At Blue Lagoon, we made money to do recordings
changes or whatever. And Barry is then the melodic maestro of it all. He is a great creative force.
“Our first single was ‘Just What The Sucker Wanted’. That was the one that Bill Whelan liked and we were all very proud of it. That track has Maura O’Connell and Flo McSweeney on backing vocals.
“She remembers it well – I was talking to her on Twitter a few weeks ago. It was before she took off on the international scene.”
MEANWHILE, back home in Sligo, Those Nervous Animals were real legends in the iconic Hennigan’s venue. Eddie said: “A lot of our creative things happened around Hennigan’s. “There would be a session in Hennigan’s and loads of creative people were there so there were a lot of like-minded people there.
“Then everyone would bail out to the Mission, the house on Union Place where Padraig Meehan lived.
“We were all in our early 20s and there were plenty of parties, but that was where a lot of the songs were written.
“It was a very rich creative scene at the time in Sligo. The Cellar Bar was a great venue, too.
“There was also an amazing arts festival in Sligo back then run by Rory O’Connor along with Charlie Kelly, John O’Dea and a bunch of others.
“It was one of the best arts festivals in the country. There was a real music and arts scene in Sligo in the 1980s and it was just amazing.
“Of course there was the Blue Lagoon, which was our real stomping ground. That is where we played proper gigs where we actually made money that we could put back into the recordings.
“We got in the habit of selling out the Blue. It was a big room with well over 300 people in it. That is what paid for the recordings.
“You had to pay £1,000 a day in Windmill Lane if you wanted a decent international quality recording. So we just gigged until we got enough money to record songs.”
Elsewhere, the band were in the Irish charts. ‘My Friend John’ came in “well up the charts”.
Eddie said: “It was much harder in those days as today it is all streamed. “It is easy to get into the download charts – when we re-released ‘My Friend John’ it went to number two in the iTunes pop charts in February. “The charts are totally movable all the time. Sometimes a record can go straight to number one and then quickly back to number 30. “I remember when we played the National Stadium in a double bill with Moving Hearts and we did the SFX in Dublin and a lot of big halls around the country. It was a great scene in those days.
“We did Self Aid in the RDS in front of 40,000 people in 1986. That was certainly one of our proudest moments.” “On the Self Aid posters, we were just before U2 – it was in alphabetical order.
“Then record company CBS were interested in us. They wanted us on the same label as Pre Fab Sprout. We were big fans of that band.
“We felt we had something in common with that band. We were flown over to London and back and we had a contract to look at. We had some fancy lawyers who worked for U2 who said we should also explore other options. “That did not work out. They got impatient, and we didn’t sign on the dotted line in time.”
Many years later, that is still a big source of regret for Eddie.
“It is a massive source of regret that we never got to make that album. That would have allowed us a lot of freedom to go in and make that record and spend six months doing it. We would have been paid a wage for doing it. “We never got to a stage where we were able to pay ourselves a wage. Everything we made was put back into the band. It was a shame.
“We should have been more forthright and gone with our gut instinct. “You lose momentum in those situations and there is heartbreak. But we never fell out with anyone – just parted company and tried other avenues. “One of those avenues was Nicky Ryan, who was a great help. He advised me to go to Dublin after the band broke up in 1988.
“But we have been back gigging occasionally since 1993 and this is the 40th anniversary.
“I was on the dole for four or five months. I signed on in Thomas Street while waking through the Liberties – that was 1990.”
Eddie got working with a band called the Pale, but there was no money, just a cut of the profits.
He said: “They had a few hits, and they are a lovely bunch of lads and I ended up playing bass with them. “My first role was programming drums. I was working on their album and I did the rhythm programming. I went to Japan with them for two weeks in Tokyo.”
The first proper gig that Eddie got was with top folk and trad group Stockton’s Wing.
He said: “I got a call from Mike Hanrahan one day. He sent me a cassette tape. I had two weeks to learn it and it frightened the life out of me. “They were very accomplished and had a great bass player in Tony Molloy so I thought I could never play that well.
“I started to play their stuff around the clock until I had it as good as I could. I played a few tunes with them. “I remember Kieran Hanrahan welcoming me in his best Clare accent.” “Maurice Lennon and Paul Roche were also with them, and I played with them for about a year and a half.” Eddie went to Australia with Stockton’s Wing. They were playing in front of as many as 6,000 people. Eddie said: “Dolores Keane was on the same bill and there was an amazing group of Irish musicians in Danny Doyle, Arty McGlynn, Donal Lunny and Mary Black. It was a great tour. “We became friendly with Dolores. I ended up on the Woman’s Heart Tour and separately I played with her for five years.
“There is a book in those five years alone and there are a lot of stories – but I won’t be telling them!
“She has a unique voice and she held the country in the palm of her hand.” Dolores, Eleanor McEvoy, Sharon Shannon, Maura O’Connell, Frances Black and Mary Black were on the Woman’s Heart project – all strong women and wonderful artists.
EDDIE SAID: “Their first tour was absolutely massive. It was six weeks long and there was hardly a night off. And that was only in Ireland north and south. “I never realised there were so many different venues in Ireland.
“I met the cream of the crop along the way and made friends like Gerry O’Beirne, a wonderful guitarist with Maura O’Connell.
“We did five nights in the Point Depot, the Ulster Hall and Millstreet in Cork. The gigs were too big and there wasn’t the same craic.”
“I played with Maura and her band, and they were wonderful. She is an amazing, versatile singer.
“I went to America with Frances Black after A Woman’s Heart finished up. I was with her band for two years.” Overall it was a great time for Eddie to be involved – and, he said, it was “great craic”.
The last gig for A Woman’s Heart in Galway saw all the men with the support of the women come out on stage in drag singing “My Arse Is Low”.
“Those were great days,” said Eddie. Eddie played on the last album that Enya released and recorded with her. In more recent years, Those Nervous
“It was great to get such good reviews for the Those Nervous Animals album in March this year. We got massive reviews in the Irish Times and Hot Press”
Animals have come back together again occasionally.
“We did a performance for Kieran Quinn’s Lamplight Podcast.
“That was in the Hawk’s Well. That was our last recording and it had been a lot of years since we had recorded before that.
“But we do plan to get playing gigs again as soon as we are allowed. There is a bit of unfinished business there. “And it was great to get such good reviews for the album we released in March. We got massive reviews in the Irish Times and Hot Press.”
“Padraig Meehan is the most underrated songwriter that Ireland has ever produced.
“He spends his whole life doing amazing things but not coming to much public attention apart from for ‘My Friend John’.
“He has written tons of great songs. In Hot Press the reviewer compared Padraig to William H Burroughs, Samuel Beckett and Mark E Smith, the guy from The Fall. He was compared to all of them in the one paragraph. “There are a lot of people out there who still love our music. We are going to give them a lot more in the near future.”
Meanwhile, Eddie is very well known in jazz circles, where his true passion lies. He started the Sligo Jazz Project in 2005.
HE SAID: “Myself and a few lads had been trying to play jazz for years and we got no tuition apart from some from Mike Nielsen, who is a great jazz guitar player.
“He was a big influence on us and there was myself, Eddie McFarland and Eddie Lynch playing together. We were playing in the Garavogue every Sunday afternoon and we had a great bunch of people coming to see us. “I think Jim Meehan got Mike Nielsen to do something with us by bringing some musicians down to play jazz in Sligo. It was a workshop thing and we got four or five tutors who came down and we had concerts. “Thirty-five people came to the classes. We had a budget of €6,000, helped by Sligo County Council. We realised that it could take off. We got great help from Mike Nielsen and we applied to the Arts Council to get some funding for a summer school for jazz musicians. Then we hired seven or eight musicians.
“I had been in the US and when I got back there was a DVD of Rufus Reid in the post. I was trying to play the double bass and he had played with Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getts.
“I stuck the DVD in the computer. I asked Rufus by saying ‘this was a long shot, but a silent priest never got a parish’. I asked him if he would come over as a bass tutor. I got a reply back in 10 minutes which said, ‘Dear Eddie, it is just as well you are not a silent priest’.
“So he came over. And that was the stepping stone for us to get on the international stage. The rest is history.
“We got the funding and we had 60 or 70 people on the first summer school that we ran. We have built on that every year, and we have a massive video library of the jazz festival and the summer school. “We now have a world-class festival. Last year and it was all video. This July we are going to have the biggest showcase of Irish jazz artists that has happened anywhere.
“We are recording a lot of music in the Hawk’s Well at the end of May and early June and that will be shown in July.
“It is all live takes. There are eight bands in the Hawk’s Well and four other bands are sending us recordings from all over the world.
“So, it will be a big deal this year and hopefully very polished.
“We started a youth academy back in 2012 when we had our first proper youth section.
“That changed the whole face of the Sligo Jazz Project. It made it an absolute joy for me as you can see the kids growing up with the musicians and the music and we are seeing the fruits of that now.
“We must give great credit to Niamh Crowley with her Sligo Academy of
Music, which has contributed so much to the growth of music among the young people of Sligo. “She has done Trojan work for a few decades and her academy has been very important for us for sending young musicians to as well.
“Kieran Quinn is bringing on a lot of young musicians too, especially singers, with his teenage theme nights.
“He is a very inspiring guy in terms of getting things happening in Sligo. Kieran is one of the powerhouses of Sligo music.
“There are some energetic people who are promoting music in Sligo and that is just great.
“There should be a civic reception for all these great people who are doing so much for the kids. We never had anything remotely like this when we were young. “Teenagers have so many opportunities these days.
“A lot of them are starting to become really good jazz players and that is great to see.” Eddie is artistic director and does not have time to teach the young people. He said: “Putting it all together, the festival and the summer school, almost takes a year’s work to do.
“The summer school is very time consuming. You spend half the year getting the funds.
“But we have a very good team of people helping now. The Hawk’s Well and Marie O’Byrne are very good to us. Tara McGowan is another good friend and has put some great events together.”
Eddie has now been playing with No Crows for 16 years and enjoys every minute of it.
He said: “We have played in Glastonbury and some of the big European venues and the vast bulk of our music we have composed ourselves. It is the most eclectic band of all time.
“It is a mixture of jazz, trad, world music, gypsy music, Balkan music and Rhumba. We all love doing it. We are playing in Boyle Festival this year.”
Eddie has also played with Cathy Jordan and Dervish and is on their recording of ‘The Great Irish Songbook’.
Eddie said: “Cathy is an old friend and a unique person.”
Eddie said he was lucky to get playing with so many great musicians and singers – but so were they!
His most recent artistic venture is photography. Look at his website and you will see some stunning landscape shots of this lovely county as well as photos of the stars in the early hours of the morning.
Eddie said: “I have always been into taking photos. When the pandemic happened and there were no gigs or musical distractions, I kind of went headlong into the photography. I started to put some stuff up on social media.
“I was out late at night taking pictures of the Milky Way. I got stopped every night by the gardaí. One of them now follows me on Twitter and likes my landscapes.’
“It has grown into a monster. I have applied for a local enterprise office for my photography website.
“A shot of the Gaelic Chieftain in Boyle went down well and I have sold a few prints.
“Strandhill people’s market is open next month and I will be selling my photos there.
“This is a whole new career for me – a hobby that became a job that I love. “I will have an exhibition in the Hyde Gallery in August.
“I have always been interested in photography. But it takes time. You could be out for a long time just to get a certain light.
“It is a lot of work and there is a lot of technique and pieces of software for the night stuff. But it is great if you get the right image.
“For me it is the perfect marriage of science and art.”
AND NOBODY does it better than Eddie Lee – an artist in so many ways and a truly remarkable local legend. Keep doing what you do best, Eddie!