How do you approach a song like Mole in the Ground? The lead single from Look Over the Wall, See the Sky – the second album from Dublin singer John Francis Flynn – is one of the strangest items in folk’s rich inventory. It was first recorded in 1928 by Bascom Lamar Lunsford and anthologised by Harry Smith in 1952; since then, it has confounded and delighted song collectors and music historians in equal measure. The words take in a host of inscrutable characters and bizarre images, from blood-drinking railroad men to vernal lizards. Conjecture about the lyrics points in various directions: politics, sex, plain old nonsense.
Mole is a song you might come to backwards, perhaps without realising you already know it or bits of it. You might recognise the vampiric railroad men from Bob Dylan’s Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again, which itself marked the moment where pop culture and American folk history collided with surrealism most resoundingly. Dylan’s Greenwich Village wanderings brought him into contact with Smith’s anthology in the early 1960s, by which time a whole host of folk revivalists would likely have had their way with the song.
But even by the time of the ‘original’ 1920s recording, Mole in the Ground had almost certainly been through a whole bunch of changes. A folk song has more lives than a cat. This one was likely chopped up, repurposed, misheard, intentionally mis-sung and re-remembered multiple times – Lunsford was a self-confessed prude who swept many a naughty verse under the rug in his time, and in the case of Mole, he first heard the song in 1901, so it was rattling around in his head for nearly three decades before it made its way onto shellac. Does Mole have sexual overtones? Who knows, frankly. It was first collected by Lunsford from the singing of a schoolboy, so it’s likely. Is the imagery surreal or satirical? Is it even imagery? And why does it sound so powerful, so weird, in Flynn’s rendition, a rendition which does away with singing entirely in favour of the spoken word, a kind of forceful, persuasive mumble? What these questions tell us, if indeed they tell us anything, is that folk music isn’t simple; that what we think of as a ‘standard’ or a ‘traditional’ song is often anything but.
When does a song slip from one state to another, from something unknown to something contemporary and, from there, to an old favourite, and finally to a folk song? Where, for example, does Dirty Old Town fit on that matrix? Flynn seems to acknowledge his place as a facilitator of this slippage. He sings – on this album exclusively – old songs, songs that aren’t his. And yet they are wrought so strangely in his hands that they can’t be anyone else’s songs either, not any more. That might be why it feels so absolutely liberating to hear Flynn sing; he unropes these songs from their historical moorings and lets them barrel downstream into the world. As a result, they have the feel of radical statements on the nature of ownership, songs as protean beings, new shapes to comprehend.
Flynn’s version of Dirty Old Town, which concludes the album, is a slowed-down, stripped-back beast. The new shapes come in the form of a brass section, a slightly tipsy addition that dislocates the song from its singer’s usual musical landscape and apparently offers it back to the northern English environs from which it first sprang. It plays out like a comment on the eternal reciprocity of folk music, on how it thrives on the tension between constancy and change. All of this is grand but would mean nothing without Flynn’s awesome power as a singer and musician. I can think of vanishingly few folk singers who are as adept at combining fragility and strength in a single phrase. Richard Dawson is perhaps analogous: despite the vast differences in their respective material, the two seem to approach their songs in similar ways.
Kitty is another exemplary case of fragility coexisting with strength. Best known for its place at the end of the Pogues’ remarkable debut – Shane MacGowan learned it as a child from his mother’s singing – Flynn adorns it with off-kilter woodwind, drones and slowcore percussion. His singing remains the beating heart of the piece, repeating the final lines, heartbreaking and soporific before the composition winds down into a glacial post-rock squall. In this kind of mood, he can conjure up a huge sound: Willie Crotty begins in radio static and flutter, evolves into an impressionistic passage of Brendan Jenkinson’s clarinet and finally resolves into a mountainous drone, jagged with peaks of electronic percussion on which Flynn’s voice teeters and rolls. That voice is perhaps at its strongest on The Lag’s Song, where it ranges pained and impassioned, high in the mix above minimal plucked strings and Ultan O Brien’s scraped fiddle.
The Seasons – an old Scottish song – allows for a moment of respite from the album’s heavier passages. Essentially, it’s pastoral folk processed through the weird warp of Robert Wyatt-like instrumentation, but even here, there are moments when the drums courtesy of Ross Chaney – sound like one of the Japanese noise-rock combo Boris’s forays into minimalism. Within a Mile of Dublin follows a similar quiet-loud structure to Willie Crotty, but here, Flynn’s precise, flighty whistle drives a furrow through the drone. The song ends in a crash of sandblasted drums and Kaija Kennedy’s highly processed vocals, and the result is perhaps the album’s most strangely refreshing piece.
He can be playful too: Zoological Gardens, which is the album’s opening track, pays homage to the Dubliners’ version by playing up to the groaning, unsubtle double entendres of the lyrics. It’s a delight, but it also lulls you into a false sense of security. The first few seconds are sung unaccompanied, but a strange soundscape, jarring and almost bleak, soon begins to take over. From that point onwards, the surprises rarely let up.
In one sense, Flynn belongs to the tradition of Ronnie Drew and Luke Kelly, but in another sense, he is part of the world of contemporary experimental music. Which is to say that, like fellow Dubliners Lankum and like Richard Dawson, he truly belongs in neither camp, and that’s probably the way he likes it. Flynn cut his teeth in Dublin trad favourites Skipper’s Alley, whose 2014 self-titled debut was a predominantly instrumental affair. He began to emerge more fully as a singer on 2019’s The Oul Fip. His first solo album, I Would Not Live Always, came out on the River Lea label in 2021 and immediately established him as one of the most distinctive voices in Irish folk. His outlook, which seems sometimes to be in the modernist tradition, is actually less about making his songs new than letting them exist in liberated states, where newness and strangeness are encouraged rather than forced.
It’s wrong to think of songs as existing in isolation from each other, even songs as weird and singular as Mole in the Ground, and Flynn reminds us that there is a web of creative expression on which even the most disparate elements hang. This album is like that web in microcosm: there are links everywhere – threads rather than chains – that don’t so much provide a structure as suggest multiple jumping-off points for further exploration. Sometimes, these links are obvious – the two consecutive Ewan MacColl songs that end the album – and sometimes less so. There is, for example, a constant battle between imprisonment and escape. The Lag’s Song and Kitty are both sung from the point of view of prisoners, and in Dirty Old Town, the prison is the industrial landscape and the social conditions it implies. Mole in the Ground is perhaps best understood as a song of wish fulfilment, where the language is both liberating and liberated, though even here, the narrator describes the hardship of being in a real, rather than symbolic, penitentiary. The Zoological Gardens was once sung by Brendan Behan, one of Ireland’s most famous prisoners, and Willie Crotty tells the tale of an outlaw who is incarcerated and finally hanged, thereby attaining a very different sort of freedom.
Look Over the Wall, See the Sky is also an album that explores freedom of movement and, by extension, the breaking down of borders. Its title refers to a world beyond, a dream of freedom. It’s easy enough to draw parallels between Flynn’s boundary-breaking approach to music and the concepts he espouses. Easy and probably correct. And Flynn goes even further: there is something refreshingly, vividly utopian behind the darkness in these songs. If there were any doubts as to whether traditional songs can still be sharply meaningful in a contemporary musical setting, this album lays them to rest.
Look Over The Wall, See The Sky will be released via River Lea Recordings on November 10th 2023
Album Tracklisting:
- The Zoological Gardens
- Mole In The Ground
- Willie Crotty
- Kitty
- The Seasons
- Within A Mile Of Dublin
- The Lag Song
- Dirty Old Town
Pre-Order Look Over The Wall, See The Sky: https://johnfrancisflynn.ffm.to/lotwsts
Forthcoming Tour Dates
tickets on sale Friday, Sept 15th
Fri, Dec 1st – Set Theatre, Kilkenny
Sat, Dec 2nd – Vicar St, Dublin
Fri, Dec 8th – Roisin Dubh, Galway
Sat, Dec 9th – St Luke’s, Cork
Sun, Dec 10th – De Barras, Clonakilty
Thurs, Dec 14th – Dolan’s Warehouse, Limerick
Fri, Jan 12th – Out To Lunch Festival, Ulster Sports Club, Belfast
Fri, Jan 19th – Brudenell, Leeds
Sat, Jan 20th – Celtic Connections, Drygate, Glasgow
Sun, Jan 21st – The Caves, Edinburgh
Tues, Jan 23rd – The Exchange, North Shields
Wed, Jan 24th – YES. Manchester
Thurs, Jan 25th – Hare and Hounds, Birmingham
Fri, Jan 26th – Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff
Sat, Jan 27th – The Exchange, Bristol
Tues, Jan 30th – Concorde 2, Brighton
Wed, Jan 31st – The Dome, London
Thu, Feb 22nd – Theatre Royal, Waterford