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Sharon Shannon.
 One of the many pleasures of WOMAD is the chance to experience musicians from anywhere on the planet in one convenient location. Another is to witness combinations of artists that are not likely to be repeated elsewhere. This year Sharon Shannon is one such example. The renowned Irish accordionist has been quite a regular visitor to Adelaide over the last few years, playing with her own band to highly appreciative audiences. This time though, along with her regular guitarist Jim Murray ("I don't know what I'd do without Jim!"), Shannon will perform with two musicians from Manchester, Michael McGoldrick (pipes) and Dezi Donnelly (fiddle). McGoldrick was last seen at the festival as a member of Capercaillie, so with the various reputations preceding them, this is one musical amalgamation that holds a lot of promise.
As Shannon explains, this particular group will be performing only in Australia. "Mike was going to be touring there the same time as us and we had the same promoter working on a gig for Mike and a gig for me, and he came up with the suggestion that maybe we join up and do all the same gigs as a band together. We thought it was a great idea. It's a lot easier for everyone and we got very excited about it and decided to do an album and everything."
The CD is all-instrumental and entitled 'Upside Down', a title she hopes isn't too clichˇd for an Australian audience! It was recorded late last year, but the band members are yet to hear the result; their fist time hearing it will be when they arrive in Australia. As to its content, Shannon elaborates, "It's kind of half and half of new stuff that we just put together when we decided to get together for the album. The intention was to just put together an album that would be exactly like the show that we would be playing, and our intention for the show would be we'd play the best of what the four of us have to offer, which obviously would include stuff we've already recorded before. But we couldn't resist doing some new stuff as well. So it's about half and half of new stuff and 'best of' type thing."
There is certainly plenty of material to draw from; local audiences may not be aware that Shannon's career stretches back to the late 1980s. In a way, her musical life has been almost charmed - she has always had the ability to attract musicians from different genres to her various projects, with end results that elicit the best from all concerned. Her very first self-titled album, which sold over 50,000 copies in Ireland, featured Adam Clayton from U2 and Mike Scott of The Waterboys, of which she was also a member for eighteen months. Later CDs such as 'The Diamond Mountain Sessions' saw her successfully collaborate with artists of the calibre of Steve Earle and Jackson Browne.
In recent times, Shannon has also expanded musically to include hip-hop rhythms on her 2003 CD 'Libertango' but judging from her live performances, her heart is very much in the traditional music of her home country. Even so, a great deal of her material is contemporary - either written by herself and her band members or sourced from other modern writers - but with a strong foundation in the energy and rhythms of Irish folk music.
One indication of her success in Ireland was the compilation CD 'Sharon Shannon Collection' recently reaching number two on the mainstream charts - "I was delighted with the number two. It stayed in the top ten for weeks and weeks, nearly ten weeks or something." She has the advantage of running her own record company Daisy Discs with her manager, which meant she could pick exactly what tracks to include. One downside was the unexpected success itself - "It ran out loads in the shops, there was a shortage, it happened a lot." Shannon admits she is happy to play the music however, and leaves the business side to her manager.
Ah yes, the music. Rooted in the tradition of her homeland, played with skill, energy and fun - a typical Sharon Shannon gig fulfils one of the most important functions of music, in that it simply makes the audience happy. Combine that with the special nature of this WOMAD performance, and one can understand when she says, "It's new and fresh and we're really sparking off each other. We're really getting a great buzz out of it ourselves, so hopefully that will come across."
Michael Hunter
 | Sharon Shannon performs at WOMAD from Fri 10 to Sun 12 March |
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