Religion, politics still too touchy a subject for Celtic band

WASHINGTON (CNS) - Even after playing professionally for 40 years, Cathal McConnell, a flutist and vocalist for the Celtic music band Boys of the Lough, finds there are some songs that are too sensitive to make the group's repertoire.

They deal with the dicey relationship between religion and politics in the British Isles. "Although I'm Catholic and Dave (Richardson, the band's other original member) would be Protestant, I suppose we tend to avoid all those type of things," McConnell said in a telephone interview from Richardson's home in Edinburgh, Scotland. "I have some political songs in my repertoire, but for the most part I tend to avoid those. It might be OK to try some of those songs - some of those songs are very good - but that would be a democratic band decision." McConnell added, "Myself being from Northern Ireland, you know, 30 years ago, it wasn't safe to sing some of these songs, you know? You would tend to be careful. You wouldn't want to hurt somebody's feelings. The answer to that is we tend to walk a fairly conservative line." While some bands may specialize in that branch of music, "that's their situation," McConnell said. "The songs that I do would tend to be older." And by "older," he means older than the oldies-but-goodies or classic rock favored by aging baby boomers. "If I were to sing political songs they would be much older songs like 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley,' which was written in 1798, or something like that," McConnell said. The Boys of the Lough, based in Edinburgh, were touring the United States in March, but planned to return in the fall for a 40th-anniversary tour. McConnell, 62, and Richardson have been making music together since 1967; the Boys of the Lough was established in 1973. Their newest album, "Twenty," is the band's 20th recording. Much like their earlier albums, which were released on LP records rather than compact discs, it retains the quintet's stripped-down, acoustic style: mandolins, flutes and whistles, concertinas, melodeons, button accordions, fiddles and guitars. "The way that we are, the Boys of the Lough, you get what you hear," McConnell said. "We're not one of these zany, crazy bands. We're middle-aged men." After more than a generation of playing traditional Irish and Scottish music, the "boys" of Boys of the Lough aren't regarded as "quite a modern, hip band," as they were at the group's founding, McConnell said. The name of the band is taken from a fiddle tune of the early 20th century that McConnell first heard on scratchy 78 rpm discs. He was a champion flutist in Ireland before heading to Scotland to try to make a living playing music. After 20 albums, is there something left for the Boys of the Lough to do? "At this time, my answer to you is, I'm not sure," McConnell replied. "It's whatever we will come up to. We might come up with a different approach ... an album with a certain theme or whatever. Nowadays there's so much music around you've got to have an approach to whatever you're doing. "Yes, there might be something we'll think of that we'll come up with," he added.

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