Serious Livestream Session: Lisa O’Neill, Fri 12th June, 8pm

Serious have announced that they are joining with the National Concert Hall in Dublin to present Lisa O’Neill in a Livestream Session this Friday 12th June at 8 pm.

In 2018, Lisa released her Rough Trade album debut with Heard A Long Gone Song, which marked a new milestone for the County Cavan folk singer songwriter. As well as the album track Rock the Machine, winning Best Original Folk Track at the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards she also saw her fanbase broadening upon the album’s release. She touched on her growing UK audience when she spoke to Folk Radio’s Danny Neill at Cambridge Folk Festival last year:

There are bigger audiences coming to see us and you have to realise this is an audience of strangers for us as well. Why should they come? How should they know? I’ve been coming over to the UK for the past eight or nine years. It’s been a very slow process and slowly it’s been gathering. But with this album, it was a significant difference.
Lisa O’Neill

During that same interview, Danny asked Lisa about the album title which takes its title from Shane MacGowen’s ‘Lullaby of London’ which found her speculating.

It’s quite nostalgic those lyrics, “Heard a long gone song, from days gone by, blown in on the great North Wind” What I get from that as a songwriter is you can be out for a walk and you can get a sense of a couple of notes in the wind. And I imagine Shane taking a walk down the Thames in this situation – if I get a chance to ask him someday, I will, but I haven’t got that close to him yet – but yeah, I picture the young lad walking along the river and it does happen to poetic and musical people, a few notes come in a row and it reminds you of something. It reminds him of music from the past…
Lisa O’Neill

Talking of music from the past, you can watch Lisa performing the album track Along the North Strand, a song she discovered with the help of Alan Woods at the Irish Traditional Music Archive. It was at the Archive that she heard a recording of an Irish Traveller woman named Kitty Cassidy singing the ballad. Myles O’Reilly filmed the video below during the Come On Up To The House tour of Ireland in the summer of 2018. It features Cormac Begley on concertina, Libby McCrohan on bouzouki and a dancing parrot…