Tony MacMahon image

Froots June 2001

Tony MacMahon

Mac Mahon From Clare

Maccd 001 (69mins)

He’s Mac Mahon fom the County Clare now, but he will always be Tony Mac Mahon, the extraordinary and passionate button box player, radio and TV producer, catalyst, enigma, etc. Though he has been recording since the late 1960s (on Topics, Paddy In The Smoke) this collection of his recordings is riveting. He loves the music with a passion and he plays it that way too, whether it’s an air or a reel and he condemns anybody who mucks around with the music. Yet, he will say he sometimes hates the button accordeon, the very instrument he has played all his life. I suspect he is a frustrated piper and the way he plays the button box indicates this with the bass buttons silent until the appropriate phrase can be harmonized like a good uilleann piper can on the regulators.

That passion and intensity may not make life easy for the mere mortals around but Tony Mac Mahon challenges the half hearted, and champions the great unsung musicians such as Joe Cooley and Mrs Galvin, and he is an exceptional musician in his own right. Here we have solo tunes, reels with the likes of Seamus Connolly on fiddle, duets with Joe Cooley and Breton tunes with Barney McKenna. Some of them go back nearly three decades but, this isn’t a retrospective of the days when he recorded Joe Cooley on a winter’s night in Galway in the early 1970s or the grand tour of Ireland, Brittany and France with Barney McKenna, filmed as a series of programmes for Irish TV called, The Green Linnet.

This is great music, uncompromising, almost un-accordeonlike for an accordeonist, and although he has recorded two outstanding albums with Noel Hill, he says this is the first (nearly) solo album since 1972. It is high time he made them regularly because they are a rare treat and a source of great musical enjoyment. Distributed by Copperplate.

Joe Crane

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