Questions and Answers

CPW: Where and when did your musical journey begin? I hear "Life's Like That, Isn't It?" (from Kirwan's solo CD, "Kilroy was Here"), and envision you getting your first guitar as the song says. Is that pretty much the way it happened?

LK: "Life's Like That" captures the essence of growing up in a small town in Ireland at a particular point in time, and definitely deals with my first steps into music, but more in the spirit than the fact. With songs, even those that are very autobiographical, I am always after the poetry of the moment rather than the actual event. Actual truth is for biographers and journalists, I never allow it to constrain me. In the end, "Sgt. Pepper" or "Electric Ladyland" sum up the 60's a lot more accurately than any historian, TV show or journalist, because those and other albums capture the spirit. This is something that the journalist or biographer who was not there at the time can rarely do.

But I did get an old acoustic guitar at an early age and taught myself. I had grown up around folk and ballad music - and listened to the radio, as did everyone in those days. Radio back in that Ireland was totally eclectic. Beethoven existed quite civilly with Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, Sean O'Riada, Elvis and the Beatles. It is totally dissimilar to radio today. I joined both folk and rock bands in school, then got into show bands at an early age. In the show bands, you got a great musical grounding because you had to learn everything that was in the top 20 and a lot of standards too. This led to a thorough grounding in chords and enabled me, for instance, to utilize a lot of "jazz" chords - major and minor sevenths - in the making of "Kilroy." I use those kinds of chords for coloring with Black 47 but employ them as the basis for "Kilroy."

CPW: What made you decide to pursue a career in performance?

LK: I never decided to do anything. I just followed whatever dream I had on that particular day. That might sound quixotic now, but back in the late '60s/'70s, anything was possible. Rock music was at the cutting edge of a popular youth movement. It was where the action was, along with sex, drugs, self-expression, politics. Music was "where it was at," and I had, and continue to have, a ball doing it. However, I wouldn't even dream of getting into popular music now. Popular music has very little to do with the any kind of cutting-edge thought nowadays. I'm not totally sure why. I suspect its time ran out or, perhaps, as the hero of my play "Days of Rage" suggests: people only took from it and didn't respect the form enough to give back. Who knows, and at this point, who cares? I did, but I got a lot of my anger and frustration out in that play. Oddly enough, when I came back to rock music I was purged of a lot of that negative kind of thinking, justified though it may have been.

CPW: Clearly, you have a number of favorite musical influences. Over time, some change and some stay with us. Who are your most enduring musical influences?

LK: Well, the long-story song is still very important to me. It was called "sean nos" (old tradition) back in Ireland and was popular in Co. Wexford. Basically, the people who wrote these twenty-verse songs were narrating history and the hopes and aspirations of both the ordinary people and a nation through these songs. What I set out to do with the sean nos tradition was to update it into the 20th Century (and now the 21st) by introducing psychology into the tradition (i.e., not just relate what happened to him but what would actually make James Connolly go up against the might of the British Empire - show his internal dialogue as well as giving people a sense of what actually happened.) This is probably the reason that the songs of Black 47 are used so much in college and high school history and political courses. They go beyond the mere narrative and get into the mindsets of the characters.

I was also interested in rhythm. My father was a merchant seaman and brought home lots of calypso and tango records. So, when reggae came out, it was already second nature to me to play it. My mother was very interested in opera, particularly Verdi. So I suppose some of that inherent drama rubbed off also.

Then there was the vitality and sheer exuberance of rock and roll. To this day, there is something wonderful about strapping on an electric guitar and slashing out a couple of power chords. And to play with a great rock and roll band like Black 47 is a thrill that is hard to convey. I can get out of a van after driving 300 miles, have a shot of whiskey, hit that first chord and be transformed - all the stupid cares of the day hurtling off towards the far wall with the music.

Black music is still an inspiration too. To listen to Otis Redding sing a song still takes my breath away. There is something ineffably human in the music of black Americans. I always keep my eye on black rhythms. It's not that we don't have our own beats, but there is a naturalness in the way black Americans experience and transmute music. That was a founding idea with Black 47. I had become aware that in the Five Points area of New York City in the mid-19th century, black musicians were employed to play in Irish shebeens. I knew that they must have been playing Irish-type music. So, I suspected that Irish jigs and reels would work wonderfully with black beats and, as the songs of Black 47 proved, they did.

CPW: What concert performances stick out in your mind as the best you have ever attended?

LK: Well, Bob Marley in Central Park still affects me, and that's a long time ago. His "Live In London" CD is probably the best live CD ever. When producing "Live in NYC" and "On Fire" by Black 47, I used that CD as a template. I also learned from Bob Marley that you could use politics with popular music, as long as you didn't preach. The two great protest/political songwriters of the last 40 years have been Bobs, Dylan and Marley. And yet, you'll find that they get their messages across, for the most part, very obliquely. They don't hammer you over the head with the message; rather they suggest it to you. That's what I've tried to do with Black 47. Get people thinking. It doesn't matter if they disagree with me. I don't have answers. But if I can send a kid home thinking about something I've sung about, then that's a kid probably saved from the worst ravages of television, which I think is the "Great Evil" of today.

There was also a Van Morrison show in Carnegie Hall where he did a transcendent version of "Madam George." A couple of Clash shows at the Palladium. There were hundreds of others. I used to go to live shows a lot and saw so many different acts. Now, because the band plays so much, I don't go out too often. But, in general, I would say that the golden days of rock and roll are long gone. Self-awareness has taken away so much from live music. Which is why I mentioned the shot of whiskey before - that is to stop the analytical part of me from working. With Black 47 we do a different set every night. That keeps the show always fresh - none of us really know what's coming and have to deal with that aspect. Toss in the whiskey and that part of my mind that judges what I'm doing - the "voices in my head" - doesn't work as well, and I can get back to my own essence.

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Photography Credits

1. Larry, by Guenter Friedrichs
2. Set list from 16 November 2001