Entertainment

Philip King bringing it all up north with Heaney HomePlace Scullion gig

Philip King, musician, radio presenter and film-maker, is coming to the Heaney HomePlace later this month
Philip King, musician, radio presenter and film-maker, is coming to the Heaney HomePlace later this month Philip King, musician, radio presenter and film-maker, is coming to the Heaney HomePlace later this month

THE work of Philip King will certainly go down in the annals of Irish music history when it comes to be written. As a singer, songwriter and guitarist with Scullion, as the documentary film-maker who made the Bringing it All Back Home series and the man behind the long-running Other Voices concert series, King’s name is a quality mark on any cultural product.

Philip grew up in Cork city but the family moved to rural Co Kerry when he was young, where he remembers being a bookish boy.

“Oh, yes, I was an avid reader from a very early age because the age that I grew up in was pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook and free from all those companies who want to buy up your time and your attention.

“Our window out into the world was effectively the radio and subsequent to that it was langauge and literature – those were our means of edification and education and enjoyment,” he recalls.

Philip was lucky then to have moved to west Kerry, where culture wasn’t a commodity but a natural and sustaining accompaniment to life itself.

“What struck me was the people and the community and the richness of the language both in Irish and in English and the music and three words that have stayed with me – tradition, translation and transmission.”

That nicely leads us to talk about Seamus Heaney – Scullion are playing in the HomePlace in Bellaghy at the end of this month – and one poem in particular that of course resonated with Philip.

“I remember very fondly Seamus Heaney coming to this part of the world and his beautiful poem The Given Note, where he talks about ‘bits of a tune coming in on loud weather' and '…whether he calls it spirit music, Or not, I don’t care. He took it Out of wind off mid-Atlantic'.

“I was very taken by the title, The Given Note, a note that is freely given and exchanged between people and means that it is a gift and it enriched both the giver and the receiver and that was something that I was struck by early on and it has inspired me ever since,” says Philip.

And while grand literati like Frank O’Connor and Seán Ó Faoláin were still knocking around Cork at the time, there was something else happening too. Donegal-born, Cork-reared but Belfast-loving Rory Gallagher was introducing Philip to blistering blues music.

“I actually grew up in parallel traditions of listening to Alan Freeman playing pop music on BBC radio, Ciarán Mac Mathúna playing traditional music on RTÉ radio and Rory playing the blues on the American Forces Network coming in from Germany.

“If you think of Cork city as being situated on the Lee Delta, it was like a confluence of all of those varied different bits and pieces of music coming in ‘on loud weather’ or on wings of static coming from the radio.

“It was those sounds that set me off on a journey that continues to this day.” he recalls.

That journey was vividly brought to life in the BBC Northern Ireland-commissioned series Bringing It All Back Home, which won an Emmy Award in the United States in 1991. It told the story of what happened to Irish music when it migrated with the Scotch-Irish down into Appalachia where they left an indelible mark on bluegrass and country music.

Later waves of migration post-Famine brought Irish music to the likes of Chicago and New York and Philadelphia and Boston, where it met technology for the first time, and so the position was reversed, and Irish music came back to Ireland via 78rpms.

This of course had the unintended effect of giving a hammer blow to regional styles because everyone, no matter where they were from, wanted to play fiddle like Michael Coleman did on the vinyl that came all the way from the USA.

“With the likes of Coleman and James Morrison and Paddy Killoran – all from Sligo – being recorded and their music sent back all over Ireland, a sort of pan-Irish style of playing began to develop,” Philip explains.

Many people will still remember clips from the programme, like Emmylou Harris, Dolores Keane and Mary Black singing Sonny or the beautiful Rose Connolly sung by The Everly Brothers or Paul Brady’s angry Nothing But The Same Old Story, but the series as a whole was a pitch-perfect celebration of the musical give and take between Ireland and the US.

With someone with a vast range of musical tastes and knowledge, when Philip was making his own music with Scullion in the late 1970s, did the band have a 'mission statement'?

“I’m not sure that we did,” he replies. “The original manifestation of the band was built around Sonny Condell’s songwriting and the grammar of his songwriting was quite broad. He was very taken with jig rhythms and in the original band Greg Boland would have come from a jazz/funk tradition, oddly enough, from the likes of Weather Report and Chick Corea, and we had a piper from Waterford in Jimmy O’Brien Moran.

"And then there was me. So it was a really eclectic bunch of people and there was something in the atmosphere that made something happen between us.”

Scullion has enjoyed legendary status among Irish traditional bands with its unique sound, peerless musicianship, and songwriting panache.

Of course, one band would never be enough for such a creative group of people and each went off to do various things but in recent years the core trio of King, Robbie Overson, and songwriter Sonny Condell has made a triumphant comeback with the 2012 album Long Wave being Scullion’s first album in 27 years.

In 1999 Philip made a film to celebrate the collaboration of poet Seamus Heaney and piper Liam O’Flynn called Keeping Time so it is apt and fitting that the Heaney Centre’s HomePlace is about to welcome Philip and Scullion to its Helicon performance space for an intimate gig showcasing some of their best-loved songs.

:: The Given Note with Scullion, the Seamus Heaney Centre, Bellaghy, Co Derry, Saturday July 29, 8pm; tickets £12; you can book online at www.seamusheaneyhome.com