Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 08:50:51 -0600 From: Mark Gonnerman (markg@LELAND.STANFORD.EDU) Subject: Re: The McPeakes Yesterday afternoon Susan Pennypacker ventured out in search of the McPeakes. She returned by nightfall with the following account in hand: "The Heart and Soul of Belfast; Irish Piper Francis McPeake Tells Kevin Jackson about 'The Fairy Music'," THE INDEPENDENT, Saturday, 23 February 1991, p. 30. Highlights follow (and I quote): "Outside West Belfast , the name of Francis McPeake is not likely to prompt many nods of recognition. Yet 'Francie', as people here know him, has seldom gone short of admirers in the worlds of folk and rock music. Van Morrison has long raved on about the influence of the McPeake family; Pete Seeger once came from America to make a film about them. There was even a heady moment in the late Sixties when a young pop star asked McPeake to initiate him into the mysteries of the uilleann pipes: his name was John Lennon. . . . "Despite the educational successes of Clonard [the monastery where McPeake teaches music to children], McPeake continues to be best-known in Belfast for his performing career in the Sixties, when he and his family enjoyed a lively recording and touring career. Their line-up, which included his father Francis on pipes and sister Kathleen on bodhran, toured throughout Ireland, the UK, the USA and as far afield as Moscow. It was on one of these trips that the encounter with John Lennon took place, when the family were invited to play at a surprise party for the rock star. 'John wanted to meet us because at that time he was into what he called "the fairy music", he had been doing a lot of reading about pipes and he had decided that what we were doing was "the fairy music". So he put the pipes on and I must say he made a good show, a very good show for a first-timer.' "Their association continued, and Francie soon commissioned a set of uilleann pipes on Lennon's behalf from the one of the few firms who still make them, Kennedy's of Cork, and took them to America. 'But unfortunately, by then John was into other things, he was ' McPeake raises his eyes and waves his hands around airily, to signify something like "away with the fairies".' "An accident to his right hand in the early 1970s meant the end of McPeake's full-time career as a performer, but he never gave up playing altogether. On Monday night, for example, McPeake joined a group of recent graduates of Clonard to fill the upstairs room of a Belfast pub with jigs and reels. Initially, there was something mildly incongruous about the sight of all these young people in trainers and blousons playing tunes that first hit the charts in the seventeenth century, but the incongruity had long since faded by the time McPeake took up his banjo to duet with his sister on "Fair and Tender Ladies". By the end of the evening it was hard not to join the audience in regarding the McPeakes and their music as 'the soul of Belfast'." The article ends with this note: "Francis McPeake is featured in "Rhythms of the World", 8.10pm tonight [2/23/91] on BBC 2." I've called around and it seems that recordings by the McPeakes are out of print. True? --Mark