The profound shock and grief in the Manchester Irish music community that followed the unexpected death of fiddle player Andrew (Andy) Dinan in May this year says a lot about both the high regard in which Andy was held and the strength of the ties that bind that community together. You may not have heard Andy’s name before, but that he recorded with Ade Edmondson, Michael McGoldrick, and Jon Thorne shows how highly his playing was thought of. The tragedy of Andy’s death is distressingly compounded by him having recently recorded, but not then yet released, his first album as a named artist. Recorded with guitar player Jim Richardson, the album, Inside Out is an apt record of Andy’s considerable talent and legacy. Jim and Andy’s contemporaries Grace Kelly and Michael McGoldrick (who recorded the album at his studio) kindly spoke to me about Andy and the album.
Andy learnt his craft in Manchester as one of many exceptionally gifted second-generation musicians playing Irish traditional music in Manchester in the 1980s and 1990s. As a young musician, he played alongside Flook’s bodhran player extraordinaire John Joe Kelly in the St Malachy’s Ceili Band. The first English-based musician to win the All-Ireland Fiddle Championship in 1994, Andy went on to play with Toss The Feathers around the time of their final 1995 album, The Next Round. A busy period followed from 2009 to 2013 as a member of Adrian Edmondson’s The Bad Shepherds and the short-lived Manchester traditional Irish band, The House Devils. In 2011 Andy recorded the Future Trad Collective album with Michael McGoldrick and guitarist Ian Fletcher (another Toss The Feathers refugee), supported by many others, including Jon Thorne (double bass) and Parvinder Bharat (tabla); a real cornucopia of styles – primarily traditional tunes, some new ones, in a mix of dance styles, with heaps of percussion.
Two years later, a closely overlapping group of musicians (Andy, Ian, Jon, Parvinder – McGoldrick on just two tracks) released the album MANCUNIA as the band Ducie, unsurprisingly in a similar vein but probably overall a more cohesive record. Our editor, reviewing the album back in 2013, said that the “inventiveness of MANCUNIA is staggering” and had this to say about Andy’s playing on the track ‘Grianan Bear It‘, two jigs and a tune from northern Spain in a reggae dub style: “Dinan’s fiddle dances around like the man with no weight on his shoulders”. That description is extraordinarily apposite, as Andy played with his left hand unusually high, making the fiddle appear exceptionally lightweight, and there was a distinct lightness of touch in his playing.
Traditional tunes, and tunes written in traditional style, are very much at the core of Inside Out, primarily Irish, but there are Breton polkas and a French-Canadian tune, all punctuated by a couple of songs and a blues tune. The opening track – Little Katie Taylor’s/Sean Ryan’s/The Silver Spear – establishes a very effective pattern, with Andy’s buoyant playing front and centre, fortified by sympathetic, unobtrusive accompaniment from Jim Richardson. Andy describes the first tune as one ‘you can really get your shoulder into’, and he does, Jim supplementing guitar with overdubbed subtle walking bass that helps to drive The Silver Spear. Michael McGoldrick described Andy as having “a unique style of playing, able to craft a performance out of any tune and make it an ‘Andy’ tune. It could be soft and gentle at times, or wild and full of sparks; Trad at heart but with echoes of blues and classical at times. He was self-taught and played by ear. Andy was one a big names on the Trad scene.”
Manchester has a thriving pub/bar session scene, and Andy was a regular participant, luckily for me, in a weekly session led by stalwart whistle/fiddle player and singer Grace Kelly only 15 minutes from my front door. Grace said that Andy: “brought any session to life, with wonderful tunes, rhythm, and pace. He inspired others and always made everyone laugh”. Grace is also a composer of excellent tunes, and for the album, Andy and Jim recorded a set of three – The Night Owl/Horsebite/Our Kid – and another, The Conversation, with ever-popular tunesmith Tony Sullivan’s Exile of Erin (also to be found on Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill’s Live In Seattle album). During lockdown, Andy had asked Grace if she had any tunes he might record for the album. Grace told me: “I played him a few tunes and he said, send me those. I was over the moon he loved them and wanted to record them. What a wonderful job he did, bringing them to life with his gorgeous twists and turns.”
A ‘blues’ tune – Ten Bar Blues, written by Andy – shakes things up a bit. It starts with a fiddle refrain, more like a snatch of a slow air than blues, the fiddle sounding almost like a viola. While the fiddle playing has a jazzy feel, there’s no mistaking the blues in the fine harmonica break from Mat Walklate (Mat played with Andy in The House Devils) and the electric guitar from Jim. On the surface, a simple tune made notably intriguing with the shifts in the sounds and arrangement.
The American Civil War is the inspiration for Andy’s composition Civil War Lament. More specifically, Andy writes in the sleeve notes: “Southern landowners offered black soldiers a deal – fight on their side and if victorious, they would be given their freedom. I’ve always thought it was such cruel irony for black soldiers to be made to kill each other in a fight for what was supposed to be about their liberation.” It starts with an evocative Ry Cooder-esque slide guitar with Andy then effortlessly capturing that mournful old-time fiddle sound, ideally suited to that disquieting slice of history.
Nancy, Andy’s daughter, sings two songs on the album. Jolie Holland’s Old Fashioned Morphine and, much more left field, a reworking by Jim of Transmission, Joy Division’s first single on Factory Records (an explicit Manchester reference, alongside the cover photo – a distance shot through a window of the Beetham Tower in city centre Manchester). Bearing little resemblance to the original, it works remarkably well, sounding more like a lost psych-folk classic. Michael McGoldrick described what happened when Nancy recorded her vocals. “Andy said, if he stayed in the studio while she recorded, it would put her off, so he nipped across the road to the pub. Nancy nailed both songs on her first takes, so I called Andy to come back to the studio to listen. His reply was: ‘That was quick. I’ve not even finished my first pint. Get Nancy to sing them a few more times’. He was only joking, but the memory of listening to the playback of those songs altogether and Andy giving Nancy a big hug was so beautiful and will stay with me forever. She’s a star in the making.”
The album came about after Andy and Jim started playing together during the pandemic. “We found a lovely groove when we played together”, Jim recalls. “Andy had a box of dreams containing tunes he wanted to record one day. He mostly brought the trad compositions, and I supplied the other genres. Sometimes Andy suggested the arrangements, sometimes I did.” They made McGoldrick’s job as producer relatively straightforward. “The recording was fun”, McGoldrick remembers, “Andy was always making me laugh, but when it came down to recording they gave it 100 percent. They knew exactly what they were going to record, 2 or 3 tracks each session, usually 3 takes and we would pick the favourite. Nothing overdone or stressful; it was a very relaxed atmosphere.”
At the heart of Inside Out are sets of traditional tunes played impeccably on fiddle and guitar by Andy and Jim, together with, what Andy described a few weeks before he died on Facebook as “some surprises, as we believe music is ultimately a form of self-expression, so once you have learned the rules, there are no rules.” The most poignantly titled tune on the album must be Time flies too fast, which Andy wrote for his daughter Nancy.
Jim summed up the tragedy of Andy’s untimely death: “Andy’s sudden death has been heart-breaking. A lot of the tunes Andy brought were by his friends or written for his family. The album was supposed to be a beginning not an end. Now I see it as a farewell and a gift of love to those of us involved in it.” Andy Dinan is much missed, but we are fortunate that the realisation of his dream is a gift of top-class fiddle music we can all share in.
Inside Out can be purchased by emailing insideoutalbum@hotmail.com. There will be an album launch and celebration at Syndikat, Great Underbank, Stockport, SK1 1LN on Friday, September 9th from 7.00 p.m. with Jim Richardson, Nancy Dinan, Michael McGoldrick, Grace Kelly, John Joe Kelly, Mat Walklate and The Hayes Sisters.