"I suppose I am spiritual in a lot of ways. I think of death, not in a final way. Time is only relative. Even if it takes me 30 years or 40 years, then I'll be dead too. I just know that love never dies. His love is still around, that's all very, very solid in my head. That is definite, that his love is still around. I feel it."
Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh's bright sitting room in her new south Dublin home suddenly seems full of the presence of her husband, Frankie Kennedy, the flautist who founded Altan with her over 10 years ago, and died of cancer in late 1994 at the age of 38. The brightest thing in it is Mairead herself, not empty or absent, but full of positive energy.
She is one of those almost embarrassingly nice people. Just back from playing for a press junket in Donegal for 70 British journalists and sales representatives and Irish journalists from just about every newspaper, TV and radio station in the land - even RTE's financial programme, Marketplace - she busies herself arranging cake and chocolate biscuits on a tray for a journalist brazen enough to track her down at home at night; and invites the journalist to "Go on and have a wee nosey around".
How this civility has survived is a mystery. Allan has hit the big time now, and no mistake. The band's critical success has been so constant as to be almost numbing, and the Donegal inspired combination of Ni Mhaonaigh (vocals and fiddle), Ciaran Tourish (fiddle), Mark Kelly (guitar), Dermot Byrne (box) and Ciaran Curran (bouzouki) is now routinely described as the finest traditional band of its generation.
The band's last album, Island Angel (1993), on the Green Linnet label, won it a National Entertainment Award, a "Best Folk and Roots Album of The Year" citation in Q magazine, reached No 2 and stayed in Billboard magazine's World Music Chart for six months. The previous album, Harvest Storm (1992) also had a long stay in the Billboard chart, while it topped Hot Press's "indie" chart for four months. The Red Cow (1990) earned in Q magazine the coveted 5 star rating, meaning "indispensable. Truly exceptional".
It all began in 1983 when two young teachers, who had made a bit of a name for themselves playing the exotic and little known tunes of the Donegal tradition, were asked by Gael Linn to record an album. Ceol Aduaidh was to be, says Mairead: "Our little signature in the world".
The response to Mairead and Frankie's first outing (which was produced by Nicky Ryan and featured a certain Enya from up the road on backing vocals) was immediate. They were different, not only because of the Mazurkas and Germans they played, imported by means unknown to the Donegal Gaeltacht, and not only because of the frenzied way they attacked their instruments, but also because they were a couple, and very soon a married couple.
"I met Frankie the summer of my fifteenth birthday," says Mairead. "He came to Donegal from Belfast to learn Irish. He knew he couldn't talk to me in any other way but to learn an instrument. I was very shy in those days. He learned, not even to chat me up, but as a way of joining in the conversation."
It's obvious she wants to talk about him, because although Blackwater, which will be launched in Dublin this day week, is the first Altan album without Frankie, he did all the ground work. When Altan's five album deal with Green Linnet was up mainstream record companies were ready to chase the band, until the deal with Virgin Was finally struck last year: "It was ironic", she says, "that things just started to finally blossom for us after his death."
If anyone is worried that the Virgin deal is going to mean dolmens, thunder claps and crows stage left, Mairead is quick to slate that the band has retained "total artistic control" of its material.
If you stay with the indie labels, you stay within those parameters," says Mairead, with no hint of criticism in her voice. "We wanted to see how far we could go. You only have one chance at that. We're not a common sounding band. We play traditional music. But we feel we haven't yet gained our full potential, and we feel with the Virgin deal, we'll get a chance to spend more time in the studio, to perfect what we do."
"They see something in us that can make money for them," she says with great clarity. "But we won't change our style. Too many Irish musicians are trying to be rocky, when they have no rock background. You have to have integrity and play true to yourself; then you might gel through to people. Look at the old blues artists, like John Lee Hooker, and look how popular blues have become. You can't look at people as having no intelligence. It can't be all chart music. People nowadays are more interested in trying diverse things, and I think Virgin see that."
There is astonishingly little development in the sound of Altan, from Ceol Aduaidh, through to Blackwater. In concert, they sample easily from songs from all the albums, and they seem all of a piece. What this means is that they are responding to their traditional material, not moulding it to suit them - and so it is no insult to say that Black water is more of the same.
The making of it was very different, however: "During the last recording, there was a point when I developed a block. It was the events of the last year coming to a head. I lost the voice totally, it was a psychological thing. Everybody was having heart attacks. The mind is a very strong thing altogether."
With the help of producer Brian Masterson, she got over the crisis and Blackwater features some fine recordings of what Q magazine has described as her "nearly vibratoless soprano voice". It is neither strong nor rich, but its innocent clarity makes it seem to carry all mankind's sorrow since the banishment from Eden.
She likes the sad songs best, she says, but she rations them out so they have greater effect. On Blackwater, she sings a version of the old sean nos song, Taim i Mo Shui, with its devastating conclusion; the stricken man asks a speirbhean will he ever get over his love, and she replies: "Ma theann se fan chroi ort, cha scaoilfear as e go brach ("If it goes through your heart, it will never release you".)
Blackwaterside, collected from a traveller in Co Wexford, and heard by Mairead from Grainne Nic Mhaonagail in Gweedore, hammers from English the same lyric intensity as can be found in the old Irish songs, to paint a picture of a woman's sexual abandonment: "That's not the promise that you gave to me/When dew lay on my breast/You could make me believe with your lying words/ That the sun rose in the West".
SHE is an assiduous collector and singer of well known and obscure songs in her native Donegal Irish, marvelling at their expressiveness: "I mean, think of An Clar Bog Deil. He just wants to put her on a board and make babies." Wild and romantic the older songs may be, but they are still strangely detached, explains Mairead, because they rely on the basic formula of amour courtois which came in with the Normans.
For a woman who had enjoyed greater emotional stability than most - her mother and father are still living in Gweedore, her brother is married to Frankie's sister, her sister sings with her - Mairead conveyed great sadness through these beautiful songs in her early days. She admits that in the wake of Frankie's death, at times she could see the band picking up particular meanings in the lyrics.
A Tune For Frankie a dark but lovely reel composed and performed by Mairead on Blackwater, was written, she says, during a depressing day in Minneapolis, when Frankie was in Belfast having chemotherapy: "I played it over the phone to him", she says, and jokes at his response. "Whenever I get low, I just hear his Belfast accent saying, `Wise up, wee girl'."
"He knew it would do neither himself nor us any good to be self pitying. Maybe he was training me," she says. "I wouldn't have been able to handle it had he said, `Right, Mairead, I'm going to die'. The day I realised he was dying was the day the Ceasefire was announced. I was in Philadelphia and I got word to come back. His subject was political history and yet he was taking no interest in the Ceasefire at all. I realised his mind wasn't on it. There was this death going on in a house in West Belfast. So much hope outside, and none inside."
