Episode 8: Spring Andante

Episode 11: Bright Star Of The West - Sean Williams and Joe Heaney

Just listen to this. Sean Williams shares her memories of learning from the legendary Joe Heaney. We talk music; ornamentation; Oirishness; messengers from the otherworld; liminality; being visited by Heaney in a dream and corrected on your writing, cleaning up his apartment on Phinney Ridge. We talk the sacred, alluring and dangerous; immigration and emigration; 'you lived away for so long,' thresholds, crossing over. Transgression, and where is home. What a dream, this conversation turned out to be. Straight after, I drove south to Portland, Oregon and watched a soccer game on a glorious summer's night while drinking an icy cold beer. The glory. Thanks Sean. Thanks also to Em Kildea, and to Ciaran O'Grady and Aifric Boylan for the chance to share some extracts of this episode with attendees at the annual Comhaltas weekend in Queenscliff, Victoria. You can find a comprehensive list of Joe Heaney's songs here, at The Joe Heaney Archive: https://www.joeheaney.org/en/ [https://www.joeheaney.org/en/] And here's the Joe Heaney archive (some of it) in the University of Washington Ethnomusicology Archives in Seattle: https://soundcloud.com/uwlibraries/sets/wauem1997016_heaney-interview [https://soundcloud.com/uwlibraries/sets/wauem1997016_heaney-interview] Thanks for listeneing, and see you soon I hope... Dominic

Episode 10: Friday Harbor

Friday Harbor is as beautiful as you might imagine - a small, saltwater town on San Juan Island on the north west edge of Washington State. If you head out there on the weekend, north from Seattle, up Interstate 5 to the ferry that leaves from the once thriving cannery and oil town of Anacortes, Friday Harbour can feel like a safe haven from the week just gone by. Some folks think it's a bit too cutesy, a chocolate box version of a Pacific NorthWest town - and truth be told it does have a bit of that about it. It's well kept, tidy, there's a little picture house and the timber buildings are all neat and painted. You can buy hemp products and souvernirs and paintings by local artists; small batch ales with names like Weed Whacker that smell of pine and coffee; you can get timber from the hardware store and boating shoes and life vests and corkscrews; and you can fuel up your outboard at the depot a little bit out of town. Out off the high west side of the island you can watch the orcas pass as the lights from BC flicker across the water; even in such a comfortable and cosy place there's a sense of a bigger world beyond. And even in such a comfortable and cosy place you know that out in the wooded gullies and crannies there's some folks doing it hard. 'The Colonel' lives out there in his airstream that sits up on breeze blocks. He rents off a guy named Clay who comes by once a week to collect the rent, which he mostly forgets, being there more for the talk and the smoke and to check in on the Colonel. Brings him a twelve pack of Pepsi, because the Colonel is sober; and he tells him the news. The Colonel doesn't go to town any more much, and never goes to Seattle. His Delia got cancer twelve years ago and once a week every week they'd drive out of the woods, onto the ferry, through Anacortes and down I-5 to the city for her treatment. In their Chevy Impala with the bench seat in the front so she could lie down all the way home while steering one handed with the deadly cigarette between his middle finger and forefinger, blowing his smoke out the window, right hand resting ever so softly on the side of her head, stroking her hair. Once on the ferry he'd slide quietly out as they reversed into the deeper water by Anacortes dock and walk the decks. An hour, two hours, walking around and around as they traveled west and her sleeping uneasy down below. Dolphins, cormorants, seals, orcas, gulls. After she'd died - not passed on says the Colonel, not lost - died - he sat in the ferry queue as usual that first Tuesday morning after, and then when the people around him started driving down the ramp he never moved... let them drive around him. Joe tapped on his roof, 'Colonel, you wanna go today?' He just shook his head, drove to the bottom of the lot, took a left and headed back up through town without stopping. Got back home, sat in the car all day outside their shingle house, with the engine off, smoking. And he slept there too. Woke at five the next morning and knew he'd never ride that ferry again in his life if he could help it. Delia's twelve years dead now, he's twenty years sober. Getting ready for the collapse of the government, invasion by the government, drinking his coffee from a Seattle SuperSonics mug in the woods, in the morning mist, droplets of mist forming on his beard. There's blackberry pickers out that way too, and weed growers, and weed smokers; dodgy attornies and honest ones, beauticians, ancient hippies, bad comedians and half decent hand-to-mouth authors. Soft drink millionaires who fly in by private jet from California to Friday Harbor. And the rest of us who amble in on a Washington State ferry.

Episode 9: Skyscraper Stan

This is a podcast about living and this episode has a lot of it: the Fitzroy underground scene; the excesses of youth; being in a band; being in a society sleepwalking towards environmental catastrophe. You know, happy stuff. Doomscrolling, yelling into the chasm; books, crooners and gentrification. AND crackin songs. In this episode Stan plays: I Fell Over Flag of Progress A Little Light 21st Century Lullaby and a quick song that doesn't yet have a name... You can find Skyscraper Stan and the Commission Flats music at bandcamp: https://skyscraperstan.bandcamp.com/ [https://skyscraperstan.bandcamp.com/] And videos, gig details and other stuff at https://www.skyscraperstan.com.au/ [https://www.skyscraperstan.com.au/] Thanks so much Stan - what a treat.

Episode 8: Spring Andante

In the almanac of Ireland on RTE the writer Manchán Magan talks about the word magh – a measurement of distance in the old Irish – the distance that a bell or a cock-crow can be heard. Magh. I’ve been thinking of that idea for a couple of years now since I first heard it from my friend Colette Kinsella who produced that show – a fantastic radio producer and like-minded lover of sounds and the way we inhabit a world of sounds, and they – sounds – they inhabit us. You can find the episode I'm talking about here. [https://www.rte.ie/radio/podcasts/series/32164-the-almanac-of-ireland/] I met Colette when I was living in The Hague in 2023 and we hit it off immediately, not least because we shared a love for a bakery called Kitty’s Kitchen run by a most inspirational woman called Mary Bruton – though that’s another story. So me and Colette would meet in the morning, have scones and coffee, and talk about radio and sound and splashes and history and crack. And in the way of all the most fantastic friendships do, I’d always come away with my heart abuzz and my head ringing with ideas, the freshest of breezes blowing through me, and joy – how’s that for a far north Antrim man – joy at having spent that time with Colette. The distance a bell ring can be heard from the church – on a Sunday morning in The Hague the bells still ring as they have for centuries it seems like, a sound I miss now I’m no longer living there. The ringing, the voices of those bells, carrying out from the church tower through the air, over the hedges and ditches and streets and canals, grachts and puddles and briars and lawns and trams and shops – to us, me and Colette, sitting drinking coffee together. I’m going to play you something today – it’s very short. much shorter than this introduction – that I recorded in 2012 or so. It’s a poem by a fella called Phil Sprang, who became a friend very dear to me. I met him when he was 70 or so and he was a still a broad, slightly forbidding figure in an eternal plaid shirt. Who shook hands like a man who’d been on the tools all his life; would greet you with an arched eyebrow and a grim sceptical at eye, then a smile and he’d ask you in. He was a poet, Phil – a storyteller, house-builder, dramatist and writer, a San Francisco beatnik in the 60s, a sufi mystic in England in the 70s, a trekker and bluffer, and a lover of baseball, who’d pour a couple of glugs of Baileys into his morning coffee; a ghost of times past in Seattle’s great once literary boozer The Blue Moon Tavern and a string of other andcient drinking shops in Pioneer Square in the 60s; a student of the great American poet Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington, a skier a football player and a drinker of a couple of bottles of starpramoen pilsner each winter afternoon as we would sit talking in the glowering twilight; a man who described his life as a mystery in which he somehow managed to remain upright with no visible means of support. Who told me he didn’t fear death, he was curious to move onto the next stage of the journey and find out what was up ahead, round the bend. I last saw Phil in 2022 a few months before he died…I visited in him his retirement home, he’d had his beard shaved off and didn’t look like himself. He seemed shorn of more than his beard somehow, lying in a bed with the TV at the foot of the bed on all the time. When I told him I was there he reached out his hand, and called out to his first wife, then already gone, ‘Noni, Dominic’s here.’ I played him some of the things we’d recorded, sat with him on afternoons as the sun shone bright and blustery outside – that deep, West Seattle sunlight. I need a word that does for friendships what magh does for that ringing bell…a word for the distance from which friendships can still be felt within us, despite the passing of time and the vast spaces separating us. That they CAN still reach us even after all the seconds minutes hours days weeks months years that have passed, those friendships, seems miraculous, miraculous, and yet we feel them – ringing as they do within us like – well, a bell, what else…out across the water on a clear morning. This is Phil Sprang, my friend, the poet, Out on the Ocean. ---------------------------------------- You can hear more of Colette Kinsella's work at Red Hare Media - check it out. A treasure trove of lovely audio pieces. https://www.redharemedia.ie/ [https://www.redharemedia.ie/]

Episode 7: Wet was the day, cold was the ground

And so in the end up where did Granny Brown go And what about Granda Leo Aunty Julia, Uncle James and their wee dog Rona Bernard, and Gerard and Roy Something to do with roving at night Something to do with the water A backyard lit by the kitchen light Something to do with the water Mum and dad, Bernie and John Ellie and James and Gerald, John Cochrane, John Francis and Uncle Ben Mary, Marie and John Butler Something to do with the kettle not boiled Something to do with the meal Something to do with the best china cups and The smokers around for their tea Something to do with the sycamore tree Something to do with the rowan Something to do with the hazel bush Something to do with the season Polly and Jeanie and old Billy Greer Paddy and Jack and Arthur Arty McAllister, Dessie McKeown Tony and Mrs. McKinley Something to do with the river in flood Something to do with the blackthorn Something to do with the red shade at night Something to do with the morning Something to do with the wheels of the world Something to do with the gulder Something to do with the wheel of the hurl And the eternal chip on the shoulder Something to do with the rose in the heather There’s cows coming down through the orchard Something to do with the weeds in the lane And evening out on the ocean Something to do with the chapel and clay Something to do with the sound Of a dog barking down round the end of the road Wet was the day, cold was the ground