"How long would I be in Dublin before I started recording the cuckoo!" wondered Bill Whelan, chatting to Ryan Tubridy about Roundstone life. In a swap-around of the natural order, Bill is in Dublin while Ryan is visiting Roundstone in Connemara on his tour of the Wild Atlantic Way but the long-time fan and resident of the village couldn't let Ryan's visit go by without his input. He spoke about the tie between man and nature, the beauty of the sunrise and the magic of waking up to and recording cuckoo song in his garden.
"Denise and I started going to Roundstone I would say in the early 1980’s and we rented houses… We kept coming and very often in the off-season and we just fell in love with the place and some time in the late 90's I got word that the house that we'd often admired on the way into Roundstone was up for sale so I contacted the owners and we did the deal… We did some renovations to it and I built the studio and since then I have both written and recorded quite a lot of music in Roundstone, notably for instance ‘The Connemara Suite’."
Apart from providing him with an endless source of inspiration, it's the rhythm of Roundstone life that appeals to Bill.
"It's that thing that living in Roundstone does for you, you're so much more conscious of things like the tides and sunrise and sunset and, you know, the weather. Obviously, everybody watches the weather all the time and particularly the people who fish. It's an essential part of life and you're far more connected to the elements."
The house itself has some serious credentials, boasting previous ownership of the likes of Sting and writer Kate O'Brien, which Bill is particularly proud of, being a Limerick man himself.
"A lot of people would have visited that house, you know, Micheál Mac Liammóir, Hilton Edwards, she would have had a kind of coterie of artistic folk who visited… and then Sting obviously was there and then recently… James Galway came down and spent time there and Garech Browne, God rest him, he was there last summer… It's just a very special place.”
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