Andrew Dinan & Jim Richardson: Inside Out
Artists
Andy Dinan: fiddle
Jim Richardson: guitars,bass, harmonium
Nancy Dinan: vocals
Mike McGoldrick: cittern/percussion
Mat Watlake: harmonicas
We welcome the release of INSIDE OUT, a new album by Andy Dinan in collaboration with Jim Richardson. It’s a bitter sweet release in that Andy, who had been dreaming of making this album for many years, passed away shortly after the final tune was recorded.
Andy was a renown fiddle player on the Manchester trad scene. Many people will remember his extraordinary talent from winning the All Ireland many times, as a junior and senior, and from his extensive career touring the world with various bands such as Toss the Feathers, the Bad Shepherds and his own band, Ducie.
This album has been a while in the making. Andy, for some years, had been composing and collecting tunes that he wanted to record “one day.” That day came when he met Jim Richardson the young versatile guitarist that he had been waiting for. Together they took Andy’s ideas and over two years they worked them into this exciting and original album. Some of it is pure virtuoso trad. Joy in the playing of it leaps out at you from the opening tracks, like “Little Katie Taylor’s.” Andy’s typical style with its flowing ornamentation and improvisation is matched by Jim’s percussive drive. Andy’s trad style always feels original - his musicality always exciting - his playing unique.
There is variety in the album though - Andy’s “Ten Bar Blues” and “Civil War Lament” featuring electric and slide guitar, and Jim’s gypsy jazz influences on “Old Fashioned Morphine.” This song features Andy’s daughter Nancy on vocals. Nancy also sings on Jim’s haunting and mournful arrangement of Joy Division’s “Transmission.” Nancy’s smoky modern vocals sit perfectly on the plaintive acoustic backing, making this song a really original interpretation. Andy’s playing on this track is especially poignant as it was one of the last things he did.
The album was produced by Andy’s old friend Mike McGoldrick whose guiding hand added extra polish to the whole project.
Andy’s death is a tragic loss to Trad and will be felt by many. This album is a fitting tribute to his art and he put his heart and soul into the making of it. His compositions were inspired by the people that he loved. Andy leaves us with this final celebration of his playing and hands over his legacy to the emerging talents of Jim and Nancy.
Hi Alan from Copperplate here:
When Mike McGoldrick told me about Andy's recording it struck a resonence with me of 1980 when John Roe told me of this brilliant recording of Manchester fiddle master Des Donnelly (uncle of Dezi) I was so knocked out with his playing, that I vowed to bring it out so the other people would Remember Des Donnelly. Delighted to relate this is available to you on CD from Copperplate. Dessie had passed on killed on a building site accident, and was destined to become one of the great Irish musicians whom old men talked about with awe. All I wanted was for his record to be in the racks in stores alongside his comtemporarys. Thankfully it proved successful. Now several years later young Dezi Donnelly has carried on the family tradition of playing the fiddle with amazing talent. I did meet Andy playing with Mike McGoldrick at the Cambridge Folk festival some years, I was aware of his brilliant playing long before that, through his many wins at Feis Ceoil. Hopefully this CD will ensure that the music of Andy Dinan will long be treasured among lovers of Irish music. Alan O'Leary
Audio
Track 1: The Blockers
Track 2: Ronnie Coopers
Track 3: Transmission.
Track 4: Polka des la Meteo Marine
Track Listing
- Little Katie Taylor's/The Blocker's/The Silver Spear
- The Night Owl/Horsebite/Our Kid. (comp Grace Kelly)
- 10 Bar Blues. (comp Andrew Dinan)
- Old Fashoned Morphine. (vocals Nancy Dinan)
- Civil War Lament (comp Andrew Dinan)
- Ronnie Cooper's/Tommy McElvogue's/Sean Walsh's
- Exile of Erin (comp Tony Sullivan)/The Conversation. (comp Grace Kelly)
- Transmission. (comp Joy Division/ vocals Nancy Dinan)
- Holes/The Strong Men From Kilfinane/Time Flies Too Fast ( both comp by Andy Dinan)
- La Polka des Ours (comp Lors Jourin)/Glen Cottage/La Polkade la Meteo Marine (comp Jean-Michel Veilon
Also available from Copperplate
Remember Des Donnelly
Dezi Donnelly: Familiar Footsteps
Dezi Donnelly & Mike McGoldrick: Dog in the Fog
Press Reviews
www.folkradiouk .co.uk
The profound shock and grief in the Manchester Irish music community that followed the unexpected death of fiddle player Andrew (Andy) Dinan in May this year says a lot about both the high regard in which Andy was held and the strength of the ties that bind that community together. You may not have heard Andy’s name before, but that he recorded with Ade Edmondson, Michael McGoldrick, and Jon Thorne shows how highly his playing was thought of. The tragedy of Andy’s death is distressingly compounded by him having recently recorded, but not then yet released, his first album as a named artist. Recorded with guitar player Jim Richardson, the album, Inside Out is an apt record of Andy’s considerable talent and legacy. Jim and Andy’s contemporaries Grace Kelly and Michael McGoldrick (who recorded the album at his studio) kindly spoke to me about Andy and the album.
Andy learnt his craft in Manchester as one of many exceptionally gifted second-generation musicians playing Irish traditional music in Manchester in the 1980s and 1990s. As a young musician, he played alongside Flook’s bodhran player extraordinaire John Joe Kelly in the St Malachy’s Ceili Band. The first English-based musician to win the All-Ireland Fiddle Championship in 1994, Andy went on to play with Toss The Feathers around the time of their final 1995 album, The Next Round. A busy period followed from 2009 to 2013 as a member of Adrian Edmondson’s The Bad Shepherds and the short-lived Manchester traditional Irish band, The House Devils. In 2011 Andy recorded the Future Trad Collective album with Michael McGoldrick and guitarist Ian Fletcher (another Toss The Feathers refugee), supported by many others, including Jon Thorne (double bass) and Parvinder Bharat (tabla); a real cornucopia of styles – primarily traditional tunes, some new ones, in a mix of dance styles, with heaps of percussion.
Two years later, a closely overlapping group of musicians (Andy, Ian, Jon, Parvinder – McGoldrick on just two tracks) released the album MANCUNIA as the band Ducie, unsurprisingly in a similar vein but probably overall a more cohesive record. Our editor, reviewing the album back in 2013, said that the “inventiveness of MANCUNIA is staggering” and had this to say about Andy’s playing on the track ‘Grianan Bear It‘, two jigs and a tune from northern Spain in a reggae dub style: “Dinan’s fiddle dances around like the man with no weight on his shoulders”. That description is extraordinarily apposite, as Andy played with his left hand unusually high, making the fiddle appear exceptionally lightweight, and there was a distinct lightness of touch in his playing.
Traditional tunes, and tunes written in traditional style, are very much at the core of Inside Out, primarily Irish, but there are Breton polkas and a French-Canadian tune, all punctuated by a couple of songs and a blues tune. The opening track – Little Katie Taylor’s/Sean Ryan’s/The Silver Spear – establishes a very effective pattern, with Andy’s buoyant playing front and centre, fortified by sympathetic, unobtrusive accompaniment from Jim Richardson. Andy describes the first tune as one ‘you can really get your shoulder into’, and he does, Jim supplementing guitar with overdubbed subtle walking bass that helps to drive The Silver Spear. Michael McGoldrick described Andy as having “a unique style of playing, able to craft a performance out of any tune and make it an ‘Andy’ tune. It could be soft and gentle at times, or wild and full of sparks; Trad at heart but with echoes of blues and classical at times. He was self-taught and played by ear. Andy was one a big names on the Trad scene.”
Manchester has a thriving pub/bar session scene, and Andy was a regular participant, luckily for me, in a weekly session led by stalwart whistle/fiddle player and singer Grace Kelly only 15 minutes from my front door. Grace said that Andy: “brought any session to life, with wonderful tunes, rhythm, and pace. He inspired others and always made everyone laugh”. Grace is also a composer of excellent tunes, and for the album, Andy and Jim recorded a set of three – The Night Owl/Horsebite/Our Kid – and another, The Conversation, with ever-popular tunesmith Tony Sullivan’s Exile of Erin (also to be found on Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill’s Live In Seattle album). During lockdown, Andy had asked Grace if she had any tunes he might record for the album. Grace told me: “I played him a few tunes and he said, send me those. I was over the moon he loved them and wanted to record them. What a wonderful job he did, bringing them to life with his gorgeous twists and turns.”
A ‘blues’ tune – Ten Bar Blues, written by Andy – shakes things up a bit. It starts with a fiddle refrain, more like a snatch of a slow air than blues, the fiddle sounding almost like a viola. While the fiddle playing has a jazzy feel, there’s no mistaking the blues in the fine harmonica break from Mat Walklate (Mat played with Andy in The House Devils) and the electric guitar from Jim. On the surface, a simple tune made notably intriguing with the shifts in the sounds and arrangement.
The American Civil War is the inspiration for Andy’s composition Civil War Lament. More specifically, Andy writes in the sleeve notes: “Southern landowners offered black soldiers a deal – fight on their side and if victorious, they would be given their freedom. I’ve always thought it was such cruel irony for black soldiers to be made to kill each other in a fight for what was supposed to be about their liberation.” It starts with an evocative Ry Cooder-esque slide guitar with Andy then effortlessly capturing that mournful old-time fiddle sound, ideally suited to that disquieting slice of history.
Nancy, Andy’s daughter, sings two songs on the album. Jolie Holland’s Old Fashioned Morphine and, much more left field, a reworking by Jim of Transmission, Joy Division’s first single on Factory Records (an explicit Manchester reference, alongside the cover photo – a distance shot through a window of the Beetham Tower in city centre Manchester). Bearing little resemblance to the original, it works remarkably well, sounding more like a lost psych-folk classic. Michael McGoldrick described what happened when Nancy recorded her vocals. “Andy said, if he stayed in the studio while she recorded, it would put her off, so he nipped across the road to the pub. Nancy nailed both songs on her first takes, so I called Andy to come back to the studio to listen. His reply was: ‘That was quick. I’ve not even finished my first pint. Get Nancy to sing them a few more times’. He was only joking, but the memory of listening to the playback of those songs altogether and Andy giving Nancy a big hug was so beautiful and will stay with me forever. She’s a star in the making.”
The album came about after Andy and Jim started playing together during the pandemic. “We found a lovely groove when we played together”, Jim recalls. “Andy had a box of dreams containing tunes he wanted to record one day. He mostly brought the trad compositions, and I supplied the other genres. Sometimes Andy suggested the arrangements, sometimes I did.” They made McGoldrick’s job as producer relatively straightforward. “The recording was fun”, McGoldrick remembers, “Andy was always making me laugh, but when it came down to recording they gave it 100 percent. They knew exactly what they were going to record, 2 or 3 tracks each session, usually 3 takes and we would pick the favourite. Nothing overdone or stressful; it was a very relaxed atmosphere.”
At the heart of Inside Out are sets of traditional tunes played impeccably on fiddle and guitar by Andy and Jim, together with, what Andy described a few weeks before he died on Facebook as “some surprises, as we believe music is ultimately a form of self-expression, so once you have learned the rules, there are no rules.” The most poignantly titled tune on the album must be Time flies too fast, which Andy wrote for his daughter Nancy.
Jim summed up the tragedy of Andy’s untimely death: “Andy’s sudden death has been heart-breaking. A lot of the tunes Andy brought were by his friends or written for his family. The album was supposed to be a beginning not an end. Now I see it as a farewell and a gift of love to those of us involved in it.” Andy Dinan is much missed, but we are fortunate that the realisation of his dream is a gift of top-class fiddle music we can all share in. Dave McNally
