Ian Lynch is a storied and deeply inquisitive man.
He is a founding member of Lankum, Ireland’s premier doom folk ensemble, and the mind behind One Leg One Eye, the harrowing and beautifully dark extension of his work in one of our most celebrated cultural exports. Earlier this year, he composed an immense soundtrack for All You Need Is Death, the debut feature film from Paul Duane, who we have also celebrated in these pages. Between these internationally acclaimed projects, Ian finds the time to be an activist, a father, and more recently, a new husband.
Congratulations are in order, to our interviewee and his wife, Summer, who wed shortly after this conversation.
In this space however, I wish to talk about Fire Draw Near, Lynch’s monthly radio show concerned with investigating Irish traditional music in its myriad forms through his vast and manifold archive. Throughout the podcast’s numerous formats, his enthusiasm and deep knowledge for his subject is plain to see. The esoteric histories behind ancient melodies are explored and discussed without pretension, the hosts words laden with a passion and zeal that is infectious, whether he is singling out an ancient instrument for discussion, or expounding on the lyrical differences between versions over centuries, or discussing an obscure contemporary folks artist. I was lucky enough to meet with Ian and his beautiful blue-eyed dog, Banshee, to ask him: how do you find the time?
So, first off, did The Deadlians do the version of Plain of Boyle that you use as the theme song for Fire Draw Near?
It’s not the Deadlians! The drumming is sampled from Running Free by Iron Maiden, and the pipes were from Willie Clancy, and some different voices. The first couple of episodes were my version of it, and then DJackulate did a remix. He also did a ten minute long version of the whole thing, up on Bandcamp, called An Eldritch Communion.
I’ve long been fascinated by the research and study that goes into your work. The history and the folklore. The parallels you draw are fascinating, like the episode around Eggs and Marrowbone and the deep dive into the commonalities between Irish and Indian traditions.
There’s a very similar story in the Panchatantra, a collection of Indian folk tales from the third century BC. I have a degree and a Masters in Irish folklore, so that would have been my introduction to a lot of it, and learning about traditional song as another aspect of folklore. I hadn’t even been listening to a lot of traditional music at that time, in my early to mid 20s.
I was introduced to the more academic side of traditional song before I was listening to a lot of it. I had an interest in that music in my teenage years that really blossomed in my late 20s, and I started going to singing sessions around then. So it really would have been in college that I was learning about those different aspects and parallels in folk narratives and folk tales.
And now you’ve lectured in the prestigious environs of Johns Hopkins University.
I gave a lecture there on the Child Ballads [books of traditional ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, anthologized by Francis James Child] in the Irish tradition. It’s a collection of 305 Ballads, and within that collection, Child will go into the whole history of a particular song, talking about the versions of it found throughout the world, as a folk tale in India, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and he’ll give examples and talk about the differences, whether it’s found as a ballad or a narrative, when storytelling used to be a much bigger thing. It’s a massive comparative study. It’s a really fascinating area of folk song to study, and something that comes up a lot in the bonus episodes that I do now in Fire Draw Near.
I know you started Fire Draw Near because you had a very enjoyable experience at… I can’t remember if I read it was NTS or NPR.
It was both! We [Lankum] had done a guest radio show for NTS over in London, and a show for NPR around the same time. But the NTS show was more or less the same as the first episode of Fire Draw Near. I’d always had it in my head that it would be a class thing to do, but never really had the opportunity. When I was in UCD, a mate of mine, Johnny Dillon, who does the Blúiríní Béaloidis podcast now, encouraged me to get a slot on the college radio, but I was so busy with study at the time. We did this NTS show, and it was meant for the whole band to do but I kind of took it over and did my own thing with it. I had so much fun I started to work on my own, That was before the lockdown, then when the pandemic happened I had loads of time. When I started I was using a Zoom recorder and Audacity to mix it, but during lockdown I got a Scarlett interface and Pro Tools, when I started doing the ‘Wild Rover’ episodes.
I was looking at that timeline, of when you first upgraded your gear and that would have been around the same time your incredible One Leg One Eye project began.
It’s all interconnected. I didn’t really know how to use a Digital Audio Workstation or anything before that. When I did the first couple of episodes I was just recording spoken passages onto the Zoom, using Audacity to chop stuff up and mix it together. When I got Pro Tools, I got kind of excited, and started learning about mixing and EQ and all of that, and coming up with the soundscapes I used in those ‘Wild Rover’ episodes. I was making the fake tavern environments before I even knew I was doing an episode on the song.
Making those went hand in hand with learning how to use a DAW. Then I did this one off dungeon synth project, and learned a lot doing that also, which led me onto One Leg One Eye, being able to record it myself and having an idea of how to go about it. It used to completely bamboozle me, I mean, where do you start? But I realised you just have to have a project. One thing leads to another in a lot of different ways.
Can I ask about what led you to study Irish Folklore?
Essentially, I was getting threatened to get kicked off the dole, so I got the Back to Education allowance and went to UCD, and realised “I actually love this.” I was offered scholarships to do a masters, and it was kind of looking like I was going to have an academic career. I was all set to do a PhD, but the band got too popular.
It’s interesting, these similar veins are present in each extension of your work. It’s very cohesive. It’s always got some unique element to it. Like, starting with an idea to do a radio show and ending up with this exploratory seminar on the history behind a tune.
I had planned to do a PhD. I wanted to do it on the Child Ballads in Ireland, like that lecture. I had a supervisor and I was all good to go, and then I thought Lankum was getting pretty big. I don’t have time to be at this. A PhD is a very full time affair for a couple of years, and I was always off playing shows. There’s stuff happening that’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, and academia will still be there.
After a couple of years of touring, I felt like there were large sections of my brain that I felt were atrophying I just wasn’t utilising. At the same time, I started up a Patreon for Fire Draw Near, just chancing my arm, while also feeling that I had to make something extra for the people that signed up to it. I started doing bonus episodes, but then I was thinking I didn’t only want Patreon listeners to hear that, so I did a six month lag time for Patrons.
Those deep dive episodes are my favourite ones to do, getting into the meaty bits, taking one song and following all the threads. I get a lot more out of it than doing the regular episodes. I’ve been really surprised to learn that a lot of people seem to be drawn toward those episodes also. Some people might think it’s crazy to play twenty different versions of the same song, or fifty, or however many versions were on the three separate episodes dedicated to Barbera Allen. I didn’t imagine there would be many folks out there interested in listening to that, but there is.
It would be remiss, not to talk about music from Ireland, at this point. It seems now it’s harder to find bands who aren’t doing something weird. A unique take on it.
I think it used to be harder for people. Do you remember Estel? They found it hard to get gigs anywhere because they didn’t fit neatly into any one genre. They were putting out great records, and playing great shows but they could not get gigs outside of Ireland. People didn’t know how to bill them. It was a real impediment for them at the time. I think that’s something that Irish bands have always had. When you go to other places, they’ve such a large population that their subcultures are much more fragmented. Bands from those subcultures sound exactly the way they’re meant to. In Ireland, because there’s such a small population, if you’re a weirdo you hang out with other weirdos. Might be metallers, might be goths, might be noise freaks, they might be skateboard punks.
There’s great stuff happening now. I go to a gig in Unit 44, some experimental thing and there’s some trad musician I know, and it’s, “oh, I didn’t know you were into this too”, and they tell you they’ve got a Prophet-5 back home and they’re really into synth music. I see a lot of that around Dublin now that I didn’t see so much even ten years ago.
Just all the people who are weird getting weird together.
Words: Adhamh Ó Caoimh
