Kavana laments changes in music industry

CELEBRATED Cork musicians Ron Kavana and Jimmy Crowley will perform in Minogue’s in Tulla on Saturday night at 9.15pm.
Both of them have been winners of the Annie McNulty award for Best Irish Singer/Musician. The two musicians have also had chart success, Crowley with singles such as If I didn’t have a dime and Kavana with his 2007 box set Irish Ways, which spent months in HMV’s top 10 albums chart and his Irish Songs of Rebellion, Resistance and Reconciliation, which was the best selling folk album of 1997 and was awarded a gold record for sales of over 100,000 copies.
Ron now lives near Labasheeda. His last album was The Last of the Troubadours, although he has another one recorded.
“I’ve another one that hasn’t been released yet. It’s a charity album that I’ve given to Pavee Point that celebrates the music and lifestyle of Ireland’s Travellers. That’s with Pavee Point at the moment and when they decide to release, it is down to them.
“That’s a nice album. There are a lot of Clare musicians involved, different people singing on different tracks and so on. It’s credited as Ron Kavana and friends and there’s people like Mick Kyne from Ennis and Blackie O’Connell,” he says.
His work has been recorded by many top artists over the years, while he has released numerous albums. The changes in the music industry in recent years have been very dramatic, he says and he believes it’s getting harder for people to get good folk music.
“Nothing is as busy as it used to be in the music business. There’s a definite decline, with the internet sales being the cause of record shops all over the country shutting up. Ennis is very fortunate in having a couple of them. Cork is the second biggest city in the country and it doesn’t really have anywhere that you can go to buy folk music. There’s a big HMV there but the folk and trad section usually has about six titles in there. It’s not reflective of all the tastes of people.
“It’s just difficult now because everyone’s downloading. It’s a very difficult situation when you’re primarily a recording act, as I’ve always been. These days when you’ve finished an album, you just think where do I go to get this released and distributed?”
With regard to iTunes, he says, “It’s a strange set-up. It works well enough for most people, for the millions who deal with it, but for me the sound quality isn’t anything like CD quality and I thought CD was a step down from vinyl. It’s all changed very rapidly over 20 years or so. I’d never have envisaged the way it’s gone. I talk to people in the know in the business and they tell you things like HMV are the only chain left in Europe and they have one buyer who buys everything.”
He says himself and Jimmy Crowley share a love of older songs.
“I presume what we’ll do is a set each and one together. We’ve lots of material in common. We have all the old Cork songs that we know and Jimmy has recorded songs of mine. The last time I saw him do a gig on his own, he did only three songs of mine. He knows a lot of my material and I know some of his.
“We have a great liking for some of the lesser-known Irish songwriters. I mean lesser known to the general public as being Irish, not lesser known in terms of the songs they’ve written. I’m thinking particularly about Jimmy Kennedy. He wrote Red Sails in the Sunset, South of the Border Down Mexico Way, they were hit songs of his day, which would have been in the ’50s. He wrote songs that stand up to this day and will probably always stand the test of time.”
The two of them have been friends for many years. “When I was living in London Jimmy would stay with me whenever he was over gigging. We’ve done some recording together and we do a little fun tour every June. We’re good buddies,” he concludes.