DANIEL DAY LEWIS GOES OUT IN STYLE it’s friday!
A final Oscar for a screen legend?
THERE’S no doubt that at one time or another, all of us will have heard The Last Rose Of Summer lilting through the air. The man responsible for this and so many beautiful Irish melodies was Thomas Moore, an 18th century poet and songwriter whose works were, up until recently, associated with the likes of Josef Locke and John McCormack.
Lately Moore’s ballads have fallen somewhat out of favour but musicians Simon Morgan, Karl Nesbitt and Drazen Derek are about to change all that.
They have created a band called The Moorings and have gathered some of the most enchanting performers from all walks of music to create Thomas Moore: Reawakened, a night celebrating the bard at the National Concert Hall.
The Moorings will be joined by Eddi Reader, Martin Tourish, Lisa Lambe, Dave Fleming, Nigel Linden and the Key Notes for an evening where classic songs like The Minstrel Boy will receive a modern-day makeover.
And it is Morgan’s passion for beautiful melodies that instilled an idea to bring them back into use today.
‘I was a boy soprano years ago and I used to sing Thomas Moore’s melodies as a kid,’ he explains. ‘For the last 20 years they haven’t been around that much after centuries of being extremely popular. But sometimes popularity breeds contempt I suppose.’
It was while he was working on something else ten years ago that Morgan discovered a book of Moore’s Melodies and started playing them by accident.
‘I hadn’t heard the songs for years but I found the book when I was supposed to be learning something else,’ Simon says. ‘I started playing all the pieces on the piano and singing along to them not in a classical way but a more relaxed, jazzy way and they seemed to work really well in that style.
‘I got together with a few friends and we started jamming these songs together and we all decided that they sounded good done in a more relaxed style. And that’s where the idea formed really.’
MOORE was born in Dublin’s Aungier Street, over his father’s grocery shop in May 1779. He was the oldest child and although his parents were Catholic and so could not vote, they were successful and encouraged young Thomas to pursue the arts. As such, he was one of the first Catholics who went to Trinity College even though, in spite of his excellent exam results, he could not get a scholarship due to his religion.
‘He became friends with Robert Emmet, one of the United Irishmen,’ Simon says. ‘He became a fierce nationalist and wrote some beautiful songs about the Emmets and the whole fight for Irish nationalism. He became a real spokesperson for Irish Nationalism, even in England where he was very happy to argue with the great and the good about it.’
Moore was a poet and actually many of the songs he wrote are his words on traditional airs. And we have Moore, amongst others, to thank for Ireland’s rich seam of traditional music.
‘He was an interesting guy,’ Simon says. ‘We have so many Irish pieces now, our traditional scene is really rich and we have lots of different tunes, a lot more than most other countries and the reason for this is Thomas Moore and a few other people at that time, the end of the 18th century, actually went round and wrote the songs and melodies down.
‘There was another guy called William Bunting and it was the two of them, really, who created the written record. There were a lot of old harpists at the time who were between 80 and 90 and were dying and all these old songs would have died with them had Moore and Bunting not written them down.
‘Up until then Ireland had an oral tradition where songs were passed from one generation to the next whereas these guys collected them and, in Moore’s case, put words to the old tunes. Otherwise these melodies would have been lost forever.’
Moore was also widely respected in England, he had friends and patrons amongst the English nobility.
‘He was basically the One Direction of his day,’ Simon explains. ‘Moore would come home to Ireland and there would have been crowds of people and parades welcoming him. He was massive in England too and a good friend of Byron the poet.
‘He was really well respected and would have been in the court in England a lot. He wasn’t just an Irish guy they put up with. He was only about five feet tall and he would hop up on the table and start singing. They loved what he had done with Irish music.’
Although born in Ireland, Moore is classed as part of the Romantics movement alongside his great pal Lord Byron and was actually tasked with being his literary executor after his death.
In fact, Byron dedicated one of his own poems to his friend, whom he initially met when they rowed by letter over a previous duel between Moore and one of his critics.
And it’s because of this colourful past that Simon decided to ensure Moore’s legacy lives on in a modern way.
‘Because these songs are old pieces, people treat them as museum pieces,’ he says. ‘They were written about 200 years ago and about 100 years ago recorded music came into being, so everyone makes them synonymous with the John McCormack style but they weren’t actually originally sung like that.
‘So I kind of feel we are almost going back to the original way they were meant to be heard. They were written for the people as popular songs of that day so they would have been more like folk songs, which would have sounded very different to how we heard them a century ago when they became art songs. ‘So we have reclaimed them, if you like. We are doing the same words and pretty much the same melodies for most of them but we aren’t doing them like a classical artist would.’ Simon’s passion is shared by a number of musicians and singers and many, including Scottish folk and pop artist Eddi Reader and singer and actress Lisa Lambe were delighted to get on board.
Lambe will be familiar to fans of Celtic Woman and Ross O’Carroll Kelly as she starred in the stage versions of the books by Paul Howard. She also released her own album to much critical acclaim.
Dave Fleming is a well-respected musician from the jazz tradition while Nigel Linden is a composer and actor who has scored films for the likes of John Boorman.
READER, best known as the lead singer of Fairground Attraction, has previously been interested in the works of Thomas Moore through exploring her grandfather’s roots in Ireland
‘I met Eddi Reader through work I was doing with the Concert Orchestra,’ Simon explained. ‘We were doing a gig together for the 1916 Centenary celebrations and she loved the concept as well.’
Musicians and singers from all worlds – from trad, jazz, opera and pop – are involved in the project and Simon says it is a great opportunity