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| Image compliments of Gavin Kelly, DJK Photography |
Millennium Forum and it would seem the high spirits are still soaring as Ciaran Carlin, whistle player, reflects on the night. “It was a brilliant night, there were nearly five hundred people there, we were only expecting around three hundred because it was only really going to be family and friends, and it’s a new band. Nobody really has heard about us so this was to kind of kick start us for next year."
"For anyone who wasn’t at the Millennium, there were nearly five hundred people all on their feet for the last three sets of the night. Even the sound man down there, he has seen some fantastic acts through the doors of the Millennium and he was saying it was as good as he’s heard and seen from anyone else. The audience really made it for me.”
Ciaran explains that although the band has only been formed six months, they wasted no time
before getting started on an album. “We have an album, a lot of it is original material too so it’s all
stuff we’ve written. I’ve written stuff myself and Barney, our piper, has written some tracks as well,
then we have a few covers too of old trad songs, some crowd pleasers in there. It’s a festival band,
and the best thing for us to do would be to have a CD to send out to the different festivals, that was
the thinking behind it. It’s a big set-up, there are ten people in the band so it’s a professional enough
unit, and it’s not the kind of gig you’re going to get in a pub down town or something you’d hear at a
wedding.”
Of course it can be expensive business to record, especially with a group so big but the group had
plenty of help to hand for recording after they got a bit practise in. “Basically we have our own two
sound men that travel everywhere with us and do all our sound; they did the sound on the album.
We recorded the album at Michaels, the bass player, parents’ house in Donegal. We transformed
his living room and kitchen into a recording studio more or less, and we recorded it all live. It was
a lot of practising first of all for weeks and weeks just to get it together and get tight. We have
eight musicians recording live. It was hard going, a lot of days of recording from ten in the morning
to twelve at night. We had to get it in and set for the time we had decided to release the album
because now is the time to send them out to get gigs for next year.”
However, this band isn’t our typical set-up; in fact, some would say it’s not traditional at all. It almost
challenges the boundaries of Irish and Scottish music with influences of Rock and Jazz which come
through very well with the use of bass, electric guitar and drums. “Basically there’s a whole pile of
different genres of music within it, it’s a unique sound, and it’s something different from anything
else you’ll ever hear.” This idea of trad music with electric guitar may conjure ideas of The Horslips,
Rory Gallagher or maybe even Thin Lizzy but it is definitely out there on its own as a new music
venture that has a big sound and a bigger passion from all involved.
Ciaran paints a picture of how the band operates so smoothly even when there are so many
different influencing aspects which could present as issues for other large groups. “It’s hard to
explain, you’d think it wouldn’t work but it jelled well together, everybody all gets on really well with
everybody and in work we’d all be comfortable enough to say if something wasn’t working. We all
meet up in a hall out in Bready in the Waterside. A practise will be at eleven in the morning and it’s
not easy to listen to bagpipes at that time. We just practise, get a set of tunes together and do a bit
of arranging maybe on a set for an hour. Now that we have a set together we would play through
that and anything that we know needs practised, we would focus on then.
The way we do things is, myself and Barney, we’d be the main tune players in the band so we would
get together and say if Barney had written a couple of tunes, I would pick them up and learn them
and we’d try them together and see what they’re like. We’d get them to fit with the whistle and the
pipes, figure out what arrangement works and then take them back and play the set to the likes of
our piano player, bass player and drums. They work around the tunes then and after that we try
it all as a whole and see what comes out. There’s a lot of backing to it, a lot of arrangement, and
that takes a lot of skill as well. Sometimes when things aren’t working out, maybe some of the parts
seemed a bit cluttered, or we wanted pieces that were a bit freer flowing with more melody coming
through we can just say. You would think with so many people it would always seem cluttered but
we’ve been playing that much and practising that much together that we’ve gotten really tight so
the sound doesn’t seem cluttered, it sounds really well.
The group have already played big events such as the welcoming of the Olympic torch in both Derry
and Belfast to around 20,000 people. As a cross community band Sontas plan to involve themselves
deeply in the City of Culture celebrations and will also be playing at the coming tattoo festival. It can
prove hard to get gigs as they are such a large act but there are many gigs yet to be confirmed so do
keep an eye out on Facebook or on sontasmusic.com for them. In the mean time, the eleven track
album is available for download and locally in music stores for around £8-£10.
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