Released twenty years ago, Fused was Michael McGoldrick’s second solo album, one that followed four years after his debut Morning Rory. Bodhran player Cormac Byrne’s description of seeing Mike play live, with Dezi Donnelly, John Joe Kelly and Ed Boyd, at the time of Morning Rory’s release: “I was blown away by the sound and the arrangements, just the vibe of it, it just felt like something other, something different, had this raw kind of edge.” While Fused retained that feel, it was so much more, Fused had a much bigger, contemporary sound which drew on, and very successfully integrated, a wide range of musical styles – jazz, funk, dance and Indian rhythms – into what was still wholly recognisable as Irish traditional music. It was the polar opposite of a difficult second album, and could not have been a better choice for the launch of Donald Shaw’s Vertical Records.
Part one is story of the making of Fused based mostly on interviews with Mike (the name by which everyone I interviewed for this piece referred to him), with some of the band who played on the album – Donald Shaw (producer, keyboards and label owner), Ed Boyd (guitar), Ewen Vernal (bass) and James Macintosh (drums). It is a story that is inextricably tied up, for both the band and for others, with live performances. Mike explained that: “Since Fused was launched in 2000 at Celtic Connections, we’ve continued to play material from the album on the rare occasions that we’ve played as the big band; rare because of the cost and the logistics. If it was possible, I’d love to do it all the time.” For Ed Boyd: “Playing with the big band is definitely a special thing for me, it’s rare but it’s always a treat.” After a triumphant Anniversary gig at Celtic Connections back in January (read our review here, including Mike’s track by track description of the album), COVID-19 has completely muted any further live celebrations by wiping out planned Festival appearances. This two-part exploration of the making and influence of Fused may go some way to restoring some of that missing due recognition for a 20-year old landmark album. Part two will have the thoughts of other musicians on the impact that Fused has had on them, and more widely.
‘The tune was always king’; Mike and band on the making of Fused
Fused, Ewen Vernal put it, “borrows from a quite a variety of different styles of music that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with Celtic or traditional music”.
Where did all that come from?
The comparison with Moving Hearts was made at time Fused came out and also by some of our interviewees. Mike was happy to acknowledge the debt: “If you’ve got uilleann pipes, low whistle, bass, drums and keyboard, and you’re playing up tempo music, it’s going have similarities with Moving Hearts. I’ll tip my hat to them. Without their music, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. Then there’s Davy Spillane’s albums with Bela Flack and Albert Lee, and getting a chance to watch him, and Stockton’s Wing, at The International Club in Manchester loads and loads of times. I’d come away and think, one day I’d like to be a good enough a musician to get up there and do that.”
Mike was a member of ‘Celtic rockers’ Toss The Feathers for almost a decade, so was used to playing with drums and bass. In 1989 they released their own version (including the, at the time, ubiquitous 12” mix) of Stockton Wing’s disco-style arrangement of the tune Skidoo.
Around the same time, Mike and fiddle player Dezi Donnelly recorded the more modern dance sounding Acid Reel. Two instrumentals on Toss The Feathers last 1995 album The Next Round – Keeple Hole (which resurfaced on Capercaillie’s Beautiful Wasteland) and Hop Two Three – also offer a hint, but without the same subtlety or depth.
Mike picks up the story: “Let’s go back to Morning Rory, my first album, which came out in 1996. I thought that album had a traditional feel to it but the last track, The Dub Reel, shows different influences, with the bass and the drums. From that there was a collaboration with Ian Fletcher in a band called Inner Space, with samples and different world music influences [Ian and Mike later collaborated on the Future Trad Collective album in 2011]. Fused built on that and was a combination of my favourite music and albums I’d been listening to. I’d never heard Indian tabla played with a set of traditional Irish tunes, and some of the rhythm patterns reminded me of the sound of Irish step dancing. So, when I was listening to Shakti with John McLaughlin or to Hariprasad Chaurasia, I was thinking about how to incorporate the tabla into my next album. I was listening to John Coltrane for saxophone, to Tower of Power for the brass section sound, to Gil Scott Heron for Brian Jackson’s jazzy flute playing, to lots of dub reggae on the Trojan label, to hip hop, rap, to Weather Report, to jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius, drummer Billy Cobham, to Gong, to Talvin Singh. Then to Matt Molloy, Seamus Ennis, to albums by The Bothy Band, Planxty, Stockton’s Wing, Moving Hearts, all of which I was always listening to.”
So, how did Mike, and Fused producer and keyboard player Donald Shaw, bring together such a myriad of influences, and the band to do the job?
Mike: “I slept on these things for a long time, trying to work out if, through all the music I was listening to, different things would work; an album with Indian tabla, with a full brass section, a heavy funk groove, a track with a dub reggae feel. I was thinking that I’ve got to try and get my ideas out on the next record, with all these influences in a way that has never been done before and put an individual stamp on it. I had a small recording studio in Manchester, so I did a lot of pre-production, playing bass and guitar lines, before I went up to Glasgow to record the album. I knew what kind of drum groove I wanted, the grooves I wanted, the tempos I wanted.”
Donald Shaw: “In the year and a half or so Mike had been with Capercaillie – he joined around 1998 – we spent a lot of time on tour listening to a lot of things and chatting about music. We really shared a lot of the same passion for artists, particularly albums that might crossover from world music into other forms. We had a plan which was to go into the studio and not think too carefully about what was expected of a traditional music record but at the same time we didn’t want to try to sound cool or anything, we didn’t to make it too rocky, or indie, or clubby or anything. We said let’s just feel the music, feel what’s good for the track. We were both into the idea of it sounding a little bit left field. It was at a time in my life where I was really into experimentation, cutting up beats and samples.”
Mike: “Some of musicians had played on Morning Rory [Donald Shaw, Ed Boyd, Alan Kelly, Manus Lunny]. I was doing some gigs with Johnny Kalsi, and Johnny played tabla and dhol in The Dhol Foundation, so I got him to come in and play tabla on the album. Neil Yates had played on a Toss The Feathers track ten years before, and we played together on Edward II’s album Zest in 1996. I loved his trumpet playing and then discovered here was a jazzer who was also into Matt Molloy, Seamus Ennis, the same music I was listening to. So, I asked him if could help get a brass section together. James Macintosh is a musician’s drummer who knows how to play the tune. I liked his playing with Shooglenifty and with Capercaillie. Ewen came from a pop background.”
The participants in the making the album each expressed the view that the traditional tunes are the foundation on which the rest of Fused was built.
Ed Boyd: “Mike’s always said that the bedrock of what he does is traditional and that’s what he loves, but there’s no harm in seeing how far you can push it. With him the melody is so strong and so engaging and so musical that everything stems from that. If you’ve got a great tune, whatever you do to it is going to be OK – you’re starting off with something good already, you’re not trying to take something that’s mediocre and polish it to make it shine.”
Mike: “The tune was the king always. All the little intricacies whether it’s a brass line, a flugel horn, or a tabla pattern or a sample of a groove, were never meant to be over the top, just subtle additions, and that was the result in the end.”
Donald Shaw: “We had this thing as well, the starting point, if you just record Mike playing a tune, for me that was great, I love that, that was almost enough for me. So, I had this theory that when we were making the record, if we always started with that and we’d then just built up the track, and add drums, base and brass, and samples, and so on. At any point we could just say, ‘you know it sounded better without all that’, but with this album that didn’t happen. We ended up loving the way the arrangements worked.”
Ewen Vernal: “I think when you hear Mike play, when he’s playing on his own, there’s an integrity and a real positivity about his playing. It’s easy to get involved in something that he does. There’s’ never any feeling of it being a bit contrived, or like we’re trying to shoehorn one kind of style into another. There are some experiments that you hear in this kind of scene that sometimes don’t work, there’s some quite incongruous combinations sometimes. I’ve never heard that for a second in Mike’s music, in anything that he’s done, which says a lot for him as a person and a musician. Loads of people can be great musicians but to make that something that’s your own and have a real strong individual voice, that’s a big step.”
How did things work once they were in the studio?
Mike: “I went into the studio and we recorded seven tracks as guide tracks with bass, drums, keyboards and guitar, then other things were laid on top of that, and then I rerecorded my parts. Having a producer like Donald meant the guide tracks were properly recorded. He comes up lots of ideas, has got a great pair of ears, is really easy to work with. He played the guide tracks to me, and then the rerecorded versions, and I could hear that the earlier ones were better. The later ones just didn’t sound right, sounded too distant from the sound I wanted. I still hear a few mistakes on the album, but I left them there because they were meant to be there.”
Donald Shaw: “Mike and I crossed over from both being musicians to both being producers, from being producer to being musicians on different days.”
Ewen Vernal: “Without being single minded, Donald’s always got an overview of what the thing sounds like in a rough, ball-park kind of way. Within that he’s generous enough to have other people’s influence, but still without losing the original concept.”
Ed Boyd: “A great thing about Mike and Donald together, they never force you out of your comfort zone. So, they take what you have to offer and say that’ll work with that bit there – it’s adding something, it’s supporting but it’s not clashing with anything. Everyone on that album is a friend of Mike’s, they haven’t just been drafted in just because they are good at what they do, but it’s come out of a human connection, not simply a job for a fee.”
James Mackintosh: “It felt very exciting at the time. I loved it when we hit on the groove for James Brown’s March.”
Mike: “We added lots of little layers, there’s loads of sounds that come in: it could be a jungle beat, a drum & bass beat, synth sounds. They’re not there all the time. I remember a lot of people, in particular musician friends saying a few years after it came that every time they listened to it, they kept hearing something new. That was on purpose.”
What was their sense of the finished album, and how it was received both at the time and since?
James Mackintosh: “It took things to another level, playing the tunes in a tasteful and funky way. I remember playing the Festival Club the night after the launch gig and the vibe in the room was extraordinary. You know things are happening when the other musicians are hanging out at the side of the stage checking out what’s going on. Then you started hearing the tunes in sessions and you still hear the tunes in sessions. I was in the Ben Nevis [a Glasgow session bar] last night and heard James Brown’s March, they’ve just become part of the cannon.”
Donald Shaw: ”Something that was really telling was that we had someone who was looking after the album in Ireland. I asked him about an advertising budget in Ireland and he said I think this album is so different, so unique, you’re better off not spending any money. Don’t advertise it because if there’s one thing the trad heads hate, it’s being told what to like. I wasn’t sure about it, but then within six months it had sold 5,000 copies in Ireland, which was really good for trad music at the time. He said it’s just been amazing, word of mouth, people phoning up saying you have to get me that record. When I’ve been with Mike at different times around the world, someone will come up and say, ‘I listen to Fused all the time’.”
Ewen Vernal: “I remember not so long after it had been released going out for a pint with Donald to a place where there was a session with young players and at least 2 or 3 of the tunes that were played were from Fused. So already at that point the tunes were starting to become quite popular session tunes around Glasgow and Edinburgh with younger kids.”
Mike: “I didn’t set out to thinking about what people would think of the album, I just knew that I’m here to make an album of the music and influences that I’m into. I didn’t want it to sound like anyone else – this is my record, my idea my tradition and to have something that nobody else was doing. I love that musicians say that they kept hearing something new, that it’s a grower, and that young musicians say it was an album they listened to growing up and were inspired by, the same as I was listening to Bothy Band. It’s one of the biggest compliments you can get, that and hearing one of your compositions being played by other people.”
Part two of this exploration of the making and influence of Fused will have the thoughts of other musicians – Julie Fowlis, Duncan Chisholm, Damien O’Kane, Jarlath Henderson, Cormac Byrne, Aileen Reid, Ciaran Clifford, Graham Mackenzie and Méabh Kennedy, together with sound engineer Alan ‘Dinner’ MacKinnon. We will also have favourite, Fused related, amusing and illuminating stories from Mike, Julie Fowlis, Cormac Byrne and Donald Shaw.
Fused is available from Vertical Records here.