Venerable West Cork institution DeBarra's have launched a new section on their website, documenting and preserving the oral history of the music venue, as well as their wider community’s musical stories and memories.
Below, local writer Dave Lordan share some tales about Jimi Hendrix Experience bass player Noel Redding, a DeBarra's regular who spent many years living in the region.
West Cork has always had a reputation as a fun place to escape to, full of singers and dancing and craic. As a coastal territory open to the whole world's influence since time immemorial, the region has ceaselessly attracted those in search of something special, be that the beauty of our landscapes, or the many talents of our people. West Cork has never and likely will never suffer from a shortage of stand-out-personalities with artistic gifts willing to show them off to a hospitable audience, both among our 'natives’ and among those many who have adopted us and in turn been embraced by us. Indeed the centuries-deep cosmopolitanism of West Cork is a wonder of the rural world. Around here, we do not only accept the creative diversity of characters and perspectives, homegrown or otherwise, which is the bedrock of the arts in any time or era – we positively encourage it, we grow it as our major spiritual crop. As such, West Cork is a standing contradiction to the widespread notion that Irish small-town culture is inevitably reactionary and dull & downright silly. Wherever in Ireland The Hardy Bucks and Killinascully are supposed to be about, we know it is not West Cork.
As a youngfella haunted enough to be growing up in Clonakilty just as the heavy-rocking 80s were morphing into the harder-raving 90s, I was surrounded by a golden generation of high-energy, high-output people in the grassroots arts – this was the era not only of the birth of DeBarras Folk Club, but also of Craic Na Caoilte, of the superlative busking festivals, of underage No-discos in the community hall, of the long-standing & ever-euphonious Pub Singing competitions, of world-class teenage flaneurs crooning Where do you go to my Lovely on Pearse Street on a drizzly Tuesday afternoon… & so on & so on. Not to mention the breakdancers of Bog Road. It was a simply wonderful atmosphere for a young person with a creative bent to grow up in and among – you felt anything was possible and possible for anyone at all.
There are of course many people, and venues, that can justifiably claim to have contributed to the artistic utopia that West Cork had become by the late 1980s and has remained ever since. It should be noted that Noel Redding—a great but humble man—never personally claimed any kind of predominance for himself over the domain of local creation. Yet, who can deny that had Noel and his effusive partner Carol Appleby not arrived out of the blue in Ardfield in 1972, & had they not set about electrifying the local music scene in the years after that, a lot of what I mention of my youthful arts life in the paragraph above might not have happened or at least not happened in such an exciting and memorable way?
I remember Noel and Carol in those locally-flowering years of the late 80s as stand-outs among stand-outs. Carol exuded warm and positivity. Carol overflowed with good tidings. She had the power-of-the-flowers no doubt about it and she was beautiful inside and out – like she had walked out of a Haight-Ashbury dream. You only had to pass within fifty yards of Carol’s life-giving aura and you were cheered up for the day. Noel was a little less colourful most of the time, but he too had his rock-and-roll hair, his rock-and-roll glasses, his rock-and-roll trousers. He struck me as a man who knew who he was and what he was here on Earth to do, and that he was going to go about doing it, whatever it took, a man who said little & delivered much – the best kind around in a world with so many do-nothing loudmouths. Noel in no sense comported himself as if he were superior stock to us locals, but as one who was here precisely because we afford no such superiority to the artistic personality or any other kind of personality.
How many awesome nights out for how many people did Noel generate in his Clonakilty life? How many times over & over did he set a rainy night on fire for locals & for our multifarious guests around here? The mind boggles!
Noel perhaps instinctively understood that while we are all for dressing up and having a good time—do we ever stop?—what we really look up to in the 33rd County of West Cork is hard work, especially hard work that benefits others, that presents a lasting benefit to the community—whether that be the hard work of the builder, the frontline worker, the window-cleaner, or indeed the musician. What Noel did all through his life, right from the 9-year-old-day he picked up the Jew’s Harp in Folkestone and blew through his first ever audience-pleasing notes; right through the incessant, breakdown-inducing schedules of The Experience years; right through three decades of leaky-roofed Ardfield Winters; was work, work, & work. Noel understood that the key role of the artist lies in entertaining an audience of one’s peers, one’s neighbours, one’s guests – in being the makings of a great night out. And that, before it is anything else, is hard bloody work. Especially in front of the discerning West Cork audience which is always spoiled for choice when it comes to great entertainers.
How many awesome nights out for how many people did Noel generate in his Clonakilty life? How many times over & over did he set a rainy night on fire for locals & for our multifarious guests around here? The mind boggles! What the musician produces for others is joy – joy in our bodies, joy in our souls – something no mathematics or accountancy can sum-up. It is such Joy, that comes to us always in mysterious ways & never ever in scientific ways, that makes life worth living – or at least worth bearing, no?
Read the rest of Dave's essay via the De Barras website.
