Luke Kelly
… in Tribute
Luke Kelly — a singer of great conviction
By Elgy Gillespie
LUKE Kelly was a Dublin ballad singer in the old street-ringing tradition, and he was in the purest of senses the real thing. He was young when ballad singing was being taken in off the streets and dusted off for the small club circuits; and then later popularized for stadiums and concert halls and threatres.
Luke Kelly died at 44, but he died in time to miss the final extinction of pure, authentic Dublin ballad-singing delivered in its rawest and most unsentimental vein. When people remember him they will remember that and there win be no shortage of those people for Luke Kelly knew practically everyone in Dublin city and plenty in the country and other countries besides.
Most people will want to remember Luke Kelly the way his Armagh friend and contemporary Tommy Makem wants to. "I'd just like to remember Luke throwing back his head and letting a song soar out, any of his songs. He just let them fly. These were songs that maybe had fallen into disuse before the Dubliners found them, but after the Dubliners recorded them were become so commonplace that people disregarded them — songs like 'The Black Velvet Band.'"
When Tommy Makem first met Luke Kelly, Makem had been singing for four years in the US with the Clancy Brothers. The young Luke had a Dublin National School education and a few years in Birmingham to his apprenticeship before returning to Dublin in 1961. It was at the house of a former IRA detainee and teacher, Sean Mulready and his wife. Mollie, in Birmingham, that Luke Kelly met lots of other Irish singers and musicians in England and broadened his repertoire.
Back in Dublin, Luke Kelly went to the Shelbourne Hotel with his friends Barney McKenna and Ronnie Drew to meet Makem and the Clancy brothers. Luke was still shuttling across to England a lot to sing in the small folkclubs there but they were trying to turn four fellas into a proper group and find a name for them. He told me they were thinking of calling themselves The Heads', as in "howyer head!" Makem recalled.
Ronnie Drew had met Luke Kelly in the International Bar and by 1962 they were playing together in O'Donoghue's with Barney McKenna and Ciaran Burke. Later they appeared in the Gate Theatre with John Molloy, and in time they did again, with "Finnegan's Wake", in which they sang the cheeky Northsiders' hymn "Monto" by George Desmond Hodnelt.
Many people have squandered adjectives on trying to describe Luke's delivery of a ballad like "Raglan Road" and perhaps nobody has one with which to counter the description of Ronnie Drew's voice as resembling "coals crunched under, a rusty door."
For Jim McCann, the folksinger-guitarist that Luke asked to join the band in 1974 after Ciaran Burke had fallen ill, his voice was "natural, completely without artifice".
Ronnie Drew spoke of how Luke Kelly had believed his own songs, and sung them with great conviction. He added that Luke had brought his CND ideals to the songs in the Dublin ban, and brooked no falsity. Obviously very much affected by the death, he planned no gathering or wake.
Close sources to the late singer said yesterday that he had finally decided, after his second tumour operation on March 31st last year, to become a patient at the new Cancer Self Help Centre in Bristol. His life had changed a great deal since the first operation in 1980; he spent much more time at home in his house in Ranelagh and with his close companion of the past eight years, Madeleine Seiler, of Heidelburg.
THE composer, Phil Coulter, who has produced many Dubliners records, recalls his friendship with Luke Kelly and assesses the group's contribution to the folk revival.
The man I loved so well
Even now I get goosepimples just remembering ... the night I stood at the back of the Albert Hall and heard Luke Kelly sing "The Town I Loved So Well" for the very first time in concert…the way he cried when I reluctantly let him hear a new song that was very personal to me called "Scorn not his Simplicity" … the way I cried at a protest rally in Dublin two weeks after internment when Kelly breathed life into my words singing "Free the People" … the look of panic on Luke's face the first night I counted him in, flanked by two chorus girls, to sing the pan of King Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar at the Gaiety.
The pictures are flooding back to me now as I write. Kelly in the studio, Kelly on stage. Kelly in the pub, Kelly with a hangover — and above them all I hear that voice.
Professionally Luke could be uncompromising and abrasive. We crossed swords often, but I forgave him everything when he opened his throat and sang.
Personally he was a man of deep convictions. He loved a good argument almost as much as a good pint and could attack both with equal vigour.
He was a public figure but a private man. He always had time total strangers who would inevitably greet him on first name terms, yet he jealously guarded his own privacy. I have seen him backstage in a crowded dressing-room, one minute the life and soul of the party, the next, quietly slipping off into the night.
I have often tried to analyse the appeal of the Dubliners. It wasn't merely that they were all individually talented; it wasn't just that each was a character in his own right; it wasn't even that they were the first. It was all of those things and more. When those five guys walked on stage something magical happened. They weren't a ballad group, they were a national institution. Twenty years before the music business discovered the phenomenon of "street credibility" the Dubliners had mastered.
They were the first. They blazed a trail through the Aran curtain of singing jumpers just being themselves and damn the begrudgers!
And always, always in the forefront, leading the charge was that voice again.
I refuse to think of Luke Kelly in the past tense. He will always be a part of Irish music and Luke's songs will always be his songs only. He will always be a part of my life. He sang my most important songs and gave me some of my most thrilling moments. In the days, weeks and months ahead I will listen again and again to Luke's records. I will cry a little, I will remember a lot, and I will savour every moment.
And I will still get goosepimples every time I hear that voice again.
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