“I LOVE old books. I read Dante for a few hours before I got out of bed this morning and Don Quixote is one of the greatest books I have read”.
Now we know more of what informs Johnny Duhan’s travelling mind. If attending one of the concerts by his on/ off band Granny’s Intentions in the Belltable, hark to the notion of troubadour and his scatter of Aishling reveries. See Thursday October 27, Friday 28 and Saturday 29 at 8pm for a two hour set with the original line up that made the Granny’s trailblazers in the ’60s: Cha Haran, Johnny Hockedy, Jack Costelloe, Guido DiVito and himself.
The concerts sold out by mid-October, eye-popping evidence of the esteem in which these considerable musicians are held.
“People think we will be playing all the back stuff, but the concerts won’t be like that although we will play a medley of hits at the end. We are more grandads now than ‘Granny’s’,” he chuckles.
The official blurb says that the beat group reunites to perform his song cycle ‘To The Light’, “which is also one of the best love songs I ever wrote, [recorded by Mary Black] although it’s not played much on radio. It is also the name of a memoir I wrote”.
Ever a wordsmith, he rolls slowly along with reference to being prepared to fail in life, twists in the road, London’s limelit venues, Emily Dickinson, band members and the disimproving quality of modern writers over previous greats.
Of October’s concerts, he speaks of a night that unfolds in a writing collaboration with fictional poet David Miller in his opening composition ‘The Story of David’.
“Essentially the song cycle is about quixotic years in search of love and romance, going out into a bewildering world. The songs are about my relationships with women, songs such as ‘The Room’, recorded by Dolores Keane which is based on a time with my missus when she packed in her teaching job and came to live what she thought would be the music life in London”.
Nothing flows to plan however. The Duhans moved on to The Old Bog Road outside Galway and raised a clutch.
If the resonance of Duhan’s songs ‘The Whiskey Didn’t Kill the Pain’ (Mary Coughlan); ‘Don’t Give Up Until it’s Over’ (The Dubliners) and ‘The Voyage’, still in the iTunes top 5 chart, speaks to you, the Belltable’s nights will be celebratory and nostalgic. Duhan does not fade. His last album, ‘The Burning Word’, is an exquisitely musical exploration of married love and individual spirit.
“Do I reveal everything in my work? Well, that’s the way I think a decent writer writes. That is what the arts are about, there is no compromise in the arts”. Duhan speaks, and Granny’s Intentions are singing.
