In April 2024, a new trad group arrived full-formed. Biird had landed, announced on Instagram as “a brand new Irish traditional music superstar collective who are breaking the mould by teaming up with Ireland’s most disruptive designers and stylists to change the image and narrative of trad across the globe!”
The accompanying image showed a group of women, styled by Ríon Hannora, lounging, framed by two harps, looking very much like a polished and complete band. And a big band at that. Look closer: there are pipes, fiddles, a banjo, a concertina. There’s Nicole Lonergan and Ciara Ní Mhurchú on fiddle, Laura Doherty on fiddle and guitar, Sal Henegan and Claire Loughran on fiddle and harp, Aoife Kelly on cello, Zoran Donohue on concertina, Niamh Hinchy on synths and vocals, Miadhachlughain O’Donnell on flute and vocals, Hannah Hiemstra on drums, and the woman who initially put the group together, Lisa Canny, on harp, banjo, and vocals.
Since then Biird’s trajectory has been upwards. Technically their first show, with half a dozen members, was at the London Irish Centre the previous September, for a literary night Annie Macmanus (aka Annie Mac) was organising. The first full band gig was in Trafalgar Square during the St Patrick’s Day celebrations in 2024. This was followed by Belfast Trad Fest and All Together Now. The designers St Diabhal and Cian Hogan, who have also worked with Kneecap, added stage visuals.
In February, a performance on The Late Late Show preceded a subsequently sold out Irish tour in May, along with a London gig. When Guinness hosted a series of summer shows at St James’s Gate, Biird were a support act alongside Morgana for CMAT. Earlier this month, Biird played at the wedding of Saoirse-Monica Jackson, the Derry Girls star, to DJ Denis Sulta.
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Canny grew up in Hollymount, Co Mayo, where her principal at national school in Roundfort “made us all learn the feadóg stáin, and would come in and listen every day at a quarter to 11 to us doing our Dawning of the Day – in perfect harmony of course – a load of four-year-olds.” He then gave her a banjo “he had hanging around at home”.
Canny happened to be living close to a banjo teacher, Bernie Geraghty from Ballindine. When Canny picked up the harp, aged 10, Geraghty’s daughter, Holly, became her teacher. Canny is the youngest of three – “My brother and sister weren’t into trad at all. My sister was into Cyndi Lauper, Lisa Loeb, Texas, Extreme. My brother was into Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana” – and a large extended family, where gatherings would often finish with a big family singsong. In terms of music lessons in the local area, trad was the focus, but Canny was also drawn to pop music, especially Destiny’s Child, The Spice Girls and TLC.
But she was excelling at banjo and harp. She won her first two All-Irelands when she was 11, in the under-12s category for harp and harp accompaniment, and came second in banjo that year too. She recalls “coming into Hollymount and some of the locals having bonfires lit for me out the road. There was a real sense of pride attached to it ... It all felt extremely positive. There were never any negative feelings with it. I wasn’t pushed into it, in fact I used to pull my parents along with me.”
Canny says her mother would have called her “a very determined young girl”. She’d wake early to practice the harp before school, “and feel really connected to it, really natural, easy. I just loved it.”
A fortnight after she won the senior harp category at Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann when she was 19, she got a call to join a touring group, Celtic Crossroads, and hit the road across North America.
“I didn’t probably recognise it at the time, but looking back now, what a blessing that was, and what an enormous opportunity that was. To be pulled out of Mayo and put on stages to audiences of anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 people per night. It was a real baptism of fire. It had a significant effect on my whole musical journey, but more specifically my performance identity. Not all for the better. Looking back now there was a lot of playing of a role happening. Now I can look back and see ... they were shows. They weren’t bands; they were spectacles. They were there to please the masses. We were picking crowd-pleasing songs and putting things together that would pull on the nostalgia of the Irish diaspora.”
But it was also a big learning experience. She built her confidence, learned how to talk to a crowd, how to entertain, how important the relationship between the musician on stage and the audience in the stalls is, how to keep people’s attention. And she learned how to tour, about group dynamics, and what it meant to be living on a tour bus for months at a time.
“Our first tour, most of us were 19 and 20, and we were being thrown out into America – with a good wage – going from city to city to city on a tour bus. It was absolute carnage. God bless the managers at the time. I don’t know how they did it. We really had to learn how to get on, learn how to make it work, learn how to get up and put on a show even when you really didn’t feel like it ... As you can imagine a whole load of 19-year-olds out on tour, there was an awful lot of partying going on as well. Some days you really weren’t in the mood to tell a yarn that you’ve told million times on stage, but you just had to turn up. It taught me professionalism in that respect as well, both on and off stage. I look back on it now really, really grateful for that opportunity.”
She was also studying, earning a BA in Irish music and dance, and an MA in ethnomusicology. On tour, a chance meeting with Miles Copeland, who managed The Police, brought her to a songwriter’s retreat in his castle in France.
“The wine came out and everyone started socialising a little bit more and someone was like, ‘Lisa, get out the harp and play us a song’, and sure that’s where the Irish shine. I led the singsong then into the wee hours of the night and was invited day after day into [songwriting] sessions from there on out, and got a chance to really watch experts at work for 10 or 11 days. I wrote my first decent songs there.”
She signed a publishing deal and worked on her songwriting. Returning to the road, the shows as spectacles began to lose their shine. In 2016 she decided she wanted to start afresh, and moved to London. “Literally started from scratch. Went from whatever those shows were doing, a thousand people a night with that last group, to I think my first gig in London had 12 people at it. Stripped right back to the beginning. But it was exactly what I wanted. I wanted space to explore a little bit more and see what I was interested in.”
The idea for Biird had been brewing for almost a decade. When she was in Cork studying for her master’s degree, she and a friend, the fiddle player Tara Breen, would play multiple pub sessions a week.
“It was commented upon that it was rare to have a group of girls sitting in the driver’s seat at these sessions. I suppose that opened up a conversation that I had been having internally that we need a girlband ... Slowly but surely I started talking it more and more into existence, what it needed to be, what it could be.”
Initially, Canny conceived it as a touring show, but one that modernised and potentially even revolutionised the trad offering for the Irish diaspora. When the pandemic hit, she reconfigured, realising that maybe a band made more sense.
The main motivation, she says, is to “represent Irish female traditional musicians better, because they’re class. They’re unbelievable.” She began to identify people who’d make sense in Biird: “savage musicians, brilliant people, so sound, great personalities about them, all very individual and different, had their own things to say and things they stood up for, skill sets, beliefs ... They’re all superstars in their own right. Bit by bit it started to form. Out of the 11 of us, there’s a group of maybe seven or eight who hang out regularly. We became a friend group. We met through trad. A lot of the conversations about Biird would happen at 2am or 3am at a house party: ‘I’ve this idea, I think we should do it’.”
Before Biird began, Canny and her friend (and now also a member of Biird) Niamh Hinchy began posting videos of them lilting in harmony, a trad style where singers deliver rhythmic sounds and nonsense syllables. “It was a complete accident. We had no thought process, no development time in this at all. I taught her a little lilt backstage when she was on tour with me with my own project in Germany two years ago. We put it up online and it took off.”
Absolute Lilt was born. “We had no real understanding of why it was taking off the way it was. Obviously we were appealing a lot to the Irish diaspora. But we were surprised to see that we were also really being accepted and celebrated by the neurodivergent community, who were saying it helped them relax.” They have recorded two (unreleased) lilting albums, one in Ireland with Alex Borwick, and a drum-and-bass lilting album with the producer Toddla T.
As Biird was laying out stepping stones, each leading to more opportunities, a landmark few days came at the outset of August. They played a main stage set at the All Together Now festival, drawing a huge crowd. Then they set out for the Fleadh to play with Ed Sheeran. “Warner Music Ireland invited us to come and play with him. We were all on a serious hangover after All Together Now that weekend. You know that hangover giddy energy? We arrived in our collective energy and had the biggest laugh with him.” They clicked with Sheeran immediately, who wore a Biird football jersey while playing, and he offered them the possibility of using his studio. Canny characterises this kind of encounter as one in tune with a sense of “magic under Biird. There’s been an ease from the get-go.”
I wanted it to feel like the energy when we’re playing a session at 4am in a kitchen at a house party
An 11-piece band sounds challenging in practical terms. The bigger the group, the higher the costs, and the trickier things are practically. But Canny says there are many positive aspects too, “The 11-piece, I knew it was going to be financially tough, but I also knew it was going to be very unique. From a marketing side of things, that people were going to go, ‘What the hell, why is there 11? That’s ridiculous!’ I knew that it was going to create a big sound. That was something I wanted. I wanted it to feel like the energy when we’re playing a session at 4am in a kitchen at a house party. I wanted it to feel chaotic, real, raw, imperfect, a bit mad, full of life, full of human.”
An issue with trad live on big stages, says Canny, is that the farther away the musicians get from their audience, the harder it can be to maintain the essence of the music’s connection, “that bit of draíocht, when fiddle bow dust is hitting you in the face you’re so close to it in a session. I think that connection is so strong because we as Irish people really feel this music in our bones.” But 11 people on stage gives a scale of presence and sound.
All of this, of course, is happening in a context where Irish culture is in the ascendant, where trad music and its variations, reimaginings, interpretations and deviations are increasingly popular.
“My perspective on that is trad has always been this popular in the trad communities,” she says. “It has been huge all my life. There are huge numbers of people playing trad, going to the Fleadh and all of these festivals. It has always been really big in the communities that play it. I think what has happened in the last few years is the nontrad communities have started to accept it, and the music industry has started to invest in it. That’s thanks to the likes of Lankum and Kneecap, and people who are leaning into Irish music, the language, heritage. But it’s also fan-driven. It’s driven by Irish people who are looking for something more authentic. It’s no coincidence that’s happening in parallel in what’s happening politically in our world ... It’s also fashion. These things happen. There’s always a folk revival at some point. There was a folk revival in the ’70s. It’s a time to look inward. I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that, but I think it’s part of it too ... People are looking back to old Ireland, mythological Ireland, for inspiration. You see that in the fashion designers’ collections, graphic designers. That has always happened, but it’s definitely having a very trendy moment. It’s the cool thing to do, to be connected to your own source in whatever way you want to be connected to it.”
Biird are this year’s Culture Night ambassadors, which takes place on September 19th featuring free events around the country. While Biird is becoming established, the musicians involved also have multiple projects of their own. Canny, too. Upcoming is the dance piece Reverb, with the dance company Luail, which will tour around Ireland in September. Canny is the composer on the project, with choreography by Sarah Golding, and music performed by Canny, Laura Doherty and Josh Sampson.
When Annie Mac spoke to Canny about Biird back at their first gig, Canny recalls Macmanus saying they were destined for success. “I was like, well, now we are!” she says. But there is something of an inevitability to the project gathering momentum. It’s a great idea. It appeals to multiple audiences. Despite the band’s size, the potential for touring internationally is huge. There’s a strong aesthetic. In many ways it’s so obvious that it will surely be replicated.
When I ask Canny what she thinks the group’s motto might be, she pauses. “The first thing that comes into my head is, ‘Continue having a ball’. I don’t know if that’s deep enough for all that we stand for. But it’s certainly the most fundamental thing for me when I’m making a decision on behalf of the girls. I’m constantly thinking of everyone’s level of enjoyment. As much as we’re in it for Irish culture, Irish music, and the representing of it, we really are in it for the amount of fun we’re having ourselves. That’s really what we’re doing. We’re wanting to hang out together more and get to experience what it’s like to have an ascendence, to get to tick off all these boxes of fun things to do with all of your best mates. Really and truly, our biggest mission is to continue having a ball together and make beautiful music. It’s that simple.”
To book tickets to Reverb in September and October, see luail.ie. Biird’s performance on Culture Night will be broadcast live on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player on September 19th.
Photographs: Nicola Tree for The Irish Times
Styling: Dani Behan
Make-up: Simmi Virdee
Hair: Leanne Miller
