The tiny, isolated village of Doolin, population 250, is about as unlikely a tourist hotspot as one could imagine. You could easily be forgiven for driving past on your way through the silent green expanse of coastal County Clare, without suspecting it to be anything more than an unremarkable smattering of farmhouses interspersed with the odd tumbledown church and the occasional horse.
But to those in the know (which happily included us), this miniscule seaside town transforms at night into Ireland’s hoppin’ and boppin’ capital of traditional music.
I’ve been fascinated with Celtic music since I was a kid. The first CD I ever bought, at age 10, was Forgiven, Not Forgotten, by the Irish pop group the Corrs. I first fell in love with the album because of Andrea Corr’s crystalline voice, but as the years went by, the songs I found myself going back to again and again were not the radio-friendly pop ballads, but the vignettes of traditional Irish instrumental music that ran in between the vocal tracks. The Corrs eventually left their distinctly Celtic sound behind and started to release very generic-sounding stuff*, but not before they planted in me a deep-seated love for the lilt and rhythm of Irish music – the dizzying fury of the fiddle, the delicate tabla-like reverberations of the bodhran, and the plaintive high notes of the tin whistle.
This, combined with Sean’s genetically-inherited love for Irish music, made coming to Doolin a no-brainer for us. We dropped our bags off at our too-cute-to-be-true hostel (a converted 17th-century farmhouse) and headed out into the night in search of Celtic melodies.
Considering that there are generally more tourists than locals in town at any given time, it wouldn’t be too hard to fear the worst about the Doolin pub scene – kitschy costumes, green beer, and drunk tourists attempting to channel Michael Flatley. Happily, our night involved none of those things – the live music scene in Doolin is pleasantly low-key. I guess it’s a little off the beaten track to be invaded by giant in-and-out tour buses.
We hopped between pubs, each with a different set of musicians and combination of instruments. To call what we saw “shows” would probably be an overstatement. The musicians mainly sat at the same level as the patrons as opposed to elevated on a stage, and seemed like they were playing whatever they felt like, whenever they felt like it - the breaks between songs would often be five or ten minutes long. In one of the pubs, Fitzgerald’s, which seemed like it had actually a higher percentage of locals, there was only a guitarist playing and singing when we walked in. About halfway through our first beer, two of the guys sitting at the table next to us polished off the last of their Smithwicks, told their friends they’d be back in a jiffy, and went to join the guitarist with bagpipes and a fiddle. On the whole, you got the feeling that the musicians would be jamming whether the tourists were there or not, which was nice.
The style of performance reminded me of jazz, in that there is a canon of well-known tunes that every musician learns to play very early on. So you’ll often be hearing a song that you’ve heard many times before, but if the musicians you’re listening to are any good, you’ll never have heard it played like this before. The band will start and finish the songs together, but in between each musician will get a chance to put their own stamp on the familiar tune with a virtuosic solo.
I guess the proof of how much I enjoyed our night in Doolin was that I was yawning ominously when we set out for dinner at 8pm, and yet managed to remain wide awake tapping my feet and lost in the music till the wee hours of the morning. I don’t know what else can I write in mere words about a pleasure that simply has to be savoured first-hand. So I’ll say no more, except “get thee to Doolin”!
*This has a happy ending. About a decade later the Corrs released a full-length album of traditional Irish songs, called Home. It’s awesome.
