The Paul Brock Interview – Part 3: The Attraction of the Fleadh Cheoil

Athlone Miscellany

By Gearoid O’Brien

The Paul Brock Interview – Part 3: The Attraction of the Fleadh Cheoil

When we get to talk of the whole Fleadh Cheoil experience Paul tells me that the first Fleadh he competed in was held in Loughrea in 1955. This was the year that Kieran Kelly won his senior All-Ireland title. By that time Paul was hooked on Irish music and simply couldn’t get enough of it. He would come home from the Fleadh and the music would be going around in his head for days afterwards. With typical modesty Paul didn’t tell me that he won his first junior All Ireland title when he was just eleven years old.

His father, the late Arty Brock, used to bring him to the Fleadhs and Frank Dolphin often went with them. In 1956 they went to Ennis and he competed there again and this time he met up with lots of people from the world of music who were household names at that time, including the legendary Mrs Crotty from Kilrush. “I was being exposed, through the Fleadhs, to what was happening around the country. I was becoming aware of style: regional styles, players, repertoire and that kind of thing” he tells me. The following year, 1957, he went down to Dungarvan and competed in the Fleadh there. He recalls that these Fleadhs were great places to meet musicians and fellow traditional music enthusiasts.

The mid 1950s was an exciting time in Irish music and an exciting time to be attending the Fleadh. One of the most keenly fought competitions was between the Ceili Bands. There was great rivalry between two major bands from County Clare at that time – the Kilfenora and Tulla Ceili Bands - and this probably increased the public interest in the competitions which were growing more and more in popularity by this time.

Why the Accordion

“I had started on the melodeon and then I was playing the two-row accordion and, of course, the big influence in the era was the likes of Paddy O’Brien. Paddy O’Brien’s recordings from the 50s, which I used to buy in Walsh’s Newsagents in Connaught Street, had a profound effect and accordion playing became phenomenally popular at that time. The two main dealers were in Dublin: Walker’s and Walton’s –Walker’s were the agents for the Hohner (which came from Germany) and Walton’s for the Italian-made Paolo Soprani accordions. It would be interesting if one could track down details of the numbers of instruments sold in that era. The instruments weren’t as sophisticated as they are now. In some cases they weren’t exactly welcomed into the music sessions, because the tuning wasn’t as refined as it is now – but all that changed over a period of time”.

But Paul was always interested generally in music, his interest wasn’t just confined to traditional Irish music, because there were a lot of other things going on in his head. He was listening to, for example, the Voice of America radio programme so he was hearing a lot of jazz. He shared a common interest in jazz with his cousin, Des Egan, and again through his Egan cousins he was also listening to Classical music.

To emphasise his wide tastes in music Paul tells me “I went over to England to hear people like Thelonious Monk, the great American jazz piano player, who remains to this day a huge figure as far as I’m concerned. And another one from that time, who I remember hearing for the first time on radio, on the Voice of America, was Bill Evans the great American jazz piano player. I went to see him in Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London. I used to go quite regularly to hear people of that order. So because my musical tastes were broadening all the time this influenced my approach to the accordion. I started to question what was happening out there in the accordion world beyond just the Irish thing”.

In terms of being drawn towards the accordion Paul remembers being introduced to the music of a very famous Norwegian accordion player from that era, a man called Toralf Tollefsen. He describes Tollefsen as being “like the Larry Adler of the accordion”. Tollefsen used to play with orchestras and he was hugely popular worldwide. Paul’s father took him to see Tollefsen in the Theatre Royal in Dublin and he describes the impact of this concert. “When he came out on stage he was a tall, young, blonde Norwegian playing a five-row accordion with scenes painted down the front of it. When I saw that, and when I heard him playing ‘The Flight of the Bumblebees’ and other Classical pieces, and when I saw the scope of what was possible I said ‘I want to have a go at that’, and so over a period of time I persuaded my father to but me a chromatic continental accordion”.

Coming to Grips with the New Accordion

Paul had explained to me earlier that the first accordion that he owned was a second-hand melodeon acquired by his father for £1, but having proven his dedication to his music Paul’s father later made sacrifices to ensure that Paul had a more suitable instrument. But before he had acquired his first new accordion he tells me that when he was competing in the Fleadh Cheoils, or perhaps making a broadcast, or appearing in a concert that he never wanted for the use of a good instrument: “Frank Dolphin and my father knew a man who worked in Athlone at that time, he worked with the ESB and he was from Kilkenny. His name was Seamus Breathnach (or Seamus Walsh) and he later married Anne Lenihan a sister of Mary O’Rourke’s. He is now retired and living in Dublin but at that time he lived down beside Lyster’s Saw Mills, in Excise Street, he was in digs there and he owned a lovely accordion and he used to loan it to me regularly…If I needed an accordion for a special occasion Seamus was always there and always loaned it to me with a heart and a half. I lost contact with him because he had moved – he went to Galway and other places, but I often thought back on his unstinting generosity. It was great for an aspiring musician such as myself to have such generosity shown to me. I was delighted to make contact with him in recent times after all these years and to share some memories of Athlone in the 1950’s with him.”

Paul recalls the joy of going to Dublin to buy his early accordions “It was always a great treat when my father brought me to Walton’s where we bought a number of accordions, and where Martin Walton was the owner at the time. I think perhaps it was in 1956 or ’57 that I was bought my first brand new accordion which at that time cost about £26”.

Having come to grips with the basic accordion Paul wanted to explore the scope of the instrument further. He was beginning to hear French musette music, a gypsy and Jazz influenced music which was composed mainly for accordion. He heard the music of guitarist Django Reinhardt, the musette players from that Golden age and also American jazz players playing jazz on the accordion – and these were all influential. Paul explains how his tastes developed “I got the three-row and then I got the five-row accordion and that enabled me to try things that I would otherwise have been unable to attempt, but having said that I know that some of the Irish musicians of the era wouldn’t have liked that. They wouldn’t have approved because their focus was on Irish music but I wanted to have a go and I did, and I got it out of my system”.

In the late 1950s Paul Brock was busy making a name for himself, he was entering a lot of competitions and winning a lot of competitions as well as making guest appearances at concerts “I played all over Ireland and the U.K., and of course many times in the Dean Crowe Hall in Athlone. Variety shows and the dance halls were the order of the day and all sorts of people came through that system. It was an era when generally people playing Irish traditional music weren’t paid. It was probably only from the 70s onwards that Irish music really started to travel overseas. You had the emergence of groups and bands – you had the commercialisation and professionalization and the beginning of the globalization of Irish music”.