The Goo 1
SEP '25 on our own stuff. That completely changed
overnight when Mise Éire came out in 1960. Everyone started to hear Irish music differently, and that allowed us, coming along a little bit later, to push the envelope, like he had. So that legitimised us, in a way, although I’ve no doubt he would have hated what we wound up doing. So did we feel that we were doing something new and different? I think we did, and we certainly got a lot of pushback from mainstream, traditional musicians, but we kind of expected it, because we knew what we were doing was really rocking the boat. But at the same time, we reckoned that the people who were getting hot under the collar were just missing the point. Because we weren’t a traditional band. We were a rock’n’roll band who were using traditional stuff as an influence, as an ingredient – which was precisely what they didn’t like. But I think we probably had more confidence in the ability of traditional music to survive than they did. I can see their point of view to some extent, because traditional music had been on its knees in the ’50s, the number of pipers was dwindling. It’s hard to see how it would have looked in those days, from a present day standpoint, because it’s now so incredibly healthy and vibrant and there’s brilliant young musicians playing traditional music all over the place. Back then, it was a completely different story, and it looked as though it could start to go under. The same way the language was going under. So I don’t really blame them for getting upset. But we did feel that we were doing something that they couldn’t. Every album that came out was different from the previous album, which was not a very commercially clever thing to do. But we tried to stick to using traditional music as a fount of inspiration. That was partly why we broke up, because we felt we had done as much as we could with that way of doing things, we had pushed that experiment as far as we could. That speaks to how wedded we were to the approach we took to the music. Despite having a ferocious amount of fun and wearing absolutely appalling crime-against-fashion clothes and being pretty messy in a lot of ways, we were serious about the music and we worked extremely hard to get it right and to keep it right. Then when we got back together in 2009 and we did the Odyssey in Belfast and the O2 in Dublin, what was interesting was that people still had their chops, but they also had developed different angles, people were playing different kinds of stuff and listening to different kinds of stuff. We had always listened to a fairly eclectic, diverse range of music anyway, from early music and classical music through to blues and jazz and soul and traditional, obviously, and whatever you’re having yourself. Plus, all the synthesiser stuff that was starting to happen around the same time, Kraftwerk and all the German stuff – sorry, I can go down a rabbit hole about synthesiser music, given half a chance, I’ll stop. Do you feel vindicated now when you see the likes of Lankum and their adjacent bands, the current boom that’s partly traditional, but also incorporating lots of other elements? Yeah, like Lankum talk a lot about German industrial stuff, actually. But, at the same time, I don’t know: it probably would sound pompous or conceited to say it, but I don’t know if we want or need vindication. I think we’re confident enough that we were very proud of what we did, and we could turn around and hold our heads up. I mean, it’s 33