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Reviews

• Hot Press
• Ireland of the Welcomes

HOT PRESS MAGAZINE, DUBLIN

HIT THE NORTH By Stuart Bailie 'SWEET BEAT MANIFESTO'

'DIFFERENT DRUMS OF IRELAND are helping the lambeg and bodhran to beat as one.'
...But what the hell is going on up there? A huge, ancient drum on either side of the stage. They look physically intimidating, but just look more closely at the artwork on the side of them. Two representations of King William of Orange astride his horse, steeling himself for victory over the Catholic forces in 1690.
These are your proper Lambeg drums, native to Ulster, designed to make a ferocious noise and to cause major heart palpitations throughout the summer months. Drums with the worst PR in the world, seemingly out of place in the right-on atmosphere of this special opening.
Now here's the team that are going to play these monsters. They look like normal, steady guys. No dodgy tattoos are on show.
Neither do they look like art terrorists - the Test Department of this island.
Slowly, the beat picks up, slamming around the walls, causing everyone to leave their stalls and watch. It's a tribal thing for sure, but almost imperceptibly, the mood changes. You can hear a bodhran there as well, voicing another tradition, accenting the beat. And there's the plaintive squeal of the Uilleann pipes, and some sean nos singing, bending our perceptions further. Finally, the sound is internationalised, with exotic percussion from the Orient and Africa, shaking it to the east and west.
Different Drums of Ireland have played the White House and are respected in Japan. Their art takes them to community centres and posh municipal buildings. Their brief is beautifully simple. They take the bigotry out of Ireland's rhythms, and in the process, they redefine the exciting potential of the drum. One of the issues they raise is that both sides of the religious divide in the north have cut themselves off from an aspect of the music that they once shared.
"In many ways, both sides gave it away," explains Stephen Matier, one of the group's mainstays. "And both sides are starting to claim it back. As I see it, it's just one music, just different arrangements or different time signatures."
By way of an example, Stephen is talking his way through the history of a marching tune like 'The Orange Lily-O'. Hibernian bands also play a version, commonly called 'Shanghai Lil'. And before that, there was a reel called 'The Swallows Tail', which in turn was developed from an age-old air. You can do the same kind of archaeological dig with 'The Sash', and trace it back to a love song, when the object of affection was a beautiful girl, as opposed to some emotive regalia.
"In the past," Stephen continues, "Hibernian bands used Lambeg drums. In some places, they actually borrowed the drums off Protestant bands, and covered the paintings with a green sash. In places like Ballynahinch, the musicians used to play in both bands. They all knew the same tunes."
He's talking about how they played in the Lower Ormeau Festival fast year, on July 20 - only a week after the 12th Parade caused such anguish for the nationalist community there. But Different Drums, they loved. The group also played in the predominantly Catholic Short Strand on Internment Day. Once again, the Lambegs were given a good wallop, and the reaction was hugely positive.
"Some people would be a bit uneasy about what we do," Stephen admits. "it's edgy because there's that possibility. But the more we play and the more people hear about us, the less risk there is. From doing stuff that we weren't sure about, we're now being requested to do The Sash and stuff."
On the other side of the equation, they played a gig in Portadown Town Hall, a venue embellished with the trappings of Unionism. One of the drummers, Kevin, was from the Bogside, and he was amazed at the joyous reaction. He turned to Stephen in mid concert and laughed. "Jeezes, look, will ye? There's a load of Prods dancin' to diddley dee!"
Different Drums of Ireland started at the end of 1992 with The Kodo drummers from Japan set up a week-long workshop in Derry. One of the participants, Roy Arbuckle, got to thinking about the significance of the drum in Ulster culture. So himself and some friends started to experiment. In the early days there was no music at all, just the rhythms and some chanting. Still, it was a winner. Soon they were wowing everyone from Bill Clinton to the Duke Of Edinburgh.
Different Drums would be forgiven for sounding limp and liberal, taking all the visceral power of sectarian music and replacing it with a tame version. But, miraculously, this thing still retains the power to excite. You are reminded of how people viewed the pioneering work of Sean O'Riada and The Chieftains, when they found a new way to articulate traditional music. And once you learn to make an under-valued music swing, you're entering a very exciting arena.
Northern Ireland needs these people.

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'Ireland of the Welcomes'

DIFFERENT DRUMS by Alf McCreary (In Summer 2001)

"If we do not learn to create an authentic sense of community at local level, how are we going to stop wars between nations?" asks Roy Arbuckle, the Director and founder of the unique Irish music group Different Drums. "This philosophy underlines everything we do as a musical group. We are not trying to change people, but we are attempting to help them to express themselves as individuals within a larger community, and how to develop their own culture without harming others."

Roy was speaking during a short break in a one-day workshop for 345 children at the Academy Primary School in Saintfield, Co. Down - a small picturesque village south-east of Belfast, and not far from the famous Mountains of Mourne, immortalised by Percy French. During the workshop, Roy and his colleagues introduced some of the children to the practice of rhythm and taught them part of a piece which they played to the entire school and teachers later on. It was an electrifying performance musically, with the added cultural dimension of seeing a Lambeg
drum and a bodhran, symbolic of the Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland, being played in harmony, side by side.

To reinforce the point, the group played three versions of the one tune- as an Irish 'slow air' titled "Young Boy", then in a variation which became an Orange "marching tune ", and then as a hauntingly beautiful Irish reel, called "Swallow's Tail." At the end Roy summed up succinctly "This is basically the same music, but it shows how-in the end- we all march to the
same tune."

The children, and their teachers, loved it. All across the large Assembly Hall the tiny children expressed themselves spontaneously with the kind of rhythms which adults also experience, but are often too inhibited to follow with the same openness. The School's Principal Stephen Moore commented "This is very much a cross-community school, and it is good for our pupils to hear the different forms of music expressed in this way."

The performance at the Academy Primary School encapsulated the essence of what Different Drums have been during their meteoric rise since 1992, when they were conceived and founded by Roy Arbuckle. He is a Derry man, with a Presbyterian background, and like many of his fellow citizens; his early musical experience was with local Showbands. He also developed an interest in traditional Irish music, and played with the well-known groups Chaff and Fiddler's Elbow. After spending 8 years in Canada, Roy returned to his native city, and since then has been involved in cross-community projects. Part of his inspiration to form the group came from the poem by Henry David Thoreau, and the book " A Different Drum" by Dr. M. Scott Peck, both of which underline the necessity for humanity to march to the same beat. In 1991, with community- relations funding, Roy carried out experimental work with communities on both sides of the border in the North-West of Ireland.
He says "This development gained momentum, and we were invited to an Irish Festival in New Brunswick, which had the theme 'Come Celebrate Orange and Green'. This is exactly what we wanted to do back home! So we took about 100 people, based across a large spectrum from the North-West of Ireland to Carlingford, to the Festival in New Brunswick, and it was a marvelous."
On his return to Northern Ireland, Roy Arbuckle had a watershed experience when he spent two weeks with the Kodo Drummers of Japan. "This is a mixture of music, meditation and martial arts, and it elevated the ideas we had onto the level of world music. Having heard the big Kodo O-daiko drum, I had the idea of introducing a big drum to our group-and so the concept of the Lambeg alongside the bodhran sprang to mind."
Some time later Roy was acting in the seminal play "Observe The Sons of Ulster Marching to the Somme" by Frank McGuinness, and a Lambeg drum is an integral part of the production. "I arranged it so that two Lambegs were made available, and at the end I was able to buy them for our group."
He bought the drums in a shop in Belfast's Sandy Row, a well-known Protestant area. "They were a matched-pair which had been used by an Orange lodge at Finnis, near Dromara, and were around 100 years old. So it was a great purchase." Around the same time he commissioned a new set of bodhrans from Eamonn Maguire, a craftsman of musical instruments, based in Ardoyne, a Catholic part of Belfast. The symmetry of instruments acquired from both parts of that troubled city, and being played in tune by the same group, was impressive. The symbolism was also inescapable.

As the group gradually made itself known, it was invited to play at various one-day events, including craft fairs. All the while it was developing a performance repertoire. Their concerts eventually produced a fascinating blend of sounds and rhythms, including Irish reels, jigs and marches, an element of reggae, and traditional Lambeg chants- played with a mixture of bodhrans, Lambegs, a Long Drum and African Djembe.

 

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The evolution of the Long Drum was due to the initiative of the group itself. Roy explains " We had also been exposed to the world of African music, and their concept is that of a family of drums. We had the large Lambeg, which was the 'father,' and also the small bodhran, which was the 'child.' We needed a 'mother', and this became our Long Drum!"

In the early days, the membership of the group changed as it developed, but the current line-out has been together for some time. Roy Arbuckle himself plays guitar, bodhran and Lambeg, and also provides vocals. Stephen Matier, a co-founder and band member since its inception, has a background in community arts activity and plays bodhran, Lambeg, Djembe, Darbuka and bones. He recently resigned from his job as Director of Belfast's Citizens' Advice Bureau to devote all his time to Different Drums. Brendan Monaghan is a multi-talented traditional musician from Banbridge, who is one of Ireland's top exponents of the Uilleann pipes, and he also plays all kinds of whistles. He has recently started playing Scottish Small and Highland Pipes. Kevin Sharkey, from Derry plays Djembe, snare drum, bodhran, tabla and Lambeg, and started his musical career at 15 in a rock and roll band, later playing with several "progressive rock' groups in and around the city. Rory McCarron, the newest member of the band, returned to Derry in 1998 after recording with Sony and touring extensively with the band "Schtum". He is noted for his powerful and rock-solid sense of rhythm.
The band's breakthrough came in 1998 when they were invited to take part in the St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin. Since then they have developed a high profile, through extensive television work, participation in music festivals in the USA, Europe and Japan, as well as in keynote events
including special performances for successive Irish Presidents Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese. More recently they played at the new Odyssey Centre in Belfast, in the presence of President Bill Clinton, British Premier Tony Blair, local Unionist and Nationalist political leaders, and several thousand cross-community representatives.

Other major highlights of the band's career so far include a 1999 visit to the USA as part of a "Both Sides Now" tour with, among others, the noted Irish musicians James Galway and Phil Coulter. They made an historic appearance at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and on St. Patrick's Day
performed for President Clinton at the White House. Roy Arbuckle comments "It was an amazing experience. I will never forget appearing with Gregory Peck in St. Patrick's Cathedral, and also the fact that there were a number of people from Belfast Shankill Road, a strong Protestant area of the city, among the audience in the Cathedral. We truly broke the mould on that day!"

Last year they returned to the USA where they played in the Kennedy Center in Washington, alongside such established performers as Elvis Costello, Steve Earl, Ricky Skaggs, Emmylou Harris, Sharon Shannon and Mary Black.
The group's engagement book is well-filled, with scheduled appearances later this year in America and the European mainland, as well as in Ireland. Their programme of workshops will also continue, as they literally hammer out the theme of different people marching to the same tunes. Though their success is considerable, they have had their problems.

Roy Arbuckle says " Sometimes our concept has been rejected even before we start to perform. In the early days we had skin-head thugs who created trouble for us in Belfast, and later in Waterford there were Republicans who were not too happy that we were using the Lambeg drum. To them was a symbol of British ' Imperialism.' These kind of objectors are a minority, and when most people start to listen to what we are doing, all that kind of stuff disappears."

The presence of the Lambeg drum in their ensemble, however, remains a definite talking-point. Roy says " The Lambeg has a kind of edge for Catholic people because of its association with the Orange tradition. That is not the fault of the drum. The underlying question is ' Who is the drum playing for?' To an extent we are dispelling the territorial dimension of the Lambeg, and presenting it in its own right as a musical instrument. " I like to think that for some people we are putting the Lambeg onto a different level. For many Catholic people their participation in a workshop the only time they have an opportunity to touch, feel and hear a Lambeg. We are not presenting ourselves as Lambeg drummers. It is a dying tradition in lots of ways, and it would be sad if it were lost, because it is unique to Ulster. There is nothing else like it in the world. I know that a number of other groups have been sparked off by us to do something similar in their own way."

Undoubtedly, the group is crossing barriers-musical and otherwise-as it brings its unique sounds to people who never dreamt that traditional Irish instruments and Lambegs could blend in such harmony. Roy Arbuckle treasures one remark made to him by a Protestant, after a hugely-acclaimed concert to a large cross-community audience in Belfast's Waterfront Hall. "He said to me ' You have done for the Lambeg what Riverdance has done for Irish dancing."

In Northern Ireland terms, that is real progress.