Trad and bluegrass get new twist as Fling go on journey of world music

Fling are an exciting Galway based five-piece who have been gigging solidly since their formation earlier this year. Their music, to take liberties with the famous Star Trek saying, is “trad, Jim, but not as we know it’, encompassing influences from Russia to South America, while remaining rooted in Irish trad and American bluegrass music.

The band members are Maeve Kelly (feadóg/ low whistle), Liam Conway (guitar/mandolin), Paulie Smalls (double bass), Alan Walsh (drums) and Liam Carroll (guitar/mandolin/charango).The two Liams and Maeve met while doing a course run by the Access Music Project (AMP) in St Patrick’s Band Hall in the city’s Fairgreen. AMP provides training opportunities for unemployed musicians to gain the skills and knowledge needed to find work in the music industry or to access further education.

It wasn’t long before the Liams began to collaborate on different pieces.

“In February I was going over to Spain to hook up with a musician there and I wanted to bring an example of my own work,” recalls Maeve. “So I called in a couple of the lads for recording and I thought ‘we could work together’.”

The course had a demanding workload but the nascent group still found time to play.

“There’s a little room upstairs in St Pat’s Band Hall and we used to sneak off up there whenever we had a break from classes,” says Liam Carroll. “Maeve had this melody, which came to be known as Atlantic Swell. Myself and the other Liam started jamming on it. Coming from a more rock background, we almost went a bit Metallica on it!

“I think the sound we have now developed from that day in that room,” he continues. “Loads of ideas developed from that; any chance we had we were up in that room, playing away, just seeing what came.”As well as bringing Fling together, Liam Carroll also feels that doing the AMP course has helped him hone his skills as a musician.

“It’s a life changing course,” he explains. “We didn’t know it when we got into it, but it really is. Personally, I went travelling for ten years with a guitar and mandolin. I let the professional side [of playing music] go a little bit. This gave a structure, an order. We started arranging and organising our ideas.”

While Fling’s high energy folk has its roots in traditional music, its members are determined to add their own particular flavour.

“I’ve noticed something that’s only become apparent to me in the past two years: there seems to be two strains of musicians in the kind of genre that we’re in,” Maeve says. “There’s the people that were born and bred into trad and did the Fleadh Cheoils, did the lot, then moved on into bands. Then there’s more the likes of us lot, who are all self-taught.

“We all got into music around the same age, 15 or 16, and have fallen into this genre almost by default. We’ve all been attracted to traditional music, not just Irish music, but World music in general.”

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.