A Conversation with Luka Bloom
Luka Bloom recently released a 2 DVD, 1 CD set entitled “The Man is Alive”. It includes two concerts—one in Luka’s house in Nass, Co. Kildare and the other at the Helix in Dublin, along with a question and answer session. It also includes the Dutch documentary “My Name is Luka” and a CD with songs from the concerts.
Luka recently spoke with Cindy Reich from “Celtic Connections” via phone from his home in Naas on a rainy evening in March.
CR So how’s the weather in Naas by the way?
LB The last ten minutes have been wonderful…
CR And now it’s pelting rain and blowing a gale..
LB Yeah, its very typical spring weather, actually—you know, the thing about St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin is that there is always a hilarious crew of delightful young boys and girls walking up and down O’Connell Street, waving flags and celebrating their Irish-Americanhood and being absolutely hammered with hailstones. And God love them coming here and thinking that its spring.
CR If they really want to be Irish, they’re going to have to face the reality that the weather in Ireland—what is it—eight months of winter and four months of bad weather?
LB (Laughing) Its been a bit like that lately, yeah…
CR Let’s talk about this project—it evolved from what originally was just going to be the release of the “My Name is Luka” documentary, is that correct?
LB No, the documentary was a completely separate thing that was done by a Dutch TV company. I had nothing to do with that. I just invited these three guys from an independent Dutch TV company to come into my home and I brought them around the west of Ireland and played music, and they did this documentary, but it was a completely separate thing from the DVD.It was basically my nephew Niall, and his business partner Usna, decided about 3 years ago it was about time I did a DVD of an actual performance and I was kind of very reluctant about it because I like to sing and I love to write songs ad perform them, but I’m not really wild about the whole intrusion of cameras in the process. I think they get in the way.
But I went along with it and we did this delightful evening in the Helix theater in Dublin about two and a half years ago, and we had a really great show—people flew in from different parts of the world to see the show and it was a very intimate personal theater gig that had a very lovely atmosphere in there.Kind of typical of the extreme way my head tends to work, when we had some of that on film, I went from not wanting to do a DVD to wanting to do more, so I got this idea to balance the atmosphere of the theatre in the city.
I’d like to give people the feeling of what it might be like sitting at home singing a couple of songs. So I invited some people into my home and put in a tiny little sound system sang a bunch of songs and we had a lovely time.It was after that we put the three pieces together—the documentary, the two gigs and the CD. So it’s quite a package.
CR It is a great package. You said you feared the cameras might be intrusive, but the atmosphere of both gigs is basically like you are sitting front row at a very personal gig and it’s a great way of bringing that experience to people who can’t go to your gigs or haven’t been to one of your gigs to bring that experience into their home.
LB Yeah, it’s a very particular type of gig I was doing at that time. Very personal, very low key, very intimate and a bit sort of tender and raw and very unlike the kind of show people were used to seeing for years in my earlier visits to America, for example.It’s a nice little document—a photograph in time.
CR My exact feelings. It is a wonderful snapshot of you musically and some insight into where you’ve come from, where you’ve been and where you’re going. You’ve always striven to bring a personal touch—even into your CD’s where it wasn’t a visual experience. I remember vividly in Windmill Lane when you had invited people who had been to your gigs in Whelan’s to come and be an audience while you made a CD. To bring that sort of atmosphere into the CD making process. To me this is the same thing, except being able to see it visually.
LB I guess so. I just think part of the difficulty of making CD’s is the isolation. I think particularly for someone who likes to do shows and to perform with lots of people around, which of course creates this fantastic atmosphere in which you present your songs. Sometimes the sterile nature of the studio can be challenging in that regard to try to pull the performance of a lifetime out of yourself when you’re pretty much there on your own apart from engineers.
Once I was able to get past the presence of the cameras and in fairness to them they were pretty discreet, I ended up kind of enjoying it actually.In one of the sections of the DVD, there are a couple of shots in the Helix gig where I’m kind of seeing myself playing guitar for the first time in my life. I had to okay the finished product and the part that intrigued me the most was just the portion of the filming where I was just playing guitar when the camera was very clearly focused on both hands and playing the guitar.
I’ve never seen myself do that before and I went, “God, I haven’t a clue what I’m doing here—how is that happening?” It’s so weird. It’s a very strange feeling to watch yourself doing something and not quite understand how you’re doing it.
CR You talk about your guitar playing and I think that one aspect that not a lot of people really focus on because your songs are so well crafted and its so much about words and lyrics as much as melody, is the fact that you’re a serious, serious guitar player.
LB Well thank you, Cindy. You know, I don’t really think of myself in any of those ways.For me I’m just constantly learning, and exploring. A lot of what I do is really quite simple. I’m not really interested in the technical side of things. I’m really interested in something that’s really simple that sounds good. That connects with the person’s soul and with their heart as immediately as possible.
I’m constantly searching for that in my chosen instrument. I see songs as being a kind of a three way package and each of the parts of the package are crucially important in their own right.Its really important to me the way the guitar sounds and the way it feels. Its really important that the guitar blends with the words which themselves are probably the most important part of the deal. And finally the melody and the singing. Those three elements have to be great of their own selves. Within the one person then you kind of bring the three elements together.
My challenge is to always to try to deliver something that has a bit of integrity, that is simple, that is understandable the very first time you hear it so you get a sense of it and you get a feeling for it. Whether or not you like it, is up to your own personal taste. I’m really into trying to reach out to people and the guitar is a really important vehicle in making that happen.
CR Its important to catch them with the quality of sound and of course the melodies you craft, but at the end of the day the lyrics I think are one of the areas you shine the brightest, because your songs are very instantly and very easily accessible. As you’ve found, you travel around the world and you get as big a response in Amsterdam as you get in Colorado as you get in Dublin, so your songs are accessible to anyone that hears them. You don’t have to have any special connection to Ireland or be Irish to understand what’s going on with your songs and that in itself is a bit of an art.
LB Well thank you. That was the whole idea behind Luka Bloom. What you’ve just described there was precisely what I wanted to achieve as a result of taking on this anonymous stage identity. Of deflecting away from the importance of one’s national flag or one’s family. To give people an opportunity to focus on a person purely because of the music they were creating and the songs they were creating with no distraction and no sense of borders or boundaries or nationality in the hopes you could reach out to people anywhere in the world.
CR It succeeds and continues to succeed. You spoke in the question and answer section about specifically the performance at the Carre Theatre in Amsterdam and how it changed how you did things. What was it about that performance that changed what you were doing?
LB I think that it might be a slight misunderstanding. I think that the evening in the Carre in Amsterdam, which precipitated the recording “Amsterdam”, was almost a fluke. I had no intention of recording it. We were actually recording in a very basic way in the hopes that we would maybe get a couple of bonus tracks for an album or something, but a live album wasn’t on the cards at all.
CR Why had you not wanted to do a live album before?LB I guess I really feel the live experience is very much in the moment and of the moment and it’s that moment that is precious. I always feel, myself when listening to live albums like a kid outside a house window looking in the window at other people having a great party. That you’re kind of experiencing it, but you’re not really there. As someone who listens to a lot of music, I find a lot of the applause of live albums really distracting. I don’t need to hear a bunch of people applauding and whistling. I just need to hear the music.
What you’re asking me about change in relation to Carre. It was actually afterwards that I realized—it was like the end of an era for me. I’d been running around the world for fifteen years and I kind of felt after Carre when I listened to that, that I’d taken this style of performance that I created in the mid to late 80’s in Dublin and New York and I’d taken it as far as it could go. By 2002, something shifted in me and I just felt it was the end of a passage of my working life and, yeah, I changed dramatically after that. Really dramatically.
CR Your shows prior to that had been very intense with an “in your face” quality, Now, the gigs are quieter, thoughtful, emotional.LB Yeah, it was a pretty bombastic kind of an experience. When I went to American in 1987, what I wanted to achieve was to be like a one man punk band with a huge guitar sound who could play on stages with the Pogues or anybody and make as much noise as anybody else and be as raucous as anybody else. It really worked and I had a ball.
But I suppose, if I was completely honest about it, by the time I got that gig in Amsterdam I realized I was a bit burnt out from it and I needed to find a new way to express myself and a new way to write songs.It wasn’t long after that that I developed some problems with my vocal chords and pretty serious tendonitis in my right hand, so as they say, necessity is the mother of invention and out of that came some very mellow recordings which are utterly different from anything that I’d done previously and which I’m really happy about. The nice thing about the DVD is that it captures the atmosphere and the kind of quietness and stillness of that time.
The great thing is I look back on the DVD which is only now just being released, and that was then and this is now, because I’m back on my feet again and I’m starting to make a bit of noise again.
CR I wanted to talk about some of the songs, first and foremost, because you haven’t recorded it before now, one of my favorites—“Don’t Be Afraid of the Light That Shines Within You”.
LB Thanks, Cindy. I wrote that song about five or six years ago and I had a strange feeling about only singing it at springtime and only singing it in Kildare because the song was inspired by the celebration of St. Bridget on the first of February in Kildare, and I only ever wanted to sing the song in Kildare. About two years ago, I was with my friend and our recently crowned Oscar winner, Glen Hansard, and we were playing a couple of songs somewhere and I sang that song and he said, “Wow”. “What’s the story with that song?” And I said, “well, I only sing it in springtime and I only sing it in Kildare”, and he said, “man, you are really stupid”! (Laughing) So I stuck it there on the DVD, but funnily enough, I’m about to go in the studio and record my next studio album and I’m going to do it yet again, so from not having had it at all, you’re going to have two completely different versions of it within a year. I plan to do something quite big with it.
CR You have everything from early works such as “The Hill of Allen” and “The Man is Alive” to “Lebanon” and “Peace on Earth” from your most recent work, “Tribe”. It’s a great retrospective of everything you’ve done in the last fifteen to twenty years in a wonderful, intimate snapshot.
LB I said, O.K., if I’m gonna do this, then I’ve got to just completely open up to it and let it be personal and let it be a little bit in my face. The result of that is I just can’t watch the bloody thing—its way too personal for me. But I definitely will accept that I think it made for a more interesting project and maybe something people will dip back into and watch it more than once because they get different things from it.
CR Absolutely so. And it answers lots of questions. I think you will find that people that want to know—why did you come to America? Why did you change your name? Why did you do this? Why did you do that? A lot of it is answered in the documentary, which tells your back story. There’s great family history from your sister, Anne, so for people who are really fans of your music and interested in who you are, where you came from and what molded you, it answers those questions.
It comes across as so gentle, its so genuine, its so authentic and its so intimate. It is as if you’re sitting down having a conversation with a friend and learning all about them in a very engaging and interesting way. I think this project will stand the test of time and twenty years from now when another generation discovers you, they’ll come back to this DVD/CD set to find out who you were and what was happening in your life at that time.
Lets talk about “I’m not at War with Anyone”. On your last tour of America, you started your gigs with that song.
LB Interesting thing about that song. The reason that song works for people is because it wasn’t angry.The first night of my last tour in America was in Washington D.C. and I just had the feeling I really need to start my American tour with this song. I wrote it almost as a lullaby. A very personal, very not angry little song. That song has just got such a life. It just seems to be a song that connects particularly with kids. Its one of the most remarkable songs I’ve ever come up with.
It’s such a simple song with such a simple message. For some reason it just really connects with people.I know in those shows throughout America there were people at the shows who were struggling with their feelings about the war and their feelings, obviously about their sons and daughters in danger and all that understandable stuff. But there was something in the song that gave people permission to say, you know—I really didn’t want this—I really don’t think this is the way we wanted to go. Just to even say that, you know?
Because who knows what the answers are at this particular moment in time? A couple of years ago in America, I actually felt a kind of longing. I can’t explain it, but my feeling was a kind of longing. A longing for something other than fear. There is another way and we have to find it. We have to look for it. That’s our duty. We owe it to ourselves; we owe it to our children. We owe it to all the future generations to find a way to live on this planet together than by going around with appalling weaponry and killing each other. It’s as simple as that.
“The Man is Alive” 3 disc set is available from Luka Bloom’s website, www.lukabloom.com