“The name caused great hilarity when we appeared on Radio 4’s Kaleidoscope just a few days after we’d first met,” remembers Sarah. “We weren’t really from three nations at all, but we didn’t want to admit it. When it was announced that Mike was from Scotland he got the giggles, so when we started playing a set of tunes live, he started playing a completely different set of tunes from Brian and I, which caused us all to get the giggles. It was so bad that the BBC actually repeated it a couple of times and we ended up getting more royalties than if we’d played properly!”

Fortunately, the band members were able to keep their faces straight long enough at tour gigs to play the kind of music that left both themselves and their audiences hungry for more. However, the name just had to go.

“Three Nations Flutes was only ever intended as our name for that initial tour anyway,” says Sarah. “By the end of it, in addition to deciding that we wanted to carry on playing together, we’d decided that we didn’t want to be just a three flute band anymore, we wanted Ed to join us on guitar. He’d already played the final gig of the tour in London, following an earlier appearance by John Joe (Kelly) on bodhrán in Manchester.”

The new name, Fluke! (simply a play on the word “flute”), was soon changed to Flook! after it was discovered that a Manchester-based techno group had got there first. It was under this name, complete with exclamation mark, that the band’s first recording, Flook! Live!, appeared in 1997.

“That album was recorded in August 1996 at the Sidmouth Festival,” says Sarah. “Music journalist Colin Irwin’s story is that Ian Anderson, editor of Folk Roots magazine, wanted to do a feature on us, but said he’d only put us on the front cover if we had a CD. Ian himself doesn’t remember it quite like that, but whatever the truth is, the two things did go hand in hand.”

The fact that the CD inlay for Flook! Live! includes advertisements for each band member’s other musical projects – Sarah Allen’s band, Big Jig, for example, and Ed Boyd’s band, Red Ciel – makes it clear that the future for Flook! at this point was still far from clear.

“We weren’t really doing enough gigs together to make Flook! our main project at that time,” recalls Brian. “Although we were still getting a lot of help from Becky Morris and her friend Kit Bailey’s Brass Tacks agency, the work coming in was still kind of patchy.”

“I seem to remember things picking up fairly rapidly after the Sidmouth gig though,” adds Ed. “That’s when a lot of other festival organisers got to see us for the first time and, of course, it led to our appearance on the cover of Folk Roots. It certainly gave us some momentum which hadn’t been there before.”

Inevitably, as more work started coming in for Flook!, Mike McGoldrick found it increasingly difficult to juggle all his other commitments around the band and, in early 1998, decided that it would be best if he left.

“Mike’s first son, Rory, had been born around the time Flook! started,” recalls Ed, “and he was also getting offered lots of work with Lúnasa, Kate Rusby and the Afro Celts. I think it was a very honourable decision he made to leave us once he realised that he couldn’t commit himself full time.”

Several observers predicted the imminent demise of the whole band at this point. Up until then, the musical emphasis in Flook! had been on Mike and Brian’s flutes improvising up front and it was assumed that the space left by Mike’s departure would be impossible to fill. As it turned out, space was precisely what the band needed in order to evolve.

“I was listening to a recording of one of our early gigs recently,” says Brian, “and I was shocked to rediscover just how frantic things were back then. It was really manic music, with lots of percussive tonguing and so on. Mike and I were kind of sparring musically, which at the time was very inspiring, but there was no space at all in the overall soundscape. When Mike left, it was like loosening a corset.”

“Replacing Mike with John Joe on bodhrán changed us from being a very flute-dominated thing to more of a band of equals,” says Ed. “Listeners were now drawn as much to the bottom-end, rhythmic elements in our sound as to the top-end, melodic parts. We definitely became a much more balanced unit. From a purely personal point of view, it was also great having John Joe as a partner as I’ve never really enjoyed the exposure of solo rhythmic work.”

“Ed and John Joe can both play tunes as well,” points out Brian, “Ed on guitar and John Joe on banjo and mandolin. This means they’re very clued in to what Sarah and I are doing on the melody side of things. I don’t think of them as mere backers at all.”

One of the last things Mike McGoldrick was involved with before he left Flook! was a multi-national Folkworks project entitled Flutopia.

“The Flutopia tour took place in February/March 1998 and involved Flook! and three flute players who Brian had recommended,” explains Sarah: “Jean Michel Veillon from Brittany, Andras Monori from Hungary and Quique Alnendros from Spain. Unfortunately, Mike got chicken pox halfway through the tour and had to be replaced by Emer Mayock.”

Although Breton music had occasionally featured in Flook!’s repertoire before this time, the band hadn’t yet explored Eastern European and Spanish music together.

“Our ears were really opened by that tour,” remembers Ed, “and we started to incorporate those new influences into our own sets. For instance, we combined a Macedonian tune which Andras had taught us with a tune called The Gentle Giant which Brian later wrote and named in his honour. Another set, which we call Flutopia, includes an Asturian muiñeira, a Breton gavotten, a Macedonian oro and a reel by Newcastle’s Thomas McIlvogue.”

These new sets feature prominently on each of the band’s next two albums, the second live recording, The Four of Us, and the first studio recording, Flatfish.

“The Four of Us was brought out around April 1999 specifically to give us something to sell on a tour of Denmark,” explains Sarah. “We realised that another release from us was overdue, but we’d simply been too busy touring to finish the studio album yet. The Four of Us includes a lot of the material from Flatfish, as well as a new version of The Dub Reel from our first album, this time featuring a trademark five-minute bodhrán solo from John Joe at the beginning.”

The eagerly awaited Flatfish (“flook”/“fluke” means “flatfish” in certain dialects) finally appeared in September 1999, and it wasn’t just the recording quality and the dropping of the exclamation mark from the band’s name which signalled that a new era in their career was beginning; the whole package – including a distinctive logo and beautifully designed cardboard album cover rather than the usual plastic jewel case – just oozed originality and class.

“Our illustrator since Flatfish has been Andrea Davies, a Welsh friend of Ed’s who lives in Bath,” says Sarah. “We give her broad topics to work on and she then comes up with pages and pages of lovely artwork for us to choose from. Unfortunately, we have a habit of changing our minds about album titles after we’ve commissioned her, so we then have to come up with suitably abstract new titles that will still fit her artwork. For instance, when we started thinking about what to call the album after Flatfish, we had a vague idea about calling it Butterfly Box, so the artwork for what became Rubai is actually based on butterfly wings. Likewise, our latest album, Haven, was going to be called Island, so there’s a stylised island on the front cover, which fortunately still fits with the new title anyway. Guy Jackson, who designed our logo, is the computer whizz who incorporates Andrea’s artwork into the finished album covers. We’re really pleased with the look of the last three albums; they complement one another perfectly and have really helped us to establish our own unique identity.”

The release of Flatfish opened a lot of new doors to travel for Flook (now minus the exclamation mark in their name), so it was over two and a half years before they were able to complete their second studio album, Rubai, which took its title from a form of poetry favoured by the thirteenth century Islamic mystic, Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi.

“The name of that album really chose itself in the end,” explained Brian at the time. “I was reading the foreword to one of Rumi’s books called Birdsong and discovered that the most popular form of Persian poetry was the rubai: ‘a four-line poem, in perfect rhyme, full of music, rhythm and breath’. I later found out that the four-line rubai is based around the four levels of friendship, which made it seem even more appropriate as a title for the work of our four-piece band.”

As well as containing more original compositions by Sarah and Brian than had been the case on previous albums, Rubai featured a number of guest musicians for the first time, including the band’s multi-talented new recording engineer, Mark Tucker, of Presshouse Studios in Devon, who contributed some particularly fine e-bow acoustic guitar.

“Having guests was partly a way of avoiding merely repeating what we’d done on Flatfish,” explained Sarah back then. “Hopefully people agree that we managed to do it in a way that doesn’t distract from the fact that it is essentially still an album by the four of us.”

I’ve certainly never heard any complaints – the album got nothing but rave reviews as far as I’m aware – and it doesn’t seem that the band have either, as they decided to include guests again on their latest recording, Haven. However, as before, the aim has been to include guests in a way which subtly enhances rather than overpowers the essential Flook sound.

“The recording process always begins with just the four of us trying to capture the essence of one of our live performances,” explains Brian. “Some bands can take ages to make CDs, with individual members recording at different times to a click track. We use John Joe as our click track and play sets through until we’re all happy with a particular take. Having guests in the studio during this stage of the process would be quite disruptive as we’d all be aware that there were other people hanging around waiting to record their parts. Before Haven was recorded we didn’t really have much of a clue who we were going to ask to appear on it with us anyway. We kind of knew that we wanted Capercaillie’s Ewen Vernal to play double bass again and that it would be nice to have more percussion from Baka Beyond’s Seckou Keita, but other than that, things were still unclear. As was the case with Rubai, we could quite easily have left the recording as just the four of us, but having baked the cake, it was nice to have some icing on it in the shape of guest musicians.”

Once the choice of guests for each track has been made, they then tend to be sent a copy of the core recording and are asked to let it inspire their own contributions.

“The people we ask to be on our albums are all highly competent musicians,” says Brian, “so it would be patronising of us to tell them exactly what we wanted them to play. Some of them get more inspired than others, of course. For instance, when we sent a track to Rory McLeod for Rubai, he put down so many trombone parts that it took us almost two days to decide which bits to use. It was like Tubular Bells!”

New sounds on Haven include Leon Hunt’s 5-string banjo, Andy Davies’ Hammond organ, Padraig Rynne’s anglo concertina and Catriona McKay’s harp.

“We’d collaborated with Daily Planet’s Leon Hunt before,” explains Ed, “on his brilliant solo album, Miles Apart. He put us in touch with fellow Bath muso, Andy Davies, who played on John Lennon’s Imagine and is one third of The Three Caballeros, a West Country institution. We’d known Padraig Rynne from Ennis since March 2004, when we toured Austria with a trio he was playing in. Scottish harpist Catriona McKay was someone we got to know through Brian, who had done some teaching work with her.”

Having now recorded with ten different guest musicians over the course of their last two albums, I wondered if there were any plans for a live “Flook Big Band” performance in the future.

“Ed and I were talking about that recently,” says Brian. “We’d like to get everyone who’s ever played with Flook to perform live at the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow, not this coming year, but maybe in 2007. It would be just wonderful!”

Part of the reason for Flook’s longevity is hinted at in the title of the latest album, Haven.

“Flook to me for the last ten years has been a rock,” says Brian. “Whatever’s going on in our personal lives, we know that when we’re on tour together we’re safe. There’s just such harmony. When you spend as much time together with three other people as we have over the last ten years, it kind of goes beyond love. We’re all best friends, almost like family. The most amazing things that I’ve experienced over the last ten years have been with Ed, John Joe and Sarah. I read something once by Dizzy Gillespie in which he said that music reflects your life experience. It’s about the number of times your heart’s been broken, the people that you’ve lost, the children you’ve watched being born. If you haven’t lived it, it won’t come out of your instrument. I think Flook have lived it over the last ten years and that that’s reflected in the depth of our music on Haven. It sounds grown up and at ease with itself to me.”

There’s a definite sense of “living the dream” in Flook these days, and moments like the following seem to bring this home.“We were doing a gig in the mountains of New Mexico last year,” remembers Brian, “and there was someone in the audience shining a really huge, powerful spotlight all around. At one point, I had my eyes closed, but was aware of this light having just passed across the stage, so I opened them again. I followed the beam of light right down into the valley, and right at the end of it, perhaps as much as half a mile away, there was a Native American woman on the flat roof of her house, in full costume, dancing to our set of jigs. It completely took my breath away!”

So where does the band go from here?

“It’s quite difficult even now to turn invitations down,” says Brian, “but I think we are at a point when we can afford to be a little more choosy about what we do. There’s definitely more to life than charging around the world chasing your tail. We don’t like to repeat the same sort of thing too often if we can help it. For instance, if someone rang us up and said, ‘Come to Lithuania for two hundred quid plus expenses and a good time’, we’d probably do it as we’ve never been to Lithuania before. However, if someone offered us five thousand pounds to do a one-off gig in Frankfurt, where we’ve already played many times, we probably wouldn’t do it. There are lots of places we’d like to go and people we’d like to play with, but really we have very little idea of what the future holds.”

One new place they’ll be visiting locally is The Barrington Theatre, Ferndown, on Saturday 11th February, 2006. Don’t miss it! More information is available at www.fawm.net and tickets can be ordered from Val Munro on 01202 707498.

For all the latest Flook news, simply visit the band’s own very extensive and up-to-date website: www.flook.co.uk

Julian Gurr

Not that it was ever conceived with any great masterplan. Flook will quickly tell you anything they’ve done has always come about entirely by accident and nobody’s more surprised that it’s now 10 frenetic years since they first put flutes to flaming tunes than the boys and girl of Flook themselves. They all look mystified and shrug their shoulders when you ask them how they’ve managed to make such a success of it.

“Well, I dunno really…” says Sarah Allen, still seemingly flummoxed by the strange beast that swallowed her up and took her away for a decade after she’d emerged from Barely Works and another fine band BigJig. “I mean, it’s a miracle for any band to stay together 10 years, but to keep virtually the same line-up in just amazing. Becky Morris had this idea of a three flutes tour over three weeks and, well, it wasn’t even that many gigs to be honest. We certainly never expected it to lead to anything else…”

The Three Nations Flutes tour was one of those deliciously illogical whims that normally get left in the pub at the end of a night of playing, drinking and animated bearhugs. But Londoner Sarah found herself on the road swapping tunes with Brian Finnegan from Armagh and Mancunian Irishman Michael McGoldrick and to each of their surprise they found it worked from almost every angle. “I loved the idea of a flute band,” muses Brian Finnegan, formerly with Upstairs In A Tent, who has more tunes but less hair these days, “but thinking it and making it reality is not so easy. Musicians tend to be quite good at talking about things but not so good at doing it…”

After just a handful of gigs they decided it needed freshening up and gave guitarist Ed Boyd a call. “It was very strange,” remembers the affable Mr Boyd. “I’d only ever known Sarah from admiring her at Barely Works gigs and the suddenly came on the phone and said ‘I hope you don’t mind but I’ve nicked a bassline of yours for a tune.” Ed went to see the three flautists playing at the Chestnuts in Walthamstow and caused something of a sensation. “He walked in with a mobile phone,” says Sarah in some awe. “I mean, he was the only person I knew at the time who had a mobile phone…”

Before they knew it, the one-off Three Nations Flutes tour proposed had been slyly extended to include Ed Boyd on guitar and without any of them noticing they became a regular band. They changed the name to Fluke! but in time they had to change that to Flook in order to avoid confusion with some long-forgotten Manchester indie techno band

“We’ve had four rehearsals in 10 years and I can’t even remember what they were like,” says Sarah, “We never had a plan in our lives. We just did it and liked it so we did it some more and people seemed to like it. We never had any expectations. Nothing’s changed in that respect.”

They’re celebrating their 10th anniversary with a major tour and a brand new album, though as we sit in their favourite Indian restaurant in Marylebone, the title remains the hot debate of the night. Well, that and the robbery in Sarah’s flat when the thieves got away with all their earnings from a Canadian tour. Well, that and the eternal debate about where the last 10 years have gone.

There had been no precedent for a band fronted by a trio of duelling flutes though they fondly recall the drunken conversation in Sidmouth with Aly Bain, who informed them of the time Cathal McConnell, Seamus Tansey and Matt Molloy had spent hours knocking out tunes together in a back room in Ireland. “Yes, I heard Seamus Tansey when I was growing up,” says Finnegan as we swap colourful tales of the outrageous Sligo flute icon. “His record would have been in the house, but he played in a particular style – the Leitrim/Sligo way – and the major figure for me was Matt Molloy,” says Brian Finnegan. “There was something about the way Molloy played, the looseness of it, which defied all categories and for an impressionable 16-year-old, he was pivotal to me.”

Early on they released a live album they all now hate. It was all Ian Anderson’s fault apparently. “Oh we didn’t ever want that released,” groans Sarah. “It wasn’t planned. Ian said he’d put us on the magazine cover if we had a record out, so we were railroaded into releasing it really. But the odd thing is people still love the vibe of it. I get so many emails from people wanting it that we made another 1,000 and re-released it last year.”

“I’ve got no quibbles about performance but it was just done straight off the desk,” muses Ed Boyd, “and I thought the sound was horrible. Being really anal about it when you pick out the guitar off the board it sounds terrible. That’s why proper live albums are mixed after the gig. Donal Lunny did a great live album but when you read the sleeve half of it was redone after the gig. It doesn’t bother me but it obviously bothered them at the time.”

Increasingly invited to play at other people’s parties – notably with Lunasa and Capercaillie - Mike McGoldrick left Flook a couple of years down the road. It doesn’t take much to get Finnegan waxing lyrical about McGoldrick. “He’s simply one of the most inspiring musicians I’ve ever played with. He’s into all these different styles…jazz, world music, everything and he’s not just a great flute player, he’s a great piper who can also play tunes on the button box and plays bodhran too. He’s brilliant, totally irreplaceable.”

So irreplaceable they didn’t bother trying and the triple flute attack became a dual spearhead, with another Mancunian Irishman, the enigmatic John Joe Kelly, introduced to offer a different kind of flare and further his reputation as the world’s most inventive bodhran player.

John Joe doesn’t say a lot. He seems to harbour a deep suspicion of the press and prefers to keep his own counsel, but as the drinks start to fly and the talk turns to bodhrans, he enters the fray. “Ringo was the man,” he says, as we talk influences. That’s not Starr, but McDonagh, De Dannan’s legendary man of the goat skin. “It was the Star Spangled Molly album with that track The Queen Of Sheba Arrives In Galway, full of top to bottom solid runs. See, bodhran playing has really changed in the last 10-12 years, there’s so much more top end stuff now, it’s strongly influenced by tabla players. There are a lot of similarities in the bending of the skin and stuff like that – it has become very modernised.”

Many claim John Joe Kelly is the leading moderniser and while the man himself slips back into his shell when you ask him about it (“there’s lots of others doing it and I’m just lucky to be in a band where I don’t have to play in a traditional style because the tunes and arrangements we use allow us to be more adventurous”) the others are quick to big him up. “Who needs a drumkit when you’ve got John Joe?” says Ed Boyd. “John Joe plays banjo and mandolin to a really high level so he can pick the melody and when he plays bodhran he’s thinking about the notes,” says Brian Finnegan. “He knows exactly where we are and where the bar is and he plays much more sonically than most drummers.”

Kelly’s inspirational bodhran playing is a key reason why Flook have lasted the course and always sound so fresh – and why the band are constantly challenging themselves and driving themselves to ever greater peaks of intensity. “I love gigs that take me out of the comfort zone, even in different genres with jazz and so on,” says Finnegan. “I feel so inspired when I’m in territory I’ve never been in before. A Flook gig feels like a work-out – I’m always totally exhausted at the end of it and I know I couldn’t have given a millimetre more effort. I don’t tend to speak to people after gigs and that’s because I don’t have any more words to say, I can’t articulate it, I’ve said it all on stage. A lot of people want to know more about the tunes but I don’t have the energy.”

In 1999 they toured under the name ‘Flutopia’ with three European flautists – Jean Michel Veillon (Brittany), Quique Almendros (Spain) and Andras Monori (Hungary) to spread the love further and have since made two more fine albums Flatfish and the one they all agree is their best, Rubai. “We came of age with Rubai,” says Sarah. “There’s a whole crowd of more traddy people who say ‘Oh let’s just play fast and furious’ but that’s not what we’re about.”

With a fan base well beyond the normal parameters of folk music – they once played a huge gig with Massive Attack – they were keen to push the envelope further with a dance remix album of Ruba.i It didn’t happen but they are hoping it will with the new one. “Not because we’re unhappy with the acoustic versions but we all like dance music – and I don’t mean English country dance music,” laughs Sarah. Ed: “Not as a live thing – we’ve seen bands trying to mix electronica with live performance and it’s always held back by the click track, but on a DJ level it would be good to try it. So if there are any budding DJs out there…”

I ask if they’re likely to last another 10 years and they look nervously at one another. They’ve already come through so much turbulence with the constant travelling and the impact the band has had on their personal lives – even surviving the break-up of Sarah and Brian’s relationship – that at present they can’t see beyond the new album.

“I think it’s unlikely we’ll be here for another 10 years,” says Ed eventually. “Not in a pessimistic way but just because of circumstances. It’s part and parcel of being a musician, you have to sacrifice so much. All the stuff about births and deaths and having a routine. We’ve put such a lot into this new record it’s hard to imagine we’ve got another one in us…” “Then again,” chips in Sarah, “we said that after Flatfish. I thought then that if this was the defining moment of our career together then I’d be happy. Then we made Rubai and that was even better and I thought that was our defining moment. Now we’ve done the new one and it’s even better and I’m thinking ‘if I never make another record, I’ll be happy.’ After Rubai I didn’t think we needed to do any more, so who knows what we’ll think after this one?

“One thing I’m clear about is that if one of the four of us isn’t in Flook any more we’re not going to be like Pentangle and carry on with replacements, the band is very much these four people. But when you make a new album you are deciding that yes, this is us carrying on for at least another three years so who knows how we’ll feel at the end of that time?”

Their woes tend to be forgotten in any case once they’re on stage. “There are times when you go on stage jet-lagged out of your head and you’re feeling lousy but you just catch a look from somebody in the crowd and you suddenly realise ‘this is why I got up at half five in the morning to get on a plane…’” says Brian.

We’ve already established they never rehearse and if Brian or Sarah wants to introduce a new tune into the set, it undergoes an organic process where they subtly slip it into the soundcheck. “We have to keep an eye on the others’ faces to see what they think,” says Sarah, “if there’s a glimmer of interest from them then it’s usually okay.” And nor do they feel constricted by the apparent limitations of a line-up of bodhran, guitar and two flutes. “It means we really have to concentrate on the arrangements,” says Ed. “Then again a good rock band only needs four members. Look at Police. There were only three of them and I think they made a pretty good job of it most of the time. You don’t need loads of people to make an exciting sound, you just need to focus more.”

After gigs they’re usually too knackered to play at sessions but more often than not will still go along to feed on the spirit. Sometimes they’ve been shocked by what they’ve seen and heard. “There always seem to be these super trad musicians who at 13 are light years ahead of how we were playing,” says Finnegan. “I look at them and feel like a dinosaur. It’s totally inspiring. There’s a young guy from Scotland who’s doing my head in right now he’s so good.”

Kelly: “Once upon a time if you could play a tune in your early teens you were considered a good player but I was at a session recently in Ennis and there was nobody over 17 at the session, yet the music sounded so mature. Some of the bodhran players…phew…I wanted to chop their hands off! I was talking to this kid of 10 and his knowledge of music was amazing.”

Brian Finnegan recalls hearing one of his own tunes played by a 15-year-old in Scotland recently that gave him the shivers. “I was thinking ‘you were four when I wrote that’ and there he was playing it with complete self-belief. It was incredible. I really did feel we’d been together 10 years then…”

Colin Irwin
fRoots
October 2005

Flook was something of a reed players dream, three surefire exponents of the flute and whistle variety–Brian Finnegan from Armagh, Michael McGoldrick from Manchester and Londoner Sarah Allen all different stylistically yet equally accomplished musicians put together and left to their creative interpretation of the music. The accolades flowed from press and audiences, and their reputation grew. Even with the departure of Michael McGoldrick to Lunasa, solo work and Capercaillie, the addition of guitarist Ed Boyd and Manchester bodhrán supremo John Joe Kelly solidified the band and made for a more balanced ensemble that created its own unique identity.

The albums that followed ‘Flatfish’ and ‘Rubai’ did the necessary business, the latter winning awards all over and their live appearances generating both pleasure and delight everywhere. In the US, their reputation borders on the Messianic, as typified by their 2004 Milwaukee Irishfest concert being awarded show of the year by liveireland.com. Flook it seems has hung the moon in those quarters.

Now 2005 sees Flook embarking on their 10th anniversary tour. Covering the UK and Ireland it coincides with the release of their new studio album ‘Haven’. Following on the heels of the award winning ‘Rubai’ one of 2003’s most accomplished releases-‘Haven’ sees Flook celebrating their first decade and looking to the future.

The interviews with Sarah Allen and Brian Finnegan conducted for this feature center on more than plugging the album and tour. That is a vital part of the package but it is not quite the whole enchilada as it were. There is the inherent dynamic and group spirit which exists within Flook that makes them one of the most determined and long lasting of ensembles and that is the hub of this investigation.

‘We are proud to have made it to 10 years. I think we are a bit astonished too’ Sarah Allen reflected. ‘It doesn't seem so long ago that myself and Brian and Mike (McGoldrick) sat down in a living room in Manchester - having barely met, let alone played together, and certainly with no clear idea of what we could string together to entertain the audience for a whole 1 1/2 hours at a gig in Birmingham that night. When we started out in 1995 we certainly never would have thought that Flook would have come to this 10 years of pretty constant touring. I guess one of the reasons we have lasted is because we all enjoy playing together - that has to be a good starting point. After that, I would say another reason is that we have managed to keep control of ourselves; we try not to sign things with people we work with, we try to work on a basis of trust. In addition, I think that the trust starts from within; even though it is me who ultimately takes most of the decisions, I check everything out with the others all the time, and so no one can really get too pissed off with anything - because they have always had a choice. The touring - all 10 years worth - actually, though we work a lot, we have never done really long tours. We try to respect each other’s need to have a personal live and I think that helps too’.

Looking at the internal dynamics within a performing group – one often wonders if personal issues overtake the groupthink betimes. Do outside issues colour the canvas and how do the people get on with one another in the band? ‘We all get on pretty well. I do not think we would bother playing together if we were not all friends’ Sarah stated. ‘Flook has always operated in 2 teams - myself and Brian, and Ed and John Joe - but the two teams work well together, and these days the teams are more blurred. Of course we have the odd conflict, but mostly these can be worked through if they are confronted’.

Flook has always maintained its independence and not followed the lead of others to sign to major labels and encounter the vagaries of the system. In this case, Flook has existed without the system interfering. ‘We never really wanted a record label and that is the truth. It goes back to keeping control; we cannot bear anyone else to tell us what to do!’.

Independence exists at the heart of the Flook gospel –‘With apologies to any small record companies out there who do a great job, I would advise any young band to try and produce their own records, so long as they have someone a little organized who can deal with the business side of things. Having said that, we are delighted to be connected with World Village / Harmonia Mundi in North America, we licensed ‘Rubai’ to them and plan to license ‘Haven’ to them too. They are really good people to work with, and it has been a revelation for us to have some real professionals working on our behalf. We even have a publicist in America! We never had one of them over here though we have hired one for the coming birthday tour and new CD’.

Achieving this level of independent and professional/artistic integrity takes work and planning. Flook undertakes its own management and outreach services. ‘I'd like to say otherwise but there does always seem to be loads to do in the background of Flook to keep everything moving smoothly’ Sarah Allen states. ‘Organizing the travel alone can take ages, we do a lot of gigs abroad - in Europe and North America mostly, but just getting everyone to the airport at this end is complicated, as we all live all over the place. We have never all lived in the same town. I am in London, Ed is in Bath, John Joe is in Manchester but often in Ireland, and Brian is currently living in Edinburgh, but rarely found there. Therefore, it takes a fair bit of forward thinking.

Then there is always a lot to do regarding the CDs. We do not make them very often, but there has to be plenty of planning to make sure we always have enough stock ourselves and that all the distributors and shops we deal with are supplied. We borrow money to make our albums (which is not very often as we only make them every 3 years) but aside from that, we operate completely within our means. I would not have it any other way. Then there is the publicity side of it - making sure everyone who is interested knows what we are up to. At least its easier these days - it's so much easier to send an email to 8000 people than to send them all a letter!’

Flook’s continuity as a band depends on the interaction between the four band members. ‘I'm not sure how we've managed to survive when others have stopped’ Sarah states. ‘I think what makes Flook special is the continuity of the line up and the way the 4 of us interact. We have been very clear in only doing gigs when the four of us are available. We would not think of using a dep except in very exceptional circumstances, I think is a road to ruin. We all have a clear role in the band and we are all equals. There is an absence of ego and just a desire to play good music together’.

While using instrumentation associated with Celtic music, Flook has not always looked at itself as a Celtic outfit per se. Where does Sarah Allen see Flook fitting into and differentiating itself from other major 'Celtic' or semi Celtic bands? ‘I think we have always been different from other Celtic and semi Celtic bands Two of us are English for a start, and we are all living in England. The line up is not exactly normal either, with the two flutes up front. We are happy that we have been so broadly accepted by the Traditional scene in Ireland and it is a huge honour to be thought of amongst those top bands that we have always looked up to and admired. We will always mix up genres, styles, beats, and ideas but we will always remain respectful to the origins of the music wherever that may be’.

‘Haven’ is released on November 7th. Flook’s tenth birthday tour sees them playing dates in Dublin, Ennis, and later dates in Waterford, Baltimore (TBC) and Limerick. 2006 will see Flook on a massive tour in USA going as far as the West Coast. Back in 1995, Flook established itself as one of the most innovative acoustic bands of their generation, here’s to the next decade, and from the signs on the road they could well be doing the business in twenty years time too.

© John O’Regan September 2005
© Irish Music Magazine

Alongside the usual Irish and Scottish inflected pieces (many by main writers Sarah Allen and Brian Finnegan) are tunes from Galicia, Sweden and even Greece, plus six unobtrusive guest musicians. The production, sequencing and variety of pacing are all easier on the ear. A confident maturation.

The Spitz is one of London’s hottest live music venues. As well as quality bookings, it also has some of the least adequate air conditioning in the capital. The audience may be sweating, but it’s nothing compared with the hardworking Flook, playing their first gig in four months to launch their new CD Rubai.

Guitarist Ed Boyd is a proverbial slave to the rhythm, hunched intently over his instrument. To his left sits a similarly engrossed John Joe Kelly on bodhrán. Flanking them, and making frequent intuitive eye contact from either side of the stage, are whistle player Brian Finnegan and Sarah Allen on flute. Her left leg twitches to the beat, often lifting off the ground completely.

“I think it’s a balance thing,” she explains afterwards. “It’s always my left leg and my flute's going out to the right. It seems to ‘centre’ me. If I’m swinging my leg around it’s usually a good sign.”

Though there are a few oldies like their perennial party piece The Dub Reel, on which John Joe gets to show off his ever evolving solo bodhrán skills, most of the gig is devoted to showcasing new pieces. The most unusual of these is the delightful lilting Greek tune Kalamantinos, which features Sarah’s piano accordion drones accompanying lead mandolin by John Joe. After pulling nervous faces for one and a half minutes, he seems relieved to get back to the drum he’s usually seen playing.

“That was the first time he’s ever done that live on stage, but he is actually a really fantastic mandolin player,” Sarah reveals. “He can play loads of fast reels, and banjo as well. No-one knows that ’cos he just sits there playing the bodhrán all night long, but he is a really good tunes player ... so it was just first night nerves.”

Discreet guest appearances on Rubai include trombone by Rory McLeod (most obviously on Sarah’s skanking tune Granny In The Attic) and the young Manchester Irish fiddler Colin Farrell with his own Natterjack’s Reel, a highlight of the closing set.

When I spoke to Sarah and Brian in March 2001, they were toying with the idea of working with dance producer Austin Maguire, but they were so happy with the results they achieved with producer Mark Tucker that this idea is now likely to come to fruition as an EP of remixes later in the year. And a further idea of using a guest vocalist has also been put on hold.

“We had a few people in mind actually,” recalls Brian in his unmistakable Armagh accent. “I really wanted to do something with Cara Dillon, and we know a great little singer from Denmark called Sine Lahm. I think she’s gonna be a superstar in Denmark quite soon, so we might not be able to afford her when we go back [into the studio]. But that’s definitely an idea ... for the future.

So really, Rubai isn’t that much of a departure from Flatfish?

“No, not at all ... it’s calmer, more gentle, more laid back. That is really the only difference, apart from the guests. We’ve probably grown up in the last two and a half years and were not quite as frantic as we were."

The band had got hundreds of suggestions for the album title after requesting them through their website, but in the end it was Brian who came up with 'Rubai':

“I’d been into a Persian mystic poet called Rumi. He’s a kind of a musical dude and a lot of his poems are based around melodic and rhythmic interpretation of music. 'Rubai' is a four-line poem and it’s also based around four levels of friendship...”

Because there are four members in the band?

“Yeah, whether or not the other two think that we’re friends!”

Jon Lusk
The Irish Post, May 2002

“The name really chose itself,” says Sarah Allen when I speak to her and fellow Flook flute player Brian Finnegan in early May, a few days after Rubai’s release. “The more we found out about its meaning, the more we realized that it was the title we were looking for.”

“I was reading the foreword to one of Rumi’s books called ‘Birdsong’,” explains Brian, “and discovered that the most popular form of Persian poetry was the rubai: ‘a four-line poem, in perfect rhyme, full of music, rhythm and breath’. I later found out that the four-line rubai is based around four levels of friendship, which made it seem even more appropriate as a title for our four-piece band.”

“We are as the flute, and the music in us is from thee,” writes Rumi to the Beloved in Book One of his spontaneously composed spiritual masterpiece the Mathnawi. More than ever before, the music in Brian Finnegan and Sarah Allen is finding its way through their flutes into the outside world. No fewer than twelve of the twenty-one tunes on Rubai are original compositions, compared with just three on 1997’s “Flook! Live!” and six on 1999’s “Flatfish”.

“The release of Flatfish opened a lot of doors to travel for us,” explains Brian, “and I think that this, along with everything else going on in our personal lives, has had a knock-on effect on our tune writing. I often get inspired by the people and places we visit, although it usually takes a few months for things to come out in the wash. For instance, there was an awful lot to process after our six-week trip to Australia last year and I didn’t realize at first that the tunes I was writing a few months later were actually inspired by that journey.”

Being “in-spired”, or literally, “breathed into”, is an experience which even flute players find hard to describe.

“‘Conlágh’s Big Day’, which I wrote for my nephew, is one of the few tunes that I’ve ever consciously set out to write,” says Brian. “Mostly things just seem to appear. When a tune starts to come together within the first five or ten minutes of playing then you know you’re on to something. If you record it immediately, it will usually still sound good the next day.”

“Another good sign,” adds Sarah, “is if you get up and start humming a new idea from the day before. You know it must be good if it’s still in your head.”

The apparent lack of connection between waking consciousness and composition is illustrated by Sarah’s explanation of how her tune “Granny in the Attic” came to be.

“Although it’s probably the happiest sounding tune on the new album, it was written when I was in a state of complete frustration. I’d been living in the same flat for twelve years when my new neighbours downstairs started making all sorts of changes to the entrance and hallway without even asking me. I can remember being in a particularly fierce rage one afternoon, getting out my flute and coming up with this really light and happy tune. The contrast between my conscious mood and the mood of the tune was really weird.”

“I think it’s great that such happy tunes can come out at the darkest of times,” says Brian. “It’s like a sign from somewhere telling you that things are alright and that you should relax and not worry.”

Brian is keen to acknowledge the influence of the Armagh Pipers’ Club on his tune writing.

“Brian and Eithne Vallely instilled a great sense of freedom in me regarding Irish music. They never tried to mould me as a musician, but rather encouraged me to be expressive and to find my own style. I owe a lot to them for helping what was in me to come out.”

Of course, not everything that “comes out” finds its way into the Flook repertoire.

“I only bring a specific type of tune to Flook,” says Brian. “I have to be able to hear Ed (Boyd, on guitar) and John Joe (Kelly, on bodhrán) backing something in my head as soon as I write it for me to think it’ll work with the band. I’ve written a lot of other tunes that I wouldn’t dream of bringing to them as I’d probably just get told to jump in the lake!”

Although Ed and John Joe’s main role in the band is to provide rhythmic and harmonic support for Brian and Sarah’s melodic ideas, their contribution to tune arrangement does not always stop there. For instance, it was Ed who came up with the idea of asking singer-guitarist Rory McLeod to play trombone on the recording of “Granny in the Attic”.

“We’d seen Rory playing his trombone at sessions,” explains Sarah, “and the way that he plays rhythmical parts underneath tunes was exactly what ‘Granny’ needed. We now do the trombone part as a sing-a-long at our gigs. Ed leads it and it’s absolutely hilarious!”

Other guests on the album also have Ed and John Joe connections. Martin Cradick (wah wah mandolin) and Seckou Keita (percussion) both play with the band Baka Beyond who Ed knows from the Bath area, while Colin Farrell (fiddle) comes from John Joe’s home town, Manchester. Ewen Vernal (bass) plays a lot with Mike McGoldrick, as, of course, do Ed and John Joe.

“We didn’t have guests on the album just for the sake of it,” says Brian. “The tracks that they appear on simply seemed to ask for those musicians to complete them.”

“Having guests was also a way of avoiding merely repeating what we’d done on Flatfish,” continues Sarah. “Hopefully, people will agree that we’ve managed to do it in a way that doesn’t distract from the fact that this is essentially still an album by the four us.”

Another thing which distinguishes Rubai from Flatfish is the absence of any Eastern European tunes this time around. However, an international flavour
remains with the inclusion of tunes from Scotland, Belgium, Sweden, Greece and Northern Spain. “Kalamantinos”, the traditional Greek tune, even gives John Joe the opportunity to show off his mandolin skills on a recording for the first time.

“He’d become so well known as a fantastic bodhrán player,” says Brian, “that people, perhaps himself included, had forgotten how good he was on the mandolin. He actually won the All-Ireland competition many years ago. He’s a man of many talents.”

Trying to capture Flook’s abundance of talent faithfully on tape must have been a pretty daunting task, but sound engineer Mark Tucker, who has previously worked a lot with Fairport Convention among others, seems to have relished the challenge.

“He’d been really keen to work with us for a long time,” explains Sarah. “At first we were just going to record at his studio, Presshouse, in Devon and get someone else to do the mixing. However, after the first few days of working with him there was no way that we were going to go anywhere else. Technically, but also musically, he was just fantastic!”

He was even persuaded to make a cameo appearance on the album.

“We’d finished recording a tune called ‘Pressed for Time’,” explains Sarah again, “and Mark, in engineer-speak, had said that it was ‘a bit lacking in the middle’. Ed had already sussed out that he was a really good guitarist, so when he mentioned this e-bow guitar effect we persuaded him to do it himself.”

To sum up, Rubai is a wonderfully rich mixture of original and collected tunes, delightfully varied in mood and texture, played with a virtuosity that transcends mere technique and approaches the sublime. If, as it has been said of Rumi’s poetry, outer beauty has the power to touch the beauty inside of us, then we should not be surprised when we are touched by the ravishing rhythm and breath of Rubai.

Julian Gurr
Irish Music Magazine, June 2002