On the long finger

Ciaran Sloan, Deirdre Starr and Roy Thompson discussing the programme while setting up for Deirdre's concert in Kilcullen Town Hall last night.

Ask Deirdre Starr if there's a theme running through her latest CD and she'll give a quick grin.

"Total misery. Everybody dies, of starvation, or unrequited love, or drowning ... there are quite a few drownings. There's only one song where nobody dies, and that's about a bird."

The CD's title is 'The Long Finger' and the reason for that one is easy. "The last three CDs I did, I hadn't any control over the material — the producers decided what I sang. The songs on this album are ones that have been in my repertoire for years, and I've always wanted to record them, but they were put on the long finger ..."

Deirdre 'collects' her songs in a number of ways, listening to other artists, trawling through archives of old traditional lyrics, and the tracks on the new CD are all traditional.

"Some are very ancient, and others more recent, from around the 1800s. What I do is rearrange the the airs in a sort of contemporary way — I wouldn't play them in the way they were originally performed. And sometimes I'll swap airs for a particular set of lyrics, if I don't like the air."

An example of this is the first track, 'The Nightingale', which was written around the early part of the 1800s and published in Sam Henry's 'Songs of the People'.

"The air was dreadful, but there was an air I loved on another song which used to be sung by Anne O'Donnell. I couldn't sing it, because it was about a hare that gets torn to pieces, so I took the air and grafted it onto 'The Nightingale' lyrics. I had to change some of the stanzas around so that the metre would be compatible in the end, but there's a great satisfaction in that, and I want to do more of it."

Deirdre decided on all the material for 'The Long Finger', but she enlisted the help of Lunasa bass player Trevor Hutchinson to produce the CD.

"My whole emphasis was that I didn't want it to be cluttered. I wanted everything kept very simple, so that I'd be able to reproduce it in a live session. We used a real piano, and I played the songs and then added my voice. When that was done, we brought in things like the double bass, the cello and the flute ... but overall it has a very live, acoustic character."

... and everybody dies.

— Brian Byrne.