Storm Ashley was forecast for days. You know how it is here in November — the lads on the radio getting that little tremble of excitement in their voices, naming the thing like it's a racehorse, telling you to bring in the wheelie bins and check on your elderly neighbours. I brought in the bins. I did NOT think the night would go the way it went.
We almost didn't have the session at all. Mick texted me about six o'clock — "you mad enough to go out in this?" — and I texted back "obviously" because of course I was. It's a Tuesday. We always do the Tuesday. A bit of weather was never going to keep me off my own stool in the corner. So down I went, head bent into it, the rain coming sideways off the Fergus the way it does, and by the time I got into the snug I was wringing wet and grinning like an eejit.
There were nine of us. Small crowd, but a good one — the diehards. Mick on the guitar (no tuner, naturally, he'd sooner lose a finger), Fiona had driven over from Corofin with the fiddle in the back seat, young Eoin who's only learning the bodhrán and is fierce earnest about it, a couple of the regulars, and a German couple who'd wandered in off the road looking for shelter and a pint and got considerably more than they bargained for. God love them.
We were maybe an hour in. The fire was going, the place was warm, and we'd just rolled into the bog. We were at the FLEA. The flea on the feather, the feather on the bird — you know the verse, the whole room stacking it up breath by breath, everyone leaning in because by the flea you have to go fast or the whole thing collapses. And right there. Right on "and the flea on the—"
The lights went.
Not a flicker. GONE. The whole pub, the whole street, the whole road as far as you could see out the window — black. The fridge behind the bar stopped its hum and you suddenly heard how loud it had been all along. Somebody's pint glass clinked. Someone said a word I won't repeat. And there was that half-second where you genuinely don't know what's going to happen, where the room is deciding whether it's annoyed or delighted.
And then Mick — and I will love him forever for this — Mick just kept playing. Didn't miss the bar. Out of the pitch dark you hear him land on "and the flea on the feather" like nothing happened at all, and Fiona's fiddle comes in over the top, and the whole room sort of GASPED and then roared back into it, and we finished the verse in the dark. We finished the WHOLE SONG in the dark.
I'm not going to be able to describe this properly. I've been trying since Tuesday.
Here's the thing nobody tells you. We sing in pubs. There's always a hum — the fridge, the till, a telly somewhere, the heater, the low electric drone of the modern world that you stop hearing because it never stops. Take all of that away at once and the human voice does something. It opens up. It gets BIGGER and softer at the same time. With no amp, no nothing, just nine wet people and a fire, the sound went round the stone walls and came back at us and I swear to you it was the truest the song has ever sounded in twenty-some years of me singing it.
Somebody got the candles going. The pub keeps a box of them behind the bar for exactly this, because this is Clare and the power goes in a stiff breeze, and within a minute there were tea lights along the bar and a few proper candles stuck in old whiskey bottles and everyone's phone torch pointing up at the ceiling so it looked like a little orange sky in there. Eoin held his phone in his teeth so he could keep the bodhrán going. The German fella was filming on his, then put it down — I watched him do it — put it down and just listened, which is the highest compliment a session can be paid.
We did the bog again. Of course we did. You don't get a moment like that and walk away from it. Slower this time, savouring it, and when we hit the flea verse the whole room knew what we were doing and we let it BUILD and build and it was, I am not exaggerating, the best the flea verse has ever been. If you've never understood why I bang on about it being the climax of the whole song, you needed to be in that snug on Tuesday night. The flea by candlelight. Lads.
Nobody wanted to leave. The power came back about half eleven — the lights blinking on all at once, the fridge groaning back to life — and there was this genuine groan of disappointment from the room, like the spell had broken. We'd have happily sat in the dark till morning. I think a part of all of us was a small bit sorry to see the electric come back, which is a mad thing to feel and I felt it all the same.
I've written a fair few session reports on this site over the years and most of them are grand, lovely, ordinary nights. This was not an ordinary night. This was one of the ones you'll be telling people about at YOUR funeral. Go out in the storm sometime, is what I'm saying. Bring the bins in first. But go.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Rattlin slept through the entire thing on top of the radiator and woke up confused and furious when the heating clicked off. She has no respect for atmosphere. She got back on the warm radiator the second the power returned and gave me a look like I'd personally arranged the outage to inconvenience her. Twenty-odd years and she still thinks the whole world is staff.