folk holidays

THERE ARE ONLY TWO OF THEM, BUT THEY BREATHE FOR ONE

ONE OF BRITAIN'S GREATEST LIVING FEMALE SINGERS AND A BRILLIANT GUITARIST WHO RELIES ON EMOTION

Ríoghnach Connolly is the kind of singer where after a couple of notes you freeze up and immediately know that you won't move from your seat for the rest of the concert. She has an absolutely intoxicating, unmistakably Irish voice, against which only the deaf will remain impassive, even if he sees before him a woman to whom he could, for some reason, entrust his own children. And hence another reason for your petrification: authenticity; the conviction that there is truth, so to speak, in everything she sings, talks and jokes about, though you can understand hardly a word of her Manchester dialect and look forward to her shifting from anguished posture to husky blues shouts. Undoubtedly in the tense moments when her confessed memories probably hurt the most. And thirdly: you can never imagine the chair-sitting Ríoghnach Connolly being accompanied by anyone other than Stuart McCallum, long-time guitarist of the nu-jazz band The Cinematic Orchestra and a figure on the contemporary British scene in general.
While the previous two albums were recorded by the duo with the band, last year's Land of My Other was the first time the two of them were alone. The production was handled by the famous American pianist Thomas Bartlett, among others a member of The Gloaming, but he restrained himself from "the most emotionally reckless lyrics" and sometimes we feel rather than hear him in the pair's intention to record "something serious and deep". What brought Ríoghnach Connolly to such openness? In 2019, after giving birth to her daughter, she fell gravely ill and then history caught up with her with the unexpected death of her father. In her 20s, before the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, she fled Armagh, Northern Ireland, for Manchester. "On the album, after his death, Ríoghnach unashamedly touched her lowest roots and I can't imagine she could have opened up like this before," said Stuart McCallum.
Although Ríoghnach grew up with Irish traditional music, playing bagpipes and flutes from a young age, she cut herself off from all that in Manchester and turned to jazz. She performed with the jazz-swing band Louis Barabbas & The Bedlam and eventually formed her own funky-rock-folk freak band, Honeyfeet. It wasn't until she joined the ranks of the Afro Celt Sound System that Ríoghnach Connolly claimed Irish ancestry: that's when she and her mournful, soul-turned-voice with its references to the old sean-nós vocal style started to get a lot of buzz, and that's when Stuart McCallum heard her, immediately followed her, and soon they formed The Breath.
Then they were invited to play in Brighton, but they didn't have a fee for the whole band, so they just played the gig with Stuart and were not only surprised by the audience response, they didn't really understand what had happened, they just knew that next time it would be like this. The people from the Real World label liked it so much that they had no problem with The Breath's transformation and just asked when the sequel would be.
There are only two of them, but they breathe for one, and perhaps no other accompaniment than this simple one would fit the musical memories of his father and other stories. You'll see for yourself. It will be an unforgettable experience, believe it.