EMPTY: ROOMS/GAY & TERRY WOODS

Writing this on a windy, wet and bleak day in Shropshire, exhausted from a ramble around the Wrekin. Exactly the mood to bring on an attack of the folk-rock itch, todays scratch coming from the exquisite store cupboard of Gay and Terry Woods. And it set me a'thinking, not least of the back of the rereleased Richard and Linda Thompson catalogue, what if? OK, don't mistake me, I love RT and all of his oeuvre, but, coming out at much the same time and on the same record label, to say nothing of, broadly, the same musicians, how are we now not celebrating this other couple also? After all, what did they have in common? Talented instrumentalist and songwriter? Yup. Consummate singer of said songs? Yup. A sense of overarching melancholy? Yup, yup, yup. (To be fair, like the Thompsons, both could sing, if Terry, like Richard, was a more acquired taste. Plus their material was decidedly co-written between them.)

Empty Rooms is a classic of the early to mid seventies folk rock style. One of the finest tracks on their second album in their joint name, The Time Is Right, from 1976, I surprised to see it actually came out on the Polydor label and was not produced by John Wood, so indelibly is it stamped with the aura and ambience of the pink Island label. The slow build, the soaring vocals, initially Gay alone, autoharp and harmonium providing a desolate backing over picked guitar. Gay then harmonises with herself, with distinct echoes of, yes, Linda Thompson, but also of the lodestone of this genre, Sandy Denny. Indeed, the melody and mood is very redolent of Denny's own solo work. Finally a coda kicks in, with the Fairport rhythm section, Island records own house band for everyone at that time, the Dave's Pegg and Mattacks, accompanying Terry Wood's guitar, adding plangent chords as it fades to the end. Exquisite. As is the song below, Back to You.

But the time, sadly, wasn't right, they failing to make any great breakthrough, breaking up both as an act and a partnership after a third album. But that wasn't the end of either of them. Mind you, they had paid their dues, neither here today and gone tomorrow flitterbegibbets. Teenage sweethearts, they had grown up, in Dublin, as near neighbours, both drawn by their mutual love of music, performing together as early as 1963, mainly a mix of country, blues and a little Irish. It is hard to believe how unpopular the traditional Irish tradition was at that time. Perhaps the first group to give that tradition a good kicking was Sweeney's Men, as Johnny Moynihan, Andy Irvine and, initially, Joe Dolan transplanted Irish idioms onto a transatlantic hillbilly base. When Dolan left, Terry Woods interrupted the initial iteration of the Woods band, he and Gay, to become an integral part of the line-up. 

Meanwhile, over in England, a certain Ashley Hutchings was tinkering with the formation of a group to take the folkier leanings of his then band, Fairport Convention, further and deeper into that tradition. So having invented folk-rock with Liege and Lief, he left, an original plan being that he and Sweeney's Men would combine, bringing in Gay Woods as a female voice. Neither Irvine nor Moynihan were up for it, so Hutchings pitched the idea to some others in the same field. So, Hutchings and the Woods, in 1970, combined with the duo of Tim Hart and Maddy Pryor, to form Steeleye Span, this grouping responsible for the first record by this band, Hark the Village Wait. Less austere than later line ups, this is almost a transition, bridging the styles of Fairport and the Woods, retaining drums as an integral part of the sound if not officially of the band. But Terry Woods and Tim Hart had distinctly different opinions as to, well, just about everything, and, for the good of the band, Hutchings enlisted Martin Carthy and dumped the Woods.

There then came a brief joint membership with Ireland's answer to the Incredible String Band, Dr Strangely Strange, who were, perhaps unsurprisingly, much as the name might suggest. Even when featuring a young Gary Moore on electric guitar, they couldn't quite ever work out quite who their audience should be, and they ground to a halt, that accelerated by the Woods reviving their duo. Which is where we came in. 

On the dissolution of the duo and their marriage, Gay Woods, somewhat surprisingly and counter-intuitively, became, for a while, the brighter flame, as she applied a more modern varnish to songwriting. For a while the keyboard and synth heavy Auto da Fe were seen as Ireland's next big thing, the presence of Phil Lynott as producer and on bass helping no little. It couldn't last, however, and 1994 had her rejoining Steeleye Span, now a completely different band, with only Maddy Pryor remaining from that first line-up. For a while they were joint front women, with Woods taking over entirely for a while, as Pryor took a sabbatical. Woods left again shortly after, but not before providing the stand out track for 2000's Bedlam Born.

Terry has had a more varied career, dipping in and out of various groupings with artists as varied as (again) Phil Lynott and Ron Kavana. But his moment in the sun came a little later,  when folk-punk mavericks the Pogues needed a little more gravitas to ground their unwieldy, if effective, amalgam of the musicianship of the Dubliners with the attitudes of punk rock. Woods was the perfect bridge between the two opposing styles, his membership giving a boost of credibility to those who couldn't see past the image, and thus failed to see the astonishing songwriting of Shane MacGowan. And, as MacGowan slipped into a drunken self-parody, it was Woods who could provide the glue and keep the band together. Whilst he left in 1993, he became again present in band reunions from a decade later until final performances in 2014, spending the interim and since back with old buddies from his long and varied past. A final iteration of the Woods band, the name revived even if he the only Wood present, provide an apt reminder of his position as a weaver of styles and traditions.

Fill your rooms with this!

IN MEMORIAM: LIAM ÓG O’FLYNN

A much more influential individual than the blank expression that meets the hearing of his name in most circles, O'Flynn was the first uillean pipe player to gain notice to a rock and roll audience, as a core member of the first Irish traditional act to really break through to the same. No, I don't refer to either the Chieftains or to Sweeney's Men, pacesetters though they were. I refer to the mighty and majestic Planxty. The Chieftains were important, for sure, breaking down barriers and bringing the music into respectability outside of otherwise hooleys and bar sessions, latterly also for their work with major names in the fields of folk, country and rock. And Sweeney's Men, who included O'Flynns's later Planxty bandmate, Andy Irvine, took the mainstream safety of the Clancy Brothers into a wilder and more bohemian sensitivity. Go compare the difference between the Chieftains handling of this tune, 'Give Me Your Hand' ('Tabhair Dom Do Lamh') by the blind 17th century Irish harpist Turlough O'Carolan, with the altogether more exuberant Planxty version below, the tune kicking in at 2.27, following the song ahead of it:

I bloody loved them. They were hitting their prime in the early 70s, just as I was hitting mid-teens and expanding my then musical palette from the pop charts to anything and everything I could get my ears on, usually directed by the inkies, the music influential press that governed all the hip from the non hip. Planxty were seriously hip. With a line-up of O'Flynn, Irvine, Donal Lunny and Christy Moore, they played traditional irish jigs and reels, airs and ballads, seamlessly integrating their own material into the same. With two fine singers and an instrumental prowess encompassing guitar, bouzouki, mandolin, bodhran, hurdy-gurdy, whistles and, most importantly, uillean pipes, that irish bellows driven bagpipe, capable of a plaintive wail, swirling and bending notes, like nothing on earth, one part banshee, one part lullaby. Yes, I had heard a little of this instrument before; the aforementioned Chieftains had introduced me to it, and Horslips, the Dublin folk-rockers had deployed it a little. But nothing like O'Flynn, who could make it sing, scream, howl and lilt, sometimes simultaneously. This is his description of the instrument. And I haven't even mentioned his whistle playing, both normal whistle and low, a few blasts thereof instantly evocative of joy or sorrow, dependent on mood.

It would be no hyperbole to say this band revolutionised how the world had previously seen irish music. From a twiddley diddley dee diversion, this was suddenly to be taken with the utmost seriousness, alongside and in the same breath as the Stones and Bowie. But with more fun. O'Flynn was possibly the quiet man of the group, more soberly attired and less hirsute than his compadres, but it was his solos that had the crowds in awe. A number of incarnations of this band took place over the years and the decades, as individual members peeled off and others joined in, Paul Brady and Matt Malloy to name two, the band formally breaking and re-forming twice, the last such being 20 odd years after their debut, in 2003-5. But whenever it was called Planxty, so always there was O'Flynn.

After the final demise, and in the earlier breaks, O'Flynn was never short of work, with a who's who of session work that ranged from the folk circles he began within to Kate Bush, Mark Knopfler, Emmylou Harris and more. With Planxty no more there was a short period as and in LAPD, he, Irvine, Lunny and Paddy Glackin, the title being to represent Liam, Andy, Paddy and Donal. Hell, on past form they could have called it Planxty and got away with it, but they didn't. However, health was beginning to cause concern, and O'Flynn left in 2013. A private man outside music, he died in March after what was called a long illness. Here's a video of the song featured a little above, 'As I Roved Out', in a live and later setting, Planxty at Vicar Street, Dublin, in 2004, the pipes part transposed to whistle.

His legacy lives on through the wave of younger players who have followed him and been inspired by him, with both pipes and whistle commonplace in the repertoire way beyond any silo of trad. arr.

Rest in peace.

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