The Clare Champion Clare news, sport, entertainment and local notes
AN ounce of breeding is worth a tonne of feeding, some say, but when breeding does break out across generations it can still take a surprising twist.
The late concertina player Chris Droney was a traditional music legend. A winner of numerous All Irelands, he was honoured with a TG4 Gradam Saoil award for lifetime achievement, and named the Clare Person of the Year in 2012.
It would hardly be a surprise that a grandson of his would have a passion for music and some talent, but instead of playing trad, Daithí O’Dronaí is an acclaimed electronic musician, who has recently released his third LP, I’m Here Now.
The album has been described by the Irish Times as an “optimistic, celebratory return”, while Hot Press said that one of the tracks was “a hot contender for the song of the summer”.
He tops the bill at a show in O’Donohue’s of Fanore this Saturday night – Fomhar in Fanore – while the following day he heads for Glasgow, where a six-date UK tour begins.
“It’ll be myself, my sound engineer and drummer, we’ll be in one small car! It’s good though, it works well,” he laughs.
Daithí says he has been very pleased with the reaction to the new album, while he feels the music reflects his arrival back into north Clare as a 30-something.
“I had a record called L.O.S.S. out a few years ago that got nominated for a Choice Award and it was a real turning point in terms of getting these full pieces of work out, it was really important. This one is really interesting, since the pandemic I’ve been back in Clare a lot more and the album is very much about that.
“I’d been living in Galway City and Dublin for a long time and coming back to Clare was a big change.
“If a 21-year-old me had been told I was coming back to Ballyvaughan he’d have been like “that’s crazy” because you’re looking for action the whole time.
“But you appreciate it a bit more when you get a little bit older and stuff, you try and make it a little bit more yours. Myself and my partner run this artists’ retreat in Ballyvaughan called the Beekeeper’s and that’s taking up a lot of my time at the moment. It has been really nice.”
Most of the album was made locally, while he used a lot of local sounds on it.
“I brought a whole pile of artists down every few weeks, we’d record in Ballyvaughan. Bringing people down has been really great, you feel very proud of the area when you see people coming down and being blown away by the place.”
“Sometimes it takes other people to point out how beautiful it is, because you kind of take it for granted for a little while. That was brilliant.
“With the album, I was kind of rediscovering the area a bit and using samples from the area and stuff. When I listen to the record I think of Clare an awful lot as well.”
It’s electronic music, and he says many of the sounds were taken from the local area years earlier. “There are high dance moments but a lot of introspective stuff as well. The title track ‘I’m Here Now’, is an interesting one, I do a lot of collecting samples and I have sample collections from years and years. I was trying to pull samples from different times in my life when I was in Clare.
“There’s a sea sound from when I was 18, a whole section with wind in a gate from when I was 22. My grandfather Chris was a concertina player and I borrowed a concertina from my aunt and we use that in the track, you can hear all this padded noise in the back, that’s a concertina. It kind of makes up a whole pile of different parts of my life in Clare.”
The scope of his style of music is virtually limitless, so he says it is important that everything he includes has a genuine meaning.
“My ethos is that every single sample I use should mean something, have some sort of reason for being in there, rather than just throwing in anything that you find and like.
“When I listen to a track I kind of listen to a big long collection of different things that mean something to me. It’s not just the song, not just the lyrics, it’s all of the sounds baked into it.”
What Daithí does is a very different style of creativity to most musicians.
“When people say what’s your main instrument, I say my computer! The thing you have to know about electronic music production is that you have access to absolutely everything in the world, any single sound that you want is there.
“It’s almost more of a practice of limiting yourself to stuff or else you end up not really getting a style and you throw so many different things in. That’s the real trick.
“Then, especially at the start of the process it’s very solitary. You’re spending a lot of time trying to get into that flow state and trying to find stuff yourself, which I quite like.
“The second part of it then, you can bring in these amazing vocalists. Sinead White has been working with me for a long time and she’s really amazing.
“I have Ailbhe Reddy for the record as well, you get them to spend time with you and everybody just hangs out and you’re opening up your art to other people.
“The themes mean something different to those vocalists, and once you get those mixes it becomes better than the sum of its parts. That’s the really exciting social side of it.
“Right now we get to play it live, to share it with the rest of the world, and that’s really special as well. I’d be one of those artists that when it comes out it’s less mine and more belongs to the people who are listening to it.”
He says that his late grandfather Chris was “a real leader in the family” and he was very nervous when he showed him the direction he was going in.
“When I showed it to him first it was a real nerve wracking experience for me. I brought him into my room and showed him the loop stations and synthesizers and stuff.
“I played a bit for him, he gave me his blessing, but I was lucky that it was so far removed from traditional music. He was just delighted I was doing music at all. He’d be a massive role model for me, he did so much touring and travelling and really made music a vocation and such a big thing in our family.”
While his own creations may seem very different from the music his grandfather loved there are commonalities, and earlier this year he worked with Martin Hayes.
“It seems so removed, but there are some traditional elements in it. This year I went to Dubai for St Patrick’s Day and played with Martin Hayes, he put me in a band for the Dubai Expo. Now, I play fiddle, but I can’t play like Martin Hayes!
“It was absolutely mad, I was talking to him on the phone and I was, like, ‘Martin you know I can’t play fiddle with you, I’m nowhere close to you!’.
“But he didn’t want me to play fiddle at all, he wanted me to play synthesizers underneath his violin playing. He was wanting me to bring my world into the traditional thing and I had never even thought about it that way.”
Like many families, the Droneys couldn’t have an ordinary funeral after Chris passed in 2020, but through music Daithí has heard a lot about his grandfather in recent months.
“Chris passed away during the lockdown, the funeral was very closed off, only family in the church, a load of people lined up outside, which was amazing, but we didn’t get the kind of thing where people would tell you stories about Chris.
“Over the course of the year I’ve run into traditional Irish musicians and they’d all have these stories. Hanging out with Martin Hayes and Cormac Begley and those lads, you get all these mad stories that I was really blessed to hear.”
Having come back to North Clare after years in Galway and Dublin, Daithí says he feels a responsibility to give back to the area.
“When you come back down, after spending 10-plus years away from it, you’re still a little bit of a blow in! You have to work at it. What’s very important to me, is that coming back into a community, you try and give back to it.”
He feels he can do that through his new business and events like the show on Saturday.
“The things I can do are bring artists into the area, kind of show people around and build that side of things. In Ballyvaughan there isn’t a massive young population and I’m kind of taking it on myself as a responsibility to try and get more people down there and stuff.
“The village is absolutely gorgeous and I want to make it even better, and I think it’s really important to give back to the community. I’m so delighted this gig is on in Fanore, these ideas are the things that really bring a place up.”
Fómhar in Fanore is on Saturday in O’Donohues of Fanore and features Daithi, Strange Boy, Bog Bodies, Toshin and Dora Gola. Tickets from Eventbrite.
Owen Ryan
Owen Ryan has been a journalist with the Clare Champion since 2007, having previously worked for a number of other regional titles in Limerick, Galway and Cork.
