WITTY WITCH
IRISH TUNES AND SONGS
Auto-production, no date, WW 193
This album is an example of what Irish music was like in France around 1980. I know all these musicians who were part of the Irish scene in Paris. One of them Marc Guilloux passed away in Brittany recently. He was one of the pioneers of the uilleann pipes in France and was among the founders of the Parisian equivalent of the Piper's Club (Na Piobairi Uilleann) in Dublin in 1981.
This band didn't last long as far as I remember but they managed to record this album in 1980 or 1981. We can feel the strong influence of Irish bands like Dé Dannan or Bothy Band.
One of the main aspect for a French band was to have an Irish singer because if plenty of French musicians could play Irish music (rightly or badly) very few of them could sing in English let alone in Irish. So they worked with Ollie Gallagher who stayed in Paris for a while.
My feelings about the global result are mixed; for example the fiddle player already mastered the typical (and difficult) ornementations of Irish fiddling but he spoiled it with hazardous harmonic variations or distorsions. I suppose it was what most players were exposed to in France from Irish bands and their approach to music.
A bad aspect too was the sound recording with a poor balance between the insruments or it was the mix maybe.
Note that Brieg Henry's composition ''the Silver Goblet'' refers to the pub of that name (in fact le Gobelet d'Argent was the real name), the first pub owned by an Irish man in Paris Anthony Prett who opened it in 1980. This pub was for a while the only place where Parisian musicians could play together on a regular basis.
It is a rare document nevertheless since very few copies were made.
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