Uilleann pipes, harp and banjo. It. Sounds. Crazy... But. It. Might. Just. Work...
While most people might think that combination of instruments might be a little bit left-field, the members of Alfi – Alannah Thornburg, Fiachra Meek and Ryan McAuley – had no such doubts.
Fiachra and Ryan had teamed up at the same music class, as Fiachra explained to me this week.
“Because we’re from the same home town, Dundalk, I would have played with Ryan’s brother, Conor, which led me to playing music with him,” he recalls.
“I didn’t even know he played but we were both in the same music course, and we played music together and hung out together and became close friends.
“And then we met Alannah – also via Ryan’s brother – and we were all in the same house, a bit of a bohemian kind of household in Maynooth.”
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This was “like a mini Greenwich Village”, he tells me. “You’d have loads of different lads and lassies who are playing today and doing quite well, like Lemoncello with whom we’d live on and off, and then Conor McAuley, who’s doing the rounds with Jamie Bishop in the Shamrock Showband at the moment, and there was loads of different musicians coming in and out of the house, you know.”
Alannah and Fiachra (Al-fI - geddit?) started playing together, sharing tunes when a gig came up in Bellurgan House as part of the late lamented Arcadian Field festival in the Cooley Peninsula.
They asked Ryan to join them and - hey presto - Alfi was formed.
Like most traditional musicians, the trio also teach music and, as Fiachra points out, you need to have a certain amount of patience to be a teacher.
“Luckily, all three of us have that patience and we teach one another all the time,” he says.
“We’re constantly pushing each other, pushing our boundaries to see what we can do next.
“And that’s what I really love about Alfi. When we’re in a room together, we’re not only friends, we can tell each other what we like or what we dislike, and there’s no qualms about it. That’s when you know what a real friend is and what, what a real working partnership is also like.”
The band then started doing gigs which blew audiences away, followed by a highly-praised EP, Wolves in the Woods, and now the debut album, Hey Old Man, a mixture of tunes old and new and songs from Ireland, Scotland, England and Appalachia.
Their aims, according to Fiachra, weren’t overly ambitious at the beginning.
“We weren’t aiming for the stars,” he explains. “We all played Irish folk music and then we started adding a range in music which we thought sounded good and adding different instrumentation because we all play more than one instrument and found they actually blended very well.”
The low whistle actually features more than the pipes. “I’m not comparing, but I like to think of Planxty where Liam O’Flynn is the focal point on the pipes, because they’re such a sweet instrument, you know, and the same with The Bothy Band,” says Fiachra.
“But they also have their songs where Liam sits back and he plays whistle and I like to think we kind of approach it in that kind of style.”
Another similarity with Planxty is that Alfi take on board influences from Balkan and other world music traditions.
When we’re in a room together, we’re not only friends, we can tell each other what we like or what we dislike, and there’s no qualms about it
While the band is named after Alannah and Fiachra, Ryan McAuley is crucial to the Alfi sound.
I was surprised to hear that Ryan’s father is Jackie McAuley who played with Them, the wonderful 1960s Belfast R&B band which gave Van Morrison his first steps into the limelight.
“Jackie is a brilliant blues guitarist and he writes a lot of songs,” explains Fiachra.
“He also owned a shop when we were growing up that we used to play in. I have fond memories of practicing in the music store in Dundalk beside the Square.
“And then Ryan started playing the banjo and getting into the history of the instrument. So Ryan grew up with the blues and the blues and Appalachian music.”
Family connections are very important in the Alfi story. Alannah’s father is American, so she and the others have a strong connection to the US, as Fiachra explains.
“Alannah’s father plays bluegrass as well as other styles, Ryan has the blues in his family and my father is also a blues musician, a blues guitarist and a low whistler and piper, so I grew up with that,” he says.
“And my grandmother, being American and being a song collector, was a big influence on me while my grandfather was also a collector and broadcaster for RTÉ. I feel a connection with them somehow.” (Fiachra’s grandmother was Diane Hamilton, who was born Diane Guggenheim, the only daughter of a mining millionaire whose fortune she was an heir to.)
And then there is our old friend, serendipity.
Fiachra is now based in Amsterdam and an American who is a fan of the An Góilín singing club in Dublin came to hear him at a club in the Dutch capital.
Michael, the American, sang a song which Fiachra’s mother had collected, the Fox and the Hare, and that very song is scheduled to appear on Alfí's second album. It doesn’t have a release date yet but in the meantime, you can look forward to hearing and seeing Alfi live on their upcoming Moving On Music gigs.
