On the Road Again: new Frankie Gavin & De Dannan lineup are off!

De Dannan, along with The Bothy Band, Planxty and The Chieftains, is one of the seminal super-group Irish traditional bands that started up in the heady days of the 1970s and have powered along in various incarnations to this day. Hailing from Spiddal, Co. Galway, and originally made up of Frankie Gavin on fiddle, Alec Finn on bouzouki, Johnny “Ringo” McDonagh on bodhrán and Charlie Piggott on banjo, the band recruited powerhouse singer Dolores Keane for their debut album Dé Danann (No, I haven’t got my n’s the wrong way round; they transposed them later). The band was celebrated for its innovative approach to performing dance tunes, with Alec Finn’s complex 6-string bouzouki (as opposed to the usual 8-string Irish version) providing a counterpoint in harmony and percussion to Frankie Gavin’s virtuosic fiddle. As Frankie describes it, “The band highlights tightly percussive melody lines set against a flowing, contrapuntal background.” Since those early days band members have included, variously, Jackie Daly, Johnny Moynihan, Artie McGlynn, Tommy Fleming and a who’s who of Ireland’s finest female vocalists including Maura O’Connell, Mary Black and Eleanor Shanley.

A string of stellar De Dannan albums from 1976 onward, through the 80s and 90s, has secured the band’s reputation as one of the handful of all-time great Irish traditional bands. The earlier works, such as Star-Spangled Molly, hewed close to the traditional format, but as the band grew more adventurous, How the West was Won included a hit version of “Hey Jude,” and there’s the stunning rendering of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” retitled “Hibernian Rhapsody,” on the album of the same name – try listening to that one without a smile! Through it all, the anchor of the band, Frankie Gavin, also pursued his own eclectic path, playing with the likes of The Rolling Stones, Elvis Costello and Stéfan Grappelli, a classic duo album with De Dannan co-founder Alec Finn, and solo albums such as Fierce Traditional in 2001, which was partly in response to a suggestion that he had strayed a bit far from his traditional roots with the likes of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and, yes, Hibernian Rhapsody.

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Nster.com