SOMETIMES a single conversation is never enough. I mean, how can you cover what Ríoghnach Connolly is all about in one interview?
The Armagh-born singer and flautist now living in Manchester has recorded Black Lung, an abum of mainly traditional songs she got from her grandmother; sings and plays the flute with Honeyfeet and The Breath; is part of the Beware Soul Brother Project; she is on the new Afro-Celt Sound System album; conducts an choir for emigrants and teaches Irish kids in Manchester. And there is a lot more to Ríoghnach than this.
And within each of Ríoghnach’s music projects there is a welter of ideas and innovations and experiments that she and her extended musical soulmates are weaving into something that is grabbing the attention of music critics and listeners alike.
Ríoghnach got her early musical eduction at the Armagh Pipers Club, an institution that wasn’t bothered about competitions but more on giving young people the chance to let themselves fly on their chosen instrument.
“What was really great for me about the Armagh Pipers Club was that apart from learning the story behind a song or connecting a tune to a townland or to a story, we heard music from the other Celtic nations and that blew my mind when I was really young, that Scottish people’s music and Welsh people’s music and music from Brittany and Galicia and Asturias, that there was this bond between us all. That gave me a hunger for world music and other folk music from all over the world,” she explains.
So when Ríognach left Armagh to go to a multicultural city like Manchester, she didn’t stay within the boundaries of Irish music.
Why Manchester I ask? The question is greeted with a husky laugh.
“That’s kind of a weird story,” she replies. “I’d done my A-levels and I just blindly pointed at a course and it turned out to be Cultural Theory and Literatures in English. ‘That’s the one for me,’ says I. So I phoned them right away and they gave me an interview over the phone and I was accepted right away.”
“I was a very angry young’un,” she says. “I was very politically minded because I came from a very republican background – I was used to being dragged out of bed during British army searches and my father spent 11 years in Long Kesh – and I was very confused as to why I was in England.
“I blamed colonialism for everything that had happened to me and the course helped me a lot to channel that and to deconstruct all of that. I got to study African literatures and then play music with a lot of African musicians until I started thinking ‘This is beautiful, this is what I really love.”
Not only did Ríognach finish the course, but she stayed on and did a Masters degree and she describes the academic grounding she got as very “lefty – all the lecturers were lunatics basically but that was just what I needed".
She adds: "The colonial fallout meant there was a large Caribbean community; we have a lot of Indians and Pakistanis and there is massive African community here. I worked in a Zimbabwean pub for a while! I went looking for a job in an Irish bar but ended up working with Zimbabwen baptists for a year.
"It was beautiful because we have that shared history and, musically, there is a huge Indian classical scene here I have loads of Muslim friends and I am seeing them suffering a lot now. So musically, there was a lot to bond me with Manchester," she explains.
Tomorrow night the Duncairn Centre is hosting Ríoghanch with her band, Honeyfeet, a band described as "Manchester’s finest ethio-trad, folk-hop and barrelhouse-pop exponents who have the skill, charm and (frankly) tunes to pull it all together into a joyful, foot-banging sound."
"Manchester is really small and there are lots of different circuits and everybody gets to know each other very quickly so with Honeyfeet there could be from five to 10 people on stage – so the music always changes and it is very egalitarian and everybody has something to bring to the band."
One of the best things on the internet is Honeyfeet doing their song, I Buried My Husband which sees Ríoghnach driving around with a body in the boot.
“Ha ha! I’d a great time filming that! I look like a lunatic,” she laughs. “It started off as a silly song that was taken from an Irish tune called I Buried My Wife and Danced on Top of her Grave. I sang about how if I ever had a bad husand I’d put him in a hole and the boys put that to a disco track and then our label said they’d found someone who make a video of it and so I got to drive around Liverpool with some boy tied up in the boot,” she roars.
So it's gonna be an eclectic night in the Duncairn tomorrow evening from murder ballads to hoogie boogie, jazz, blues and folk. Or maybe something else entirely.
Being from Armagh, Ríoghnach is of course a big fan of the music of Oriel, the Gaelic kingdom that spanned spanned the modern Irish counties of Derry, Monaghan, Tyrone and parts of Armagh, Fermanagh and Louth.
In tomorrow night’s gig Ríoghnach will be singing songs from the area.
“I love listening to Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin and I think it is important to talk about Oriel over here in England where I sing songs like Cailín as Contae Lú and Is Fada an Lá from around my own townland.”
So obviously, you can take the woman out of Armagh...
:: Rioghnach Connolly & Honeyfeet are at the Duncairn Cultural Arts Centre in north Belfast tomorrow night. Doors 7.30pm.
