Guidewires keep it live at Glór

IN Tóla Custy’s own words, saying that he was born into music is somewhat of an understatement. “God, I had music in me before I was even born, when I was just a twinkle in my mother’s eye,” he laughs.

Tóla is the son of Frank and Teresa Custy (nee Coote) from Toonagh. He cannot remember a time when there wasn’t music around him although, he explains, his father came to music later on in his life.
“My father was a hurler before he could ever play music. He played with his brother, Seán, and they were acclaimed far and wide as the Custy hurling brothers. Dad was a teacher and ended up being the principal of Toonagh National School. Literally, one day the man who was principal of the school before him said to him that he was too old to teach the children music so my father would have to do it. So he went to a great musician called Jack Mulkere. From when he started learning to play music, sports took a back seat altogether. He played many instruments. What was brilliant about my father playing music while I was growing up was that we had every kind of an instrument in the house. There was a great music shop in Ennis for years called Whites, at the Market and my father would go in with one instrument and come out with another,” Tóla recalls.
But he credits his mother’s side of the family for his own and his siblings’ musical abilities. “We definitely got our natural flair for music from my mother. My mother could hear a song or a piece of music on the radio and sang it back no bother,” he says.
Through his father, Tóla and his four sisters, Cathy, Francis, Mary and Nora, were all involved in the Toonagh Céilí Band and Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann.
“Playing solo never really interested Dad, he liked to play music in a community. As kids, we were all in the Toonagh Céilí Band and we’d go round to all the fleadhs and play for dances. Other local musicians played with us, local fiddle player, James Cullinane, Siobhán Peoples, who has been a close friend of mine since I was four,” he adds.
As a very young boy, he can remember his father coming home excited with a new instrument on many occasions.
“One particular night I was in bed half asleep but he got me up to try out a set of uileann pipes he had got. They were too big for me, so he tied them around me and a chair and off I went learning the pipes. I never really took to them because to play the pipes you have to be almost a plumber as much as a musician to maintain them,” Tóla jokes.
His father was also very involved in the building of Cois na hAbhna. “A group of musicians in Clare came up with the idea of Cois na hAbhna and saw it through. I can remember going around town in trailers attached to cars playing music to fundraise for Cois na hAbhna.”
Tóla qualified as a primary school teacher and  has worked in the Holy Family Junior and Senior Schools in Ennis and in Gaelscoil Donnacha Rua in Shannon. For the moment, however, he has put his teaching career on hold, only subbing from time to time, to pursue various music projects.
In the late 1990s, Tóla joined Calico with Diarmuid and Donnacha Moynihan and Pat Marsh. Through Calico he met renowned accordion player Alan Kelly.
“Alan is an absolutely amazing musician. For me, I think he offers it all in terms of performance and skill. He asked me to join him to record an album and along with Donogh Hennessy and Steph Geremia, we became the Mosaic Band, sometimes called the Alan Kelly Quartet. I’ve learned more about playing in a band from Alan Kelly than I have from anyone else. He more or less taught me about what not to do. He is big into the phrases of music, something which I never knew before playing with him,” he explains.
Through Alan, Tóla then stumbled into another unique project. “Alan was part of a band performing with a theatre production company Mabou Mines and their adaptation of Peter Pan, called Peter and Wendy. The production needed a new fiddle player and Alan put me forward for the role. This is Japanese-style puppetry. I had never done music for drama before. It’s a completely different thing. It was very new to me and I found it a huge challenge at the start. I had to learn how to play to depict the movement of the puppets,” Tóla says.
He would love the show to come to Ireland, especially to Clare. “It is amazing – it is so different and I feel Irish audiences would absolutely love it. I’m very lucky to have met Alan Kelly because he has steered me towards different music projects which I wouldn’t have come across without him.”
These days, while all of his other music projects are parked for a while but by no means gone, Guidewires, are causing quite a stir on the scene.
“Some reviewers thought we were a bit cheeky to record our first album live but they seemed to really like it so we must have done something right,” he says.
Guidewires came about through his acquaintance with concertina player Pádraig Rynne. “I knew Pádraig for a while but hadn’t met him for a long time. I really liked his style of playing. He asked me to play at the Galway Arts Festival with him in 2006. He was going to make an album so I did bits with him for that. We then started playing as a trio with guitarist Paul McSherry. It all started to take shape and we are all enjoying working together. We were away in Belgium at a great festival called Na Fir Bolg. There was a band there called Comas and we met with a brilliant flute player, Sylvain Barou, who was playing with that group. At a festival in France some time later, we met up again and played a few gigs together and it really worked. From there, we got a repertoire going – we hadn’t quite figured it out yet but we kept up the contact and spoke about different pieces. Then over here, myself and Pádraig met with Karol Lynch and we really liked what he was doing. I had known him for a few years from a few pub sessions we had played at together and was getting to know him and his music. He is one hell of a bouzouki player,” he adds.
The five played their first gig together in Glór in the summer of 2008. “Well, we had played a few sessions mainly overseas but this was to be our first official gig. We wanted to record an album but we didn’t want to go into a studio and have take after take, so we decided we’d play in Glór and record it live,” he recalls.
“We all have our own projects going on at the same time but for the past two years, we’ve done on average of one gig a month,” he says.
Guidewires play a late-night show in Glór on Saturday, May 29. They will be joined for a number of songs by vocalist Josie Harrington. “She is originally from Cork but she’s living locally. I’d describe her as a folk singer. There is a beautiful tone to her voice. I certainly rate her very highly. I would feel that she is certainly one to watch,” Tóla says.
He adds that he absolutely adores playing in Guidewires. “We are all very serious about playing music and are very committed to it but it also about entertainment and having fun and seeing others enjoy our music. This is a bit like our baby, something we want to cherish and not work the living daylights out of. Guidewires is very special to me. It happened so naturally, without being forced at all,” he concludes.
Tickets for Guidewires’ late-night show are available from the Glór Box Office at 065 6843103.