Planxty dismantled that model. The lineup was alchemical: Christy Moore’s earthy, yearning vocals; Andy Irvine’s driving, elastic bouzouki (an instrument he almost single-handedly introduced into Irish music); Dónal Lunny’s precise, percussive guitar and bouzouki work; and Liam O’Flynn’s masterful, haunting uilleann pipes and tin whistle. Crucially, no one played the fiddle. This absence forced a new kind of conversation. The pipes became the lead melodic voice—wailing, intimate, and capable of a microtonal sorrow that no fiddle could mimic. Meanwhile, the two bouzoukis and guitar created a churning, rhythmic bed that owed as much to Eastern European and Balkan folk as it did to the jigs of County Clare.
Then there is “The West Coast of Clare.” A modern song written by Moore, it is a devastating ballad of emigration and lost love. The protagonist returns to find his lover gone to America. “The harbor lights were shining bright / But for me they did not care.” Backed by O’Flynn’s weeping pipes, it captures the psychic wound of the Irish diaspora. Planxty understood that the folk song is not a museum piece; it is a living newspaper of the heart. To understand the album’s power, one must credit producer Phil Coulter. A classically trained pianist and pop songwriter (he co-wrote “Puppet on a String” for Eurovision), Coulter was an unlikely match for a raw traditional group. But he committed a revolutionary act: he recorded them in a live, single-room setting at Escape Studios in Kent, with almost no reverb and no overdubs.
The result was a polyrhythmic density. Listen to “The Jolly Beggar” or “The West Coast of Clare.” There is no drum kit, yet the propulsion is relentless. Lunny and Irvine lock into a syncopated groove that feels ancient and utterly modern—a folk music that could have headlined a rock club. The tracklist of Planxty is a political act. In 1973, Ireland was still a deeply conservative, clerical state. The romanticized “Celtic Twilight” was the official export. Planxty offered the opposite: the underbelly.
Then comes “Tabhair Dom Do Lámh” (Give Me Your Hand), a harp tune by the blind 17th-century composer Rory Dall O’Catháin. Arranged as a pipe-and-whistle duet, it is a moment of transcendent, wordless beauty. It signals that Planxty was not anti-tradition; they were pre -tradition, reaching back past the commercialized schlock to the bardic, Gaelic core.
They open not with a reel but with a slow, devastating air: “The Raggle Taggle Gypsy.” But this is no Victorian parlor song. Moore delivers it with a hushed, conspiratorial intensity, and O’Flynn’s pipes answer with a cry that sounds like wind over a bog. Immediately, the listener is disoriented—this is not “Danny Boy.”
