AN Uaithne (1990/1991)

An Uaithne began life in 1987, growing out of small gatherings of friends who came together mainly to sing and play Early music. At that stage there was little deliberate focus on one thing beyond curiosity and enthusiasm. A small number of Irish-language and traditional arrangements done by myself or Clannad sat beside a few of my original compositions, included almost instinctively rather than by design.

By the end of 1988 the group had consolidated into something unusual. At a time when it was not fashionable to cross-pollinate forms such as medieval and Irish traditional music among performers, there was nonetheless a clear hunger for it among audiences. We gave some extremely strange and wonderful performances in those early years. One concert moved from Britten’s Hymn to Saint Cecilia and Handel’s Ode to Saint Cecilia to a raucous ending of traditional arrangements for viols, harp, choir, and guitar. On another occasion we processed around the Project Arts Centre through clouds of dry ice with backing tracks and improvised dancing singing medieval chants and keening. Even then the group sat far outside what might be considered normal repertoire, singing everything from U2 to Hildegard von Bingen with no concern for propriety or correctness. What was most striking was that audiences simply accepted it.

Concerts were well attended, if not mainstream, and we were fortunate to receive several high-profile appearances on Irish national radio and television, including The Late Late Show and The Gay Byrne Show, two of the most influential programmes of the time. We were being noticed.

Alongside performing live I was constantly experimenting in studios, beginning in Tunnel Recording Studio with Colm Sexton and gradually developing ideas that would later become full recordings. Some of the earliest substantial sessions took place in Windmill Lane, where the first versions of Salve Rex Gloria and The Rising of the Sun were recorded with Brian Masterson, who I met at a session in 1990 when An Uaithne sang on the epic “Song of the Singing Horseman” by Jimmy MacCarthy. By 1990 I had released a hand-drawn cassette with a selection of An Uaithne as we were at the time, a mixture of bits of studio work and the 11 tracks above. A crazy calling card, I have to say, as it included Christmas Carols, folk songs and the “One Note Samba” as a bonus track.

I felt strongly that we needed to release something substantial by the time 1991 arrived, that captured what the group sounded like live, maybe veer away from the varied repertoire and focus on Irish music and my own stuff, rather the earliest fragments that we have here in Ireland dating to the Middle Ages. So I put the 1990 home release together with a series of 1991 recordings and that became An Uaithne (1991)

The 1990 recording made by Paul Arbuckle in Leeson Park Church beside a busy road, even preserves the audible rumble of passing trucks. The singers at that stage formed an unusual mixture. Many were work colleagues from the RTÉ Chamber Choir, trained classical soloists such as Miriam Blennerhassett or opera students, standing beside singers from the college choirs I had conducted in the 1980s, some with little formal training and others who were already established singers such as Monica Donlon. It was not unusual to have an untrained singer beside a highly trained one, and that tension created a distinctive sound. None of us were searching for choral perfection. We had no money no expectations, only enthusiasm, excitement, and the sense that we were doing something for the first time and that was enough in itself.

These sessions are less-than-perfect, and in that they pave the way for what was to come. There is a fragile and delicate solo from Anne Buckley on The Mermaid, a definitive recording of Fiontán Ó Cearbhaill’s Suantraí with Monica Donlon’s extraordinary voice holding it together, one you hear to magnificent effect later in ANÚNA’s releases, and an early Ecce Quomodo/Tenebrae I shaped by the voices of my two closest collaborators at the time Miriam and Caitríona Ó Leary both of whom subsequently have gone on to eclectic and substantial solo careers as performing artists.

Medieval fragments such as Crist and St Marie sit beside more experimental textures, including Máire Bhruinneall as arranged by Clannad. In December 1990 we performed with Moya Brennan so you can imagine the thrill it was to begin to meet your heroes for such a young group. The only real self-indulgence was Debussy’s Dieu! qu’il la fait bon regarder!. I am not much of a fan of the Trois Chanson, preferring the Ravel, but it was a piece of Debussy I could metaphorically hold in my hand, an homage to my greatest musical influence to that time.

What is clear in retrospect is that this material contains the genesis of what we would become. Less than a year later in 1991 we recorded movements from the O’Malley Mass, a work that still lives in our repertoire today, particularly the glacial Sanctus. Hidden among those pieces is Dirgidh Bhar Sleaga Sealga, written for the Seán Ó Riada Memorial Trophy at the Cork Choral Festival in 1990, where it won the competition, described by the great John Tavener who awarded the prize as “primordial”. The song subsequently was dismantled and repurposed as “The Raid” (1993) and “Raise up Your Hunting Spears/Salve Rex Gloria” (1992). It still provides inspiration for material such as last year’s “Tormán" (2025) written for Maynooth University Chamber Choir, conductor Dr. Michael Dawson.

Around this time Hothouse Flowers were enormously successful in Ireland, and I had been introduced to Liam Ó Maonlaí who asked me over to his home where I played him some of the music on the record. He listened generously and immediately singled out Dirgidh Bhar Sleaga Sealga, drawn particularly to the sound of the untrained singers who jumped out of the texture, saying he could connect with that sound. At the time I had been working with Elvis Costello. His very candid and hugely diverse experience allowed him to comment in a massively constructive way and he was never-less than positive. We talked very much about the ideas surrounding classical music and its relationship to popular and populist music, elitism and art. He was a huge influence, as was the English composer Colin Mawby who included some of my early pieces for The RTÉ Chamber Choir including Codail Begán which was to turn into “Sleepsong” in 1992.

Here I was with An Uaithne, surrounded by classical singers and concepts of what vocal purity was in that respect, and yet the strength of the sound I was trying to make actually lay in the place where my brothers John and Tom and I came from in our musical tastes, namely non-classical music - The Stranglers, Renaissance, 1970s Punk into New Wave, The Beatles, Abba, Disco, Gary Numan, John Foxx - there are so many colours in the music of ANÚNA that come from these influences.

I was also hugely influenced at this time by Traditional Irish Music in its rawest forms rather than in the tidal wave of bands that were emerging at the time. I had a particular connection to the singing of Máiréad Ní Mhaonaigh of Altan whose natural insight and humble approach to her extreme gifts was a beacon in those early days of An Uaithne.

The strength and directness of the sound reached beyond classical expectations and, in some ways, usurped them. In Ireland at that time choral music was as unfashionable anything could be. “what do you do?”, “I am a choral singer” wasn’t the best chat up line unless it was another choral singer you were trying to impress. But that was all to change.

All of this leads directly to the 1993 album Anúna, where those different strands of training, those diverse influences and the sound I carried around with me since I was a child come together in a hybrid that is chaotic, joyful, and unmistakably ANÚNA.