Belfast Regains Its Voice

(New York Times)
By JOSHUA HAMMER
Published: October 19, 2008
THE Friday night session was just getting started on the second floor of Maddens, a dimly lighted pub in the Cathedral Quarter of Belfast. Six musicians — a young woman fiddle player; a pony-tailed, grizzled uilleann piper; a pair of guitarists; a tin-whistler; and a bodhran, or Irish tambourine, player — sat in a circle jamming, gazing at one another, seemingly oblivious to the crowd. The music had an improvisational feel to it — sprightly and hypnotic, the vigorous melody of the fiddles skittering above the sweet, mellow tones of the bagpipes.


Midway through the set, I heard an unfamiliar language being spoken and turned to face a bearded, stringy-haired young man clad in baggy sweatshirt and jeans sitting beside me at the bar. He introduced himself as Caomhin (pronounced KEE-vin) Mac Giolla Caehain, a fiddler and devotee of Gaelic, which, like Irish folk music, has been enjoying a revival in Belfast the last few years.

Many of the people in the room, Caomhin (the name means gentle offspring) told me, were regulars — traditionalists who showed up at Maddens on Friday nights to pay homage to both the ancient language and Ireland’s rich musical heritage. “This is the real thing,” Mr. Mac Giolla Caehain said of the music.

Some 10 years after the Northern Ireland peace agreement, Belfast is in the midst of a transformation. A wave of investment — mostly from other parts of Britain — has turned this once war-torn, economically depressed city into one of Europe’s liveliest towns.

Hotels, clubs and restaurants seem to be springing up in every neighborhood; a new riverside promenade winds past acres of commercial and residential development to a giant entertainment complex in the making, the Titanic Quarter, named for the doomed luxury liner built in Belfast’s now-moribund shipyards in 1911. But perhaps nowhere is the peace dividend more pronounced than in the revival of the city’s music scene. Back in the 1960s, before the outbreak of the Troubles, Belfast was one of Europe’s most musical cities. Van Morrison, born in East Belfast, got his start playing folk tunes at a sailor’s hostel called the Maritime Hotel. (From there he landed a recording contract with Decca Records in London, and a career was born.) The city has also nurtured performers like Derek Bell and Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains and Henry McCullough, who started a folk band called Sweeney’s Men in the 1960s, later joined Joe Cocker’s band and then became the lead guitarist for Paul McCartney’s Wings.

“When I grew up in the ’60s there were 80 clubs in and around Belfast where bands could go and play. And that went down to one,” said Terri Hooley, a Belfast impresario who brought the Clash to Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles in 1977. (After fighting broke out between fired-up fans of the Clash and the police and British soldiers — a riot that became known as the Battle of Bedford Street — the promoters canceled the concert at Ulster Hall two hours before it was scheduled to begin.)

Now, however, there are at least 40 clubs around the city, including a dozen where Irish musicians go back to their roots — playing the traditional folk tunes that have formed the backdrop of Irish life for centuries. “You can hear ‘trad’ every night of the week these days,” Mr. Hooley told me.

Debate abounds about how far back the origins of traditional Irish music go; some of the songs played in the pubs of Belfast, I was told, date back more than 1,000 years, passed down from generation to generation. And it was only in the last couple of centuries that the music was written down and collected. Bands or small ensembles have probably been a part of Irish music since the early 19th century, when instruments like the fiddle and the uilleann pipes were pulled out for Irish dancing — reels, hornpipes and jigs — at weddings and saints’ days. These days perhaps the greatest display of Irish traditional music in the world takes place at the annual Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann festival, which begins with a series of competitions at the village and county level, and attracts as many as 20,000 participants.

I recently spent five nights in Belfast, venturing out every evening to sample the flowering trad scene. I started my tour on a Monday night, the slowest of the week, at a bar called Fibber Magee, around the corner from Belfast’s City Hall. It was a touristy place where a duet called Finnegans Wake played familiar Irish tunes to a crowd almost exclusively made up of Americans, Canadians and Britons.

But it didn’t take long before I found my way to more authentic hangouts — pubs frequented by, among others, former paramilitary fighters from both sides of the sectarian divide. Nearly all of these establishments can be found in the Cathedral Quarter, a slum only five years ago but now the epicenter of Belfast’s cultural and architectural renaissance. In most of them, the musicians gather once or twice a week for sessions — relaxed, informal gatherings at which the music is played as much for the benefit of the artists as for that of the audience.

On Tuesday night, a fairly quiet one in Belfast, I left my hotel and wandered past a boisterous group spilling out the door of the Spaniard, one of Cathedral’s oldest taverns. Then I turned down a narrow street lined with darkened office buildings and came upon a small, unobtrusive pub called the John Hewitt.

Opened nine years ago by the nonprofit Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre, whose managers hoped to bridge the city’s sectarian divide, the John Hewitt (named for a Belfast poet) stands blocks from a no man’s land once ruled by paramilitary gangs. The neighborhood is still dicey: across the street stands a burned-out office block.

When I arrived at the Hewitt, a trad quartet — fiddler, guitarist, drummer and uilleann piper — had just started its evening session. I met John McSherry, one of Northern Ireland’s best known players of the uilleann pipe — the Irish national bagpipe — who tours with a band called At First Light.

“There’s been a lot more vibrancy to the Belfast scene nowadays, and it just keeps getting livelier,” Mr. McSherry told me during a cigarette break in the street. He sat in a chair on the stage, wedged the uilleann pipe bellows beneath his right elbow, manipulating it to keep air flowing into the pipe bag. With his fingers dancing lightly over a series of holes on the stemlike chanter, he produced a haunting, vibratory sound with high-pitched, reedy notes skipping over a low monotone.

The Hewitt occasionally sponsors contemporary art exhibitions in tandem with the weekly sessions, and on this Tuesday evening the walls were covered with stark surrealistic paintings — prisoners squeezed into concrete cells, courtyards overlooked by watchtowers. The works were done by Raymond Watson, a former Irish Republican Army man who served eight years at Maze Prison outside Belfast. As it happened, Mr. Watson was at the pub that night. As the session players kicked off into a lively reel, he invited me to sit down at a round table packed with Hewitt regulars: poets and politicians, Protestant and Catholic ex-fighters, artists and ex-Communists, aging hippies and a few business types.