Salut! Folk

Andrew Curry writes: Christy Moore has spent much of his career as a solo performer, or working with the guitarist Declan Sinnott, but both of the groups he was associated with changed the face of Irish music. One grew out of the other. Christy Moore was influential in the creation of both. In the third of our pieces to mark Christy Moore’s 80th birthday, we’re looking at his involvement in one of the great Irish bands, Moving Hearts.

Moving Hearts took Irish folk music electric (Horslips came first, but had much less impact). The origin of the band came out of some of the limitations of Planxty. Donal Lunny wanted to add a rhythm section to some of the songs, but knew he couldn’t do that with Planxty, whose success lay in the way it modernised traditional Irish music. A rhythm section would have been a step too far.

Christy Moore was writing and collecting more political songs—in tune with the times of the early 1980s—but again these would not have fitted with Planxty’s repertoire.

(Moving Hearts, as seen on the back cover of Dark End of the Street. Photographer: Colm Henry).

Their solution was to create a new group. Moving Hearts wasn’t supposed to be a seven-piece band, and the economics of this were terrible. But as Lunny, in particular, kept trying things out, the band kept getting bigger. They had an immediate impact.

As the Irish magazine Magill said of them, when the first version of the band disbanded in 1984,

The music alone would have been enough, the commitment, the politics, were woven into it, part of it, moved the heart as well as tapping the foot.

I think it’s also relevant that Lunny and Moore went back a long way. Although Lunny is younger by ten months, they had been classmates at school in Newbridge (you wonder about the chances of that) and they had played in a band together as teenagers. They knew each other well enough to trust their instincts.

Declan Sinnott, who had been in Horslips, was the first to join. As Donald Lunny said four decades later,

He was an absolutely brilliant electric guitarist — a rock musician. From there, we got in a bassist who was coming from outside traditional. We put together a rock band with a bit of jazz in it. However, I was still pushing in the direction of trad. There were pipes in it. It was an interesting way to go.

As well as Lunny, Moore, and Sinnott, the first line up included Keith Donald on alto sax, Eoghan O'Neill on bass, Brian Calnan on drums, and Davy Spillane on uilleann pipes.

And then they got a six month residency at Dublin’s Baggott St. venue, three nights a week, Mondays to Wednesdays, which allowed them to work on their songs and their sound without the audience caring too much how they sounded from night to night.

The Irish journalist Eamonn McCann apparently called “these shows one of the greatest residencies in musical history.”

And those first two albums were electric, in both senses of the word, combining folk, jazz, and rock sounds, and politics. Their first record Moving Hearts, opened with Hiroshima Nagasaki Russian Roulette, written by the American songwriter Jim Page, about the spectre of nuclear war at a time when this represented an existential fear for many in Europe. But the sound is the thing that pulls you in, with the interplay of Spillane’s pipes and Donald’s sax. 

Other songs were about landlords—still a problem in Ireland—and Philip Chevron’s song about the shadows of Irish history, Faithful Departed. No Time For Love, written by Jack Warshaw about the radical American politics of the 1960s, was adapted slightly to reference Bobby Sands and the hunger strikers. The politics were unmistakable.

Dark End of the Street, made a year later, in 1982, continued the thread. The politics is still there—Allende is about the Chilean president murdered in a CIA-backed coup—as well as love songs. Downtown was an exciting instrumental that pre-figured the later direction of the group. One of the stand-out tracks is Let Somebody Know, written and sung by Declan Sinnott.

By this time WEA had noticed the band, and put out a record in the US, confusingly also called Dark End of the Street, that was a mash-up of the two records released in Ireland and the UK.

Although people often complain about record companies when they do this kind of thing, whoever assembled it did a good job. I realised while writing this piece that this is the version of Dark End of the Street that I have on vinyl, which means that I would have bought it by mail order from Roundup Records in the US. It sold well, but record industry success didn’t save the band.

(The cover of Dark End of the Street. Photographer: Colm Henry).

They managed themselves, and they were run as a ten-person co-operative (the seven musicians and the three crew were all members.)

They’d taken out loans to buy trucks, a bus, and a PA system, but had to keep touring to keep ahead of the payments. In the end they found they were working hard and gigging constantly for little return.

And this reminded me of one of the stories about the band—that they embarked on a tour of community halls in the smaller towns and villages across Ireland to take the music to the people. A few years later I worked with a ponytailed and bejeaned Irish accountant in the television industry, and it turned out that he’d been on the tour to look after the money. It hadn’t been a financial success, but the tour had been riotous.

Christy Moore stayed for the first two records, before leaving for a solo career. On his website he recalled of Dark End of the Street,

We were all a bit f*cked. I certainly was. I had some throat problems that required surgery. I was doin' too much toot and I was tryin' to be a rock singer to keep up with the arrangements.

The band changed a bit after that—The Storm, their third record, was purely instrumental, which also gave Donal Lunny more musical freedom. (Colin has written about it here on the site before.)

Christy showed up for what was the original band’s final appearance, at the National Boxing Stadium in Dublin in November 1984. Online there’s a breathless account of the gig from Magill. A man from WEA turned up—it seemed he wasn’t entirely welcome—to present Moving Hearts with their platinum disc, which the band promptly raffled to raise money for the Red Cross.

While I was researching this piece, I read an Irish review of their second album Dark End of the Street. The title song is a classic of Southern soul, written by Dan Penn and Chips Moman for the R&B singer James Carr about an illicit love affair. (They wanted to write “the best cheating song. Ever”, said Penn).

The Irish reviewer pointed out that in Ireland, at the height of the troubles, you might be meeting at the dark end of the street to keep a different sort of a secret. A song that I had thought of just as a classic cover had the politics of the north in 1982 encoded into it.

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Christy’s summer tour of Ireland has been sold out for weeks but I see that two gigs have just been added in September in Galway and Sligo, and tickets go on sale this morning.

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