Various
Come West Along the Road
RTÉ DVD99; 2005
One
of the Irish state broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann’s long-standing successes
is the weekly traditional music series Come West Along the Road, which
has run since 1994 in a relatively unchanged format, although an Irish language
version was introduced in 2001. It’s a simple and highly effective set-up in
which the director of Dublin’s Irish Traditional Music Archive, Nicholas
Carolan, researches and presents (in a very unobtrusive manner) a half-hour
show drawn from the vast archives of not only RTÉ, but from Ulster TV too and
various film and newsreel sources. 
Offering
a selection of material from the show, this 145-minutes-long DVD can obviously
provide but a mere snippet of the 150 and more episodes in the series, but it
does so magnificently. Not only are many of the 47 clips taken from the 1960s
to the 1980s of inherent musical value, but they provide a glimpse of the ways
that TV producers dealt somewhat clumsily with traditional music in the past,
whether it be in the form of a full-scale concert broadcast, a snippet on a
news magazine programme or within a documentary. Add to that a glorious insight
into changing fashions which reveal that both the paisley shirt (patterned, not
Big Ian) and the Bobby Charlton comb-over hairstyle survived in Ireland long
past their sell-by date elsewhere. Truth be told, fashionistas may find much of
the disc pretty drab fodder, but cannot fail to be impressed by a stunning
scarlet dress sported by fiddler Julia Clifford or Matt Molloy’s unfeasibly
tight jeans.
As
for the music itself, well, the sound of balladeers such as The Ludlow Trio or
Al O’Donnell has aged rather poorly. Contrastingly, the Bothy Band and Planxty
fare rather well and there’s some fabulous fiddle-work from Séan Keane and
Tommy Peoples, as well as a very rare clip of accordionist Joe Cooley and great
songs from Frank Harte, Nioclás Tóibín and the Kerry singer Pádraig Ághas (with
supportive fellow bar denizen clutching the singer’s while desperately trying
not to spill his own pint). There are shots of Wrenboys, pub and street
sessions, Mummers and frenetic middle-aged set-dancers, but perhaps the most
abiding memory will be of uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn playing the jig Frieze
Britches to an audience of
apparently bemused young black women at the Battersea Arts Centre some time in
the 1970s and gradually winning them over in the process.
This review by Geoff Wallis was written for fRoots magazine – www.frootsmag.com.