Right. I've had two days' sleep and a fierce amount of tea to think about this, and I'm only now able to put it into words. So here's the truth of it, lads: the best music I heard at the whole Fleadh this year did not happen in a pub. It did not happen on a stage. It happened in a CAR PARK. A tarmac car park behind a hotel, under one of those orange sodium lights that makes everyone look slightly jaundiced, at half four in the morning, with about forty people who would not, COULD NOT, go home.
I'll explain how it started because that's the gas part.
The official sessions wind down. The pubs have their licence and the licence has an end, and round about half two a barman with the patience of a saint starts going "now lads, now, that's us." And out we all spilled. And there's a thing that happens in that moment — you can feel it, it's like static — where a crowd of musicians who've been playing all night reach the door and NONE of them have the instrument cases properly shut. The fiddles are still out. Yer man with the box has it half on his knee already. And somebody, I never found out who, somebody just kept playing. Walking and playing. A reel, out into the night air. And the whole lot of us followed the sound like we were under a spell, round the side of the hotel, and into this car park.
And it just. Kept. Going.
I want to be specific because that's the only way you'll believe me. There was a fella from Donegal on fiddle with his coat still on, zipped to the chin, playing like the cold didn't exist. Two German girls who'd come over for the week — flute and concertina — and the concertina one knew tunes I'd never heard, these strange high ones, and the Donegal man would listen for one go-round and then he'd be IN it, no bother. There was a lad sitting on the bonnet of a Nissan Micra (not his, I'd put money on it) with a bodhrán, and a older woman, seventies maybe, who'd brought out a kitchen chair from somewhere — an actual kitchen chair — and sat in the middle of it all like a queen. Nobody organised any of this. That's the bit that gets me. Nobody said let's go to the car park. It assembled itself.
There's no pints in a car park. That's the thing people don't get. The official session, lovely as it is, there's a transaction underneath it — you're a customer, the pub needs the till to ring. But out there on the tarmac there was no till and no stage and no sound man and no setlist. There was nothing to be had out of it for anybody except the playing. And so the playing was PURE. I'm not being romantic. (Well. I'm being a small bit romantic.) But you could hear it. Tunes nobody plays in public because they're "too old" or "nobody knows them." Songs sung quiet because at four in the morning your voice has nowhere else to go.
And yes. Yes, of course we sang it. About half three, when the song-lull came and somebody needed to NOT play a reel for two minutes, I started it. Low. Just the first verse, the bog down in the valley-o, and I swear to you the car park took it up before I'd finished the line. Forty people. The German girls phonetically, the Donegal man harmonising on the "ro," the woman in the kitchen chair conducting with one finger. By the tree on the bog we had a round going, the higgledy-piggledy lovely chaos of it bouncing off the hotel wall and back, and somebody up in a hotel window — a real window, an actual guest — pulled the curtain and looked out and did NOT shout at us. He just listened. That's the Fleadh for you. If you've never sung it in a crowd, the lyrics are here, but I'll tell you the lyrics are the smallest part. The thing that happened in that car park you cannot write down.
We finished around five. I know because the sky was doing that grey thing over the rooftops. The woman folded up her kitchen chair and carried it off without a word, and I never learned her name, and I think about that constantly. The Donegal man shook my hand and his hand was freezing and he said "good man, the bog" and that was the whole of our conversation, start to finish, the whole night. Sound. Absolutely sound.
People ask me why I keep this oul website going, twenty-odd years now, a fan shrine for one daft cumulative song. And the honest answer is THIS is why. Because the song is a key. It opens car parks. It opens four-in-the-morning. It gets a German concertina player and a Donegal fiddler and a woman with a kitchen chair all making one sound for one minute, and then they scatter back across the world and you never see them again. I've written before about the Doolin session that wouldn't end, and people thought I was exaggerating. I wasn't then and I'm not now. The music doesn't stop because the pub closes. It stops when the LAST one of you can't keep your eyes open. And not a second before. If you want to know which tunes hold up at that hour, half of them are in the songbook, but honestly the right ones find themselves.
So that's my Fleadh. Not the concert. Not the competitions. A car park, a kitchen chair, and forty strangers who couldn't go home.
I'd do it again tomorrow. I'd do it tonight.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Got home at half six, fell into the bed, and Rattlin the cat was ALREADY asleep on my side of it, stretched the whole length, paws out, like he'd been up all night at a car park session of his own. I slept on the edge. He didn't move. Forty strangers wouldn't budge me but one cat did. Such is life.