My years with Sean (and many, many others) in Rankin Street have been romanticized a bit over the years. I have often regretted describing those years as ‘our apprenticeship in St. John’s rowdy dockside pubs’ in an early bio. It makes it all a bit too casual and rough and ready. And like anything else, the truth is somewhere in between.

In a way, though, we had no one to blame but ourselves. It is a bit embarrassing, but a lot of the craziest stories are true. Pubs were dodgier here twenty years ago. People drank earlier, drank more, and drank harder. Rock bands were out of favor, but the traditional scene was thriving, and we went at it full on. There were so many alcohol-fueled indulgences that sometimes it seems like an extended five-year dream We really did get into fist-fights onstage; sometimes with each other - more than once with the audience. Jeff Scott, Sue from Gander, Jackie, Fiddler, Heidi and another half dozen characters really did pass through the band. We really did swap instruments at random points during boring shows, (whether one knew how to play them or not). We really did lug the gear up and down George Street for three-show St. Patrick Days, and play seven nights straight for weeks on end, our voices bloody rags. Going straight from the pub to a final exam was routine, as was getting your whole night’s sleep ration after sound check, in the back of a car parked under the bar windows. We really did buy a large and complicated PA system on a whim one fall afternoon, and then set it up and played through it that night, despite having no idea how it even turned on, not too mention how to mix live audio. We really did produce our own series for local cable, without even having so much as a conversation about what we were going to do for half an hour a week. We played so well some nights that everyone there was transfixed, and remembered it like their high school prom - and we played so badly other nights that the bar emptied before our eyes. We really did give away some 1000 beers, right off the stage, during our farewell performance. We really did an entire show where we played ‘Lukey’ every third song, just to see if anyone would notice. We really did…and on and on it goes.

But mostly, we learned how to do this. We learned how to stand on a stage and be unafraid, no matter who was in front of you. We learned how to keep going, even if everything broke, we forgot all the words, or we suddenly acquired a world-class case of hiccups. We learned how to play when we were exhausted, enraged, loaded, when we could not hear a thing, when there was no room, when all the strings were gone, when we had no monitors, when someone was leaning on you, shouting the wrong words in your ear, or when you were trying not to spew after an unwisely accepted triple shot of Black Sambuca.

I spent years fighting with my instruments, trying to make things sound bigger and louder without also sounding like shitty electric guitars. Three different mandolins led to a mandola, and then my first bouzouki. It was a Greek model, better suited to the wall of a taverna, and it sounded so bad the band threatened to quit if I insisted on playing it. A series of fiddles all sounded wretched, with pickups that sounded like transistor radios. Once, I actually ripped an accordion in two, and I pitched dozens of cheap tin whistles into the crowd, vexed with their shrill tone. It took us til well into Great Big Sea before we got gear that was fit to actually use night after night.

Half the problem was the lack of decent models. Lots of guys played accordion around here, but only a handful had grappled with playing in high-volume situations. Most just used whatever microphone was available, and got used to the shit sound. Fiddlers, even the good ones, usually sounded terrible. No one really played the bouzouki much then.

Gradually we found decent pick-ups, and learned how to close-mic the accordion and the bodhran so they would not howl with feedback. In the early GBS days we acquired the first versions of the vastly superior Takamine guitars we still lay live. Sean discovered the Sausudo whistles, the whistle that made it possible to actually play the bloody things live. And in 1995 Alan and I bought our first bouzoukis. We used mediocre mandolin and guitar pickups for a while, until John Littler at Headway in the UK made us decent custom jobs. Then we had a bigger problem - what to play. We ended up evolving into two very different styles. Alan is primarily a guitar player, so he favours a rhythmic and chordal approach. For me, it was a just a big mandolin. Also, I knew the flowing melodic style of Donal Lunny and Andy Irvine - the guys who pretty much invented Celtic bouzouki. Mind you, their style didn’t really work for us. We needed a different sound anyway; the lyrical soft picking Lunny approach did not work at all with GBS’s power.

Turn was the first album where we really figured out how to use the bouzoukis. Alan’s style can be heard very clearly on Jack Hinks - his bouz carries the rhythm, a tight, direct strum pattern that holds the whole track together. We needed something different from me - I needed to be able to play pop hooks, but at the same time keep the sound essentially acoustic and folksy. The answer came from the Birds, half-heard on the radio. It was one of those ‘eureka’ moments. Have a listen to their ‘My Back Pages’, and then ‘Consequence Free’. The rest should be obvious.