Songs My Father Taught Me

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magine what it must have been like to grow up with Johnny Cash as your father.

Or Aretha Franklin as your mum, Ray Charles as your uncle, Paul McCartney as your big brother…

Now, throw in a round or six of Guinness and whiskey chasers, along with a few all-nighters, and you might just understand what Phelim Drew’s childhood up on Killincarrig Road was like.

Man, Ronnie and the boys really knew how to party. Long before it was all about just fodder for your social media feed.

It’s hard to describe the impact The Dubliners had back in the 1960s, not only on the Irish music scene but all over the world. Here were a bunch of very merry men indeed, rosé of cheek and bloodshot of eye, unapologetically belting out unpolished and often forgotten Irish ballads of old, and they were doing so whilst plainly having a ferocious amount of fun. Fer-fecking-ocious.

For a while there, it’s possible that The Dubliners were having more fun than just about anyone else on the planet.

Which, given that this was the 1960s, when everyone from San Francisco to Santry was on craic of one sort or another, meant the lads’ partying was nothing short of heroic.

As anyone lucky enough to swing by Ronnie and Deirdre Drew’s welcoming Greystones home will testify, that sense of fun, of mischief, and of having a soundtrack to go with it, was always there. For Phelim and Cliodhna Drew, having yet another fresh face walk through the door with an instrument under their arm and a twinkle in their eye was almost a daily occurrence.

When we met up with Phelim this afternoon to talk about his one-off musical performance at The Whale on Saturday, June 9th, it was clear the son was finally embracing the songs that his late father taught him through those growing years.

“I’ve always had fun with music, playing in various bands,” says Phelim, “but acting was my main passion. Partly because I didn’t see the point of stepping into the same arena as my dad – the man casts a big shadow – but mainly because I just got that acting bug. It was actually whilst doing the recent production of Once here in Dublin that the music came flooding back to me. We always did a 20-minute jamming session each night for the audience, picking songs out of a hat of 24, and it just brought back so many happy memories of those early songs of my dad’s that I just thought, hey, wouldn’t it be fun to do a show based around that…?”

And so Bringing It All Back Home was born, Phelim putting a one-off show together with his old friend – and acclaimed session guitarist – Anto Drennan [above, with the Corr lass], who played regularly with Ronnie. Choosing not only songs Ronnie made famous to songs the man loved too, the only problem Phelim had was whittling down the list of classics and personal favourites to a set that didn’t last all night.

So, plenty to talk about this afternoon, over a sly pint, but the Evil Ghost of Steve Jobs had other plans, as GG’s untrustworthy iPhone ran out of storage space. Which is why we did this long, rambling introduction. To cover the stuff that we spoke about off-camera…

You can find out more about Phelim’s sort of homecoming at The Whale on Saturday, June 9th right here.