A day after I first came to London I walked into the White Hart in Fulham Broadway. The floor was packed all the way out to the street. Up on the stage were Bobby Casey, Roger Sherlock and Raymond Roland playing jigs and reels. Their audience were tunnelers, surgeons, retired beet pickers in flat caps and suits, student nurses. A brightness came into their eyes as the music arrived to them. In some you could see recognition, a feeling of rightness at last, in some others a very private kind of ecstasy.
The music here was very different in what it meant from what I’d seen at house sessions in Ireland where tables and chairs were cleared away for sets or arms were cranked like Model Ts to elicit a song and the music came in as naturally as the night breeze or the smell of cooking. London then was not long past the No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish signs in landladies’ windows. The bombs in Birmingham had gone off. The audience in the White Hart and perhaps the musicians too might have put in a long day of brutal labour in the wet clay and then walked to digs or pub with a stoop and an implied flinch under the disapproving gaze of London. But before the music they could stand upright. It gave them ballast.
As Christy Moore has said, “The Bucks of Oranmore played in Fulham Broadway has a different meaning from when you hear it in Galway.”
When I started thinking about writing an Irish migrant’s life I thought he had to be a player of music. All the longing, joy, wit and defiance in his life could be better represented in his playing of music than by anything else. Music was already in the pictures Steve Pyke had made. His first photographs were of music and the effect it wrought and music, he told me, lay behind everything he photographed after. But I’d never played a note. My imagining of what it would be like to do so only reached so far.
Around this time on a visit home to Chicago I went through the door of a bar and was met with Martin Hayes playing a white electric violin in a corner with his small band to an audience of six. The effect was like seeing a Turner sea in storm, overwhelming, exhilarating and somewhere out beyond what I knew. I felt I had to know how he did it.
We talked then and many times after, occasionally through the night, about the act of expression in music and in words. The criteria for each often seemed to coincide. He was approaching a turning point then, sensing the music he wanted to play but not yet possessing it. When the book was written and put together and published we did a little show together in Rocky Sullivan’s bar in New York and I could hear in the way he played that he seemed to have found it. I asked him what he was doing differently. “A musician usually likes to decorate a phrase of music to display their skill,” he said. “I found I could just play the essential notes. It would be like removing the adjectives from a sentence.”
Much of what is about music in I Could Read the Sky comes from conversations with Martin. Not just the content, but also the manner. To write in the face of music, particularly music as pure as his, as to write before the stark immediacy of photographs, is to learn to at least try to play just the essential notes.
The book has been kept afloat over the years through live shows with many great Irish musicians, with Martin most often among them. With this new edition we thought to do an audiobook together. I sat with him in a little room in Madrid and watched and listened as he took the feelings in the words and pictures and played them on his violin.
Both book and audiobook of I Could Read the Sky can be ordered here - I Could Read the Sky by Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke: Unbound
An excerpt from I Could Read the Sky
Da takes Joe over to a chair and lifts the Wren Boys hat off his head. Out from the bag he draws a cardboard box and from the box he takes an accordion, a small single-row Hohner. The shine on it. Marbled red with little stars and gold trim. He leans over, his face alight, the accordion held like a baby in his big hands – a spalpeen’s hands, battered and scarred, the nails split, a finger crushed by a machine. The accordion cost half what you’d get that year for a heifer.
Years later on visits home I’d hunt around under the bed or in the loft for the accordion. But I never could find it. I didn’t know it had gone to America with a nephew who couldn’t play. Nor that Stephen’s Day morning did I know about the fields going to rushes, the fallen walls. I didn’t know highways and machines and tunnels and scaffolding. It was a bright day, with the white snow.
Joe takes the accordion from Da and smiles. But he never could play it. The music would come to me, not Joe.
When I hear about the death of Roscoe I am washing my socks and thinking about the way Da played “Anach Cuain” on the flute. He’d always get great silence when he played it because he’d lift the flute very slowly, draw it up to his mouth, close his eyes and wait for a beat of five before he made the first note. At the start it would be light, slow and gentle, almost faint, like the first smoke rising from kindling. Then he’d build it. It was best when he was sitting on his own against the yellow wall, for you’d want to see only him. But then everything was away anyway once he was into the tune. He’d drive the whole world away with his music. As he built the tune you would feel it moving into you, twisting and curling like a wild vine running on a wall. The face would never change. The eyes down. Maybe once you’d see a flicker across the brow. I’d heard the tune since before I could walk but I never knew where the next note would come from. Always it seemed a surprise. But it was right and sure as the flight of a hawk….
There was no lament for Roscoe. I like to think of Da standing by the side of his grave, drawing out his flute and playing “Anach Cuain” over the coffin. The way he could make the ache of it so beautiful. I hear “Anach Cuain” sometimes when I go to sleep. Then if I wake in the middle of the night it’s still there.
Matt cuts a Sign of the Cross into the throat of the pig. “Now,” he says to me. “If you can find all the notes in ‘Lord Gordon’s Reel’ you can find the aorta of the pig.” He hands me the blade….
Later Joe Connor sings “The Rocks of Bawn” while Ma fries the griskins and pig’s liver in butter. In Joe’s voice there is more than one sound. There’s a deep drone like from the pipes and above it pure sweet notes. How does Joe know so much about the hurt of this man with land that cannot be ploughed? I have a sound on the accordion I know is mine but that I cannot yet reach. It seems red and gold and full of light. It’s fast and sure.
Da plays a tune on the flute, then me on the accordion. We play a pair of reels together. Then Matt calls on me to play ‘The Moving Cloud’. I have some whiskey in me. There’s something about the way Matt is tapping his foot and cocking his head, the way he draws the music into him this night. He’s like a man with a plate of stew after a long day in the fields. When I hit the first notes my hands take off like a pair of birds. I can feel the tune spilling itself out inside me. I can see all the notes like they’re small coloured stones you’d find on the strand. I can look at all sides of them and find the right place for them to go. I could go to the well and back between each of them. I’ve never been in this place before but I know all about it.
It was the month of May, the morning light a very pale blue. Maggie and I had such hunger for each other all the way back home through the streets and up the stairs and into the bed where finally I could feel all the warmth and draw and power of her body. We drank brandy then in the bed, the sheets and blankets rippled the way sand is under water, the pale blue light moving past the irises into the room. The air of the room seemed loaded with her as I breathed it in and I knew I had never felt so filled with the wonder of another person when she placed her lips up close to my ear and asked me to play for her. I see me now sitting up in the bed in my vest only, the bare white legs crossed, the hair on my head almost all gone too, moving a little from side to side with my accordion and with Maggie beside me with her hand resting on my knee and her red hair falling down on her white shoulders as I played for her very slow and sweet “My Lagan Love”.
I Could Read the Sky is published by Unbound. Joseph O’Connor reviews it in The Irish Times tomorrow
