CULTÚRLANN Sweeney in Kilkee plays host to the renowned BBC 2 Folk Singer of the Year, Ríoghnach Connolly, next week. Fresh from a recent performance on the Tommy Tiernan Show
with guitarist Stuart McCallum, the Armagh woman is looking forward to their upcoming Kilkee concert on Monday, February 19.
Ríoghnach, who is signed to internationally renowned musician Peter Gabriel’s Real World record label, is on a short Irish tour with McCallum before they tour Britain and Scandinavia for a few months. The duo is known as The Breath, and Ríoghnach is also lead singer with the Afro Celt Sound System. She is also nominated for Best Original Folk Song this year at the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards for her collaborative single ‘Not Your fight’ with The Henry Girls. Speaking to The Clare Champion, she is modest about the BBC2 award.
“As far as I think I broke the whole competition – it hasn’t happened since. I am still dining out on it. I did an interview with BBC2 after it and they said I could have it,” she said.
“RTE then nominated me for Folk Artist of the Year as well but you know what, I am much more proud to be honoured back home. I am a sort of cultural diplomat over here.”
The BBC accolade came in 2019 and she feels she didn’t get the opportunity do the “victory lap” as she describes it because she couldn’t attend the ceremony having just had her baby daughter, and being post-partum and really sick at the time.
“It was a nightmare, and I was actually really dangerous,” she recalls.
Her first time playing in County Clare and indeed Kilkee means a lot.
“Clare is very important to me because I used to spend every summer at the Willie Clancy Festival with my grandparents,” she said.
“They would take me and my brothers and sisters away in the caravan. For me, I’ve spent so much of my formative life at Spanish Point and at Mullagh.”
So when the West Clare venue contacted her management to ask if there were any possibility she might perform there and then her public relations agent asked her, “I nearly took her hand off,” Ríoghnach jokes.
She has done three albums with Peter Gabriel’s label who she describes as a “mega-star” and “very supportive”. With label manager Amanda Jones, she initially got signed up because Amanda had been talking with Stuart McCallum from Cinematic Orchestra and Ríoghnach had worked with the pianist from the same group.
“Manchester is a really small town and as soon as I started gigging, I got to know everyone over there,” she said. “I’d a really late night kitchen and always had loads of music in the house.
“Gigging would finish quite late at night so everybody would need some food and we would go back to my house which was known as The Embassy.
“It was at that late night kitchen in my house I got to know Stuart McCallum and we started to play together and then we put together an album which we sent off to the label.
“Amanda signed us up straight away in a three-album deal.”
Manchester-based for the past 20 years, Ríoghnach is immersed in the local folk scene which she describes as “very female led” with the women primarily teaching and running the sessions, while the men do most of the touring.
“It is mostly run by really bad ass women and that is what they do differently over here,” she explains.
She is interested in learning more about English folk because it is the history of the ordinary people and especially loves Cornish folk. A Celtic region, Cornwall has a folk group dance performed with
swords and big heavy shoes. It is a parochial tradition which occurs in little pockets around the region however, it takes the Armagh woman a while to find such “little nuggets” still happening around Cornwall.
“I grew up with the piper’s club and we were encouraged to think of ourselves as a wider international club and we heard piping from places like Galicia and Asturias and even Iran,” she said.
“We had English folk shown to us as much as Scottish folk was. For me, English folk is very hornpipey and slows down whereas Scottish folk is a lot more fun. You would hear similar between Donegal fiddle playing. I was also raised in Irish dancing. That’s my bag. I love all folk music – it’s a reflection of people around the world.”
Ríoghnach is hugely passionate about a refugee folk group meeting in Manchester that she is actively involved. Meeting twice a week, the Monday meeting is just for women and the Thursday one involves food and folk. As for her own background, she sometimes feels guilty she didn’t remain on in Armagh and contribute to artistic life there. She is the eldest in her blended family of nine children, and has siblings and half-siblings ranging from age 41 to age 11. Revealing her father
was a republican war prisoner at Long Kesh up until she was aged 18, she says she is old enough to remember the days before the Good Friday Agreement. The name of her new album released on Real World Records is ‘Land of My Other’ and reflects her family story and indeed the wider human experience.
“For me in my head it is an ode to my father, my family, and my daughter. It is an emigrant’s lament and I work with the juxtaposition of those privileged to be on a list and those who are undocumented,” she said.
Ríoghnach will perform all her original material at the Kilkee concert.
“I am getting a bit nervous about it. You can treat certain audiences with disdain, but not in Clare. Och, I am really looking forward to it. I gig all over the world but it is lovely to get home,” she laughs. Ríoghnach Connolly and Stuart McCallum will perform at Cultúrlann Sweeney, Kilkee on Monday, February 19
Sharon Dolan D’Arcy covers West Clare news. After completing a masters in journalism at University of Galway, Sharon worked as a court reporter at the Sligo Weekender. She was also editor of the Athenry News and Views.