Eddie Lee is a master of music and photo
ECLECTIC does not even half describe Sligo’s music colossus Eddie Lee. In a town teeming with different musical talents, the soft spoken, highly eloquent Eddie is up there with the very best.
A few generations have known him as the highly gifted bass player in the remarkable group Those Nervous Animals, who were one the country’s top bands in the 1980s.
He is one of Ireland’s best, but his love and passion for jazz goes way beyond words and few people have done more to promote this deep, dark elemental and most haunting musical genre.
Eddie has also written several musical compositions and co-produced many recordings in his long career in music.
And those of us of a certain age remember Eddie, Barry Brennan and the outstanding songwriter Padraig Meehan from some great nights at great venues in Sligo in the 1980s. Several venues became their spiritual homes, where they were surrounded by like-minded creative people from all parts of the arts.
The band wrote all their own material and made their own musical arrangements.
Their most famous single is ‘My Friend John’, a wonderfully laconic piece. They also released ‘Just What The Sucker Wanted’, ‘How Does The Sucker Feel’ and ‘Damien’, released on their own Dead Fly label.
They were unique artists who were serious about their craft.
There was a depth and irony to their songs that you would never find in some of the commercially successful and catchy bubblegum pop tunes.
Founded in 1981, the ‘Animals’ stayed together until 1988. In between, they packed out venues all over the land, including the Baggot Inn in Dublin, the National Stadium and the St Francis Xavier Hall. They were and are musician’s musicians.
And their innate raw talent certainly deserved the big break that just eluded them in a tough world of music.
But the music has never stopped for Eddie. His talent saw him play with some of the really top acts in Ireland.
He has performed with Stockton’s Wing, Dolores Keane, Frances Black, A Woman’s Heart, Enya, The Pale, Juliet Turner, Mara O’Connell, Auto Da Fé, Dervish, Seamie O’Dowd, Kieran Goss, John Faulkner and Speranza Café Orchestra.
He co-wrote ‘The Barinthus Suite’ with David Lyttle, which premiered at the Sligo Jazz Festival in 2013.
Eddie also co-founded the Sligo School of Contemporary Music.
Eddie has done all the gigs, worn all the T-shirts and there is certainly a great book in this most erudite and entertaining of raconteurs.
Since 2005 he has been deeply immersed in his first love of jazz, setting up the Sligo Jazz Project.
It has become hugely successful and is one of Europe’s friendliest Jazz summer schools, with pupils coming from all over the world to be tutored by some of jazz’s legends.
It has had numbers of up to 100. Covid has hit hard, but Eddie and his team staged a very successful online version last summer.
In the jazz field he has played with stars like Louis Stewart, Mick Nielsen, David Lynch, Kenny Warner, John Goldsboy, Richie Buckley, Sean Hession, Justin Carroll, Andreas Varady, Jean Toussaint and Sandro Gibellini – to name a few.
Last March was a very important month for Eddie’s old band as they launched their first album, the Mission Sessions, on March 26. It has been more than well received.
Eddie has also been playing in a very gifted Sligo folk group called No Crows, a tribute to the iconic Sligo pub Shoot The Crows run by the charismatic Ronan ‘Uisce’ Waters. Eddie plays the double bass and flute and also does vocals. Other members include Steven Wickham, Felip Carbonell, Anna Houston, Ray Coen and Oleg Ponomarov. And he also plays with Anything Goes.
In the past year Eddie has pursued another art, photography, creating some stunning landscapes of Sligo. He also takes early-morning photos of the stars, and this has become a consuming passion and one he is turning into a career.
So there is no doubt but that he is a true artist in many senses.
EDDIE was born in 1961 and grew up on Cleveragh Road when it was a beautiful sylvan setting. Eddie said: “It was very different to what it is now, with green fields and a great view of the mountains from our house.
“We used to hop across the wall into the Nun’s Field.
“It was all fields, and my father built a house here because he won the Sweepstakes.
“Himself and his pal bought a winning ticket for the Sweeps.
“The bonus thing was that my dad also sold the winning ticket as he had a fuel office in town and he and his best mate Kevin Foley shared the winning ticket. It was Morgan and Burke fuel merchants, and my father eventually took over that business.
“They got £2,500 each and as dad sold the ticket, he got another £500 for selling the winning ticket.”
“So, dad had £3,000 in 1948 which was a lot of money. He built in Cleveragh. He was not a wealthy man.
“The reason he did so was because he said, that is the Nun’s Field, and they will never build on that. How times have changed!”
Eddie’s father was Denis Lee, a Cavan native. His mother was May Counihan from Dublin. His parents are both sadly deceased.
Eddie said: “I ended up buying the house off my dad. It was built in 1950 so there is a bit of history with it.
“One of the quotes for the building of the house was £1,850.”
“It was lovely here when I was growing up. We played football in that field every day and we also had the Back Avenue and Cairns Wood.
“The Back Avenue is still beautiful.” Eddie was a keen soccer player, playing in goals. He has a Connacht U-13 soccer medal, which he won as a sub when on a team in Summerhill College. He said: “That was my last competitive outing with soccer as I got into music when I was 14 or 15 and that took me away from everything.”
What drew Eddie to music?
He said: “I can’t say exactly when, but growing up in the house here we had a grey box record player, and my older sisters had some albums.
“The first thing that really struck me was Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles. I just could not stop playing it. That was 1966 and I was 15.
“The sound of it haunted me even when I was 16 or 17.
“It was the sadness. You could feel
that emotion coming out through music. It painted a picture and it told a story, and it was really powerful. “And those things that happen you in your youth leave a big impression. I was finding out the emotions of other people and the different lives that people led.”
Eddie was listening to all types of music, and this developed in Summerhill.
He said: “One friend of mine was into Jethro Tull.
“I loved the sound of the flute so I started to play the flute. It was for my 15th birthday. I tried it for three years but it did not work out.
“I remember trying to play a tune at the Ballisodare Festival in the tent after the concert was over. This would have been the very late 1970s.
“I was not able to keep up with the other guys and I thought, this isn’t for me.”
EDDIE WAS also, as he says, “mad into folk music” – Clannad were his favourite band. He said: “Another formative moment was at Ballisodare Festival. Clannad were playing, and I was in the middle of the front tent somewhere just in front of the sound desk. “Clannad had a famous manager called Nicky Ryan, who went on to manage Enya. He was a sound engineer. He was doing most of the sound at the festival.
“Paul Brennan was doing a flute solo on a Clannad song and the flute started on the far left side of the tent. I could nearly feel myself flying over towards it.
“And then it came across the tent and the sound of the flute seemed to go right around us.
“It was just incredible what Nicky could do with the sound. This was back in the 1970s.
“The most beautiful thing about that was that I later got to work with Nicky Ryan as an adult musician with Those Nervous Animals.
“I could see where he was coming from the whole time. He also loved the Beatles, who were one of his big influences.
“He recorded with Enya, and the Beatles were an influence in layering all those vocals for her.”
“Nicky is like an orchestra conductor and, while he is not a musician, he has all these ideas and concepts in his head that he is able to deliver in a studio.
“I was going to every gig I could, and my friend Carl Smith introduced me to jazz. He used to play for me. Carl also played blues on the piano all the time. He never became a musician and is now a translator in Europe but he was full of music and he is still great friend.
“We did a thing that young people don’t do any more and that is to go into a house and listen to the whole album and read the sleeve notes. “That was such a cathartic experience and something that stays with you. I can almost remember some of the sleeve notes.”
Eddie got an electric bass for his 17th birthday in 1978. That is when he began to seriously play an instrument.
He said: “When I was 15, Carl and I went to see jazz greats Oscar Peterson in the RDS and Louis Stewart in the Baggot Inn.
“There was a guy called Louis Belsen, a great jazz drummer. He did a drum solo during that gig.
“At one stage he went on to the cymbals and must have been five minutes on the cymbals alone. He built it up to this crescendo. You could feel the hairs standing up on everybody’s neck. It was just one of those epic moments.
“The roar at the end was amazing. It is something you don’t see much in other types of music, but it does happen in jazz.
“And there is a great tension and release in the music, and that was most memorable in 1976.”
Eddie went to UCD in the later 1970s and took a science degree. But he was going to gigs and listening to music the whole time he was up in Dublin.
It was then he started to play the bass.
Eddie was up and down to Sligo at the time, and it was then that he met Barry Brennan and Padraig Meehan. They had co-founded Those Nervous Animals in 1981.
“I remember doing a gig with the lads at IT Sligo. It was a lunch time and I just knew one song. I played on top four strings of a guitar rather than a bass. I remember having a guitar that was strung with four strings.” “I did not start playing the double bass until I was in my 30s.”
“And it can be a bit cramped when you play it in small but great pubs like Shoots.”
Those Nervous Animals soon caught on, especially when punters knew that they were getting an authentic, different sound from local lads.
Eddie said: “In those days, people were quite free with their terminology and there was a great freedom that came out of 1970s music.
“It changed in the 1980s with music television. Everything became geared towards the visual rather than the aural. It is something that was unfortunate because it took away a lot from the more creative artists. Very few kept up with it apart from David Bowie – he was brilliant.
“A lot of artists slipped away then because they had been making albums with 10-minute tracks and selling them as albums and did not have to worry about making fancy music videos.
“They were listened to on their own merit. They had the album covers and there was amazing art going in in the 1970s.
“I am a big fan of 1970s music.” Meanwhile, Those Nervous Animals were all systems go from around 1982. Eddie said: “In 1983 we caught the eye of Bill Whelan of Riverdance. He was a producer at the time. He got a big deal with an American company for a group called Minor Detail. “What impressed us was that Bill had a different sound which suited us, and we wanted to have an international sound.
“We sent him some music and thankfully he loved it. We started working together for a couple of years until the mid-1980s.
“We were offered all sorts of things, but it just did not happen, and we went on to be one of the most popular gigs in Dublin and regularly played the Baggot Inn.
“We played every Friday there for eight months and we packed it out.
“It was an amazing time, and we were up and down to Dublin a lot.
“It took up all your time, but it was a fantastic experience, and we had a lot of record companies after us.”
The group is always remembered for the seminal “My Friend John”. Eddie said: “In March this year we released a re-mastered version of that single and we have an album out called ‘The Mission Sessions’.
“There are other songs on this album that have not been recorded before, so we are excited about that, and it is kind of a lifetime’s work. We are proud of it.”
And of course, everything was written by the band themselves.
Eddie said: “Padraig Meehan was the creative core. He is guy with a guitar who comes up with the seeds of the songs and almost all the lyrics. “Usually Padraig comes up with an idea and I bounce off it and come with an idea for a rhythm section and chord