A few weeks ago I interviewed Allen Blighe, aka the Spook of the Thirteenth Lock, about his excellent new album. The interview’s below and I would highly recommend the album if you want to hear what talented young chaps in Dublin get up to these days…
Speaking to the Spook
The first song he remembers hearing is The Chieftans’ version of Mná na hEireann, so it’s little surprise that Allen Blighe has drawn heavily on Irish folk influences in the debut and self-titled album of his new band The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock.
“What I was trying to do was to write songs in the folk idiom and fuse them with more modern rock, such as post rock”, explain Blighe. By doing this he feels he is following a “time-honoured tradition of people taking folk music and trying to modernise it”, citing bands such as Planxty, Thin Lizzy and Horslips as influences. “It’s something very obvious but that someone hasn’t done successfully in a long time”.
However he wasn’t always so passionate about folk music. “It’s very easy to become disconnected (with folk music) and not really understand it. For years I didn’t really get Irish folk and Irish trad and then I had one of these Eureka moments when I heard The Chieftans again and became a bit obsessed with Irish folk music. I started listening to it as much as possible.”
Blighe teamed up with producer Enda Bates and enlisted the skills of former Steerage members Brian O’Higgins and Donnchadh Hoey. The resulting album, which took just under a year to make, is a heady mix of haunting folk music with strong post-rock ties, which swells and develops with each listen.
The strong folk tradition of story-telling is something Blighe has consciously followed, reflecting his desire for authenticity as well as his interest in the history of the genre. He speaks animatedly of the time when folk songs were distributed in freesheets and how this contributed to the recording of history. “In a lot of instances these songs would survive a lot longer than any historical documents so they were very much a way of telling stories that everybody can understand and the vast majority of people can relate to. The stories survived a lot longer than they otherwise would have.”
The use of music as a medium of retelling political and historical events is evident in songs such as Pimlico, which tells the story of the execution of Robert Emmet and was inspired by a local festival commemorating the anniversary. As for a central theme to the album, Blighe sums this up in one word: “struggle”.
One of the defining features of Blighe’s music is his use of unusual instruments. His favourite is a four-string tenor banjo but also plays some less associated with Irish folk such as the Russian-invented Theremin and the Indian Esraj. So how do these fit in with the Irish tradition?
“I think the Irish form can be very successfully fused in with different folk forms from around the world,” says Blighe. He cites the band Mozaik, who combine traditional Celtic sounds with East-European folk. “Listening to that music made me aware that if you look at the folk music around Europe, indeed around the world, you can see the cultural links and that’s what I find fascinating.”
However, Blighe knows he could face the wrath of purists the world over if he doesn’t play the instruments sympathetically. “It is a dangerous thing to do – if you do it disrespectfully. There’s also a danger of becoming gimmicky when you buy (an instrument like that) and don’t actually properly intend to play it so I put the time in to learn how best to play each of the instruments. With the Esraj, I’m only just learning how to do that at the moment so I’m going to unleash it soon if I get the chance.”
The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock is out now on Transduction records.
