‘Project Tina’
Ancient History:
Taking her influences from artists as diverse as Planxty and Led
Zeppelin, Tina McSherry, originally from West Belfast, has a rich
yet unfulfilled history in music. A former Entertainments Officer
at the Students’ Union of Queens University Belfast, Tina -
and her siblings John, Paul and Joanne - were well-known on the
Irish traditional music scene in Belfast and beyond.
By the time they coalesced into
Tamalin, a sensuous
blend of traditional music and Tina’s exquisite,
free-wheeling songwriting, commentators and key players within the
Irish music industry saw them as somewhere between Page & Plant
and The Corrs, surely destined for greatness.
An album,
Rhythm & Rhyme, was released
nationally on Grapevine in 1997, with glowing reviews from all the
major music titles, and the group toured Australia with Irish music
legend Donal Lunny. Tina had previously toured in Europe as an
occasional member of all-girl harmony group The Wildflowers.
A combination of Donal head-hunting John McSherry - currently a
major player in the professional Irish music world - for his own
group, Coolfin, along with changes at the Grapevine label and
questionable management decisions effectively halted the
group’s progress just as it seemed to be hitting first base.
Becoming pregnant, Tina withdrew from music completely, from both
professional and trad session environments, and settled in a remote
rural part of Northern Ireland. Was this the end of the road? No,
it wasn’t…
Recent History:
Along with Janet Holmes and Helen McGurk, I’ve always thought
of Tina McSherry as one of a trinity of really special,
’undiscovered’ vocalists from the place where I live,
Belfast. In a parellel universe they’d all be rich and
famous. I don’t claim to have ‘discovered’ any of
them, but being in awe of this disparate trio and being the sort of
person with an unfortunately restless surfeit of creative zeal (as
TV detective Adrian Monk would say, ’it’s a
blessing… and a curse…’) I was well-placed in
the mid ‘90s to ask all three to record some songs with me.
For some reason, they all agreed.
Also involved in this curious exercise (the recordings were never
designed for commercial release, though the process of making them
brought me a lot of fulfillment) were a host of other local
musicians I really admired, several of whom have gone on to feature
in further Harper projects - vocalist Rick Monro being the web
designer for both the Janet Holmes and Wildlife Albums sites, and
pianist Cormac O’Cathain producing some recent Janet Holmes
‘second album’ sessions and mastering the tracks on the
Pentangle box set, for example - along with a couple of bona fide
international artists, Martin Hayes and Brooks Williams. But I
digress…
Some of the 1995-96 recordings were remastered, added to or
otherwise tweaked for inclusion on
The Wildlife Album in 2004. For the
record, those that made the cut were the four tracks credited to
Brooks Williams, Martin Hayes, Helen McGurk/The Legends Of
Tomorrow, and Rick Monro / Iain Archer / Susan Enan. Janet Holmes
contributed a leftover from her own album recordings of 2001. The
question, then, was how could I feature the great Tina
McSherry?
I did have a fantastic sounding track - the only one we recorded
together, with full band, back in 1995 - but it didn’t feel
right for
The Wildlife Album. Somehow, the
notion of hauling her out of retirement to front another full-band
rock’n’roll bliss-out with a cover of Billy Thorpe
& The Aztecs’ 1971 Australian smash ‘Most People I
Know Think That I’m Crazy’ did.
Remarkably, Tina, who hadn’t really done anything musical for
six or seven years, was up for it. An array of great local players
all turned up for the session - including pianist/MD Brian Connor
and bass guitar wizard Ali MacKenzie - with no rehearsal necessary.
The other musicians were solo recording artiste Colin Reid and
graphic designer (often called upon, and always willing, to design
posters and flyers for Harper-related live events) James Davis, on
guitars, and drummer Paul Hamilton, from local rock stars
Leya.
Everyone was on form and the finished track remains one of my
favourites from the album. I got the impression Tina was glad to
have a chance to be in a recording studio again, and hoped this
might inspire her back into music in some way. Sure enough, a few
months later she called and asked if Brian Connor and I might be
interested in helping her make an album.
Some background on Brian might be appropriate here…
Equally adept in rock, jazz, singer/songwriter and classical music
situations, Brian, from East Belfast, has performed and recorded
with many of the most prominent ensembles and artists in Ireland
including the National Symphony Orchestra, Irish Film Orchestra,
Mary Coughlan, Van Morrison, Sharon Shannon, Eleanor McEvoy,
Siobhan Pettit, Freddie White, Carmina and Colin Reid. He’s
also worked extensively in television and radio as musical director
and in 1998 he became Musical Director of
Riverdance - The Show and performed
with it in the UK and across the US on many of its record-breaking
tours.
In April 2004 Brian completed his swansong tour
with singer/songwriter Eleanor McEvoy, having worked with her as a
duo over the previous three years. He co-produced Eleanor's fourth
album
Yola
- awarded
HiFi
Plus magazine's
'Album of the Year' in 2003 - and also features prominently on her
subsequent album,
Early Hours (2004). Several
of his recent performances with Van Morrison are featured on
Van’s recent album
Magic Time (2005).
But aside from all this glamour, one of Brian’s most
admirable qualities is giving time to musicians at the bottom of
the ladder. I remain, personally, greatly indebted to him for
helping out substantially with several Janet Holmes recordings
(three of which appear on
The Road To The West and one other
on
The Wildlife Album) and when
presented with Tina’s request his immediate response was
invigorating enthusiasm. A set of piano/vocal demos were quickly
recorded, two of which - along with a guitar/vocal demo recorded
with brother Paul McSherry - were pressed as a promotional EP and
(bar cheerleading, my role in all this) sent to numerous record
labels. But of course, of the three or four who bothered to
respond, none were interested. Truth be told, I had always
suspected this would be the case - not any reflection on Brian or
Tina, just a sense of the doomed state of the recorded music
industry, certainly in the form that we’ve known it, these
days.
In short: if you want to do anything, do it yourself. And something
we did, in this spirit, was give Tina, Brian and a couple of hired
hands a platform to perform live - at Belfast’s Spring &
Airbrake, on November 2nd
2005, alongside
international artists Martyn Joseph and Karine Polwart, the
occasion being the launch of
Live In Hope: The Wildlife Album 2. While many
were delighted that she was back performing, Tina herself, and
Brian, felt her performance was compromised by nerves. But it was a
start.
Unfortunately, with other commitments, logistics became a problem
for Brian at this point. With no-one else obvious to recommend for
the role - of unpaid collaborator on a weekly get-together basis,
to put form and structure to the wealth of songs floating around in
Tina‘s head - I offered my services till someone better came
along. That was around the end of 2005, and in spite of my
musicianship-with-caveats credentials (ie. capable of the odd
interesting idea perhaps but lumbered with an eccentric
instrumental technique, not much discipline in being able to play
the same thing twice, and almost no experience at playing live)
things progressed pretty positively. With a few songs in skeletal
form, we got bass man extraordinaire Ali MacKenzie involved, and a
few weeks later Ali got his drummer of choice, Davy Kennedy,
involved.
Bizarrely, this Tina McSherry Quartet made its recorded debut not
on a stage nor even something in a dank pub backroom that purported
to be a stage but on television: two songs recorded in rudimentary
fashion at BBC Northern Ireland in February 2006 and then mimed to
(seemingly forever) in a hired room at The King’s Head, a pub
across town. The songs will apparently be broadcast on a
Gaelic-language magazine show in June.
On March 31st
2006, Tina, Ali
and myself performed our bona
fide live debut at a
wildlife charity event at No Alibis bookstore in Belfast -
alongside readings from writers Gareth Higgins and Glenn Patterson
and music from the amazing Denise Roden’s ensemble (reprising
both ‘Bonjour Mon Couer’ and ‘Passing
Away’, from
The Wildlife Album), James Devlin
and Caroline Orr. Obviously I’m biased, but we seemed to go
down rather well - remarkably, perhaps, as all sorts of things (not
least Tina’s house flooding) had precluded a rehearsal for
three weeks. Luckily, being the organiser of the whole night, I had
far too many other things to worry about to even think about
worrying about what, for me, was playing live for the first time in
15 years!
Recorded on the night by a couple of trainee engineer pals of
Cormac O’Cathain, the three songs performed - McSherry
originals ‘Starchild’ and ‘Walk With Me’
and her translation into Irish of WB Yeats’ ‘The Sally
Gardens’ (from the Tamalin album) - will hopefully appear on
this site in streamed form.
Tina’s house had, most inconveniently, flooded on a night
we’d planned to go into a studio to record some tracks. In
the event Ali, Davy and myself decided to go ahead and managed to
record a backing track for what I suppose is a group original, as
yet awaiting lyrics from Mrs O’Donnell (our Tina‘s
alter ego). Ali’s keen to get an EP together sooner rather
than later. As for me, it’s just great fun to be involved in
something with so much drive coming from other people - where
it’s not a crazy project dependent on me pulling rabbits out
of hats all the time! Musically, I am, without doubt, the weakest
link, but it’ll be fun while it lasts.
Colin
Harper, April 2006