About Me
...a band so Celtic it'll turn yer ears green...
Songs and fiddle tunes from Canberra's premier pan-Celtic party band:
from traditional Irish and Scottish favourites to some Pogues, Ploughboys and the odd Celtic tune from Hungary and Venezuela, plus rare gems from the little-known Donegal tango tradition.
And we play all those songs you didn't know you knew: traditional Celtic favourites concerning drinking, murder, war, cross-dressing (while at war), robbery (cross-dressing optional), drinking and the usual stuff about not being where you want to be with the one you would have liked to have been with.
Cassidy's Ceili plays at festivals, parties, weddings, dances: our unique corporate bush dances are alarmingly popular... team-building with a vengeance via ancient Celtic initiation rituals such as the Brown Jug Polka.
If you like the idea of Cassidy's Ceili at your event, contact us and let's talk about it! You can phone us on 02 6254 7352.
And remember: 'Celtic' is a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come... (J.R.R. Tolkien)
About the songs
To kick off, here are two new ones from the latest CD Sunday at Sandy's:Wicklow Queen and Step it out Mary.
The Fair Maid who joined the Navy: no glass ceiling when it comes to running the rigging, if you looked the part. There's a body of ballads concerning women who went to sea: compare The Female Rambling Sailor sung by
Jenny Gall at Mark Gregory's Australian Folk Song site. Come to think of it, Stinky was a ship's cat in a former life. Number seven, probably.
And if you look below at Chris' profile pic, you'll see Kevin Smith's head moving nicely in time (on a good day) to the music.
The Duke and the Tinker was recorded live at The Irish Club, our Canberran home from home. The story gets a mention in Emerson's essay Self-Reliance: 'That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.'
Mercy, also from The Irish Club, is by Damian Howard – a Ploughboy and a Gentle Soul.
Pills of White Mercury '...one night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury' – had he but told me...
The Goldminer ... A Cass and Pete original. Hard times at the goldfields of Kambalda, West Australia.
