TRADITIONAL Irish music legend Cathal McConnell is performing in Greenock next week.

Cathal, who is a founder-member of Boys of the Lough, will bring his sweet singing and tin whistle to the Beacon Arts Centre on Wednesday evening.

He will be joined on stage by his ‘superbly talented’ friends, Kathryn Nicoll, who plays the fiddle and viola, and Karen Marshalsay, who plays the harp.

Over the years, Cathal has taken the Irish music tradition around the world.

In addition to a natural musical ability that saw him achieve the rare distinction of winning the All-Ireland Championship on both flute and whistle as an eighteen-year-old in 1962, McConnell has an onstage manner that can have even his fellow musicians in stitches.

His apparently absent-minded between-song commentaries have endeared him to audiences across Europe, the UK and especially in America, where Boys of the Lough toured some seventy or eighty times.

He said: “Originally there were three boys.

“Just after we got together, we played a gig in Belfast supporting Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl. 

“They were big stars at that time, and they liked what we were doing so much that they invited us to tour England as their support act.”

Early in the tour McConnell and his bandmates, fiddler Tommy Gunn and singer and bodhran player Robin Morton were asked to do a television broadcast. 

Before the cameras rolled, the presenter asked what they were called and when Morton rattled off their individual names, the presenter said, ‘No, no, you need a band name’.

Gunn came up with Boys of the Lough on the spur of the moment and it stuck.

Within a few years, with Shetland fiddler Aly Bain having replaced Gunn and singer-guitarist Dick Gaughan having appeared on their first album before moving on, the Boys were selling out venues including the Usher Hall in Edinburgh and the Royal Festival Hall in London as well as making the first of those American tours.

Surviving a series of personnel changes that saw Aly Bain leave in 2002 after thirty-two years, they went on to release twenty-four albums. 
With no new releases since 2014’s The New Line, their future is currently uncertain.

But the Edinburgh-based McConnell is not ready to retire and is enthusiastic about continuing to play with the trio that’s called, unofficially, Boy of the Lough and the Girls.

He added: “Kathryn and Karen are great players and I’m really enjoying working with them.

“I don’t like to play it safe. 

“I like to change the repertoire around and keep things fresh but the main thing when you get up onto a stage is you have to communicate with the people who have come out to hear you.”

The Cathal McConnell Trio will be at the Beacon on Wednesday October 4.
Tickets are priced from £10 to £12. To book phone 723723.