Andy Irvine: A Beginner's Guide

It’s hard to overstate Andy Irvine’s lasting impact on music – whether you look at Planxty, his work with Paul Brady or his solo records, Irvine was a leading figure in transforming Irish trad music in the 70s and continues to explore and surprise well into the fifth decade of his career.

Growing up in the UK, Irvine first found fame as a child actor, performing with Peter Sellers and Laurence Harvey, among others. On moving to Ireland in his early 20s, however, he left acting behind. In Dublin’s pubs, Irvine, who had learnt classical guitar while in the UK – and also plays bouzouki, mandola and harmonica – met a range of talented musicians. In 1965, he formed Sweeney’s Men, with Johnny Moynihan (credited for bringing the bouzouki into Irish music) and Joe Dolan. A few years later, he left Ireland to travel Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia, where he picked up a love of Balkan rhythms. On his return to Dublin, the now-famous band Planxty came together. “Bill Leader, who was very much in the forefront of recording folk and traditional music at the time,” Irvine explains, “asked Christy [Moore] to make a second [solo] album. And Christy said, ‘Yes, I will, but I must make it in Ireland, and I must make it with the musicians that I choose.’ So he chose his old friend Dónal Lunny… Liam O’Flynn, who came from the same county, and me, and we went down to his brother-in-law’s house which was in a village called Prosperous and there in the basement we recorded the album of that name, Prosperous… It did so well that Christy came up to me one day in Dublin and said, ‘Andy, what would you think about forming a group?’… I thought, ‘well, I can’t be left out of this!’”.

Officially formed in 1972, Planxty were soon invited to open for Donovan on tour. Irvine recalls their first show at the Hangar in Galway: “We went on and after about ten or 15 minutes, the audience was going berserk. I thought it was a fight. And I looked at the others, and they all had smiles like that,” Irvine points to his broad grin. “I gradually realised that we were going down like you have never seen anybody go down before. And when we came to the end, the audience went berserk, and they wouldn’t let us off [stage]… The whole rest of the tour, it was about seven or eight gigs, same thing happened. There used to be – I haven’t heard it for a long time – a tape of the second or third gig in Cork and at the end of every song, the audience goes mad and all you can hear from us on the stage is giggling hysterically.” Irvine chuckles, “We couldn’t believe it.” The group recorded several highly acclaimed albums that have stood the test of time. Their first, self-titled record proved especially influential (with its still oft-referenced versions of ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy’ and ‘The Jolly Beggar’). Sewn through Planxty are songs followed by tunes, a now ubiquitous format in Irish music that the group are often credited with first devising.

Each member brought unique sounds and talents; Irvine was no exception. His time spent travelling was particularly influential, he explains. “In Eastern Europe… I had eventually learned these rhythms, which were totally alien to Western minds, you know? And the first person, of course, who I played them with was Dónal Lunny, who was avid for any music… We played on the third Planxty album a song called ‘Baneasa’s Green Glade’ that I’d written in Romania. And we played this tune, which I had Balkanised. It was a Balkan tune and it went” – he taps a complicated rhythm on the table and tootles the melody – “Later on… we did a version of a piece of music called ‘Smeceno Horo’, which is in 15/16. And that became so popular that we even considered finishing the set with it… But then somebody said, ‘well hang on a second, we’re an Irish band, not a Bulgarian band.’” I marvel at an audience able to keep track of a tune in 15/16. “Oh, everybody was lost, you know”, Andy laughs, “But they loved it because it was kind of exciting and mysterious.”

Though they disbanded around 1975, Planxty reunited several times over the years, most notably in 2004/2005, to huge acclaim. “One of the reasons we got back together in 2004 was because Leagues O’Toole had made this film about Planxty”, explains Irvine, “We suddenly realised that a lot of young people who weren’t even born when we were playing in the 1970s really liked the music, so we got back together and it was great. I thought we were better than ever.”

In 1976, after the first Planxty break-up, Irvine and Paul Brady recorded their seminal Andy Irvine / Paul Brady album. “I think I can speak for both Paul and myself when I say that we are very proud of this album”, Irvine writes on his website. “It takes a long time to be at a distance from something you recorded and listen to it dispassionately. When I hear that album, I can say it’s good without fear of being thought of as conceited.” The album includes Brady’s famous, perhaps still unmatched, rendition of ‘Arthur McBride’ and Irvine’s heartfelt ‘Streets of Derry’ with its delicate guitar and pipes. The tune-playing is remarkable, too, particularly the intricate and uplifting ‘Sailing into Walpole’s Marsh’.

Beyond the work with Planxty and Brady, Irvine has consistently released solo albums, collaborated and toured. In 2002, he created his “dream band”, Mozaik: “I thought it would be great to get a band that knitted together [the] three kinds of music I really love: Irish music, Balkan music and old-time American music”, he says. “Even as I thought that, I knew the people I would love to have in the band to play that. And they all said yes.” The group consisted of Irvine, Dónal Lunny, US fiddle-player Bruce Molsky, Bulgarian multi-instrumentalist Nikola Parov and Dutch multi-instrumentalist Rens van der Zalm. “We went on tour in Australia in 2001 and made a live album [Live from the Powerhouse],” Irvine continues, “We made the second album in Budapest in 2005, Changing Trains.” Irvine’s candid, warm voice opens Live from the Powerhouse with ‘My Heart’s Tonight in Ireland’, a song he wrote celebrating Sweeney’s Men’s tours in County Clare. The whirling, sprightly tunes and songs that follow are formidably played and arranged. Throughout the album, the complicated, mesmerising Balkan rhythms that Irvine loves dance around and fold themselves into Irish and US folk (‘Romainian Horă / Black Jack Grove’ and ‘The Last Dance’ are strong examples). “The trouble with bands like that”, Irvine says of Mozaik, “is that the musicians are so good that they’re doing lots of other things… getting [them] together is the utmost problem.”

More recently, Irvine recorded two singles with Italian “chamber crossover ensemble” Viaggiatori Armonici and this year he is touring the UK and Ireland with Swedish band Quilty. He first played with the group in 2023 and they’ve tended to play Irish music, but Irvine says, “I told Quilty, it’s all very well to be playing Irish music in Sweden, but if we want to go and play outside Sweden, we’ve got to have some Swedish music.” Knowing Irvine, it’ll be an exploration worth listening to.