Straight from the heart

It was hard to keep up with singer Niamh Parsons last weekend. We first met in the Clarence Hotel in Dublin for coffee. She came along dressed like a diva, in black, and marched me through a neatly sorted chronology of her singing career, before she suddenly had to leave.

A couple of days later, I caught her again, this time hauling a big shoulder bag around Dublin Airport. She was on her way to London, where she had been nominated for a BBC Folk Award. Although her career began when she was in her 30s, it's only now, having hit the big Four-O, that it has really taken off.

That's part of the story behind the big dark ballads of her two solo albums, released on Green Linnet in quick succession: Blackbirds and Thrushes (1999) and In My Prime (2000). Both show her dusky, mature vocal chords; her beautiful, coaxing musicality and phrasing, and the heart-slicing emotion she gets into love songs of "false young men".

Her voice invites comparison in particular with that of Dolores Keane, but rather than moving more towards the mainstream, Parsons is returning to her traditional forte, and it's proving the making of her.

She is a Dubliner born and bred like her father; her mother was a singer and set dancer from west Clare, and she remembers, as a child, going along to Dolly MacMahon and Shay Healy's folk club, and seeing acts such as Emmet Spiceland, Sweeney's Men, Paul Brady or Danny Doyle.

She was more interested in Carole King and James Taylor songs as she grew up, however. She was also the choir-leader with a youth group right into her late 20s, but she returned suddenly to traditional singing in 1982, when she happened upon a singing festival in Ballyvaughan. She remembers singing a Stockton's Wing song, "and the entire pub joined in on the chorus - I was hooked".

At the time, she had a comfortable day job with an insurance company, but the singing bug began to take her off every weekend, or to sessions at the Brazen Head: "I used to strategically place myself so nobody could leave while I sang - it really pissed off the lads who normally went to the loo when someone started singing."

Then Gerry "Banjo" O'Connor invited her to join Killera with fiddler Maire Breatnach and others, but when the band got more serious in 1989, she opted out, claiming to have no confidence in herself as a singer - "I still haven't, half the time".

Solo gigs and broadcasting slots started happening, and she met her husband Dee Moore, a musician, and in October 1990, they conceived both a child and a band, The Loose Connections. "So I gave up the job and moved to Belfast, all for love . . ."

Moore arranged, produced, played bass and wrote the songs, a bluesy rocky four-piece with Belfast musicians such as John and Paul McSherry, and the late drummer Dave Early. Parson remembers her first gig, when she was five months' pregnant, playing support to John Martyn.

It was a strange time: "Caoimhe was just a little baby, while I was a new mother, I had left my home, my job, I was in this strange town, and those early 1990s were very vicious. There was a peace process talked about, but a lot of people didn't want to know."

The Loose Connections were doing well in the US, and after a trip to the Edinburgh Folk Festival, Niamh was invited to do a one-off album, Loosely Connected, which featured two extraordinary duets with Brian Kennedy.

That album led to the invitation to join Arcady, with whom she recorded on Many Happy Returns and she began to do the odd American tour, leaving Caoimhe at home with Dee. "The longest I left her was for three and a half weeks. She was only 17 months old, and when I came back, she'd grown so much, it was so weird . . ."

They all moved to Dublin from Belfast after Greysteel and the Shankill bombing in 1993. Meanwhile, Arcady petered out when its leader Johnny Ringo McDonagh joined Riverdance, and after The Loose Connections started going the same way, her marriage eventually unravelled.

However, she suddenly turned around her career when she went into studio to record Blackbirds and Thrushes in 1999, featuring big dark songs such as The Wounded Hussar or The Flower of Finae, stripped bare. She calls it her "winter album".

There's something of the same emotion on In My Prime, from the spooked title track (a duet with her sister Anne) to happy little ditties like Horo Johnny. Her main accompanist now is guitarist Graham Dunne, and they bring in guests such as fiddler Siobhan Peoples or harmonica-player, Mick Kinsella. "I didn't need big production, we record everything live. On In My Prime, especially Green Grass It Grows Bonny and Black is the Colour, we just went into the studio and put on all the candles, turned off all the lights, and worked away."

Other better-known songs, such as The Water is Wide, still echo the break-up. But she's anxious not to appear bitter: "Dee and myself had a great relationship and when it went wrong, it went very badly wrong, fairly quickly. But we're grand with each other now, we've got a daughter together, and you know how important a child's life is . . .

"As time goes on, it gets harder and harder for me to leave Caoimhe behind, because she's adorable, and she's proud of me, and she has an interest in the songs. She's great at putting her own words to songs on the radio - she can be very funny - and she does great impersonations of me - she does a great Sally Sits Weeping."

So is she constantly working up songs at home? "Well, at home, or particularly in the car. When I didn't have a car, Luke Cheevers [an organiser behind the Goilin singers club] suggested I just get a steering wheel and sit in the jacks - which completely misses the point, I always thought . . ."

She adds: "For me, the song is more important than listening to my voice, which is why I'd consider myself more a songstress that a singer - a carrier of tradition."

Such singer's argot comes across as a tad modest for someone who, with touring partners Josephine and Pat Marsh, played for Bill Clinton.

Her gig this week at the HQ, playing support to singer Tommy Fleming, is an unusual Irish date. "I'm not known here at all, except for pure traditional circles, but I never wanted to be famous. I just wanted to sing, and get respect for what I did with my material. But Irish people in general aren't mad about Irish music, so you just put your head down and do what you do to the best of your ability and hope for the best . . ."

Niamh Parsons sings at the HQ Hall of Fame on Wednesday as part of the Celtic Flame Festival, which starts today. For information, phone 01-8783345