Last year, we introduced many of you to Bring Your Own Hammer, a project in which historians and composers collaborate to create new and original song cycles based on historical sources. It is rooted in the history of nineteenth-century Ireland and the Irish Diaspora and involves leading Irish composers, musicians and singers. Their first release was “Golden Streets, Bitter Tears”, featuring Adrian Crowley and Brigid Mae Power. Today, we are pleased to share their latest release in the series: ‘The Female Cabin Boy’ by Eileen Gogan, who the Irish Times called “one of Ireland’s most underrated artists”, and Neil Farrell.
Eileen has performed with some of Ireland’s most noted bands (The Would Be’s, The Drays and Microdisney). In 2015, she released her first self-penned solo album, The Spirit of Oberlin, on Stare Music. It received a four-star review in The Irish Times and was repeatedly played on Irish radio. In 2018, she sang with Microdisney on their reunion tour. In 2020, she released her second solo album, Under Moving Skies on Dimple Discs. It features performances by Damian O’Neill (The Undertones), Cathal Coughlan (Microdisney, The Fatima Mansions), Sean O’Hagan (High Llamas, Microdisney) and Terry Edwards (Gallon Drunk, PJ Harvey). It received another four-star review in The Irish Times and MOJO magazine. Tracks from the album were repeatedly played by Gideon Coe (BBC Radio 6) and John Kelly (RTE Lyric FM). Sean O’Hagan, being a fan of her singing and writing, produced an EP of four songs in 2022 titled “Another Golden Day” (Dimple Discs). The EP was greatly favoured by Radcliffe and Maconie on BBC Radio 6, and the accompanying video for the EP track, Wheels (Happy Cycling), premiered on Folk Radio here.
Neil Farrell is a musician, songwriter and producer from Galway, Ireland. He was a founding member of the Galway band Toasted Heretic, whose four albums provided them with a top ten hit as well as rave reviews in the UK and French press. In recent years, he has released two solo albums, A Trip to the Sewers of Paris (2018) and A War About an Egg (2022), both under the moniker of ‘The Melancholy Thug’.
‘The Female Cabin Boy’ is a ballad that circulated in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century. Printed versions were, for instance, published by Nugent & Co. in Dublin in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is a relatively well-known song, and there are quite a few different versions of it with varying titles (e.g. ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’, ‘A Maid That’s Deep in Love’, ‘The Rakish Female Sailor’, ‘Short Jacket and White Trousers’). The version performed on this record clearly circulated among Irish singers – a recorded version of the song by Maddy Prior, from 1968, with broadly similar lyrics, was taken from the singing of Lal Smith, a ‘Belfast tinker’. Mikey Kelleher of Quilty Co. Clare, and living in London in 1977, was recorded singing the song at that time, and he stated that it was ‘over a hundred and fifty years old’. He knew it since he was a child, noting: ‘My old Mam she sung it and I only a baby’. The sea, in this song, holds out the promise of finding the narrator’s lost lover and also becomes a place where the female narrator can (quite contently, it seems) take on a new identity as a ‘cabin boy’. This superb new version by Eileen Gogan with Neil Farrell re-interprets the narrative with a stunning vocal performance and sumptuous musical backing that evokes themes of the sea, desire, love, gender identity and cross-dressing!
All of the songs in this project have been well chosen and interpreted, and The Female Cabin Boy is no exception; Grogan’s voice is mesmerising, while the arrangements give this traditional song a beautifully atmospheric contemporary feel. Outstanding.
Bandcamp: https://bringyourownhammerpresents.bandcamp.com/track/the-female-cabin-boy