On a good day the hills around the rural Co Sligo home of the Poor Creature musicians Ruth Clinton and Cormac MacDiarmada can feel like a portal to another universe. “There’s a place up the road from us. It’s a TV mast high in the mountains. There’s gorgeous mist and fog there all the time,” says MacDiarmada, who has a parallel career wrenching terrifying sounds from his fiddle as a member of the Mercury-nominated “mutant folk” group Lankum. “It looms like this incredible, almost Blade Runner-like structure.”
Clinton and MacDiarmada moved to the northwest several years ago, leaving Dublin in search of somewhere more affordable. They found a house – they’re talking from it right now – but that was just the start. Isolated, beautiful and a bit spooky, their neck of the woods has proved a rich source of inspiration for their magnificently haunting new album, All Smiles Tonight.
The LP unfolds like a closely guarded secret. Overall it has a whispering, intimate quality, but when it gets going it’s as if someone has taken the roof off the sky. There are extended passages of droning strings that rise like mist from a bog, interspersed with gorgeously unsettling vocals from Clinton and MacDiarmada, the tapestry woven together with both subtlety and impressive amounts of welly by the regular Lankum collaborator John “Spud” Murphy.
Stuck at home during the pandemic, Clinton and MacDiarmada – romantic partners and musical collaborators – started making music together as a comfort and an outlet for their unprocessed lockdown anxieties.
RM Block
“I don’t think we were necessarily working towards an album,” MacDiarmada says. “[We were] making stuff because we had the time and space. We had a lot of toys and stuff lying about the house. We had the right stuff and we were in the right place.”
Clinton nods. “We didn’t have a theme in mind, starting out. But then, when we looked back at all the songs, they just shared that [sense of coming out of lockdown]. It could have been subconscious, or could be that we like sad songs.”
Poor Creature are a very Irish supergroup. Clinton is an experienced traditional musician and one-quarter of the acclaimed all-woman foursome Landless. As a member of Lankum, MacDiarmada has played everywhere from New York to Glastonbury as the ensemble worked their way towards an improbable global success via their ominous take on trad.
They are joined in Poor Creature by the percussionist John Dermody, a veteran musician whose background extends to the underrated 1990s post-rock ensemble The Jimmy Cake – think Mogwai meets Flann O’Brien – and who has played with MacDiarmada in Lankum.
Poor Creature’s first gig as a trio was a benefit for a hip operation needed by a friend’s greyhound – the best possible way to launch a band. Yet, for all their collective experiences, they have created something different with Poor Creature: a goth-folk sound that feels equally indebted to The Sisters of Mercy and Planxty, Enya and Fields of the Nephilim.
With Clinton singing in a keening not-quite-shriek against vast backdrops of droning noises, they are breaking new ground – though not entirely out on their own. The grandiosely grim All Smiles Tonight is in the same melodramatic register as recent output by the Fermanagh electro-folk artist Róis and the Welsh-Yorkshire goth trio Tristwch y Fenywod. “Goth folk” has coalesced as a genre, and Poor Creature are among its torchbearers.
In their gloomy intensity, the songs on All Smiles Tonight feel ripped from the fabric of modern life. They are, in fact, largely reworkings of 18th- and 19th-century material. The opening number, Adieu, Lovely Erin, tells the story of William Hill, a forger from Belfast who was exiled to Australia in 1826. The LP’s title track, which The Chieftains previously recorded, is a lament dating back to 1879.
But Poor Creature bring something new: their version of All Smiles Tonight is framed by a stygian throb of percussion, a speeded-up tempo lending a disconcerting jauntiness to a tune drenched in heartache. It makes for chilling listening. The lyrics, as Clinton devastatingly delivers them, are from the perspective of a woman forced to watch as she loses the object of her devotion to another suitor.
“What’s amazing is that so much of that stuff still resonates – the same stories. You consistently get the same themes, the same objects, the same ideas,” MacDiarmada says.
“You can still identify with these songs that have sometimes been around for hundreds of years,” Clinton agrees. “It was Cecil Sharp” – a collector of old English folk compositions – “who said the songs aren’t good because they’re old, they’re old because they’re good.”
In rock music, artists tend to stick to the themes, and the people, they know. Not so in folk, which has a rich history of collaboration. Which is how Clinton, MacDiarmada and Dermody can move so easily between their other groups and Poor Creature.
The project has also given them space to explore passions that might not quite land with their other bands, such as their love for country-and-Irish music, which they celebrate with a spectral cover of Philomena Begley and Ray Lynam’s The Whole Town Knows.
“I respect the phenomenon in country-and-Irish of dancing. People just want to dance, and the music facilitates that. It’s a very lively and living culture,” Clinton says. “Not every song would be to our taste. I guess the stuff that is closer maybe to older-style country. Philomena Begley is an amazing singer.”
Country-and-Irish is a much bigger industry than is often appreciated. Poor Creature believe there’s a secret history to be unpacked of the many labels and record studios it supported, across the Midlands and North. “There was this wild scene up in the Border counties in the 1970s,” Dermody says, “where there were loads and loads of small studios, just recording lots of this stuff.”
Rural music doesn’t have to be backwards looking, they say.
“It’s interesting that country-and-Irish can be associated with conservatism,” Clinton says. “But a lot of people when they went over to London, escaping a repressive Ireland at that time, they loved this music, where you could sing about divorce. There was a sort of liberation, maybe, in it for women.”
Poor Creature were among the many artists who signed a statement supporting Kneecap after British police opened an investigation into allegations that the group displayed a Hizbullah flag on stage in London.
If you speak out on Gaza and the slaughter there as Kneecap did, Poor Creature say – we’re talking before the Irish rap trio’s incendiary Glastonbury set – powerful forces will do their best to censor you, as happened with the attempt to remove the group from the festival bill.
“You have to credit not just the bravery, right at the point where you’re at the cusp of significant success, to risk losing that for speaking out against something that is self-evidently, obviously happening, but to then ... when you are by no means out of the woods … to dedicate the entire fee to Médecins Sans Frontières” – as Kneecap did after appearing at the Wide Awake festival in London – “is an extraordinary statement of congruence with the words you are speaking.
“My concern, I suppose, is to see such a concerned and co-ordinated attack on a group of artists from such high-level machinery in the industry. There were people speaking out, writing letters, trying to get them deplatformed from bills.”
Poor Creature are to tour the excellent All Smiles Tonight, which will also surely be in contention for the Choice Music Price, among other accolades.
MacDiarmada is still taken aback by the high points of his musical career, including the Mercury nomination for Lankum and that band’s headline performance at the 15,000-capacity In the Meadows festival in Dublin last year.
“I have to pause and take a moment because things can get normalised,” he says. “So, yeah, hang on a second, take a breath and acknowledge how incredibly privileged this thing is that I get to do.
“If I was to tell myself 10 years ago that I would be doing this, I would be telling you, ‘What the f**k are you talking about?’ It’s beyond what I would have expected in my wildest dreams.”
All Smiles Now is released via River Lea Records. Poor Creature play Donegal Castle, as part of Earagail Arts Festival, on Friday, July 18th; the Duncairn, Belfast, on September 12th; and the Button Factory, Dublin, on November 27th
