front of a mic and within spitting distance of a mixing desk is one thing. Collecting tunes and songs is another. But melding the two and mixing the ingredients in just the right measure to recreate the magic is quite something else. Athchuairt/Reprise is that magical progeny though, the product of two musicians who still speak not only the same musical language, but share the same wink and elbow dialect - much to both theirs, and the listener's delight.

The road has been long and winding since O Domhnaill and Glackin first shared a stage back in the early 1970s. Although both were students in UCD (Micheal studying archaeology, Paddy Celtic Studies), they circled around one another until they both found themselves whupping it up with what was essentially the genesis of the Bothy Band, in Slattery's pub on Capel Street (alongside Matt Molloy, Paddy Keenan, Triona Ni Dhomhnaill and Donal Lunny).

Athchuairt/Reprise is an eclectic collection of tunes, with three songs contributed by Micheal. They could have settled for the obvious, opting for a set list born of their shared Donegal roots (Glackin senior, Tom, hailed from the Roses while Micheal's father, Aodh, was from Rannafast), but neither musician is known for his lack of imagination or courage. Anyway, Paddy had already paid homage to the great Donegal fiddling tradition with his 1991 Gael Linn album, Rabharta Ceol/In Full Spate (featuring Donal Lunny), and Micheal had tested and tasted of styles both local and global during his seminal debut album with Skara Brae (featuring his sisters Maighread and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill along with Daithi Sproule).

Then there were the albums Micheal made with Kevin Burke (Promenade), and the six he recorded as part of the jazz/ classical/trad fusion outfit, Nightnoise. Paddy too had stretched and bent the fiddle strings with Paddy Keenan on Doublin, with Jolyon Jackson on Common Ground, and with Belfast piper Robbie Hannan on Seidean Si. Neither had anything to prove and everything to play for.

The timing of their reunion was dictated largely by O Domhnaill's itinerary. After over a decade-and-a-half living in the US, Micheal decided to return home, in search of a slower pace, room to enjoy the music again. And as soon as he and Paddy took up fiddle and guitar together, it seemed as though the circle was squared. The appetite was there, there was a bountiful supply of tunes, and Micheal's voice was in need of an airing, wrapped around some of his most delicate arrangements of songs, both old and handed down from his beloved aunt, the famed Donegal singer, Neili Mhici Hiudai.

"It was a pretty happy album to do," Paddy says, "because we didn't go through any great pain making it. The nights recording were really enjoyable. We didn't tax ourselves, so going in to record was as much an evening out as anything else".

Micheal nods enthusiastically in agreement. "When you've been recording albums all your life, it becomes a chore," he admits. "But this was totally different. We just felt like `great, we're going to have a bit of an oul' session tonight!"

They're determined to hang on to that enthusiasm now that the album is released. No more the interminable road miles to be navigated in the name of promotion. Micheal casts an eye on the horizon and sees a handful of comfortable ambles, without a hint of haring in the four directions of the compass.

"Neither of us are into the interminable grind of the road", he says. "Those days are over. Also, Paddy has a day job so we're quite happy to take off for a weekend here and there. Then with the long evenings, stick the golf clubs in the car and just do it like that!"

Shared Donegal roots notwithstanding, Athchuairt/ Reprise transcends terrestrial boundaries with an eclectic mix of tunes drawn from the four corners of the country. Sliabh Luachra slides (buoyed by Noel Hill's boisterous concertina) cosy up alongside Cavan man Ed Reavy's hornpipes and John Kelly's sublime West Clare reels. Add to that mix the crushingly poignant air, Gol na mBan san Ar, a favourite of 19th-century Munster pipers, and a reel from Martin Mulhaire from Galway, and you realise that Glackin and O Domhnaill's appetites are both fuelled and sated by the tradition as it thrives all over the country.

"Well, I think we felt that if we're going to go to the bother of recording, we want to do something different, and both of us had already played so much Donegal music on previous albums," Paddy says. "When I was growing up in Dublin though, the predominant influences were Sligo, and Clare - and Kerry to a lesser extent. Certainly very little Donegal music was to be heard back then. I remember playing Donegal tunes in the 1960s and fellas listening to it and saying: "that's not traditional music".

Do they encounter audiences who expect a reprise of the Bothy Band when they take to the stage?

"No, not really", Micheal says, "although we've done a few gigs with Maighread and Triona, and when Triona is on stage with us, suddenly there's three members of the band together, and then it begins to take on the shape of the Bothy Band. Last year we played at the TG4 Awards and everybody was on stage except Paddy (Keenan) and Kevin (Burke). So that was brilliant. We were on that express train again"

Having come full circle, did they ever think, looking back on their early days as players, that the music would bring them so far?

Paddy barely needs to pause to consider it. "As I get older, I start to feel ridiculously privileged and ridiculously indebted to my father, first and foremost, and my parents who insisted that I stick with it. I firmly believe that to do anything seriously, there's a certain discipline involved. Sometimes people go on about not wanting to push music down children's throats, but while I understand the sentiment, I think there's a certain responsibility there to try to help them. I also feel indebted to all the musicians who taught me, including, of course John Doherty."

That renowned Donegal fiddler first crossed paths with Glackin when he (Paddy) was just 10 years of age. It was a meeting that left an impression on Glackin that saw him returning again and again to draw from the well.

"To have someone like John show an interest in you, and in your playing," Glackin says, "somehow it kicked open the door for me. It gave the music a relevance for me that it didn't have before that. When you're very young, the advantages don't seem that obvious sometimes. John always made the music special."

Athchuairt/Reprise is available on the Gael Linn label