Luka Bloom is one of Ireland’s most iconic musicians with his mix of folk-rock and playful acoustic music that has launched a sustained a career spanning decades and continents of tours.
Charming and warm, Bloom spoke with LUNA about his career, his thoughts on WOMAD and his latest album, Dreams in America.
I told my dad that I was talking to Luka Bloom, and he had a bit of a fangirl moment, showed me your albums, so it’s very exciting to speak to you.
It’s one of the heartbreaking aspects of my ongoing career, that I find myself, on a regular basis, talking to women who tell me how much their parents like my work. It’s a bit sad, but I’m getting used to it now.
So where are you at the moment?
I’m at home in deep Kildare.
I saw that on February 18th you’re in the Netherlands –
Yeah I’m in the middle of a big Dutch tour at the moment, but I had four days off, so I came home and we plotted in these few interviews. Where are you phoning me from?
I’m in Adelaide, in Australia.
So we’re going to have a WOMAD chat?
Yes, a WOMAD chat. Exciting stuff. So you’re coming here for WOMAD, and then you’re heading off on a Australian tour. I was listening to some of your music before, and you often have a lot of instrumental backing, or vocal harmony on some of your songs … are you coming by yourself or bringing some support?
No, it’s just me, Ilona. Just me and the people who choose to show up. It’s what I like to do. I like to stand on stage and not think about what I’m going to sing. So every time I walk on stage it’s like a conversation. I just walk on, think about the first song, then off we go and see what happens. It’s one of the beauties of being a solo troubadour.
That sounds exciting, so there’s no set list?
Yeah, no, we don’t make setlists any more. I sing a couple of songs and then say, ‘What do you want me to sing?’ and then, hopefully, the answer will be a song that I know [laughs].
Sounds good. Sounds organic, and that’s what WOMAD likes.
You always want a bit of organic, fair play to you.
How much time do you spend touring?
The thing about when you’re on tour is that, you know, it’s easier for people to organise tours in a block, rather than have you jumping around the place. It’s just the way it works, because it works better for everybody. So yeah, when you’re one tour, you’re on tour. A lot of the time – well, when I’m on tour in Australia, I don’t get many days off. And that’s okay. I come to sing, so I’m there for the purpose of letting people hear my songs, and I don’t complain about it.
You’re playing the World of Music (and Dance) festival, and you’re playing the New Zealand one as well, so what do you think the importance of festivals like WOMADelaide and the WOMAD New Zealand is?
I won’t really be able to answer that question until I’ve done them, because it’s my first time to do the WOMAD festivals. I’m really, really excited to be on the bill because I’ve watched them from afar, and I’ve been to Australia on a couple of occasions during the WOMAD festivals in the past and never gotten to be there. So, I won’t have a sense of their importance until I get to experience it, but I’m really, really excited to go and perform at a festival where I probably will never have heard of about seventy percent of the other acts, and I’m so excited to hear as many of them as possible.
It’s the best way to go to WOMAD, without knowing who everyone is.
I love music, and I love discovering new music, so it’s all good.
As you do travel around a lot, maybe you’ll run into someone you can go and see in their home country?
Well, generally I don’t – to be honest with you – generally speaking, when I’m on tour, I’m just doing that. I’m running around, and I’m doing my own bloody gigs. And I love all that, but the idea of landing in a wonderful place and being stationed in one place for a couple of days, where I can hear all these nutjobs from Mali and North Africa and Asia and Ireland and blah, blah, blah … it’s going to be great.
It is going to be good, and there’s such a great lineup this year, too.
I love when people say it’s a great lineup at a festival I happen to be playing! [laughs]
It’s the truth, it’s not just lip service.
It’s one thing I will say about you Aussies, it’s one of the things I love about Australia: you don’t do lip service.
You have to earn it.
I really like that about Australia. Especially where the women are concerned, you’re very, very straight talkers, and it is an admirable quality. Which sometimes can be a little bit shocking [laughs].
Now, Black is the Colour was chosen for the WOMAD Sounds of the Planet compilation for this year, is there any particular significance for that song? Did you choose it, or did they?
They chose it, which I find kind of interesting. It’s the song I’ve been singing the longest. I mean, I learned it when I was about fourteen years of age, and it’s one of the few songs in my repertoire that I’ve been singing my whole adult life, and I never really get tired of it. So it’s kind of cool that they chose that one.
You moved to the US in 1987 –
I did.
- and you mentioned before that you were back in Kildare … Are you based in Ireland now?
Yeah, yeah, I’ve been living her for, oh, for many years. My move to America was very much a career move, and I’m really glad I did I,t and I lived there for four, five years, and I went all over America for many years, but I’m very, very happy that I’m living at home.
Was it difficult finding an audience in America for your style of music?
No, it was a piece of cake! [laughs] It was brilliant! They’re a glutton for punishment; it was brilliant. They just soaked it up – it was difficult finding a bloody audience in Ireland.
That’s a shame!
Yeah, it is a shame! It was a pain in the arse, but it was good because, it sort of – you know, you said earlier on about having to earn, your know, earn your keep. That’s what I had to do. I had to go and pack my guitar and get the hell out of here, get out of dodge, and head for America and create an audience in order to earn the right to live back at home and work at home.
They made you work hard for it, but it’s paid off.
They – the buggers! They made me go to America, then they made me go to Holland, then they made me go to Belgium, then they made me go to Germany, then they made me go to Switzerland, then they made me go to Australia – they even made me go to bloody New Zealand … and eventually I got an audience in Ireland.
New Zealand was the tipping point.
Exactly [laughs]. Exactly.
You started out, as you mentioned, at fourteen, and you toured with your brother … do you and Christy still sing together at points, or are you entirely separate?
Um, not really, no. We’re very different; there’s quite an age difference between us. In that ten year age gap between us are very, very different influences and different styles of music, and so we don’t really naturally sing together. I mean, we sing together, you know, with members of our family when we’re together, when we have these gatherings, from time to time there will be some singing, but it won’t be specifically at all about me and my brother Christy. The rest of the family will sort of pipe in as well. It’s fun that way, but professionally speaking, we’re really different.
Your life has always been led by music – you moved to America, you went on tours … has that been a conscious decision or just a culmination of talent and opportunity?
A lot of this comes down to an absolute terror that I would ever, ever have to work for a living. I think that’s been the most driving – the most driving feature of my life is the overt dread of ever having to get up early in the morning and go to a job.
No desks for Luka Bloom, then?
No, no desks, no bosses. I’ve never received a wage packet in my whole life, and I’m full of admiration for people who, who actually work and who earn their living through working for companies or working for the public service or … I’m full of over-admiration for the selfless men and women who work in this way in order to take care of their families. It would be nice of me to pretend that my entire motivation was all about creativity and wanting to bring beauty into the world, but at least a certain element of it is an absolute dread of ever having to work.
Is there any particular “stand-out” moment of your career so far that has stuck with you throughout the years?
The funny thing about stand-out moments … for some reason, I’m always reticent about that, because I always feel that if you say, ‘Oh, that gig in … Melbourne, five years ago, was so fantastic!’ that someone is going to hear this in Adelaide and go, ‘Well, what was wrong with the bloody gig in Adelaide?’ [laughs] You know what I mean?
One of the things I’ve gotten better at in my working life is letting go. What I mean by that is, when you have a really great moment, you kind of let go of it.
I mean, I had a really amazing moment in my home town. Ah, two weeks ago, I did a show in my home town and it was just … it was by far the best gig I’d ever had in my home town. It was really quite an emotional moment and all my family was there, singing along with me and it was really … some of the people I grew up with were there and it was just a really spectacular evening and these kind of … you know, there was no big media buzz or … you know, on the surface it looked like a kind of, maybe a low key … if you were looking at it from the outside, it would look like a low-key, like a local event, but for me it was absolutely magical.
So, you know. I haven’t won any Grammies or Oscars or anything like that, so I don’t have any of those stereotypical kind of “stand-out” moments, and I’m also a pretty ‘low-key’ kind of guy, so what might constitute a stand-out moment for me might seem pretty humdrum to somebody else.
Your latest album, Dreams in America (2010), why did you choose now to go back and look at the history of what you’ve done?
Uh, just to get it over with [laughs]. Um [laughs]. Well, it’s a really hard question to answer in one minute, but well, why not? [laughs] You’ve got to do one sooner or later, and I wanted to do one while I was still alive [laughs].
Luka Bloom will be performing at WOMAD on the 13th of March.
