KiwiCelt Wooden Flutes

Bob Bickerton is a stalwart member of the Irish traditional music scene in New Zealand and the current chairman of Ceol Aneas – New Zealand’s traditional Irish music workshops that are held in Nelson each year.

A multi-instrumentalist performer, recording artist, composer, producer and recording engineer, Bob is also a past director of The Nelson School of Music who has encouraged the development of community programmes, with particular emphasis on children’s education. He has performed to over 150,000 students in schools over the last 20 years and has received critical acclaim for the quality of his educational programmes as well as his ability to engage children in an inspiring way.

In the development of his personal musical capacities, Bob has studied Uilleann pipes, flute and fiddle in Ireland. He was a founder member of the popular Irish group Gael Force, is currently a member of the exciting six piece Irish band Bana Nua and has performed at most major concert venues and folk festivals around New Zealand for over two decades.

During this interview, Bob talks about the development of his passion for folk, traditional Irish and Celtic music, and how a career in the field of performing arts and music events promotion has blossomed alongside his own evolution as a musician. He also talks about the development of the traditional Irish music scene in New Zealand; of the evolution and future of Ceol Aneas, and offers insights into the history and evolution of traditional music in general.

This interview was recorded on Thursday June 14, 2007, two weeks after the annual Ceol Aneas weekend in Nelson. My sincere thanks to Bob Bickerton – a man of many capacities and a generous heart – for kindly giving his time to record this inspiring and informative interview.

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The following is Part 1 of a two part interview…

Shardul: Hi Bob – you’ve recovered from Ceol Aneas?

Bob Bickerton: Oh, I think so – just about. It was a full-on weekend, but good – good fun.

S: A successful weekend?

BB: Oh yeah, it was great! We’ve found a formula that seems to work really well and people really get a buzz out of it. I guess because I’m involved so much, I get a slightly different feel on things as perhaps other people who’re from out of town. But yeah, it was great.

S: Excellent. We’ll get back to Ceol Aneas a little later. Tell us a little about yourself Bob – where were you born?

BB: I was born in Birmingham, England – spent my childhood there and then, I guess when I was about nineteen years old, I was getting itchy feet and wanted to see something else of the world. We actually had an aunty who lived in New Zealand and she used to send calendars of sheep and mountains – all that sort of stuff. And so, because I’d heard so much about this place, I thought I’d come and visit. I’ve been back to England on various occasions over the years, but it didn’t take me long to realise that this is a great place to live and it was where I felt most comfortable – felt I had a real connection with it. That was in 1974.

I guess I was twenty-one and it all started when a friend of mine decided to sell me her guitar because she wanted to upgrade. She said, “Look, you like listening to music” – which I did – “you should try and play it.” And so I bought her guitar.

S: Do you have a Celtic connection in your ancestry at all?

BB: English largely – might be a bit of Scots there going a long way back, but English as far as I know. Although it’s interesting – I guess it’s more fashionable now to look at your ancestry over there, but people didn’t think much about that thirty or forty years ago.

S: Did you grow up with much music around you at all? Was there music in the family, music in the house?

BB: There was very little really – very little live music. My father enjoyed listening to music and his tastes were in all sorts of easy listening music I guess you’d categorise it as – Hawaiian music, light jazz, Latin – that sort of thing. He had a ukulele and used to play a few George Formby songs on it but music wasn’t exactly a strong tradition in the family. So I wasn’t really exposed to a lot of live music as a child.

S: Kevin Crawford and Catherine McEvoy are also from Birmingham.

BB: Yep – all the best flute players are from Birmingham! (laughter)

S: Of course – and that’s becoming clearly evident and plainly obvious. (more laughter) Is there a strong traditional Irish music scene in Birmingham?

BB: Well in fact there is, but I was completely unaware of it when I was living there. But indeed there is quite a strong scene I understand. On one of my trips back to Birmingham I connected with a few sessions. They weren’t that easy to find but yes, they are there.

S: What kind of nationality mixture makes up an Irish traditional music scene in a place like Birmingham?

BB: I really don’t know that much about them but they would probably be either Irish people who emigrated over to England, which many did of course, and perhaps their descendants. A good example of that would be Kevin Burke who was here recently for Ceol Aneas. He was born in London of Irish parents who were very much into their culture and so Kevin was exposed to that. And of course summer holidays were spent in Ireland with the grandparents and that would have been reasonably common for the first generation of Irish people who were born in England.

S: I was just looking at your website and a few things on the net and you certainly are an interesting kind of a person. You’re a multi instrumentalist and are involved in a lot of different projects. When did you first become interested in Celtic music and in traditional Irish music?

BB: Well that happened for me in New Zealand actually. I guess I was twenty-one and it all started when a friend of mine decided to sell me her guitar because she wanted to upgrade. She said, “Look, you like listening to music” – which I did – “you should try and play it.” And so I bought her guitar. She was into Dylan and Donovan and was Scottish herself – she was into some of the Scottish folk songs, so I sort of picked up in that area and that’s how I started on the music route.

S: Wonderful. So you came quite late to music – a little like Pat Higgins. I think he was in his early twenties when he first became interested in playing music in Ireland.

BB: That’s right. And you know, playing music wasn’t a common thing amongst my friends. It wasn’t part of any sort of tradition. There was actually a piano in the garage of one of the houses we lived in and I tinkled away on that a bit, but I never thought of music as something I wanted to pursue in any sort of serious form.

S: That’s interesting – you’ve certainly made up for lost time. I mean, apart from the guitar, you play the Irish harp; you’re a vocalist; you play the Irish flute and tin whistle; the mandola and the Uilleann pipes – which is an instrument that the pundits say takes a lifetime to learn. That’s kind of a small orchestra right there – add the bodhran and you have The Chieftains!

BB: (laughs) That’s right. I think what happened with me was I’d started to play music – I wasn’t even aware of the existence of folk clubs at that stage, you know, when I was about twenty-one or twenty-two – and then I heard The Chieftains on the radio and I thought, “Wow! – what’s that?” I hadn’t really heard traditional Irish music before but I really enjoyed it. So I followed through on that and just sort of started to buy a few recordings. About the same time, in 1976 actually, I made a trip back to England and a very good friend of mine had started to go to folk clubs over there – and he dragged me along. This was very inspirational to me because I hadn’t been exposed to folk music before and there were people like Battlefield Band, The Watersons, Martin Carthy and I just really enjoyed that music – there was something about it that lit a spark in me. I didn’t really hear much in the way of live Irish music at that stage but it was the Irish music I enjoyed listening to on records and what have you.

S: How did you learn music Bob? Did you pick it up by ear or did you learn to read music?

BB: No, it was really by ear and I’m still much stronger at learning by ear than by reading music. I can read, but I’m slow. It’s a good memory aid sometimes, but I’d much prefer to rely on my memory if I can. On the other hand though, Kevin Burke made a very good comment during the recent Ceol Aneas. He said that he’s never yet heard anyone claim that being illiterate is an advantage.

S: I’m a bit like you in that I find I can learn much more comfortably by ear and then if I want to get the note lengths and so forth polished up – if you really want to be true to the composers original intension – it’s nice to be able to read the written music at least a little.

BB: Well I think, ideally, you can do both. In my experience, and I’ve had a lot of experience working with different music genres and working with different people, it often seems to be one way or the other. People may be very good at reading music but not very good at picking stuff up by ear – and it can be the reverse. But there’s a small group in the middle who can do both with great ease and of course that’s ideal.

S: After your introduction to the folk scene in England, how did things develop for you?

BB: About midway through 1977, I was back in New Zealand and I discovered there was actually a folk scene here. I was living in Dunedin at the time and The New Edinburgh Folk Club was very fervent and active in those days. So that connected really well with my musical interests and I became very involved. So I became more interested in the music. Just to backtrack a bit though, when I was about thirteen of fourteen, a family friend dropped in some records for me to listen to. They were classical music records and I really enjoyed them.

And so for many years I listened to classical music, orchestral music and then expanded my horizons into rock and what have you. Whilst I wasn’t playing music, I had a lot of interest and did a lot of listening and I think that helped. So when I came to New Zealand to begin with, I very quickly became involved in the Chamber Music Federation and helped with organising concerts. In fact one of the things that I have done over the years that is also a passion is the management and production of concerts and performing arts. That’s actually been my career.

I was never really ambitious with my music, you know, I started late and if someone had told me when I was twenty or so that I would be making a living from playing music, I would have thought that they were mad. So I was never really ambitious, but I really enjoyed it. An important factor for me right along has been the enjoyment and the social aspects of it.

S: That’s interesting. Was it just chamber music concerts where you organising Bob?

BB: When I first started it was helping to produce chamber music concerts in Dunedin, then when I became involved in the folk club, I joined the committee and set up concerts there and became involved in organising folk festivals. In 1983 I applied for a position with the Dunedin Sinfonia and became their general manager. I was general manager for three years or so and then moved to Nelson in 1987 as I had successfully applied for the position as the director of the Nelson School of Music. So this had all been happening if you like in parallel with my personal musical interests.

S: What is it that makes you passionate about organising and promoting music events and the performing arts.

BB: I think it’s because of my experience – I believe I have something to offer in that respect. I am passionate about music anyway and I feel that if I can make more music happen, then that’s a great thing to be able to do. I’ve been lucky enough to have various experiences over the years going right back to when I first came to New Zealand. And I’m really happy to offer those skills to promote my real passion, which is Irish music.

S: Your wife Evey is also a musician – and Irish I believe?

BB: That’s right. Evey was born in Dublin and we met in Dunedin. She was very involved in the folk scene in Ireland – loved singing, going to sessions and playing the bodhran drum. Here in New Zealand, Evey sings with an all women’s group called Cairde – which is Irish for ‘friends’. They’ve been going for some 15 years now.

S: I think I’ve seen you perform on three separate occasions, but I saw you and Evey perform together at the Auckland Folk Festival a couple of years back.

BB: Yep – we perform together at concerts and now our daughter Ceara has joined us – she’s 15 and playing tin whistle and flute. We play as a trio now and are pretty busy around Nelson and Evey and I play at dances for people locally. They’re ceili dances really – barn dances with a strong Irish flavour. Of course that’s hard to do with two people but I’m into technology as well so I’ve pre-recorded a ceili band and we use this and it’s great fun – it works really well.

S: Well I have to say, I enjoyed seeing the two of you performing very much – you work very well together. I guess the thing that stood out to me was that you’re quite a character on stage when you’re performing – you have a lot of fun. You tell jokes and little stories, pull faces and move around. It’s a lot of fun actually – as well as being really good music.

BB: Oh, thank you. Yeah, well I suppose it’s part of my philosophy that reflects who I am to some extent. I was never really ambitious with my music, you know, I started late and if someone had told me when I was twenty or so that I would be making a living from playing music, I would have thought that they were mad. So I was never really ambitious, but I really enjoyed it. An important factor for me right along has been the enjoyment and the social aspects of it. And I’m really happy that I’m now playing music perhaps at a level where I can perform and people will enjoy the music but part of my personal philosophy is that when you’re performing music people really want to get to know the person on stage as well. So I try to be myself – it might be a slightly larger-than-life version of myself but I think it’s important to have a bit of character and to enjoy the process. There are many, many far better musicians than myself and I enjoy listening to their music, but I actually am sometimes disappointed if they don’t give anything away about who they are when they’re on stage.

S: I guess if the performer is having fun, there’s more chance that the audience will be too.

BB: Well that’s certainly my personal philosophy. And you know, when you look at the traditional Irish music, it was never really performance music – it was never music to be performed – it was always a social process. A possible exception was O’Carolan, the Irish harper, who composed specifically for performance to the Irish gentry. And so, the music can certainly speak for itself in performance. I love a really good band up there and the music’s driving along and it takes you into another space, but for me it’s also relating that music and trying to keep some sort of social process going even though I might be on stage and there’s a hundred people in the audience, it’s still important to talk to the people and to try and relate to them as though we were sitting in a living room around a fire somewhere. I think that’s just part of the process for me anyway.

And then I thought, OK, I’m going to do this properly and I went to a flute teacher and asked for a lesson. And when she saw the (wooden) flute, she said, “Nobody plays those things any more – go away!”

S: And it shows in your performances – most enjoyable. It’s interesting how a lot of conversations about traditional Irish music come back to O’Carolan. He seems to be a stopping point with Irish music.

BB: Well I think the difference with O’Carolan is that because he was working with the gentry, and because subsequent harpers then used his tunes, he is known and remembered. Most if not all other traditional musicians at that time are sort of unknown now. O’Carolan was in a very unusual situation. Obviously he was a brilliant person and a fantastic composer – apparently not as great a performer as some of his contemporaries – but he is remembered for those reasons. But really O’Carolan was no more connected to the tradition I guess than James Galway – or Pavarotti you might even say – because he was really working in a different realm. But what has happened is that his music has been adopted into the tradition – or some of it has – and so he’s very well known.

S: I guess much of the earlier music was lost Bob – whereas in O’Carolan’s time a good deal was recorded or consciously passed on.

BB: That’s right. I’m not sure how much of it was written down at the time, but the harping tradition had a very formal learning process in place which was as good as writing down – in fact probably better in many respects. The way harpers were taught was very formal and tunes would be passed down from one harper to another very precisely. And so that’s how the music survived and I think it was in about 1792 when Edward Bunting went to a meeting of harpers and recorded many of those tunes.

S: Turning from one great Irish instrument to another, what sort of wooden flute do you play Bob?

BB: I play a Donal McMahon flute. He’s based at Miltown-Malbay in Co Clare.

S: Do you have a favourite instrument of all those that you play or are you happy just playing them all?

BB: Well, no – I guess my favourite would be the flute.

S: Oh thank God! (laughter)

BB: Did I say the right thing?

S: Well I thought it might have been, but I had to ask…

BB: And I suppose your going to ask me why…

S: Well, if you want to tell me why… (more laughter)

BB: Well let me talk a little bit about how I started to play the flute – which would be interesting I think. I started on whistle mainly because I’d heard The Chieftains, and I said to myself, “What are those things – whistle? Yeah – ah yeah, I can buy one of those from the local shops.” So, I bought a whistle and started to play. And I was playing a few tunes there and another fellow in the folk club in Dunedin, Jeremy Brookes, said to me one day, “Look, there’s one of those wooden flute things that Matt Molloy plays in the second hand shop – you should buy it.” So I went to the second hand shop and saw this flute for seventy-one dollars and I bought it. This is probably about 1979 or 1980.

And then I thought, OK, I’m going to do this properly and I went to a flute teacher and asked for a lesson. And when she saw the flute, she said, “Nobody plays those things any more – go away!” So I really struggled and at that stage there was, as far as I am aware, only one other person playing wooden flute in New Zealand – at least in the Irish style – and that was John Allen who was living in Christchurch. He had a wooden flute but he mainly played silver flute and wasn’t really into the wooden flute in a big way. And so he couldn’t help me too much and I just struggled there for a year or two.

It wasn’t until I was in Ireland in 1981 that I went along to see Hammy Hamilton and took my flute with me and basically said, “Look, I think this is rubbish. I don’t know how to play it and maybe I should buy one of yours.” And he picked it up and played it, and it sounded pretty good to my ears, so clearly the problem was with me! And that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me in terms of playing the flute – to hear someone else play my instrument and to know that the instrument was reasonably good. It was never a great flute but at least I knew it worked and that I could get a lot more out of it. And that really helped.

I really have never regarded myself as being an expert on any one instrument, and I enjoy that – I enjoy the fact that I can knock out a tune on a few different instruments.

S: That encouraged you to play more?

BB: Yes it did. The flute then became the instrument on which I learnt tunes. I have played a bit of fiddle on and off over the years, but I’m not great on the fiddle, then I took to the pipes – the Irish pipes – probably around 1990 or so. Evey was over in Ireland and stayed with her brother Fearghal in County Kerry. He had a set of Irish (Uilleann) pipes that a priest had given him but he hadn’t taken to them himself so he’d been loaning them out. They’d just come back into the house while Evey was staying there so she rang up and said, “Would you like some Irish pipes?” – and I said yes! So I started to play the Irish pipes as well but the Irish pipes are pretty hard work so the flute is the instrument I’m probably most comfortable with.

S: One hears a lot of stories about how difficult the pipes are to learn and play – to maintain and so on. Yet the sound of the Uilleann pipes is quite extraordinary and unique.

BB: That’s right – they’re a fantastic sound. I guess the problem with the pipes is that they require total dedication. There’s a huge amount of maintenance and to get good on the pipes – there’s so much happening when you play the pipes – you really need to put in hours when your learning to play them. Well, hours, weeks and years really – you need to be at them all the time. One of the things I’m really strong on is trying to keep them in tune and making them sound good and that’s a huge achievement in itself – before you start to learn tunes on them. And quite often pipers here just haven’t got the time or the skills to try and get the pipes in tune. I find them terribly frustrating at times and I don’t have the time. I really have never regarded myself as being an expert on any one instrument, and I enjoy that – I enjoy the fact that I can knock out a tune on a few different instruments.

S: A ‘jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none’ then?

BB: I think so, yeah – and I subscribe to that. I mean – I just accept that. It doesn’t worry me that there are better flute players around, guitarists and harp players but I really love the whole process of learning and playing different instruments. And it’s actually quite useful because this is what I do as a job, you know, I’m a musician and it’s quite useful that I can play a variety of instruments.

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Musician: Bob Bickerton
Composer: Bob Bickerton
Album: The Likes of Us (2006)
Tune: After The Hunt

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S: You go to schools a lot I believe.

BB: Yep – quite a lot of my work is in schools.

S: Watching a performer who plays different instruments and is a bit of a character, I think that would really capture children’s imaginations in terms of performance and in terms of perhaps inspiring them about instruments and music. I’d imagine that if kids see someone having fun on different instruments, they might be more inclined to say, “Well, let me try that!”

BB: Sure – and that’s very much part of what I do in schools. I have different programs but probably the most common program I use is essentially going in with about 16 different instruments and showing the kids how they work. We have some fun and have some humour and it hopefully inspires the kids to get into music themselves.

S: Is it Celtic music that you play in the schools?

BB: Yes it is, it’s related to Celtic music – Irish and a bit of Scots.

S: For people that are perhaps not familiar with the different genres Bob, could you briefly explain the difference or perhaps the relationship between folk, traditional Irish and Celtic music?

BB: Well, in my personal opinion, when you talk about Irish traditional music, you are talking about a music form which has essentially been passed down from generation to generation in what you could argue is a continuum for as long as the culture has been evolving – which could possibly be thousands of years. Of course, the music itself would have changed vastly over that period of time and the melodies and tunes that we consider to be traditional music today would have been handed down for the past couple of hundred years maybe – and many of the music forms would have been around for longer that came in at different times. For instance, polkas came in later than the jigs and reels – polkas came over from Europe.

Now, having said that, the music is still evolving and changing, and I guess you could argue that it is changing more quickly now because the music is no longer just being passed down by generation but through media such as CDs, the internet and so forth. So there is a lot more access to the music than there used to be and these days we are far more influenced by recorded artists than we would be by our uncle or granddad or grandma. So there is quite a big change happening and, of course, in any point in time – and it doesn’t matter where on the time-scale you look – the way the music would have been presented would have been within the fashion of the day. If you go back to the 1920’s, the music would have been perhaps arranged with a piano backing; perhaps have ceili band settings with a drummer, and that would have been different to today. In the 1970’s there were groups like The Bothy Band introducing guitars and bouzoukis to the music form and these days, again, different workings like afro-celt for instance – still fragments of the traditional music there.

So at any point in time, it’s sort of OK that the music is performed within the context of the contemporary music of the day, but the core music is perhaps still there – the traditional music of the core tunes – the jigs, the reels, the slow airs. And many people who would perform the music in a contemporary context would also respect that tradition. And I guess, to answer your question, the modern concept of Celtic music is really just one method of interpretation that is current today. It is probably not a very good label to stick on it because the term Celtic is very broad. To my mind, Celtic music in a broader sense is more of – new age isn’t the right label either – but perhaps a slightly more ambient interpretation of music in which you can still hear traditional elements. And so it’s just one of many interpretations perhaps – that’s how I would view it.

Go to: Bob Bickerton Interview, Part 2

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