It is quite impossible to overestimate the significance of a place called Prosperous. It was here that Donal Lunny, perhaps the most influential figure in Irish music, first began to investigate a multitude of hidden musical possibilities and set about discovering how jigs, reels and hornpipes might be presented in a whole new way.
From those early gatherings in Kildare, Lunny has consistently remained in the vanguard and is now recognised worldwide as a composer, a multi-instrumentalist, a performer and a producer. More immediately in Ireland, Lunny has been that vital presence behind many of the most exciting episodes in Irish music - from Planxty, through The Bothy Band and Moving Hearts, to various bands of his own and now his latest venture, Coolfin.
Born in Newbridge, Lunny began his musical journey by avoiding piano lessons. His was not particularly a traditional music household and, via the radio, he was hearing as much classical, rock 'n' roll and jazz as anything else. His feel for music was natural, however, and the desire to play it was irresistible. It just so happened that the best opportunity to play music, of any sort, was 10 miles away in the village of Prosperous.
"I've a feeling that it was entirely to do with that opportunity to play music and I suppose if it had been jazz I might have ended up playing jazz. Certainly I used to see a guy walking down the street in Newbridge who was in a showband and he had a guitar and I was completely fascinated by this. I wondered what kind of life he had and what kind of music he was playing.
"But then the very first opportunity I got to actually play with people had been with traditional musicians. There was a ballad group in Newbridge called the Liffeysiders and we did Clancy Brothers songs and the like. But the thing that I found most exhilarating in terms of possibilities was being at those traditional music seisiuns in Prosperous.
"There was anything up to 10 or 15 musicians all lathering away for the evening under the generosity of Pat Dowling and this was carte blanche for me. I didn't exactly abuse the music but I could be experimental with the guitar. I think the lovely thing about playing in Prosperous was the acceptance and the tolerance because, while I wasn't making horrible sounds on the guitar, I might have been a shade extravagant in trying out the odd augmented or diminished chord."
Lunny's first taste of success came with the group Emmet Spiceland, although this gave no real indication of what was yet to come. He taught himself guitar and consequently developed an approach to music that was entirely his own. He never learned to play in any particular style and had simply set about, from an early age, discovering as many chords as possible and devising his own methods for playing lefthanded guitar.
"I thought I had invented the lefthanded guitar! I got the notion of reversing the strings spontaneously and worked away at it. I had to work out my own chords and found this a delightful challenge. I used have a piece of wood under the desk with the strings and the frets on it and when I should have been listening to the history teacher I was researching chords under the desk!
"I had always understood music at a very early age but whatever innate knowledge I had about music I took completely for granted. I never suspected that I was different from anybody else until I was about 13years-old and I was on my last legs at Newbridge College where I had been idling for three years. The only ray of light, if you like, was Father Flanagan who taught art and music. He was a gifted man. He was brilliant. The college had a choral recital one year and it very quickly emerged that I could retain far more music in one chunk than anybody else in the class. Father Flanagan saw this and he encouraged me. I owe him a great deal for that."
Lunny was, and still is, on the lookout for new sounds that might draw something new from within the music itself and his first move was to explore the potential of the Greek bouzouki. Musicians like Johnny Moynihan and Alec Finn were already using the bouzouki in Irish music and Lunny, too, was drawn to its rhythmic possibilities.
Initially finding the round back a little awkward, he came up with a flat-backed design which he restrung with unison as opposed to octave strings to produce what he refers to as a "silvery sound". The Irish bouzouki had been invented and was to become trademark Lunny. It proved to be a versatile instrument - in the Bothy Band, Lunny took what he refers to as "the hacksaw" approach; in Planxty the musical accompaniment was usually more what Liam O'Flynn has described as "a filigree".
"A lot of that originated from Andy Irvine building counterpoints to himself from his songs. Andy was, and still is, an original. I had played with Andy quite a bit before Planxty formed and I used to build something to go with what he did. So I would do a counter melody to Andy's counter melody and found that this could be applied within the context of Planxty as well. So I suppose it was a mixture of spontaneity and having worked together already that brought it about. I didn't become aware that what I was involved in could have any wider effect until well into Planxty. Prior to that it didn't feel momentous or groundbreaking or anything. It was fun."
Planxty enjoyed success, cult status and a series of albums that has never been equalled. The similarly successful Bothy Band, which followed Planxty, was a conscious attempt to crank things up a little more and go for the musical jugular.
Lunny was by now aware there was a huge potential audience for the music but he also knew that, to reach that audience, all manner of choices would have to be made about how the music was presented. It was perhaps the Bothy Band's great achievement that it managed to be a loud, dynamic, high energy band with all the attitude of rock 'n' roll without ever compromising the music itself. Certainly Lunny knew well that Irish music could be souped up easily enough, but any notion of an out and out Celtic rock approach was never an option.
"That just disenchanted me. I always felt that to do that, a serious concession would have to be made. If you're going to stick on a snare and a bass drum, you've got to think hard about what you're going to do with it rather than just apply the formula. Formulas turn me off. I had heard attempts at that kind of treatment of traditional music and it had never worked. Not even partially. One thing that hit me very forcibly way back was that if you take rock drumming and impose it on Irish music, you are taking music from another place and another time and putting it as a layer on top of it.
"But if you take the Irish music and then draw the components and the character from within the music itself, then the music is actually generating the rhythm and the syncopation and the punctuation.
"That's what I've always been trying to do. But yes, my view of it was that we were up against bands with big rhythm sections and superb production. At the time we were the right age to be in the heart of the pop scene and I thought that if only we could get to people, they would like it. So we did strive to make the music as exciting and as dynamic as possible and we went a long way in that direction."
The formation of Moving Hearts turned many heads. Lunny teamed up with Christy Moore and a particularly impressive line-up of musicians playing pipes, drums, percussion, electric bass, guitar and saxophone. With Lunny on bouzouki and synth, Moving Hearts clearly had a million possibilities and it seemed like the ideal forum for Lunny to explore his ideas on rhythm and his declared interest in African music. The Hearts were at times as spectacular as any band could ever be and their performances at venues such as Lisdoonvarna and The Baggot are now the stuff of legend. That said, it still wasn't quite what Lunny himself was after.
"I didn't really get the chance to explore things in Moving Hearts, at least in a direct way, because Moving Hearts was closer to a rock 'n' roll band, much closer than I would have liked. Every time I mention this I always qualify it by saying that I learnt an enormous amount and I will always be grateful for having been there because I learned how rhythm sections work from real masters. It was always very well built and if I said that I didn't like the snare where it was, I had to come up with a very good argument for moving it anywhere. But what was coming out was rock 'n' roll although sometimes my spanner into their works did help to disrupt it slightly, and could just shift it a little in the direction of something more indigenous."
There are as many different approaches to the idea of experimentation as there are musicians themselves. Some thrive on it and others are downright against it in any form. For Lunny, with his particular track record as a performer and a producer, he finds he is constantly forced to question whether or not a particular piece of experimentation is valid or not. Furthermore, the many requests made on him to perform with other artists from various genres can throw up endless difficulties in terms of concession and compromise. Where and how to draw the line is the constant puzzle.
The new album Coolfin sees Lunny joined by many of the musicians who have been working with him in recent years including John McSherry on pipes and Nollaig Casey on fiddle. The record which also features Sharon Shannon, Eddi Reader, Marta Sebestyen and Maighread Ni Dhomhnaill, is a varied mix of music and song characterised by Lunny's rhythmic variations and his ongoing attempts to uncover yet further possibilities from within the music itself. As ever, he will be watched, listened to and scrutinised because, as everyone with an interest in Irish music knows, where Donal Lunny goes, others follow.
"This is another step and there are several more steps to go - big ones. This is still at a marked remove from where I'd like to be. There are still conventions that I feel could be abandoned. I think we're getting there with the music but there are other avenues to be explored instrumentation-wise or treatment-wise. I really feel that there are other sounds that we could be using and, with that in mind, I've been trying to design several instruments - new instruments.
"It's not worth saying any more about it until something manifests but I'm preoccupied with it and I feel a certain amount of frustration at not being at that point yet. I'm uneasy too about the fact that what I say or do might be taken as a definitive thing. It makes me a lot more careful about what I do and say. Music is about love of some sort and about emotional expression. How you get that is in what you play and what sounds you use and how they are applied. That's what my concern is. But yes, I saw a book in Japan where I was number one in what they called `the pantheon of Irish music' and I thought, oh no! I can't follow my own act!"