One of trad music's finest concertina players has resisted recording his music for 17 years. He talks to Brian O'Connell about his new album
There has always been a certain resistance among sections of the traditional music community in Ireland to Noel Hill. Perhaps it's a personal thing; Hill has been stubbornly ploughing his furrow for over three decades while many others have long since amalgamated and crossed over. He is the philosophical pure drop, and his existence has always made some of his contemporaries feel uneasy. There's a story doing the rounds that some time in the 1980s concert posters with the words "Noel Hill - The World's Greatest Concertina Player" appeared. The remark that it was an attempt to make a "mountain out of a Noel Hill", says much about certain attitudes towards the Co Clare virtuoso.
He is to Irish traditional music what WB Yeats was to a generation of Irish poets, a one-in-a-generation player who casts a long shadow, all the while refusing to be drawn by contemporary currents, steadfast in his belief not only in his art, but his way of living.
There are few traditional musicians who begin talking about personal memories of Willie Clancy by way of Karl Jung and the ancient art of Zen. But as PJ Curtis stated in Notes from the Heart - "Ireland is full of great musicians, but only a few set standards". Noel Hill is a definite standard setter.
It's been all of 17 years since Hill released Irish Concertina One, one of the finest traditional recordings available, and later this month he releases the follow up, Irish Concertina Two. On a dreary afternoon in Connemara, he's willing to talk for Ireland - there is, as he says, a lot of catching up to do.
Growing up, the Hill household in west Clare was full of two things - people and music. Both Hill parents played, not unusual at a time when every second household was said to have a concertina, and a young Noel would steal the concertina whenever his brother wasn't looking. His father's playing of unusual tunes left its mark, but it was Noel's uncle, Paddy, a schoolteacher in Dublin, who would leave a lasting impression on him.
"My uncle used to spend all his holiday time in our house. He had a good quality concertina and I used to be so looking forward to him arriving to our house from Dublin in his Morris Minor, seeing the concertina being taken out of the boot of the car.
"He was a decent player and had much more music in his head than he could bring out in the instrument. But he knew the finer points of the music and was always in company of good musicians who he recorded a lot of. I remember being brought to Paddy Murphy's house, a local concertina player. The fire was on the floor and Paddy was on one side and my uncle on the other, and I would sit there and listen and all of that was sinking in and was a huge influence in me."
Of course, the other domineering figure in Co Clare at the time was Willie Clancy. Noel was taken to hear him play from a young age and the experience would stay with him. Echoes of Clancy can be heard in Hill's playing today, and in some senses Hill is a piper trapped in a concertina player's body.
"I heard a lot of Willie Clancy playing when I was young. It left an unbelievable impression in my conscious. From a very young age I was lilting music and tunes and it was tunes I heard Willie Clancy play.
"I was enjoying the sound of music in my head. I didn't understand Clancy's music at the time but I heard a cry in his music and in his playing. I didn't know the mechanics of pipes and Clancy had this almighty cry in his playing and pain and excitement and joy and pathos all mixed together that I couldn't verbalise at the time.
"He would come down on the regulators like a clap of thunder and invariably sound in tune. No other instrument I could imagine could create that amount of volume and power. Clancy seemed to be unpredictable on the outside of it, all careless fantastic melody, and all of a sudden he would come down like a clap of thunder on the regulators when you least expected it and that fascinated me."
IT'S BEEN FIVE years since Hill moved from Dublin back to the west coast and the shift in location was instrumental (pun intended) in him putting out a record after such a lengthy recording absence. Having endured a three-year custody battle for his two children, Seán and Aisling, one senses that Hill's character was strengthened during a time he describes as a nightmarish hell. Yet despite that turbulence, life is good now. Aisling and Seán both play fiddle under the tutelage of Liz Keane; the concertina is never far away, and the great Mary Bergin gives weekly whistle lessons.
"Moving back to the west coast, I now have an opportunity to be more honest to myself and to plug in directly, hard-wire back into the náduir that I had been brought up with. It not a city versus country thing, but it has allowed for a more honest relationship with the world around me. In terms of the Zen, I feel more in harmony, more in tune with things around me, with nature and the whole cosmos itself.
"Prior to that I was dishonest, on an orbit out of my natural one, yet that is no longer with the move to west coast, chosen specifically because my two children are native speakers of Irish. I hear the language around me. What drives me and the facility of music is that it brings you down to the lower layers of your people's experience and your people's people's experience. When I play music the carriageway going parallel to music is the language of the country, so automatically by living as I do now in Connemara I am much more aligned."
For all his yearning for the west, Hill is first to acknowledge the importance of the folk scene in Dublin in the 1970s. It was perhaps inevitable that in later years this scene would face competition from other musical genres, but during the 1970s the tradition thrived and gave players a taste of life as professional musicians.
HILL MOVED TO Dublin in 1977, and although he conflicted with the urban life, like many he accepted it in the absence of having an alternative. The fact that gigs were plentiful made it all the easier.
At the time there were eight guaranteed gigs in Dublin, and the most prestigious was the Trad Club on Wednesday nights, run by people such as Sean Corcoran, Kevin Cuniffe, Finbar Boyle and Tom Crean, all singers.
"Places such as the Meeting Place, the Island Bridge Club, Slatterys on Capel Street were where musicians could get few a bob and be guaranteed a listening audience," says Hill. "Then the 1980s came and publicans themselves hired musicians to play with no cover charge. A few bob was given to musicians in the corner and the whole thing changed dramatically from where musicians were on a stage refining their craft, to a consumer commodity. People now sat with their arses to you drinking pints at the bar. All the folk clubs disappeared. Musicians were frustrated and people who really wanted to hear were also frustrated because no one was listening - it was just noise and pints."
The musicians themselves quickly found safety in numbers and bands became the order of the day. Some soloists came out of it, but very few took to the concertina. Noel Hill put his head down, and quickly found an audience for his music in places as far afield as Boston, Nova Scotia, Halifax, Luton, Birmingham, Washington Asia, China, Hong Kong and Australia.
He appeared on many sporadic recordings over the years but refused to put out his own solo material, becoming increasingly disillusioned by the recording environment in Ireland.
"It seemed to me that every second citizen appeared to be putting out albums, especially with the advent of home production and the sizing down of studios. In my view a lot of that material wouldn't have been put out in the early days, the quality wasn't good enough. I withdrew from the whole thing and became disillusioned with record companies. I'll always remember certain record companies asking, 'have you any crossover material?' 'Crossover to what?' I replied,and came to see it all as part of a consumerism thing which I stubbornly reject." Describing his new recording as a pot-pourri of studio session recordings done at intervals down through the years, the desire to produce vital and dynamic expression is fused with the perfectionist's attention to technical detail. The album reflects a personal harking back as well as other aspects of a complex yet steadfast character.
"I have my vision of the music and if people don't want to hear it I'll be as happy out in the sea fishing or in a bog saving turf, one is an extension of the other for me. I may be innocent or naive enough to think that but I'll do it my own way and thanks be to God there are people in LA or Halifax or London who'll just go along to listen. People like Seamus Ennis and Micho Russell, who had one of the most natural stage presences of all, felt the same. To be on stage performing is about being able to display an extension of your particular life experience through music. That to me is the mark of the true artist."
• Noel Hill is performing a special concert at the launch of his album Irish Concertina Two in the West County, Ennis at 8pm on Sat Nov 12, as part of the Ennis Trad Festival, Co Clare. He plays Róisín Dubh, Galway, Dec 4