After 30 years together, Scullion still possess a special place in the hearts of their fans, writes Siobhán Long
TO SAY THAT Scullion have enjoyed cult status since their inception in the late 1970s is probably akin to suggesting that Bruce Springsteen is partial to the odd marathon live performance. Next week, they will play a series of four sell-out shows celebrating their 30th birthday.
The band's founding members, Sonny Condell and Philip King, have not so much floated as careened below the radar for over three decades now, surfacing with some of the sharpest and most original songs written this side of the Brill Building. Quite why they never made their millions on the back of such perfect pop as Oh Carol, or at the very least discharged a pair of sizeable mortgages on the back of Eyelids Into Snow, remains one of the enduring mysteries of the music world, but such quotidian distractions are not the stuff of which founding member and aesthete, Sonny Condell, is made.
Scullion's early gestation took a circuitous route, against a backdrop of the burgeoning live music scene in Dublin. With a repertoire that swung from Condell's and King's original material to Lou Reed covers, they were preceded by a fleeting, colourful and quite probably motley gathering: Condell, King, Freddie White, Mick Daly, Éamon Doyle and Dan Fitzgerald, who gathered in Toner's pub under the moniker of The Sunday Night Band. That was the chrysalis from which Scullion emerged, with the line-up morphing into a quartet featuring Condell and King alongside guitarist Greg Boland and piper, Jimmy O'Brien Moran.
Following the success of Camouflage, Condell's debut recording on Mulligan records, Scullion found themselves on the same label in 1978 with a debut collection, White Side Of The Night, that sounds as fresh today as it did 30 years ago. Scullion took their name from the kitchen hands in service to one of the 15th century pretenders to the English throne during the reign of King Henry VII, Perkin Warbeck. It was a sign of things to come. This was music that simply couldn't be boxed in: contemporary songs with influences that sprang from the blues and rock 'n' roll, and, in terms of Condell's own writing during and after his time in Tír na nÓg, from the likes of Steeleye Span and Jethro Tull.
Having grown up on a farm in Newtownmountkennedy, Condell drew on what he admits was the rural idyll of his childhood to inform his writing. "My childhood experiences were heaven-sent, in a way," he offers sheepishly, almost apologetically. "Being the youngest, I went to boarding school for a bit, but even that wasn't menacing, to be honest. It was a gentle, generous sort of place. My parents were very easy going. They encouraged my imagination to develop. My father, too, had a great collection of records which he would play very loud every night, when he stopped farming. That was his relaxation and we all listened to that: to classical music and later, to Portuguese fado music. My mother played the piano and loved singing too."
With songs like White Side Of The Night, Eyelids Into Snow, The Actor and the Joycean The Fruit Smelling Shop, Condell carved out an entirely new landscape where words and images floated free of the tethers that previously bound them to terra firma. This was a world where possibilities were endless, where the sky was a different colour with every performance of the same song. Of course, Sonny's version is characteristically more modest than that. "I feel that if you have the imagination", he offers, "it's easier to write your own things than to struggle to learn how to play somebody else's music! There's a laziness there that pushes you in your own direction, maybe."
And yet, that original Scullion material didn't fit in anywhere with the music scene as it was happening in Ireland in the 1970s. "There didn't seem to be anywhere we could take it in Ireland at that time. There were ballad bars, but we weren't really that. We were always much more interested in original music, and there wasn't that patriotic, Irish thing going on in our music either. We were much more influenced by the outside world really: Joni Mitchell, Tom Rush, The Byrds, Donovan and Dylan, and The Beach Boys."
In the last couple of years, Condell has forged a reputation for himself as a graphic artist, in addition to evolving musically with his band, Radar. Somehow it fits perfectly: this languid interplay between word and image, a sleight of hand that tweaks at the viewer's imagination.
"The music and pictures seem to go nicely together somehow", Condell admits. "On a deeper level too, you learn from the unconscious: this deeper world inside you, and that's where I think the music I write comes from and that's where the pictures I make come from too. They don't necessarily make logical sense, but they portray some internal working, as the music does.
"They are definitely different worlds, but I think where they come closest to one another is in not trying to force or explain certain things. They come from the imagination and hopefully, aren't interfered with too much."
Scullion play the Triskel Arts Centre for four nights starting next Thursday. Sonny Condell's exhibition of graphic art continues in the Triskel Arts Centre until next Friday.
