Lankum : The John Robb interview

Lankum : The John Robb interview

Hewn from the rocks and the soil of their Irish homeland Lankum are an astonishing experience.

In a series of albums, they have twisted their punk and darker metal roots with a deeper and more mystical Irish folk tradition and found that the crossovers in the emotions and yearning of these musics entwine into perfection. The emotive high decibel embrace of the dark energy of nature in black metal and punk’s DIY attitude somehow made sense in the prism of traditional Irish folk songs drama and storytelling. Lankum’s instinctive synthesis creates a music full of the fundamental power of nature and the elements – a true new folk music and a music that moves on whilst acknowledging the wisdom of the past.

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Last year’s ‘False Lankum’ album was one of the albums of the year because it sounded like it could have been released any year – from the deep past to the uncertain future. The mix of trad melodies and instruments with the drones and dissonance of post-rock combined perfectly for a stunning release that stood eternal with lyrics and storytelling that are at the core of humanity.

It’s a truly wonderful album that sounds even better live, hence the release of  ‘Live In Dublin’ album this month – an album that captures the band’s kinetic energy and atmospheric power. Recorded across three sold out nights at Dublin’s Vicar Street, the album features Lankum performing songs from across their catalogue, including ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’, which up until now has never been officially released. Now available as an expanded digital album with three extra tracks. 

LTW caught up with Ian Lynch from the band to talk about the eternal traditions of folk music and how to continue in this timeless music without being enslaved about it, we also talked about Dublin, Planxty, black metal, DIY punk, the power of ancient music and his academic studies and deep knowledge of the form, his wonderful music podcast on these subjects and what lies at the soul of Lankum.

John Robb

The last few years have been quite an adventure…

Ian Lynch

The last ten years have been absolutely crazy.

It’s one of those things where sometimes people go what are your goals with the band and I always say my goals were probably reached about nine and a half years ago! Since then has just been an extra bonus. Seven or eight years ago, which seems like ages ago, after we did the Jools Holland thing, I was like, this is already crazy. 

I never thought the band would get this far and it just feels like every year, since then, it’s kind of been like, just stepping up another notch, just in terms of the amount of people that are getting into the band, or the size of the venues that we’re playing. 

The whole operation is just absolutely massive now in a way that I’m not sure I would have chosen for myself, to be honest, but I kind of feel like we’re on this right now, so I’m just trying to enjoy it and try to get what we can from it.

John Robb

It’s been an interesting trip. You are from almost an underground sort of squat punk culture, aren’t you? And gatecrashed this completely different world.

Ian Lynch

Yeah, in a way we have and it feels like it was never our plan or intention. It just feels like it’s kind of happened, and we’ve gone, okay, let’s just see where it goes. Let’s see how far we can take it now. It feels like a massively enjoyable adventure and it feels like we’ve got nothing to lose because it all came from absolutely nothing. So, in terms of even False Lankum, which came out last year, we were all prepared for people to absolutely hate that because we felt like it was our most uncompromising release up to date. We were already thinking most people who are into our band, up till now, are going to absolutely hate this album and then the next thing, it seems like more people than ever are into it, which was very strange but really heartening for me to see that you can still make the music you want and not try to compromise or try to shape the music to anybody else’s idea of what the music should be. People will respond to it, and that will resonate with people, and you can be in a very successful band and still make the music that you want to make.

John Robb 

I mean, I know it’s kind of cliche to say but your music is very timeless. I think what you’ve done that is quite interesting in that you have taken your roots in an underground kind of culture but taken it back about 500 years to tap into something very mystical and eternal and you’ve managed to make something that sounds contemporary and ancient at the same time.

Ian Lynch

I think it’s been a long time coming. I’m not really a fan of music that very self consciously tries to fuse different genres. In a way where it’s almost like before it was a band they were saying, ‘we’re gonna start a band that combines elements of jazz and Neofolk,’ or whatever the genres are. I’ve never really warmed to that kind of music. It’s just a little bit contrived and it doesn’t really feel like it comes from the heart for me. I think for us, it’s taken a long time to kind of get where we are now. Obviously, if you listen to our first album, ‘Cold Old Fire’, it’s very much more a straight-up folk album. I think, the whole journey for me, and I can’t speak for the others in the band on this, has kind of gone in tandem with my own internal wrestling with my love for traditional music and my love for more extreme forms of music that I’ve been into for much longer and trying to find a way to synthesise those influences. 

When I first got into traditional music, it felt like such a separate thing to me from other types of music that I was into, which were forms of extreme metal or punk or hardcore or whatever, which was always a very forward looking music. 

I found myself being really drawn towards Irish traditional music, which by its very nature was a conservative culture because it was trying to conserve elements from the past. So even ideologically speaking and not just like musically speaking, it was very far away, ideologically speaking from what I was into and it also felt very far away as well. 

So it’s kind of taken me a long time to figure out where are the areas where those two kinds of worlds can coexist.

I think that’s what we’ve been trying to explore with Lankum and work on it. It feels like we’re getting closer and closer to the truth all the time, and it’s just a process of constant exploration.

John Robb

What was the tipping point when you discovered the older music and also got started, and was there a resonance in that music initially that actually made sense?

Ian Lynch 

A big moment for me was coming across Planxty and it blew my mind wide open. I’d already been into stuff like the Dubliners and the Pogues, who were really a part of the furniture when I was growing up. The Pogues were on the radio when I was a kid, and my aunties and uncles would be singing Pogues songs at family gatherings, just mixed in with the rest of the stuff they were singing. So the Pogues felt like they were always there. 

So, in a way, there was never any big breakthrough moment, I was just always kind of into older musics. But after somebody showed me the first Planxty album when I was about 18, that was a really massive eye-opener. I sat with Planxty for a few years and other older groups in a similar kind of vein.

Then, I really started getting into traditional playing when I started to learn the uilleann pipes. I had started just to listen to straight-up traditional recordings of solo uilleann pipes, and that was another big breakthrough moment. It was something I just kind of found myself being really drawn towards. At that point in time, no one I knew was into that kind of music, there was no one around me who were into it. People didn’t hear what I was listening to because I think if you don’t really have any exposure to instrumental Irish music, it can all just kind of sound the same. Like any kind of genre of music, if you’re not really well versed in it and if you haven’t trained your ears to the sound, a lot of it just sounds the same from the outside. It takes a while to kind of internalise the sounds, and for your ears to tune into it a little bit. Once you’re tuned in then you can really hear what’s going on behind the kind of outer, I want to call it noise, but the outer sounds that your ears will focus and pick up on. It takes you just a while to kind of move past them, and then you start to hear the differences between the tunes and the differences between the types of internal melody, and for me, that’s the same whether it’s black metal or traditional Irish music, or classical music. It just takes a bit of time to kind of tune your ears to it and that’s part of the process as well.

John Robb

Do you think there’s a commonality between DIY punk, Black Metal and extreme types of metal and older folk music as well? Is there a resonance?  Do you feel the same about those musics? Or do they feel completely different?

Ian Lynch

I think there are times I find all those types of music to be very uplifting in different ways. Punk, like black metal can be soaring live. The blast beat melodies in metal are built on very emotive kinds of riffs that you hear. Especially in black metal, which can be like a set of reels in the pubs.

To me, they are all very uplifting and life-affirming music, and it’s absolutely alike; they also have the same energy of punk as well.

I’ve talked a lot before about the parallels that I’ve kind of seen between DIY punk culture and the Irish session culture, where you would hear traditional Irish music played in pubs. The players would be just in the corner of the pub playing away or poor people playing the music for the love of it. There was so much in common in that with DIY, or underground punk culture. On a musical level, I think it’s there on a kind of thematic level. There are so many different strands in traditional Irish songs – there are traditional songs for every aspect of life that you can think of, but I think the one strand of a traditional song is that there are a lot of songs that were written that really connected with people.

In the 20th century, a lot of the songs connected to the struggle, the miner’s strikes in England or labour songs from the United States and the whole Woody Guthrie thing. Here you had the Dubliners and Christy Moore, who would have been into a lot of that kind of stuff. So I think hearing this protest music in the folk world to me is like, punk or reggae. In a sense, it’s all protest music.

John Robb

You have done a very deep dive into this because you looked into the histories of these songs. You’ve gone right back in time. This is not surface, you’ve really gone into the detail, haven’t you?

Ian Lynch

I do a podcast where I take a traditional song, and I’ll kind of look into the history and the background of it for like an hour long episode, usually for individual songs.

I used to lecture at University College in Dublin and I did a course on traditional music and also another course on the history of collecting traditional materials. So it’s something I have an academic interest in as well – the whole history of traditional music and so on.

It was about how it stems from the kind of social history of singing, like all these different aspects, and it’s all really fascinating stuff. It’s something that we try to with the band in terms of the liner notes. It’s really kind of an important part of it for me, but also when I was picking up records by Planxty, and groups like that had liner notes. Thery were something that really helped me kind of get deeper into the tradition. I know, it’s different now because you can kind of just find everything online. That wasn’t really the case when I was getting into it. Also, I just like a good LP package, and guidelines are always going to help.

John Robb

Do you think that this sense of storytelling is key to the form and also key to what you do as Lankum.

Ian Lynch

I think it is, because it’s really a big part of the atmosphere and the kind of vibe of what we’re trying to get across. I kind of like the storytelling aspect. It just kind of adds to the mystique and adds to the atmosphere and the whole ambience surrounding this kind of music. I suppose it’s part of the vibe, as it were.

John Robb

A lot of the storytelling is not specifically a snapshot of that moment in time, or is it? They’re like eternal stories, eternal themes that run through generations, aren’t they? Which you’ve kind of proven with Lankum as well?

Ian Lynch

I mean, it’s similar, when you look at folklore, narratives and folklore stories, you wouldn’t really look at them for historical accuracy but what they do show you in a stronger way is not exactly what happened at that point in time, but how people were feeling at that point in time. I think that if you look at traditional songs, they can open up the emotional reality of people living through that time. People who were maybe illiterate, people who didn’t leave written records, people who, for all intents and purposes, didn’t appear in the official, mainstream historical records.

They’re just not there.

When we look at these songs, we can find out what they were feeling and what they were going through. I don’t think there’s any other record, historically speaking, that we can look to for that, and I find that really, really fascinating. 

I mean, even if we don’t know who wrote the songs we can see that people were singing this song at a certain time and we can say, OK, we know that this song must have been popular around this point in time, because it was printed on balance sheets or whatever, so we know that this song was resonating with people for that period.

I just think it’s a really amazing subject, but there are so many facets of it that you can spend your life researching and exhausting what’s out there. There’s always more information being uncovered, and there’s a really interesting kind of online subculture of absolute nerds for this kind of stuff as well, which I enjoy dipping into, but because of the band taking off and what the band is doing, I haven’t really been able to continue with my studies and research.

I was about to do a PHD before Lankum took off, that was the kind of direction I was going in. And then Lankum just got like, kind of much more, say popular and much busier than we had been expecting so I ended up just deciding we’ll just go with Lankum for the moment, the academia isn’t going anywhere and I can come back to it. Now I really enjoy having the podcast, and I kind of just scratch that itch as well. I think it’s a really fascinating subject, and a big part of what we do at Lankum is just being able to spread and share our enthusiasm for songs and to try and just let people know a way to get into it.

John Robb

Also, by not presenting the music as a museum piece.

I think that’s the real crux of what you do here. It’s tapping into the feel of this music and tapping into the ideas behind it, yet it sounds very much of the now.

A lot of this music was not urban, was it? It was it was from out in the countryside. It was tiny villages, or people sitting in a forest, but you’re doing it in a city way. And with modern sounds and it sounds ancient and contemporary at the same time, which is a really difficult thing to pull off. Is that is that something you have to think about a lot? Or is it just something that just kind of happens because you’re so immersed in the culture anyway.

Ian Lynch

I think once you make the decision that you want to make music that makes sense to you then you go with that. We could have been content in playing traditional music in a traditional way and go to sessions and play in a very traditional way in those sessions. And that’s brilliant – there are people who are doing that to a very high degree. They are really amazing players, amazing singers. But I think for us, it’s really important that what we’re doing really means something to us. It’s like it has to be in line with our own inner musical reality, and my own inner musical reality is made up of all different kinds of things and all different kinds of influences. So the music that I make has to incorporate all those things, or else I’m gonna feel alienated, I’m gonna feel like I’m playing somebody else’s music, or I’m conforming to somebody else’s vision of what my music should be.

So it’s very important for me and everybody else in the band, I think it’s okay, if I speak for them on this, to play music that just makes sense to us. It might not make sense to everybody else because people have different influences. As they grow up, people come across different things, different styles of music mean more to older people, for emotional reasons, or for political reasons, or whatever. 

But for us, this is our very distinct vision of music. I think, once you decide that and you’re going to do that without making apologies or making excuses to anybody, it’s just a very natural thing. I don’t think we worry about it too much.

I think sometimes, if you’re too involved in the traditional scene, you can worry about how to do this thing; maybe it’s going to piss off some people? I think for us, that moment is long gone and it’s a long time since we would have worried about anything like that.

John Robb

Which is always the best way to make music.

Flipping this around – what do the folk purists think of what you do? I imagine some embrace it, and some find it a little confusing that you’ve kind of twisted it and made a 21st century version.

Ian Lynch

The interesting thing is that we’ve always had a lot of support from the kind of more dyed in the wool traditional people, which I’ve always been kind of surprised by. Even as our music is progressing they’vs been very supportive.  Whenever I was chatting with anybody from that world they’re always saying it’s great to see us out there even if they’re not into the music. I think they realise that it is drawing people into the truth. I mean, it’s not just because of us, because there are quite a few people who are operating in a similar way now and with similar artists.

There are regular sessions in Dublin and if I go to one of them now I’ll see lots of new young people that I never saw before. The general vibe is such that there are new people coming into the sessions all the time. I think, for a long time before that, there were no new people coming in and before the new generation of singers got involved in this scene, people were worried that it was going to die out with them. They thought they were the last generation. And in the last 10 years, there’s been such a resurgence, I think people are really amazed and feel really confident that it’s going to carry on. I think they realised that a big part of it is the bands that are playing now who are incorporating traditional music into what they do, and that they have drawn people into the tradition asking, ‘where does this come from?’ or this reminds me of when I was young and I first heard my parents and my grandparents sing songs like this and I want to find out more about it. So they find out where the session is going on, and then they go to a session, and then they start learning some more songs themselves.

John Robb

These sessions in the pubs are key aren’t they for the journey you’ve been on?

You went to these sessions earlier on when you were trying to find the music and it was a game changer. They do go in the UK as well. My local pub actually reinstated their Irish music sessions recently, and people bring any instruments down and they want to play something within the idea of Irish music, which always felt quite fluid to me. Was it similar in Ireland or was it tied down to tradition because you’re actually in Ireland, or maybe less of a tradition because it was more confident being in the country where it came from?

Ian Lynch

Well, I think it can vary a lot from session to session. Sometimes, you’ll go to a session, and it’s like a kind of free-for-all with people doing what they want to do. They might sing a song they wrote themselves, or they might sing a song that’s not traditional. You might go to another one and it’s very traditional, and the players are really high quality players who are playing in a very traditional way. The singers might be very serious about what they’re doing and they will have traditional players sitting in there.

It can vary quite a lot.

Musically speaking I like being at the more pure sessions because the music is just such a high degree, it’s really amazing. You really learn by listening to traditional music played well. But then again, I also like the kind of more free for all sessions which can be just more crazy.

The sessions in the pubs are really where the music lives, and that’s where it’s based. That’s where it belongs. What we’re doing isn’t like proper traditional music. What we’re doing is something else. I’d say that traditional music is an element of our sound and a very strong element, but it is just an element amongst others. But if you want to hear proper traditional music, go to a session where it has good musicians, and that’s really where it should be experienced.

John Robb

When you initially went to the sessions, would you go as a listener? Or would you go as a partaker? Would you bring your guitar down, or would you just sort of stomp your feet on the floor or join in or nod your head, or was it different every time?

Ian Lynch

I would have just kind of gone down and listened and then after a few times I would have partaken in a session. It probably would have like been singing a song, a traditional song in acapella. And then, after I started to learn the uilleann pipes, I would play them. I would have started bringing them to sessions and played traditional tunes on the pipes.

It’s interesting over here because the kind of the traditional singing world and the kind of the instrumental world of traditional music were quite separate in a lot of ways. At the sessions, they would have had singing sessions and then music sessions, and they didn’t really mix that much. The musicians used to get a bit pissed off with the singers because ‘they take too long, and the songs are too long!’. The singers would be like, ‘if we go down to the musician’s session, and we started singing a song, they all just go out for a smoke.’ So there’s a little bit of a divide there. It seems like that’s something that hasn’t really continued with the younger generation in a lot of the sessions that I see now. It seems to be like a good healthy mix between the two and that’s, that’s really cool to see.

John Robb

It’s interesting that your choice of instrument is the pipes. Is that because you liked the sound of them, or were you interested in them? Was it also something about the drone of the pipes that actually made sense to you because of the drone in black metal, as well as the mystical drone at the heart of music?

Ian Lynch

I think that the drone of the pipes is definitely the sort of thing that I kind of was drawn to. My first experience of it was actually the first scene in the film The Wicker Man. They were flying into the island on the little biplane, and the pipes came in there. You hear the drones just coming in, mixing with the drone of the propellers of the aeroplane, and I had to have that instrument that was doing that. I actually thought that was the Uilleann pipes when I heard it. I only later realised that it’s the Northumbrian small pipes, which are similar instruments but quite different in their own way.

I heard that, and I was just like, Ah, fuck, I want to play that instrument. It was an accident. I remember being a teenager and having it in my head that I really wanted to play Scottish Highlands pipes and talking to friends about it, and they were saying, wait, why would you want to learn to play Scottish pipes?  there are Irish pipes! And I was like, what, what are you talking about? I was fascinated by this idea before I’d even heard them. 

Also, the drone was a big aspect of the sound that kind of drew me to it. I just thought there’s just a certain mystique to the instruments. The uilleann pipes are one of the few native Irish instruments, along with a particular development of the harp. Everything else has been imported, like the fiddle, accordion, and concertina – all brought in from other countries. So this was something that was part of us.  

The uilleann pipes took me a long time before I could really do anything musical on them. I was living with some people when I started to learn, and they still kind of remind me of it now 20 years after, ‘I remember you doing finger exercises for hours at a time, and they would sound like the beeping sound of a truck reversing!’ Luckily, I eventually broke through and got to a stage where I could make something that resembled music!

John Robb

I had a friend who actually made Northumbrian pipes and he said they were actually from Morocco originally. Are the Irish pipes from the same family or is it just like a weird convergent evolution?

Ian Lynch

It’s part of the same pipe family. There are some sort of pipes from nearly every country in Europe and it all probably goes back to the same source. I heard these pipes from Sicily that the players use their cheeks as the bag whilst blowing into these little pipes. There are engravings from the 15th century with Irish pipes used in battle, like the way the Scottish Highland pipes are. After that, there was a more genteel kind of instrument made to be played indoors for dancers, but they are all definitely very much part of the same family of instruments.

John Robb

It’s interesting that across Europe, there is an interest in the folk roots of all countries and crisscrossing it with more modern styles. If I go to Estonia, I will see people using Estonian folk musics mixed with techno or punk rock with their weird little pipes. In a high-tech, modern time, it seems that people are trying to find their roots.

Ian Lynch

It’s definitely part of a general kind of movement and you can even see it in the States. My partner lives in New Orleans, and when I go there, all the punks are into country music, it’s all they play. Probably over the last 10/20 years people are going back to traditional kind of styles of music. There are these scenes popping up where they’ll have the same kind of ideals and the same ideas as DIY punk, but the musical styles are veering towards traditional and folk.

Maybe it’s just like a reaction against modern mainstream culture. I think people are just hunkering for something that’s just more substantial, something that means something more than what’s on offer. I think the diet of culture in the mainstream world will leave you feeling malnourished. It’s kind of akin to eating McDonalds. You buy it and it’s kind of, trashy, and cheap, and you’re kind of still hungry afterwards – which is like, mainstream pop music or whatever. I mean, I like some kinds of pop music and my son listens to a lot of it. I’m not totally against modern culture but I think that people are left feeling like they want something more.

The answer for them is this return to older forms of music and more traditional and folk forms of music. It’s a kind of music that has withstood the test of time – there is a timeless quality to the music. It’s kind of passed a certain test. It’s never had the kind of help of big money like mainstream kinds of music, industry or systems. It’s just lasted simply because it’s good music. The songs have lasted because they have something in them that will resonate with anybody from any generation. They’ve passed through time. The music has gone through so many people and entered people’s heads. The songs have been sung by people who have changed them a little bit along the way. Folklorists talk about this process – whereby, in items of folklore, the things that don’t make sense to people or the things that don’t work, they’ll just be forgotten and lost. A person will learn a song and if there is a verse that they don’t like or a verse in it that was maybe badly written or didn’t make sense, they’ll just leave it out. 

Somebody else along the line might write their own verse or write their own couple of lines that will be really good. So the next person will keep them. So by the time you pass through two or three hundred years, you have this song that’s probably different in a lot of ways than the original item was.

John Robb

It’s just the core of the idea that is there, but gets moulded with the times. That’s the power of it.

Ian Lynch

Absolutely. And that’s how folklore works. I think that’s why a lot of the songs, when they come down to us in this day and age have so much power. There’s so much to them that you could never really replicate. You could get the best songwriter and say, ‘write me a song that has that power,’ and they couldn’t do it. It just hasn’t gone through that process.

John Robb 

I interviewed Shirley Collins, and she said the folk music she deals with is specifically from Sussex and actually comes from the soil of England. And I love that idea that no matter what you try and sound like you can’t, you can only sound like what you are and where you are from. You may start off trying to do rock, but somehow the mystical soil of Ireland and that spirit is just going to seep into you anyway.

Ian Lynch

Absolutely.

I realised that whatever kind of projects I have and stuff I’m working on it always has the same kind of elements in it. In Lankum, it’s obviously the folk and traditional kind of elements that are there to a stronger degree. I feel like we can’t really help it. We just make the music that we make, and the only thing that we’re trying to stay true to is ourselves. That’s the guiding light that you need to have when you’re working. 

You just need to be authentic to yourself.

That’s all, and not to anybody else’s idea of what the tradition should be or anybody else’s idea of what your music should be. I think that can happen with bands as well, whereby the fans of the band have an idea of what the band should be doing. You can feel the pressure of that sometimes but I think you should always just remain true to yourself.

John Robb  

I’ve only got a minute left in there, but I’m just wondering, by doing this music and exploring that traditional Irishness of the folk music, does it change your aspects of that Irishness? Does it give you a different slant on it?

Ian Lynch

I think so, yeah. I think Irishness is such a funny and nebulous concept and it’s something that I’ve kind of been struggling with since I was very young – just trying to find out what it’s all about. What does it mean to be Irish? because growing up in Ireland, we have a lot of baggage as a post colonial country. 

A lot of times, we can’t speak our own language, but we have a lot of ideas about it, and there’s so much baggage there and trying to sort through all that and try and figure it all out is part of all of this.

Lankum : The John Robb interview

Lankum : The John Robb interview

Lankum : The John Robb interview

Lankum : The John Robb interview

Lankum : The John Robb interview

Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview vLankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview Lankum : The John Robb interview