IN THE sleeve notes on his new album, singersongwriter Colum Sands introduces a song with a line from his father: “If you don’t get out of the house, you know nothing.”
In other words, what do they know of Ireland, who only Ireland know — travel broadens the mind.
Well, if the itinerary for 2009 listed on his website is anything to go by, Sands must know pretty much everything by now. For this year has seen him play Denmark, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, England, Scotland, Newfoundland and Ireland.
The album theme of the journey is central to Look Where I’ve Ended Up Now. On the front cover is Sands with his guitar case, covered with airline stickers, and the sleeve notes cover is an Irish passport stamped with 11 song titles.
Fred Jordan’s Boots is about Shropshire folksinger and farm labourer Fred Jordan, who bequeathed his boots to a friend who runs a folk club in New Zealand with the instruction: “Kick them out for me.”
Du You Sie is a skittish, affectionate treatment of the German language’s way of differentiating between friends (Du) and others (Sie).
From The Darkness Of The Mine is about Doreen Henderson’s relationship with her miner father Jack Elliot in Birtley, based on stories she told Sands when he played Washington’s Davy Lamp Folk Club in the North East of England.
Fresh Bread, a song that pays homage to the mother figure and breadmaker rather than breadwinner, could have been inspired by a Seamus Heaney poem but in fact the trigger was seeing old Turkish women kneading dough at a cultural festival in Canberra. In other words, Sands finds the universal in the local, seeking out the rhymes that bind.
Song For Nuri is about an Israeli Bedouin whose family home, even the tree beside it, was destroyed by the Israeli army.
The Middle East has many parallels with the North, not least its penchant for walls. Sands and Israeli songwriter Sharon Aviv pooled their experiences to put together a show called Talking To The Wall, which they performed in Sidmouth, Glasgow, Dublin and the Middle East.
He may live in the pretty seaside village of Rostrevor in Co. Down, just a few miles down the road from the farm near Mayobridge where he grew up, but the Irish musical tradition in which he is steeped has been his passport to play all over the world.
Sands was nominated for a Grammy in the United States for his sleeve notes to an Irish traditional music album by the prestigious Smithsonian Institute, while his concerts at Australia’s National Festival are currently being distilled onto a DVD.
His bread and butter, meanwhile, are the folk clubs of Britain and the European circuit which he has been playing for nearly 40 years.
Back home, he presents a weekly music show on BBC Radio Ulster, which is the station’s most listened to programme on the internet.
It was far from the internet that Sands was born. However, the open-house tradition of his parents, who played the accordion and fiddle and welcomed neighbours in to join them, he sees as a precursor to his radio work.
“There were always neighbours coming in playing tunes, telling stories, telling lies,” he laughs. Making music was as natural as milking cattle.
He started off in the ’60s playing in local concerts as a family, with brothers Tommy, Eugene and Ben and sister Anne.
They won a competition in the Old Shieling in Dublin, organised by legendary promoter Bill Fuller, who had a couple of pubs in New York, and first prize was to play in New York for three weeks. They played the Carnegie Hall in 1970 which led to a sixmonth US tour.
“That was the step where we left the bits and pieces of jobs we had and music has been more or less the full-time job since.”
The family made a number of records in Germany with EMI, then in the 1980s Sands founded his own label Spring Records and set up a recording studio next to his house.
He and his German wife have four children. His brother Tommy lives next door with his French wife and two children.
“The Irish women knew us too well,” he laughs.
Spring Records’ logo is a water diviner’s hands, “the idea of looking for something that’s already there,” and Sands has produced over 50 albums by storytellers, young musicians and older people whose talent may not otherwise have been recognised.
He has also produced Joan Baez and a song Tommy co-wrote with Pete Seeger, The Music Of Healing.
But the ones he is proudest of are by Micky MacConnell, who wrote Only Our Rivers Run Free, John Campbell from Mullaghbawn, “a masterpiece of storytelling, I’m really glad I did that,” and Tony McMahon, a BBC colleague who produced albums by Planxty and Clannad as well as the long running As I Roved Out folk music series but was only persuaded to have his own fine singing voice recorded when his health was failing. “I had to coax him into the studio, he’s gone now but at least there’s something left behind.”
When he was small, Sands recalls, a neighbour who was also an Orangeman would join the regular hooleys. “Taking a plastic dish from my mother,”
Sands explains, “he would turn it upside down and play it with knives from the drawer and drum along to the fiddles.”
In his song The March Ditch, the title track from his second solo album, Sands paints a picture of growing up on a farm, separated only by a ditch from neighbours, whose lives were the same save for the churches and schools they attended.
“Some of my earliest songs were inspired, if that is the right word, by the Troubles,” he says.
“Whatever You Say Say Nothing, which is about people’s suspicion and fear of the other, was recorded by Makem and Clancy, translated into Dutch and Hebrew, and performed in East Berlin where it had its own resonances and in the US, where there is so much surveillance.”
Music, of course, can unite but can also divide. The Wolfe Tones and Loyalist bands are not about harmony.
“That’s something I recognise, that’s why I try to write songs that try to show people what they have in common rather than what divides them, at a local or international level,” Sands says.
“German folk music almost died out because a lot of old folk songs were adapted by the Nazis for propaganda purposes and people became ashamed of their own tradition.”
Does that perhaps explain the popularity of Irish music there?
“That theory has some legs but Irish music has travelled well because it’s good music, you can put it up on a stage with folk music of any other country, it has great energy and a sense of fun.
“You never know what a song might mean to a person.
I got the idea for The Last House On The Street when I got lost in Belfast and ended up in a street where every house was blocked up but at the end was a girl playing with ball. I thought how Belfast must look through her eyes and wrote a song.
That song is used in a show by Roy Bailey and Tony Benn called The Politics Of Dissent. I was playing in Whitby and a man asked me to play it, he told me he had been in the British Army in Belfast and when he heard that song he decided to leave the army.
“Sometimes in the darkest times trying to raise a family here you’d wonder should we be here at all,” he adds, but then something inspirational happens, a song or an act of bravery.
“We have come through a time of barbarity and savagery. The fact that that has ceased is not enough but it’s a start. Politicians here are more concerned with their own side, not their opponents, they’re afraid of moving too quickly, they are often led by the people. Artists have some kind of duty to open another window to show the way ahead.”
Today Sands is working on songs linking Ireland and Scotland, inspired by a song about a man from the outer Hebrides who came to Newry by boat to buy provisions for his wedding but met a woman and never went back.
“The boat came from Barra to buy seed potatoes,” says Sands.
“The story has survived because the woman left behind wrote a song, not angry, more a lament, but the seed boat is a great metaphor for relations between the two countries.”