Iarla Ó Lionáird on soundtracking the music for ‘I Could Read the Sky’

Once published, the public launches of the book —from Seattle and Chicago to Dublin and London— snowballed into big, emotional gigs with coalitions of artists performing in solidarity with an hitherto unwritten Irish experience —that of the countless, nameless thousands of Irish navvies who worked themselves to death, building the roads and railways and infrastructure of great metropolises all over the western world.

At the London launch, apart from O’Grady and Pyke, there was actor Stephen Rea; and amongst the musicians were Irish sean nós (literally “old-style”) singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, Sinéad O’Connor, and Martin Hayes with his guitar accompanist-partner Dennis Cahill. They all did their bit, performing under Pyke’s large projected photographs —as if the subject was somehow bigger than all of them.

Ó Lionáird’s record company, Real World, didn’t take much convincing to row in behind the soundtrack. Now they are releasing an album of music written for and inspired by the film: a thoughtful, low-temperature soundscape in its own right, with key voices emerging from the mix on different tracks. “I wanted to see if we could make a coherent, interesting album as a by-product of the film, using different structural components, short narrative snatches of what would have been longer abstract pieces…”

As producer Iarla drew together a web of people, at the hub of which is desk-man Ron Aslan, the sharp London-based programmer— in Iarla’s words, “a real left-field, underground, hardcore, drum-and-bass techno man, who’s worked with Bowie and Trevor Horn. Ron was a real pleasure to work with; it was easy to spend 15 hours at a time working really hard without any sense of dismay or upset —and that’s important”

Iarla came at the album from a multiplicity of angles, singing new material himself, his voice hovering on the thermals of multi-layered, compacted, quasi-ambient sound —just as he did with Canadian producer Michael Brook on his solo album on Real World, The Seven Steps to Mercy (Seacht gCoiscéim na Trocaire).

Building in samples of everything from instruments and building sites “just to give haphazard texturing” to the voice of novelist Dermot Healy (who neatly fits the film’s central role), Iarla also brought in London-Irish musos James McNally and Tommy McManamon, as well as Caroline Dale‘s lyrical cello.

Meanwhile, Sinéad O’Connor re-interpreted the 18th century Irish rebellion-hymn, ‘Roisin Dubh’; and the final album track is herself and Iarla duetting on the old Northern Irish song, ‘Singing Bird’ —live from the Shepherds Bush Empire gig.

Another fine track features the Scary Eire rapper, with the handle of Rí-Rá – based in London but originally from Tullamore, County Offaly— delivering himself in the blistering, marinated rage of a sedated hip-hop routine (Knuckles to the Marrow) which will raise brand new hairs on the back of your neck. “I was blown away by the sheer originality of his hip-hop vibe. I felt I was in the studio with someone really special. He’s very good at compressing lyrics down to very strong statements, way ahead of himself in some ways…”

The general sound has as much to do with the undertow of Iarla’s ambient Irish drones. “I wanted the whole thing to have an uncertainty to it, there’s a jazzy element as well, with industrial soundscapes and beats, with no attempt to squeeze it into a dance category.”

However, the heavy texturing is respectfully broken for the naked recordings of two great Irish musical masters: the impeccable lilt of Martin Hayes‘ fiddle playing the nostalgic old tune, ‘The Old Road to Garry’; and Noel Hill‘s little concertina, shaking the emotion from the air to the traditional song, ‘The Mountains of Pomeroy’.

Born in 1964 as the fourth-last of 12 kids, Iarla grew up in west County Cork: a place called Cúil Aodha, a remote, rural Gaeltacht area where Irish was the first language spoken by the people and emigration was as common as supper. “I must say this, the character in the film is only one of hundreds of thousands that went to England and fell into a quasi-slave class and never integrated, except in ghettos.  Many came from the back of beyond, to arrive in London with no understanding of a complex modern society.” Like the guy in the film says, his first day left him with the impression that England was ‘all grey walls running with water…’

“Because I grew up in the countryside, I can understand so strongly that the only things these men had ever really heard were birds and cows and horses.  So, from a familiar world of country lanes and cottages and seasonal farm work— that’s the mindscape Noel’s and Martin’s music comes from, a world of birdsong, of gentleness— all of a sudden, these people were hearing monstrous machines, Hilti guns, buses. The mind wouldn’t have the apparatus to deal with that, it could be quite a crushing experience. That was the threshold we were trying to cross… “

Originally, Iarla started working from a script and a cue-sheet, talking it all out with the film director Nichola Bruce to develop an appropriate musical language.  “I didn’t have the movie in front of me so it was very open, like an imaginary landscape you were filling in. I worked 70 days solid in the Real World writing studio they call The Bunker and in Ron’s studio in London. The writing phase was about 50 days long.  We were in there for 15 hours a day.  We would read the scenes to each other and imagine the tone, a general sense of the colour required.”

Although he wasn’t the director, how did he enjoy the process of producing a soundtrack?  “It’s very, very interesting. The director is ultimately the boss, and often a director may have a very different understanding of music to you and you’ve to subjugate yourself to that. But I was lucky that I was producing something I was very involved with, I wasn’t producing a band, so I had the best of both worlds. And it’s brilliant when you lay the music on for the first time and really see the film coming to life. For my own solo album, I arrived with lots of sketches on paper and I played a lot of instruments, and this time again I had my little mascot, the ship’s harmonium.

During the writing phase I did everything that had to be done, doing the keyboard programming and playing piano, keyboards, organ, harmonium, deciding where things went, and how much of them went in —basically rolling up your sleeves and mucking in. But I used a lot of those instruments just for texture, and when Ron had programmed them I distressed and modulated them way beyond the raw sound.”

“As a producer, you work in both a musical and programmatic way, with a structure which you can actually see visually. Basically, you’re responsible for everything and at the end of the day people look to you for ideas— and, thanks be to God, I wasn’t short of them. I threw what I could at it, conceptually. “

Although many voices and accents and experiences are brought to bear on this project, many percolate from Iarla’s native Cúil Aodha where the local hinterland hosts many fine poets, storytellers, fiddlers and flute-players.  Iarla’s own family provided a trove of songs and singing; he was first recorded at the age of seven, thanks to the many Slogadh music-competition prizes he won as a child, never mind his early association with the incorrigibly native choir in the Cúil Aodha church.

This unique choir was first set up by the late Sean Ó Riada —a giant of Irish traditional music and a man who set the old melodies into the European art-music setting, most memorably with his stirring, nationalistic Mise Eire orchestral symphony, around the motif of the air to ‘Roisin Dubh’.

Iarla’s first solo album on Real World, The Seven Steps to Mercy (Seacht gCoiscéim na Trocaire) —which he describes as a “core sample of where I come from” —includes a recording of himself at the age of 14, singing ‘Aisling Gheal’ under the tuition of Ó Riada’s son, Peadar, who took over the running of the Cuil Aodha choir. Indeed, Peadar Ó Riada’s own spacey, visionary recordings share much with Iarla’s —the same forthright emphasis to an old hymn or air, always respecting the rough-hewn shape of the Gaelic words; the same holistic atmospheres; the same philosophy of sampling ambient sounds, voices, tunes, histories. “We grew up in the same landscape, hearing the same sounds, voices and tunes…”

Nowadays, Iarla spends a considerable amount of his time with the big touring outfit of the Afro Celt Sound System and is currently deep into the “writing stage” of the new Afro Celt album. However Iarla also tours his own “multi-media” solo show, backed up by projected computer-generated imagery. “It’s basically a set of 17 songs, about half of them accompanied by backing tracks from Michael Brook, like ambient poems. It’s pretty intense, but it’s a fantastic workout for me. I do it thematically, going through all the laments, children’s songs, love songs, spiritual songs —including one mediaeval song-cycle.”

“I’m extremely fortunate with my solo work, in that I can indulge myself and make the work more dreamy —and more hardcore at times. I don’t have to go down the paths that people other than Real World would try and carve out for me. I’d wither away without that opportunity.”