The Breath: Giving up the ghosts

Oh my god there were so many different facets of trauma happening at once – it was like a reckoning. It was such a bad time to write any songs. But this album is that time. It will out. It comes out through your pores.” These are the words of singer, lyricist and flautist Ríoghnach Connolly, referring back to 2019, a year when she was dangerously ill after the birth of her daughter, and when her father Tarlac – republican socialist, poet, singer and uilleann piper – died ten weeks later. She had missed receiving the BBC Folk Awards’ Singer of the Year Award (the last time the Awards were held) in person because she was in hospital. “I was really, really sick. I had no idea how ill I was. After that the only person I could talk to had just died on me. I was just on a different planet in grief.”

Born in Armagh, Connolly grew up surrounded by traditional music and shaped by The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Beside her dad, grandparents, aunts and uncles played and sang. “I was able to sing all of Mary Black’s songs word for word as a toddler. I remember learning loads of songs from my grandparents. There was always a piano going, always tunes in the house.” Aged six she joined the Pipers Club in Armagh. “It was very dangerous to play music in the 80s, but you could hide a whistle up your sleeve going through the town to classes. It was a way of connecting to my grandparents and to my wider family. When I was about seven my dad got lifted and he was in jail for 11 years. It became a way of being close to him as well. We could sing wee tunes to each other on visits, he’d write tunes out to me in letters and sing wee songs to me over the phone.”

Aged 19, Connolly moved to Manchester to study, and began performing in the local jazz scene. “I didn’t want to be in Irish pubs and have people roar for whatever drinking song they wanted. And I didn’t want people asking about my background either,” she reminisces. In the following years she performed with an eclectic group of locals including avant-jazz provocateur Alabaster DePlume, jazz-swing outfit Louis Barabbas & The Bedlam Six and downtempo producer Frameworks. She also formed the genre-busting, wild and fun group Honeyfeet with her partner Ellis Davies in 2008.

Stuart McCallum found himself in the same scene, centred around venues like Night & Day and Matt & Phreds in the city’s Northern Quarter. McCallum started playing guitar at 15, “practising ‘Black Dog’ by Led Zeppelin” and “soon got into people like John McLaughlin and George Benson and took a deep dive into jazz. I was practising all day and made sure I either had a gig, a party or a jam at somebody’s house every day. I was really quite obsessive,” he remembers. After ten years of playing with Cinematic Orchestra, he was looking to work with a singer. “I found Ríoghnach singing ‘Knocking on Another Man’s Door’ on MySpace and thought, ‘fucking hell!’, her voice was insane. We hit it off musically straight away.” Together, they formed The Breath, working with local musicians, notably keyboard player John Ellis and drummer Luke Flowers, who Stuart says is “the person I’ve played with more than anyone else,” on the first two The Breath albums, 2016’s Carry Your Kin and 2018’s Let the Cards Fall.

Since The Breath formed, Connolly has gone on to play with the Afro Celt Sound System and Band of Burns, but says that she has recently “streamlined” the number of projects she’s involved in to just two. Honeyfeet is all about the good times, while The Breath, for Connolly, “meant I could take myself a little bit more seriously and write about stuff that really has been haunting me. I do think that with Honeyfeet and The Breath there’s no dichotomy, but when I had five or six projects happening at once, that was madness.” A more recent, occasional, ongoing project goes back to her musical roots, bringing family members together to play songs and tunes from Ulster, releasing an album last year, Rud Nach Léir, including one song sung by her dad.

The journey from the first The Breath album to Land of My Other, their third full album, is a story of shedding musical layers, from a busy, full band sound to the simplicity of predominantly acoustic guitar, vocals and occasional flute, becoming more folk-like at each step. McCallum outlines the evolution. “For me, coming out of the Cinematic Orchestra, being used to big gigs and a big sound influenced the way I produced the first album. There are strings on it, woodwind, drums, lots of guitars, lots of Ríoghnach’s vocals layered up for backing vocals. It was a ‘more is more’ mentality.” Finding that they were unable to easily replicate that sound live led to a change on Let the Cards Fall. It was “an album that more accurately reflects what the live thing is going to be like. We stripped it back and there are a lot more folk elements,” says McCallum. “We got [fiddle player] Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh on it. Less electric, a lot more acoustic guitar, a lot less backing vocals.”

In late 2018 Connolly and McCallum performed for the first time as a duo in Brighton, mainly because the fee was too low to pay the rest of the band. The musical intimacy and the audience reception were a revelation. McCallum again: “We had pin-drop silence and got a proper standing ovation. We agreed with Real World [Records] to do a version of the Let the Cards Fall tracks as a duo. After we did Only Stories (Let the Cards Fall Revisited), all of a sudden things started to fall into place. We got nominated for Best Group at the Folk Awards.” Thereafter, The Breath was officially a duo.

When Connolly felt ready to write songs for the new album, what came out was, unsurprisingly following the death of her dad and her post-natal illness, particularly raw. The trust that had developed between her and McCallum made that possible. “Our friendship has solidified. Especially through the long journeys together when you get to the root of what each other is about. We had a conversation when I blew his mind when I talked about being on a loyalist death list, which is a really normal thing to be if you are a nationalist, republican family in Armagh.” McCallum explains how their musical confidence grew. “There’s a lot of silence in a duo. There’s an initial fear of that kind of bareness. Confidence in ourselves as people, in our abilities individually and in our ability together, has grown as the number of people involved has gone down. There isn’t anywhere for us to hide anymore on a musical level, and that has then transpired into real vulnerability.” Themes of life during The Troubles, emigration, Irish mythology, loss and the anniversaries of losses, are threaded through the album.

‘Fingertips to paper, soft words in your head, secret stories hidden under your bed, oh little daughter hold your head up high, and never be ashamed of me, always look them in the eye,’ Connolly sings midway through ‘Letters from Long Kesh’, a song about the time her dad was in prison that feels like the heart of Land of My Other, accompanied by spry, anthemic Davy Graham-like guitar. She fills in the background. “My dad wrote me a letter every day. A beautiful wee letter with a wee joke and a wee squiggly cartoon in it and loads of songs. When he was in the H-Blocks that beautiful one-on-one time with him was so lovely. He was my best friend; he was a great dad. You can’t really explain that next to all of the things that he was and [have] that be the most important, but for me that obviously is the most important. It’s just about a wee girl that misses her daddy.”

The terror of being a child in Northern Ireland that Connolly sings about in ‘Head Down’ – ‘keep your head down girl and say nothing and keep saying it’ – is starkly disquieting, with appositely ominous instrumentation: jagged electric guitar and atmospheric piano. “I realised that I’d grown up having to hide your name, your school, anything about your background. Feeling in danger. Seeing the snipers in the bushes outside your house. Knowing that Billy Wright [leader of the LVF paramilitary group] was going round your windows. Knowing that there was a big bat by the back door because it was only a matter of time before it got kicked in and a death gang would come in and murder everybody.”

Some of the songs are not what they seem. ‘Lay down with me my little one, I have you now the day is done,’ Connolly gently intones on ‘Little One’, addressing her baby daughter, but the final verse – ‘and I know it’s just you and me out on the road, I held so tight to the wheel clenched heavy with rage, clenched heavy with the pain of losing you’ – goes back to dealing with her dad’s illness while being pregnant and a musician on the road. “It’s a lullaby and it sounds really twee me singing to the baby, but really it’s about me holding on for dear life on my own, dealing with these crazy journeys like WOMAD to Belfast TradFest through the night. I’m really pregnant and dad was in treatment. There’s nowhere else that I can cry, only on the road. I realised I was really afraid. I remember screaming and roaring into space. I’m sure the only thing she heard in utero was me sobbing.”

The duo have crafted a consistent and fruitful approach to writing songs together, which McCallum outlines. “Our songs start with a guitar sound which could be an idea that I’ve already had, something that I started playing on a soundcheck, or had written for something else. She’ll start to hum a melody and start to think about getting a shape together over what I’m doing, and I’ll adapt, and she’ll adapt and then she’ll settle on something, and the words start to emerge like a stream of consciousness. It’s almost like a double-headed singer-songwriter beast, with two heads feeding into that process.”

How those words emerge is described by Connolly: “I go into a hypnotic space where I feel like I’m looking at an image, but I can’t describe the image word for word, so I have to sing what the image makes me feel and I go on a wee trance and a wee journey with it, and I describe the dreamscape. For me it’s as vague as it can be, but then when you read it back you’re like, ‘oh god you just basically told your life story.’ I’ve tried to inhabit a space where your writing does that thing that art does, where it’s, ‘OK, this isn’t yours anymore,’ this is whatever anybody can project their own story onto and find affinity with.”

The production on The Breath’s preceding recordings had been done by McCallum, but this time, not wanting to “wear that many hats,” they brought in Thomas Bartlett, pianist and producer with The Gloaming and in-demand producer for many others, including Bebel Gilberto and Norah Jones. “We said to him we wanted the album to be about the duo,” McCallum says. “He talks about him ‘framing or lighting’ us. He added a few bits and bobs of piano and stuff. His thing is restraint.” That framing, and those restrained bits and bobs, help to make Land of My Other an unadulterated, folky distillation of what McCallum describes as The Breath’s original intention: “something quiet, serious and with depth.”

On a shelf in the front-cum-music room in Connolly’s house, where we talk, sits a megaphone. While I suspect Connolly uses it for maximum rabble-rousing with Honeyfeet, it could also act as a metaphor for The Breath’s new album: this story is ready to be heard.