This time a year ago, Conor O’Brien of Villagers stood in the fishbowl observation deck of the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin singing Wham’s Last Christmas.
Deep into the first Covid winter, Villagers were among the artists who had come out to perform at Other Voices: Home – a series of concerts staged by the esteemed Irish festival as it tried to negotiate a strange, scary time.
Both a celebration and a lament, O’Brien’s slow dance with the ghost of George Michael tore off the gaudy wrapping from Last Christmas, revealing the pale bones poking through beneath.
“I remember we all had to get tests,” says O’Brien. “After the show, at the bar, it was kind of a weird, surreal Guinness vibe. After all this lockdown it was like a little slice of normality above the clouds of Dublin.”
Twelve months later, Villagers will once again grace Other Voices. This time, it will be in front of a live audience at the festival’s spiritual heartland of St James’s Church – a 90 person-capacity, 200-year-old chapel just off Dingle’s main street and adjacent to a sloping Victorian graveyard.
They will be joined by other headliners including Sigrid, Fontaines DC and Sam Fender. All are bound for west Kerry to mark the 20th year of Other Voices as both a programme of concerts and an RTÉ television series.
And to add to the legacy of a project that has, since December 2002, spotlit talent such as Amy Winehouse, The National, Florence and the Machine, St Vincent, Arlo Parks and others (Adele was booked to play in 2009 but called short her tour to spend time with her boyfriend).
“I remember walking up and down the streets of Dingle trying to get people to come in,” says promoter, filmmaker and raconteur Philip King, the driving force behind Other Voices across its two decades.
King from the outset regarded Other Voices as more than a collection of concerts ... For him it represents a documenting of Ireland through the early 21st century
“And saying ‘come on, come on, come on – we need to fill these first five vows for the cameras’. It was a bit like that to begin with. It grew and it developed into something. More people began to come. The word of mouth thing went around.”
King, a musician and broadcaster from Glasheen on the southside of Cork city, had played through the 1970s and 1980s in progressive trad power-trio Scullion. While with Scullion he wrote I Am Stretched On Your Grave, a luminescent dirge that drew on Frank O’Connor’s translation of an 17th century Irish poem which was in 1990 covered by Sinéad O’Connor. Later, a Kate Rusby version featured in a key scene in Peaky Blinders.
In 1987 he moved into television production, winning an Emmy for his documentary about Irish music and the global diaspora, Bringing It All Back Home. Having relocated to Dingle, by the late nineties, King noted the emergence of a new generation of Irish artists: Glen Hansard, Damien Rice, Lisa Hannigan and Snow Patrol. They deserved a platform.
“There was no public space in Dingle,” he says. “There was the Catholic Church. There wasn’t a town hall. There was a courthouse. And this church: a functioning Church of Ireland church in the middle of the town.”
St James’ was ministered by Rev Máirt Hanley, who had thrown open the doors to local musician. “Eoin Duignan, my very good friend the piper, was running concerts there,” says King. “And we said, ‘wouldn’t that be a place you could do something in?’ Little by little, it became established as a venue. It was odd to see the London Times last week call the Amy Winehouse gig [in 2006] the fifth greatest gig of all time. There was 80 people at it and she played for 30 minutes.”
In its early years Other Voices got by on a shoe-string. However, Irish artists were drawn both to the isolation of Dingle and also to church which felt like exactly the kind of hallowed space where their songs could exhale.
“I remember Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan came down here on the bus,” says King. “They got the train to Tralee and the bus to Dingle. I picked them up. They sat down on the floor and the played the whole of O [Rice’s blockbuster 2002 debut]. I brought them back to town and they got the bus home. One thing led to another. That gang of people that came that first year: it was a gathering really. Of what would be a lot of interesting voices in Ireland.”
Alongside Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan, Other Voices season one featured Josh Ritter, Mundy, Nina Hynes, Emmett Tinley, Damien Dempsey. That first series was presented by Glen Hansard, who saw Other Voices as a way of celebrating an up-and-coming generation of Irish artists. “Glen had a list of people [he wanted to appear],” says King. “There was a renaissance underway: a singer-songwriter thing. There were new voices being heard.”
King from the outset regarded Other Voices as more than a collection of concerts or a television series (each winter’s slate of shows is typically broadcast on RTÉ early in the new year). For him it represents a documenting of Ireland through the early 21st century.
“I always go back to that old phrase of Frank Harte [traditional singer and musical anthropologist]: ‘if you want to know the facts consult a history book, if you want to know what it felt like, consult a singer’. I would say that in the 20 years that elapsed in the making of this thing, we have taken a photograph of an eloquent emotional soundtrack of a turbulent two decades in Ireland.
He adds: “If you looked at the turmoil of the first 10 years, then the Celtic Tiger, then the collapse, then the Decade of Centenaries, then the Covid debacle. A lot of people needed to understand how to cope with that. Music acts as a reflector but it also deflects some of the anxieties.”
Dingle is 350km from Dublin airport and 152km from Cork and so the journey is not always straightforward. Amy Winehouse arrived on a flight from Cork and was driven through two hours of driving rain – and with her drummer in absentia. Others have come to Kerry at the end of long tours.
This year, Sigrid will fly from Norway on the morning of her performance and straight from a television appearance in her home country. So it’s quite a trek. And yet one musicians are willing to make.
“Firstly, the place is different,” says Aoife Woodlock, the music producer with Other Voices who has booked artists and overseen the running of the festival since 2004. “The National had finished a world tour. And ended in Dingle in a 90-capacity Church of Ireland church at the edge of Ireland. Everything about it is different and unusual and unique.”
For Conor O’Brien the charm Other Voices has always been bound up in the remoteness – that sense of being at the edge of the world. He vividly recalls his first trip to Dingle 2006 with his band The Immediate.
“We were in this van which didn’t have any windows in the back. I have a very good memory of going around the Conor Pass and the roads twisting and us falling against the side of the van. And our makeshift sofa falling on top of us. I remember being blown away that we were there. Back then, The Immediate … everything had to be ‘right’. We were intense before the shows. And I remember that being one of our first television experiences and it being stressful and then enjoying it once we got out there.”
There is something. about that which permeates the atmosphere and gives it something that it might not have if it was somewhere else
Amy Winehouse will, of course and forever, hold a special places in the history of Other Voices. Her six song set, which started with Tears Dry on their Own and finished with Me & Mr Jones, captured her at a liminal point in her career, as she was transitioning from cult artist to unravelling celebrity.
Back To Black, her blockbuster second record, had just come out. There was a lot of attention –but it had yet to turn overwhelming. A few months later, Winehouse was an international star soon to be swept up in a wave of toxic fame.
Yet no matter how dark things turned, she always cherished Dingle. And talked about going back to Other Voices, potentially to play with a trad band (she was entranced by the idea of singing along to a bodhrán).
“She was a singer, a songwriter and a performer at the very pinnacle of what it was to perform,” says King. “In a church of 90 people many of whom had never heard of her name, who didn’t know who she was. And who went,’ oh my God - what is that?’
“That performance would have endured – but clearly given that she tragically died some years later it became something that people came to look at,” he continues. “It was a celebration of a singer and music. There was none of that tawdry tabloid stuff about it. Stripped back isn’t in it. There’s nothing there. There’s a guitar player, a bass player and a voice. I don’t know anybody can do it at that level. Afterwards she went for a stroll down to the pier. And she was just so happy. She was content.”
Standing at the pier, the water lapping quietly at her feet, Winehouse was mesmerised by the sea, the mist, and the Dingle Peninsula stretching out in to the flat grey horizon of the Atlantic.
“There’s definitely something deep about it. It’s on the edge of Europe,” says Conor O’Brien of Other Voices. “There is something. about that which permeates the atmosphere and gives it something that it might not have if it was somewhere else.”
Other Voices runs from November 25th to 28th at St James Church at other venues in Dingle. All the performances at James’s Church and the IMRO Other room will be streamed to venues throughout Dingle and will also be available to view free of charge on YouTube and Facebook. A six-part television series will air on RTÉ in the new year.
This Must Be The Place: Nave Melody – Other Voices 20 Highlights
Orla Gartland
The Dublin songwriter's debut album, Women on the Internet, went top ten in the UK and top five in Ireland on its release in September
Fontaines DC
The Dublin punk-poets come to Kerry after a triumph UK tour promoting their second album, A Hero's Death.
Sigrid
Just in time for her new Christmas single, Home To You (This Christmas), the Norwegian songwriter come back to the festival she graced early in her career.
Tolü Makay
The Nigerian born, Offaly-raised singer brings to a close a year of triumphant gigs.
Sam Fender
The spirit of Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty is conjured with by this Tyneside singer, whose second LP Seventeen Going Under reached four in the charts and was number one in the UK.
