It has become a bit of a parlour game among musicians to attempt to work out just how much money Bill Whelan earns in a week. For some, that debate will, not surprisingly, be fuelled by considerable envy but, for the most part, there is a certain quiet pleasure that he has done so well out of such a freak showbusiness phenomenon.
Who, with the possible exception of Flatley himself, could have foreseen what Riverdance would achieve? At this stage however, statistics and figures are mindnumbing. Suffice to say, the success of the show has been extraordinary and its rewards for the names on the poster quite unimaginable.
Whelan wrote the music for Riverdance. This brought chart success, double platinum sales, a Grammy award and the praise of his own composing idols such as Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach. It also famously relaunched Irish dancing, and continues to swell the heart every time that Eurovision clip is shown. Who would deny Whelan any of it? He has, after all, been an unassuming and hardworking musician for a long, long time.
Born in Limerick, Whelan grew up listening to everything from Irish music to opera to Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. As a teenager, he was drawn to The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Bacharach and Zappa. He studied piano and violin and went to the Limerick School of Music before playing in various pub bands around Dublin. Throughout the 1970s, he honed his skills as an arranger and soon began writing for string quartets, brass and larger orchestral situations - all the time broadening his brief and searching for something which might brighten up what he remembers as a hard slog.
Eventually, work on an RTE television series called My Ireland introduced him to Donal Lunny - exactly the person Whelan needed to meet. It led to his becoming a member of the Planxty auxiliary band in Timedance, a mini-suite performed by an augmented Planxty during the intermission in the 1981 Eurovision Song Contest.
"I remembered hearing The Bothy Band playing in the Savoy in Limerick and being totally blown away by it. I had been aware of O Riada's work too, of course, but hearing The Bothy Band and how tunes could be accompanied really excited me. I felt that the tradition had come and visited us right on our doorstep. I know there are a lot of people responsible for that, but signal among them are people like Donal. "So eventually, for me, some kind of a vision began to grow. I was thinking of some way to present the music on a larger scale. I wanted to take the way tunes are structured in the Irish tradition and try develop a voice - something new and individual -not just something that sounds exactly like it comes from Sliabh Luachra. Timedance was the distillation of a lot of work in that area. "It was a disappointment to me subsequently that the Planxty that emerged around Timedance didn't go further with it. From my perspective, the move forward that Timedance hinted at just stopped at that point - and then Moving Hearts took over."
For the next 10 years, Whelan was involved with various projects - mainly television work, producing and arranging. In 1987, he worked with full orchestra for the O Riada celebrations. Encouraged by that, he became increasingly involved in theatre work - notably the 1989 Yeats Festival, which sparked off later compositions such as The Seville Suite. At the beginning of the 1990s, however, there was one production job which was to prove more fruitful than most.
It was an occasion which was to propel Whelan both back and forward at the same time. All those years ago, when he first met Donal Lunny, he had also met Andy Irvine, someone who had long been interested in Eastern European music. In particular, Irvine had been exploring a possible marriage between Irish music and the music of Macedonia and Bulgaria. Planxty had touched on it here and there, but with an album called East Wind, the opportunity arose for Whelan and Irvine to take it further.
"That East Wind project introduced me that whole area of music which was ultimately essential when I came to work with dance. With Riverdance, I thought that the more interesting the rhythm, the more interesting the dance. Perhaps Irish jigs and reels could be pushed into something that wasn't quite straight and squared. "There had always been that debate about rhythm: if you lay contemporary musical developments on top of traditional music, what are the things that sit well? Where would the backbeat in kit-drumming lie in traditional music? I suppose Horslips were an example of an almost totally unselfconscious positioning of the backbeat in the place where it lay in rock. But what Donal was doing or what I was doing, was trying to find another way of doing it, of finding other stresses within the rhythms."
AND so the music of Riverdance was informed heavily by the rhythms of Eastern European music. Spanish music featured too, and soon Whelan had come up with a very distinctive sound indeed. It was also to be a controversial approach in some quarters - the prime example of what some critics denounce as Babel music, a dramatic but ultimately meaningless fabrication, much, they said, like the show itself. Such criticisms are harsh, but spring from a growing unease about all kinds of dilutions, and ultimately from a genuine concern for traditional music itself. There are those who would gladly harpoon the Riverdance Leviathan.
"I remember somebody said that it was going to release the most terrible things. And in a way he was right. Those are always the risks if something is successful. You think that whatever drove you personally to do it is going to be equally visible to other people, but that's not right. Some people just see that success of it as the motor and they pick some of the elements that they think are essential (but which probably are not) and burnish them up as the thing itself. That has certainly happened. But does that take away from the actual thing itself? I hope not."
The next project for Whelan is another stage piece, a musical journey into Spain and South America, in collaboration with writer Colm Toibin. It is already underway and Whelan is full of tales of recent visits to Brazil and Cuba. The alarm bells which are already ringing in purist ears will doubtless be heard in both continents, but Whelan is by now well beyond their particular reproach.
"It's funny, because in America, I'm typecast as the Irish composer and in Ireland, I'm typecast as the non-Irish composer! But I can only be honest about what I do. I still see my own work as part of a development and I'm still madly interested in what Irish music can deliver to us as Irish people. We audition a lot of musicians and singers throughout the year and it's phenomenal, and they are not trying to play Riverdance music. And that's where the hope is. When these younger people develop their own voice, that's going to be the next thing. It's not going to be somebody who copies Riverdance - myself included."