Sean Tyrrell’s
The Midnight Court
(Cuirt an Mhean Oiche) by Brian Merriman
Translation by David Marcus

What the media said about The Midnight Court at The Galway Arts Festival


Brian Merriman’s, The Midnight Court (Cuirt an Mhean Oiche), must surely one of the most exuberant poems ever written in Irish or any other European language. Celebrating the rights of women to wholesome sex and wholesome marriage it remains as popular today as it did when it was written in the late 18th century.
-Galway Observer


Anyone and everyone who has been to this show has left the theatre glowing about the hour and a half’s entertainment — and rightly so. This is a show that provided the best night’s enjoyment during the Galway Arts Festival.
-City Tribune


Apart from the theatrical aspects of the production, the music itself is outstanding.
-Galway Advertiser


This is likely to be one of those shows, which becomes a tale of wonder and a matter of legend ten years down the line.
-Arts Festival Brochure


An absolutely un-missable delight of music and comedy…if you have to sell the children for the price of a ticket, go see The Midnight Court.
-Galway Observer


Merriman’s classic bristles with bawdy wit and Sean Tyrell's rich musical settings were a continuing delight
-The Irish Times


The poem was given a dramatic presentation with all the boast and blast-off that song and music and topical allusion could provide. Hundreds of people were shouting and taking sides like a football crowd as the old man and the young woman battled it out.
-Seamus Heaney


A marvellous adaptation of Merriman’s bawdy classic about the war between the sexes. Sean Tyrell’s exuberant score brilliantly fuses elements of calypso, gospel, country’n’western, and much more with a Trad core. A dramatically effective and hugely enjoyable stage-show.
Fusing elements of country’n’western, calypso and gospel, rhythm & blues with traditional music and singing, this production, which bristles with bawdy wit, is presented as an inventive and comic musical work is artistic drama at its very best.
-Ulster News Letter

We begin the tour in Galway on August 15--20 at the Town Hall Booking at 353 91 569777 and then the confirmed dates are Peppers in Feakle August 25----- 28 Booking at 353 61 924322 under canvas, this is in fact where the court is set in the poem. September 6,7,8 Booking at 353 65 707 4288 The Royal Spa Liosdoonvarna.
September 4 th at The John Boyle O Reilly Festival Millmount Drogheda

Orchard Gathering

Singer Sean Tyrrell celebrated his new album, The Orchard, with a party in Vicar Street on Thursday evening. Doing the launch honours was actress Brenda Fricker, who was sporting a radical new haircut, and who had abandoned her sickbed to make the event. "If you’re lucky, you come across a talent like Sean’s once or twice in a lifetime", she said. "When he sings, I feel alive."

Among the guests were actors Mick Lally and Sean McGinley. Poet Michael Hartnett was being followed around by a film crew from Power Productions, which is making a documentary about him. One of Michael’s poems, The Ghost of Billy Mulvihill, has been set to music and is included on The Orchard. Also there to cheer Sean on were Mary Coughlan and Frankie Lane.


SEAN TYRRELL
(Whelans, Dublin)

PRESENCE, MYSTERIOUSLY is something you either you either have or you don’t have. Townes Van Zandt, for example, has presence. So too does Sean Tyrrell.

For two hours tonight, Tyrrell, made time stand still as he guided us through the unofficial byways of four generations of ‘Irish’ music. This magical journey sign-posted everything from bawdy seen-nos to Travellers’ love songs, and presented, in passing, the kind of unsanitised image of Ireland that tourists rarely get to see.

Sean Tyrrell is helped in his non-purist, distillation of the repressed themes of Irish folk history by the fact that his vocals and playing transform the banal into the sublime. Wielding his wonderfully weird and haunting mando-cello, tunes such as ‘Coast Of Malabar’ and ‘Isle Of Inisfree’ become the genuinely heartfelt paeans of love, loss and longing they were always meant to be.

Two Michael Hartnett poems set to music, ‘Mattie’, ‘House Of Delight’, and the beat-bop of ‘No Go’ dance though the surreal-absurdities of Irish politics, clandestine lust, drink, bitches-from-hell, more drink, and prostitution, with deadly cutting humour. Yet, Tyrrell is always sympathetic. He’s been through too much to be judgemental.

The normally up-tempo ‘Fortune for the Finder’ was one of numerous other tunes given an altered, reflective air to counterbalance the boisterous energy of the rest of the set. In truth, however, Tyrrell’s vast repertoire is too vast for detailed description. Suffice to say, those of you who have still discover the genius of Sean Tyrrell have a crock of gold awaiting you. The man is a king unthroned.

Patrick Brennan


Sean Tyrrell
Whelans
Fintan Vallely

Sean Tyrrell is a versatile performer – one day with his song and music adaptation of Merriman’s Midnight Court, next touring with a band. But it is in the solo, singer/interpreter mode that he engages best. Words are recruited by him from a kaleidoscope of eras, sources and writers, fed into the processor of his cranium to be measured, tried on and fitted out with the singer’s forte – a fine tune.

And so The Coast of Malabar became a measured lyric, The Isle of Inisfree was sung with a hoarse, clipped economy, miles from any hint of grandeur, agreeably more appropriate to the abrupt passion of those likely to have been experiencing the homesickness of forced exile.

Aware too of the need for a bit of a lift, Tyrrell also sprinkled in sugar lumps: a Peeler and the Goat parody on the deprivation and depredation visited on bulls by artificial insemination, a courtship between a Centipede and a Ladybug which ends with the former "arriving homes unexpectedly" to find "herself" sitting "beneath the holly hocks, knitting lots of little pairs of socks". Accompanying himself here on four-string mandocello and similarly appointed tenor guitar he was somewhat reserved with the intensely attentive audience, hitting easiest style in his popular, Johnny Mulhern, Mattie.

Always a singer with a conscientious, political, underdog edge, the realism of his recorded classic, Fenian John Boyle O’Reilly’s, Message of Peace, was here, however somewhat devalued by the fanciful, male-centred fantasy of the David Callinan House of Delight.

Straddling the traditional/folk/popular fence with ease, Tyrrell is one of those strong performers who explode the weakness of any cast-iron classification of song: he is a great singer.
The Weavers, London

A couple of months ago, whilst dealing with domestic trivia dans la cuisine and absentmindedly listening to GLR’s Saturday night Irish programme, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a quite remarkable voice.

Accompanied by the sparest of guitar styles, this voice oozed experience and was laced with its fair share of many a smoky bar or two.

At the end of the song the presenter said "that was Sean Tyrrell singing live here in the studio". Sean? who I thought to myself (Clearly you don’t read this magazine…Ed) and continued listening with involvement and awe. Not long after that live radio broadcast I had the chance to hear Tyrrell play live.

Strolling into the stage resembling a dishevelled D. H. Lawrence unaccompanied and unannounced, Sean – ‘the voice’ started to sing to a sparse but highly supportive audience. Sean Tyrrell is one of those rare commodities – a singer that gets right down to the real nitty-gritty of the business. No excess baggage here. Pure, unadulterated voice telling a story with conviction, passion and consummate skill. He accompanies himself in the sparest, bare-boned, flat-picking style on tenor guitar, tenor debro, mandocello and mandolin. The accompaniment kind of ‘hangs around’ his voice which at times pounds out masses of words per beat in a solid melodic flow. His version of Galway songwriter Johnny Mulhern’s Mattie is a brilliant example of vocal expertise (and was featured on our last-but-one cover CD...Ed).

Tyrrell gathers his material from Irish and Irish/American writers and is involved with setting nineteenth century Irish poetry to music. Sounds obscure but somehow he makes it all very approachable. "I don’t do Fureys, Mary Black or Christy Moore" he told his audience with a hint of mischief in his voice. He most certainly does not have to concede to any current trend or vogue. The control and mastery is his own whether he sings of the troubles or a witty love song using geometric terminology or a in his opener You Are My Sunshine.

Tyrrell’s singing brings joy to the hearts of those who feel the voice has become a little neglected in these days of instrumental wizardry. Any young budding singers out there looking for inspiration must go and hear this man sing. He’s simply one of the best.

Sam Summerfield
Folk Roots