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Monday, 18 November 2013

Delighted to have had a selection of the interviews from my upcoming CD Voices of The Men Who Built Britain featured on the John Bowman Show on RTE Radio 1 yesterday. Tune in here to listen: http://bit.ly/HUA8At and listen in next Sunday to hear more. A warm thanks to all on the John Bowman Show for featuring this work.
A warm thanks to Aine Lawlor for having me on Marian Finucane's morning show on RTE Radio 1 last Saturday. It was a pleasure to discuss my upcoming CD of Voices of The Men Who Built Britain @Finucaneshow. If you missed it, you can listen back to it here: http://bit.ly/1bTBhBY
Delighted to have been featured in Frank McNally's column An Irishman's Diary in last Saturday's Irish Times @IrishTimes. http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/trench-warfare-1.1596376?page=1

Wednesday, 23 October 2013

The Craic was good in Cricklewood:
Sell-out Show at Luton Library Theatre On Saturday October 19th. A great audience made it a really enjoyable experience for Joe Giltrap & myself. Definitely love to do it again!!!


Sunday, 15 September 2013

The long-awaited CD, The Crack was Good in Cricklewood: Voices of the men who built Britain, will be available within the next fortnight!!!

VOICES OF THE MEN WHO BUILT BRITAIN

These first-hand accounts of life in Britain’s construction industry in the last century are taken from my archive of recorded interviews and convey a vivid picture of the lives of Irish labourers both before and after leaving Ireland.
Men speak freely about ‘getting the start and jumping on wagons, about gangermen good and bad, about dogging out muck, tunnelling, and pulling cable, about sinking pints, courting women, surviving in lonely bed-sits and dreaming foolishly of ‘going home’.
 Others who didn’t either emigrate or do the work, but observed the consequences, speak hard truths about the price paid in health and relationships and the indifference of many at home who perhaps profited from the labours of those who left.

Songs such as Uncle John and The Mountains of Mourne, Cricklewood, Crooked Jack, The Sick Note, Tunnel Tigers and McAlpine’s Fusiliers, although not the music that the navvies themselves might have played or danced to, express those moods of sadness, defiance, or elation which the navvies knew well but needed others to put into words.

These interviews were conducted mainly between 1993 and 1999. Sadly, a number of the contributors have since passed on, and their world can never come again. Essentially a layered slice of social history, and not just an entertainment, this unique CD offers listeners a rare chance to share the ‘living history’ of those who were there – the men who built Britain!