Clare Sands: Have fiddle, will travel, with a tape recorder
The singer and multi-instrumentalist from Blarney is everywhere. But tonight she'll be down at the Grainstore in Ballymaloe
In between interviewing Clare Sands and publishing this piece the Cork fiddler had done a few shows in New York, hightailed it back to Cork, dashed off to London for a Paddy’s Day gig with Kíla and then hightailed it back once more to Cork where she will join a line-up of musicians at Love is a Stranger at the Grainstore in Ballymaloe tonight.
That’s some going for a fiddler.
In New York, Sands is in high spirits, and how could you not be, back in the Big A to do a few gigs with Fiachna Ó Braonáin and Peter O'Toole from the Hothouse Flowers as well as pop composer Enda Gallery at the Irish Arts Centre on 11th Avenue for Ireland The Music.
“It’s people from completely different backgrounds coming together so it’s really, really good,” Sands says about the upcoming shows. “We’ll see how it goes tonight and then I can tell you whether it was any good or not,” she says laughing.
Sands laughs often and easily. Precious she is not.
Before the recent spate of travelling she had, as she does at the start of every year, taken off for sunnier climes. Well, that is, until the pandemic put the kibosh on her gallivanting for a few years.
This past January she headed out to Columbia, by herself, armed as always with her fiddle and an old tape recorder, belonging to her father.
“Every January I just go to warmer shores,” she says, to which I say that’s not a bad idea.
“Here, I would highly recommend it, just to get a bit of sunshine,” she says, also conceding that it’s cheaper to survive in Columbia for a few months than it is in Ireland.
Temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius, surfing and mojitos were also an added bonus, as was the chance to swim in the sea everyday, something which she does in Ireland too.
Music - making it, listening to new tunes, picking up unfamiliar instruments - is an integral part of her journeys. It’s what ingratiates her with strangers wherever she goes.
“I’ll always have the fiddle and to have that on your back, you’re just welcomed all of the time.”
Sands says she sat in on a few groups and while she admits her Spanish is OK, the dialects she was hearing were far from what she was used to.
“Honestly, just joining in with the groups (of musicians) and having an open heart and an open mind was amazing.”
In Colombia, there was, she explains, a huge mix of styles and cultures “between the Spanish influence, the African influence and then the indigenous Colombians. It was incredible, the dancing and the singing was absolutely brilliant.”
After a few days in Bogota she took off to the Caribbean coast, because as she says, she “cracks up” if she’s not near the water. Her days consisted of swimming a few times a day, surfing, making music and just the general life of Reilly, because, as she says, “it’s a busy year ahead of releases and gigging and touring. So it’s just good to take a sos.”
The first two weeks of March testify to the busyness that’s to come
In New York, Sands is reuniting with The Hot House Flowers, whom she has been supporting for the past few years. She’d already played with them at St. Luke’s this past February, and tonight she’ll be taking to the barn, or grain store, along with an eclectic mix of Irish talent.
“I’m really looking forward to what they do in Ballymaloe, it’s a beautiful space, so I’d say it will be great,” she says.
While touring and gigging were largely off the cards last year, Sands put out Tírdhreacha & Fuaimdhreacha (Landscapes & Soundscapes), an EP. This year she’ll release an album, “so there’s a lot of touring built around that” for the year ahead.
Viewers of Tommy Tiernan might have caught her when she popped up along with the singer BRÍDÍN on his show at the end of January. Sands was on the other side of the world when the performance aired.
Two days prior to our interview, Sands released the appropriately titled Awe na Mná (Praise the Women) on International Women’s Day.
The music video is set on four different beaches in the four provinces and was filmed in 2021 in between one of the many lockdowns. It’s not surprising that Sands gravitated to the coast for that video - it’s in her nature to swim, and, well, sand is…in her name.
As she explains they put out an open call out at each location for “women of all shapes, sizes, races, cultures, whoever wanted to come.”
“It felt like a very important time to do it, to celebrate womanhood and sisterhood, but also coming out of a pandemic, to actually bring people together in a safe way on the beach, to sing and dance and be free.”
For Sands the song and the video was a vehicle to meet women she “probably wouldn’t have come across.”
For example, here in Cork, filmmaker Carmel Winters and her partner were accompanied to the shoot at Long Strand with a group of Traveller women.
“That was absolutely brilliant to meet all of those kids and their mothers and share a few songs with them, and to connect with their history.”
“It was just really, really good to connect with so many people I’ve never met,” she says, especially coming after such a long period where connections were severed owing to restrictions ushered in by the pandemic.
Fun fact: If you have a copy of the print edition of Tripe + Drisheen (collector’s edition now I would say) Clare Sands is on page 26 in a photo with Siobhán Devereux. The pair are behind the bar at Charlies, both wearing Christmas hats, and Siobhan is four miles deep into a story leaning over to Clare who looks out to the middle distance, likely lost in her own thoughts. The picture was taken a few years back and was from a series by Kieran Murphy, a regular Charlies photographer.
Sands worked at the famous-in-Cork early house while she put herself through UCC where she studied music and Italian.
“That was a good schooling of Cork and getting through college and opening that place at seven in the morning.”
The clientele at that hour of the morning consisted of “all sorts of people”.
“Your bouncers from the night before, you might have a few homeless people coming in, cheeky doctors and lawyers who want something before they go to work. Oh, I saw it all like,” she says with a telling laugh.
But Charlies also gave her a schooling in music. “The music there is fantastic,” Clare said between the acoustic and folk, blues, rock and roll and the trad session on Sunday.
“Great times but I couldn’t be keeping that up,” she says.
She completed a masters in the University of Limerick through the pandemic and moved up to Connemara “in the ultimate sticks” in a small cottage where she saw out the pandemic making music and swimming and getting on with the business of life and art.
“Connemara has their own sort of rules anyway, after being banished there 800 years ago they sort of have there own things going on,” Sands said.
“I haven’t picked up the virus yet,” Sands said, “and I don’t know how I haven’t because I’ve been on a million and one planes and I’m honestly putting it down to getting into the freezing Atlantic in Connemara for the last two years.”
Awe na Mná is the first single from the album which Sands will release later this year. It’s all done and dusted, thanks in large part to the pandemic, because, as she says she had a mad creative streak and just kept at it.
“I had the time,” she says, “I did an album and kept going.
Like everyone else who had to deal with all the weirdness and normalness of the pandemic, which in her case meant not touring and not really playing with others, Sands did and she didn’t miss pre-pandemic ways.
By the end of it though, she says she needed to get back out in the world. The sudden change back to normality (or the new old normal, or whatever zeitgeist word we are using to describe post-ish pandemic life) has been, well, sudden.
“New York feels like a dream. It’s a dream to be here, it is that as well, but it’s like it’s not real or something. Like it’s just mad walking around Central Park, and we’re doing a show tonight, a private gala for all these politicians and fancy people. Anyway, I don’t know how I ended up there? I’m from Blarney, like,” she says bursting into laughter.
Sands first supported the Hot House Flowers a few years back at the Opera House in Cork and it’s likely there will be plenty more times where they collide on stage.
“We realised that our energies are very, very similar, the performance and the nature of putting trad at the core and being able to take all the influences.”
She has also worked on separate projects with Fiachna Ó Braonáin and Liam Ó Maonlaí.
“They’ve really taken me under their wing as well, brought me along to a lot of places and to meet people. They are very, very kind humble, good men. It’s very important for me to have that in my life as an emerging artist, to have that support.”
Having been away for a long while, the music of Clare Sands is, like a lot of things in Cork, new to me. But the energy she refers to is there in spades, even if you’re only meeting it for the first time on YouTube. The other thing that’s there is the seamless marriage of lyrics as Gaeilge and in English. Sands moves effortlessly and seamlessly between both languages through her music.
A tape recorder
The one thing besides her fiddle and her passport that Sands always brings with her on her January getaways is a tape recorder. Specifically her Dad’s tape recorder, a “Sony box” as she calls it.
“I record everything - all the street sounds, all the bits of music, and I use them in my set. It’s trad folk at the core, but then you’re hearing all those other influences through tapes. I get the tape and put it onto the lap top and it’s a really immersive journey.”
“In Colombia I recorded so many amazing snippets of music and conversations and all sorts of things,” she said.
When I ask why a tape recorder, when she could do it with her phone, Sands says partly it’s to get that old tape-y sound, and also partly because there’s something special about travelling with her father’s tape recorder, a relic from before everything went digital.
As to where she might head for her next January escape, New Zealand is high on the list. One of her younger sister’s has moved over there and she’s looking at the photos she’s posting.
“I’ve covered a lot of Latin America over the last seven or eight years so maybe somewhere I can actually understand what’s going on.”
Love is a Stranger takes place today, March 19 at The Grainstore, Ballymaloe and features Clare Sands, Conor O’Brien (Villagers), K3:lu,Peter Broderick, Anna Mieke, Junior Brother and others.
For more information about the festival visit: Love is a Stranger
