Brock McGuire Band to perform at Ennis Trad Festival

ONE of the most eagerly anticipated concerts at this year’s Ennis Trad Festival will be the performance by The Brock McGuire Band in The Old Ground Hotel on Sunday, November 14.

The Brock McGuire Band is made up of two adopted Clare men, Paul Brock on accordion and melodeon and Manus McGuire on fiddle. Paul and Manus originally played together in Moving Cloud, while Manus was also a founding member of Buttons and Bows. Originally, they played as a duo in the Brock McGuire Band and were joined by banjo and mandolin player Enda Scahill and acclaimed pianist, composer and arranger, Denis Carey.
Their music, while steeped in traditional music styles, is also adapted to incorporate American Old Time, French-Canadian and other Celtic influences.
Paul Brock, a native of Athlone but living in Ennis for many years, explains how the band originally came together.
“Manus and I put together Moving Cloud which disbanded 10 years ago. We’d been friends musically and otherwise for a long time, since we were children actually. Ten years ago, we put the present Brock McGuire Band together. It’s a four-piece instrumental band. Enda from Corofin, County Galway is one of the best banjo players in the country. He has all sorts of awards to his name. He has produced a banjo tutor in the last two years, which is selling very well.
Denis Carey is our piano player. He comes from Newport, County Tipperary. He is well-known on the music scene for a number of reasons. He runs the Peter Dee Academy of Music in Limerick and has upwards of 700 students. He also owns Steamboat Music in Limerick. He is performer across a range of music genres. He plays jazz, popular music, he is an arranger, a composer. His works are being performed by many people overseas, including the Scottish National Orchestra, Symphony Nova Scotia and many, many others,” Paul notes.
Paul grew up in Athlone in an era when Irish music was unpopular. “When I started learning in the early ’50s as a young boy, it was a very unfashionable thing to do. We were still in the doldrums economically. People didn’t want to be looking back to the past and old traditions. My mother and father weren’t musicians but they sang a lot at home. My father was a huge John McCormack fan, so I grew up in the shadow of the whole McCormack legacy.
“My early musical influences were on radio. It was the era of the 78, the LP arrived in the late ’50s. It was also a time when there was no television, so it was a very different time. People tended to make their own entertainment. I heard all the Irish music programmes of that era, particularly Ciarán Mac Mathúna and Seamus Ennis. For some reason, I connected with the music. It had an instant appeal and I started buying records,” he recalls.
He tells how he had an uncle who had a shop that sold bicycles, radios and musical instruments just up the street from where he lived. “One day, I asked him if I could look at an accordion that he had in the window. I’d already been playing the mouth organ. So I picked it up and looked at it and pressed the button and I just got hooked. From there, I started to play Irish music. I was very lucky that my father was friends with Frank Dolphin from Sligo and he was a singer and an accordion player. He used to come to our house and when he saw my interest, he took me under his wing. From him, I got the Sligo music, which he brought to me through his own knowledge of it and recordings that he brought to play for me, some of which I still have. I learned my very first traditional Irish tune on the accordion from Frank Dolphin. It was through Frank that myself and Manus met for the first time. Frank and Manus’ father, were good friends. Paddy McGuire brought his two sons, Manus and Seamus, over to meet me with Frank, we knew of each other since then. When I came across him in later years, we knew each other,” he says.
After meeting Frank, Paul started competing at fleadhs. “I took part in the fleadh in Loughrea in 1955 and the fleadh, which has immortalised in song in Ennis in 1956. The first All-Ireland Fleadh in 1952 was held in Mullingar and the second was in Athlone, so that was more than coincidence. That speaks volumes about the strength of traditional Irish music in the midlands in those days,” he explains.
Paul came to Clare to work in Shannon Development but his county connections went further back than that. “My aunt lived in Cross. We used to come down from Athlone for our summer holidays. We’d come to Ennis and take the West Clare road out towards Kilkee. Our aunt would send in the only hackney car on the peninsula to collect us. We spent our summer holidays in West Clare many times,” Paul recounts.
His music has evolved in all sorts of directions over the years. “I have performed both as a solo performer on accordion and I’ve worked with a lot of different musicians. I’ve done umpteen recordings. Collectively, between all of us in the Brock McGuire Band, we have over 30 CDs now. Each of us in the band shares a common interest in different forms of music. Most of the work the band does is outside of Ireland. We primarily tour in the States. We’re just back from Tennessee, North Carolina, among other places and in May, we toured Colombia,” he says.
He speaks about how one wouldn’t expect a traditional Irish band to tour in Colombia but the appeal of Irish music worldwide enables bands to tour in many different places.
“The globalisation of Irish music is phenomenal. It’s just gone so big and it’s continuing to move in so many places, that none of us would have considered as potential markets in the past. Believe it or not, there was a festival of traditional Irish music in Cuba this year – a very successful trad festival.
We wondered how the Colombian tour would go for us. The reaction out there was really interesting because first of all we found they are very well educated on music. They also know that Ireland has a living folk tradition and they’re fierce interested in that. Simply, they want a bit of it too. They also like the fact that young Irish people are playing this kind of music. It’s a feature of Irish music that it has that ability to connect with an audience, even with an audience that is uninitiated, that hasn’t been exposed to the music before,” Paul comments.
He explains that at the core of what the Brock McGuire Band do is Irish traditional music.
“We’re particularly interested in the journey of Irish music, especially into North America and how the music evolved over there and how it influenced lots of different music forms. We play French Canadian music because of the Irish connection in the province of Quebec, where about 40% of the population is of Irish descent. In the case of Cape Breton, there’s a strong Irish tradition and Celtic tradition there and we’ve been there quite a few times. There’s a festival there each October called Celtic Colours and we’ve done that quite a few times. There’s also the whole journey of Irish music with Irish emigrants, for example, the journey into the Apalachians, with influence of Irish music in country music, in Bluegrass. We do some of that music as well. So we adapt what we do somewhat to suit the audience. We’re very interested in connections with Irish music,” Paul says.
The band is currently working on a new recording. “I plan to do another solo CD as well, once the band CD is completed. I’m already at the early stages of working on that. I’d hope the band CD will be out in the first quarter of next year,” he adds.
Paul is also a part-time lecturer in the University of Limerick Irish World Music Centre, since it opened. “Part of what I do there is on the business side of music, because I’ve written material about marrying business with music. I try to help musicians in all the areas of getting up and running as a recording and touring musician, including promotion, publicising, touring and so on – all areas, which I have at least a little experience at this stage,” he says.
This is the first time that the Brock McGuire Band have played at the Ennis Trad Festival. On his touring travels, particularly in North America, Paul has found it amazing the amount of people who are aware of Ennis Trad Festival.
“In some cases they’ve been over themselves to the festival but otherwise, there’s something that happens in the Irish traditional music scene which helps information like that filter through. Ennis, as far as traditional music goes has a kind of special ring about it. The town is perfect for a traditional Irish music festival – it’s compact, it’s easy to move around, it has plenty of performance venues, the right infrastructure and plenty of accommodation. I think the people who have put this festival together over the years have done a really good job. They’ve found a niche and a particular time of the year, which wouldn’t be normally associated with a festival. Most people think of November as more or less a month during which not much happens,” Paul comments.
He continues, “The word is out there that there is something special about the Ennis Trad Festival. The whole backdrop to this of course is Clare’s reputation for great music and musicians. Clare rightly earned that reputation because it has a bigger concentration of musicians than anyplace else I know. All of these things help to make Ennis Trad Festival a very good festival, attracting top-class musicians, lively audiences, and making the event a real attraction on the music calendar in Ireland and internationally,” he concludes.
The Brock McGuire Band will perform at 10pm on Sunday, November 14.