Alison O’Donnell

Alison O'Donnell, a Dub by design, missed quite a few flights because she was at the harbour at the time. Steeped in the creation of music from her Mellow Candle days, her greatest claim to fame is the astounding ability to sing three part harmonies simultaneously. The seagulls wink whenever they hear her name. Reaching the age that a number of religions reckon is worth a good outing, she ditched the beribboned shoes and applied herself to the art of song. (Bands: Mellow Candle, Flibbertigibbet, EllaMental, Earthlings, Eishtlinn, Oeda).

Aside from the usual escapist activities, she is also intrigued by some of her ancestors who have led her a merry dance up the brick-walled garden path. She unleashed folky, rocky, jazzy, rootsy, trad sounds in 2006 with a co-conspirator, egged on by two Siamese cats. Myself and Herself can enlighten you further at www.alisonodonnell.com (also available from iTunes).
The December 2006 issue of MOJO featured a special editorial showcasing the Top 50 genre-bending folk albums of all time. “Folk rock at its most acidic and velvety. The highpoints of Swaddling Songs are amongst the most spine-tingling performances from anyone, ever. Given that they were on a major, this makes Mellow Candle's obscurity even more baffling. Irish duo Clodagh Simonds and Alison Williams' soaring harmonies on Sheep Season are backed by a full band and woodwinds, chasing back the centuries, creating something quite magical.” (BS)
The April issue of Record Collector listed the Top 100 progressive rock rarities, complete with star ratings for quality and importance. Only 15 of the 100 gained five stars, including Mellow Candle. ”An extraordinary record and a folk-prog masterpiece, lead female singers Clodagh Simonds and Alison O’Donnell harmonise beautifully over dynamic, piano-led arrangements. They hailed from Dublin and were soon picked up by Skid Row and Thin Lizzy manager Ted Carroll (later head of Ace Records). Clodagh had sung backing vocals on Lizzy’s second album, Shades of a Blue Orphanage. Sadly, Mellow Candle’s only album died a death upon release.”
The Wire August 2007. "The inconvenient truth remains that singer-songwriters such as Nick Drake, John Martyn, Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson are writing out of their own individual experience, and groups like Mellow Candle, Comus and Incredible String Band were creating entirely new work, which is the diametric opposite of the idea of folk music as the natural cumulative expression of a people. The passage of time has dimmed these distinctions and we now lazily refer to all of it as 'folk': folk rock, acid folk, free folk, freak folk, wyrd folk, etc. For the expedience of this article, the term 'British psychedelic folk' best captures the frictions between conservation and progression, pastoral and metropolitan, acoustics and electricity, homespun and visionary, that define and invigorate this fertile decade of music in Avalon." ..."Mellow Candle formed part of a fertile Dublin folk rock scene including Horslips, Tir Na Nog, and The Woods Band, but their music sounds the least 'Celtic' of all their contemporaries. Singers and former convent girls Clodagh Simonds and Alison Williams wrote most of the material, and the Gothic rural landscape of Swaddling Songs has made it an iconic record to the current folk revival (a current London club is named after it). Its magic takes time to work: one suspects the live power of this group was dispelled in the studio, but the piano and rock group format ensure the songs meander unpredictably like sheep tracks on a windblown heath, and rock hard, as on "The Poet and The Witch", "Break Your Token" and "Lonely Man". Simonds' songs, especially, are riven with crepuscular pagan atmosphere, birds of ill-omen, fabular creatures, coffins and crows. For Mellow Candle, the wilderness offers an enchanted antidote to the crushing enervation of city life: the sole lines of the last track read: "I know the Dublin pavements will be boulders on my grave"