MUSIC: Mayo women reinventing Irish trad music

U2 played to virtually nobody when they first performed in public to indifferent passers-by at St Fintan’s High School in Dublin back in 1977 when they were known as Feedback.

Hollymount woman Lisa Canny and Castlebar bandmate Sal Heneghan, by contrast, played to 10,000 people in Trafalgar Square in London on St Patrick’s Day 2024 for their gig with BIIRD, an eleven-piece all-female trad supergroup.

“It was madness, I couldn’t believe it,” recalls Sal.

Major technical difficulties meant a 45-minute line check in front of the audience before the musicians could even hear each other. Then the place absolutely rocked.

It was a ‘full-circle’ moment for Sal, a highly accomplished musician who learned the harp from Lisa when she was around eleven and now plays fiddle in her ground-breaking trad group.

Lisa Canny is a seven-time All-Ireland champion and trad multi-instrumentalist. She has made a name for herself - and garnered mixed reviews - for her unique take on the harp, fusing the cláirseach with various unrelated musical styles.

Her approach as a solo artist is anything but ‘traditional’. Nor is her latest project.

Masterplan

BIIRD came to life when Lisa hand-picked ten of the best female ceoltóirí in the land (there were fourteen at one point), recruited the best and boldest stylists and fashion designers in Ireland and conceived a band that looks as bold, brash and striking as they sound.

“She is everything that BIIRD is,” Sal tells The Mayo News. “She is a strong woman who believes in herself and believes in a new idea of trad. The whole thing with BIIRD and with Lisa, it’s not like reinventing the wheel per se. It’s still playing trad music, but it’s just a new image and a new up-to-date representation of Irish women in the trad scene, and she can really see that, and that’s what BIIRD is based upon and that’s why people connect with it so much because it’s very authentic and new.

“It’s also reflective of how important it is to be proud of your culture and your identity, and there has been a real moment for Irish language and culture and music at the moment.”

Lisa Canny is ‘the mastermind and the backbone’ behind all their musical arrangements, which are more traditional and far less experimental than her avant-garde solo material, the away-with-the-fairies hand-waving high-jinx of Riverdance, or the Celtic-rock-but-mostly-rock crunch of Horslips.

Organising such a large group is no easy task either. Rehearsals are infrequent but full-on, and everyone gets recordings to practice with before they rosin a bow within spitting distance of each other.

Thankfully, the group, which contains singers, dancers and instrumentalists from the four corners of Ireland, all get along very well together.

“Lisa hand-picked everyone very well,” says Sal. “Throughout the last decade, as she was thinking of the idea of BIIRD, she came across people, and she instantly thought: ‘Oh my God, she is such a bird. I need to get her on board.’

“The extra ‘i’ in BIIRD nods to its eleven members. It’s also a way of reclaiming the word ‘bird’ from those who use it to slander women.

“There’s ten, strong, opinionated, fantastic musicians, but it actually just works, and everyone is very much a girl’s girl and being a BIIRD is kind of like a vibe you are giving off,” says Sal. “It really is spending time with those women, and each time I see them, it’s been so enjoyable and bonding over that kind of music, it’s incredible. It really is working well.”

Full flight

SAL is speaking to The Mayo News over a WhatsApp video call from her home in Castlebar in a red robe over an official BIIRD t-shirt during a rare break from gigging. When she togs out with BIIRD on their upcoming tour, she’ll be wearing extensions, cat-like eyeliner, a white dress and a skin-coloured jumper with a Maori-warrior-like black design woven through it.

Like her bandmates, Sal’s stage look is as fascinating as BIIRD’s earth-quaking sound. It’s all to do with Lisa’s vision of reimagining the image of women in trad.

“You don’t have to look a certain way, you don’t have to be a certain way, you can be whatever you want to be, and it’s kind of more expressing yourself, and you can be a bit more bold,” Sal explains.

Thousands will flock to see BIIRD in ‘The Historical Tour’ of Ireland and the UK. Sal and Lisa’s homecoming gig in Claremorris Town Hall Theatre on May 17 is already sold out. When they finish up in London on May 25, they hope to hit the studio to record their debut album.

When you look at the success of trad sensations like Riverdance, Horslips, Dé Dannan and The Chieftains, who knows how high BIIRD can soar.

“I think BIIRD has huge potential,” says Sal, sparing us the usual ‘one game at a time’ gruel you get from every GAA manager in the country.

“I think the kind of goal is that it will surpass just us, that BIIRD will go onto the next generation after us, that it’s a legacy that it won’t be just us 11 girls, and I think that’s real important, that anyone can be a BIIRD, that you can be this type of woman in the Irish music scene. I think overall that’s the end goal for us.

“We would love to go touring worldwide, would love to record an album, so there’s a lot of exciting things happening for BIIRD, even in the next few months. We can’t wait to see where it goes.”

Make America Great Again? Why not three cheers for the two Mayo women making trad cool again?