Michael O’Shea’s MO CHARA
the story of its restoration
In 2019 I produced a documentary called No Journeys End — it told the story of the late Michael O’Shea, a travelling street musician — a busker — from Carlingford, Co Louth, who played a self-made instrument he named Mo Chara (my friend), that he created from part of a door he had found in a skip in Munich.* The Mo Chara was a hybrid hammered dulcimer but Michael added amplification and effects to it lending it a strong sense of otherworldliness.
*Note on spelling: Michael referred to his instrument as “Mó Cará”. In Gaeilge [Irish] “cara” means friend and “mo” means my. “Mo chara” means “my friend”. The initial consonant of a noun is aspirated after the possessive adjective “mo”, hence — “Mo Chara”. In this feature “Mo Chara” is used.
Michael’s story and the beautiful music he created on his Mo Chara resonated with a new audience and the reissue of his 1982 self-titled album was met with enthusiastic plaudits, indeed staff in Dublin’s Tower Records voted Michael’s record the second greatest Irish album of all time.
Michael’s family have recently loaned artist and musician Stano — one of the contributors to my documentary — one of two surviving iterations of Michael’s Mo Chara that they’ve had since Michael’s untimely death back in December 1991. The instrument had lain idle for almost 30 years when Stano asked percussionist Thomas Haugh (The Plague Monkeys, Seti the First) to help restore it. Michael played the Mo Chara on Stano’s debut album and now almost 40 years later Stano and Thomas plan to record with the Mo Chara again.
It’s a spiritual story about how musical instruments have a life of their own. Stano and Thomas take up the story…
Stano — After Michael’s album was re-released, I thought about the instrument and where it was and we found out that it was in London. We went looking for it. I just thought that I wouldn’t mind trying to write some new material for the Mo Chara. I didn’t really know how to go about it, and we really didn’t know what condition the instrument was in. We contacted Michael’s sister Rita, and got the instrument back from London.
I went to see Kevin Murphy, the cello player, who has played on my previous albums, and that’s where I came across Thomas Haugh. Thomas was playing an instrument, it was from the same family that Michael had developed his instrument from and I was really interested in what Thomas was doing and I thought here’s the guy now that would understand Michael’s instrument. So that’s how it came about, after the gig I got in touch with Thomas and I told him about the instrument — he knew about Michael. That’s how we got it to this point.
Thomas — I’m a musician of various instruments over the years. I’m a collector of eclectic instruments — I suppose folk instruments is the way you would think about it now. I’ve been interested in music from all parts of the world really for as long as I’ve been involved in music. Stano came across me playing some music at a gig, a show where I was supporting Kevin Murphy, the cellist, who is someone that I have a separate project with called Seti the First. I was supporting Kevin with sort of song-based music and Stano saw me playing.
Thomas — For Seti’s second record (The Wolves of Summerland — 2016) I brought more of those instruments that I’d collected into the compositions. I was playing a lot of zithers — I’ve collected some unusual ones as well, I played a Marxophone for a long time, which is a kind of zither that has a set of hammers on it, you play it a little bit like a piano — and various other kinds of peculiar instruments.
Another instrument related to what Michael had built — these are all what you call trapezoidal instruments — is the hammered dulcimer, the Persian one is known as a santoor. The granddaddy of them would be a cimbalom, which is a Hungarian or bohemian instrument, a full concert instrument. That’s a little removed from the sort of folk element which characterises a lot of diatonic instruments. The one that I play is called a tsymbaly, which is a Ukrainian folk instrument. I bought that virtually from a little shop in the Ukraine. I managed to use Google Translate to communicate with a strange little online shop that I think is a middle man for people selling pieces of furniture. Some of these instruments turn up in funny places like that. I got that instrument a couple of years ago and I put a lot of work into refurbishing it, adding strings and getting it in tune. Not unlike what I’ve been doing with Michael’s instrument since I got hold of it from Stano.
When you see it (the Mo Chara) it does have a certain magic quality to it — how it looks — because it is unique. When I got the instrument the strings were obviously very old but really they weren’t tuned, they broke. It was a case of starting with a whole new set of strings. There are 18 strings and there are some sympathetic strings which are resonance strings. A lot of people would know that from Indian music, a sitar has resonance strings that just reverberate when you are playing. Similarly a Hardanger fiddle from Norway has resonance strings. Michael came up with that scheme for his instrument.
The bridges were a great challenge for me. First of all getting the gauges of strings and figuring that out was part of the challenge. I went to Some Neck Guitars, a great music shop in Dublin — those guys were very helpful — what we did is we measured all the strings that were on it before we took them off. The arrangement of strings on Michael’s instrument was sort of ad hoc — he probably changed strings in different ways and used whatever he had, so there wasn’t necessarily a logical approach to how you’d gauge strings across the octaves. We measured them, one of the guys at Some Neck Guitars had an instrument to do that.
Thomas — We then rationalised, we worked out intervals for how we would size the string weight across the whole set on the instrument — so that was the first job. We did the same for the sympathetic strings. That was the first part of the challenge, finding suitable strings. The bridges were another challenge, two of them were missing their metal rails that run across the top. I found suitable replacements in a model shop, a railway model shop and they were perfect for that. The big challenge was setting the bridges. You’ve got two notes across each string, which means that you have to know exactly how to set the bridges.
There was one photograph of this instrument so I could see what way the bridges were, but there was no sense of whether that was the correct set because I couldn’t tell what condition the instrument was in when the photograph was taken. The bridges are in a different position now then they are in that photograph so I consider this to be a work in progress in that if it’s not what Michael had then we still have to try and figure that out a little bit. But what I did was I spent a lot of time — it took several days really — to find bridge positions that would allow me to get the instrument in playable order. We have that now at the moment, we can tune it in different ways and we can play it, so we can use the instrument. It has Michael’s original pick-ups, I haven’t used them yet in any recordings, we just mic’d things. It would be interesting to do that though because that was kind of part of Michael’s sound — to plug it in basically, to electrify it.
It’s great, it’s a lovely thing and it’s louder than I thought it was going to be — Thomas Haugh
Thomas — It’s got good resonance and obviously the bridges give you that. Another thing you can’t see but inside the instrument Michael but metal coils and I think his logic was that he was trying to create a spring reverb addition to the instrument, I can’t quite tell how effective that is acoustically. Maybe with using the pick-ups it adds something there as well, but it kind of tells you something about him, he was constantly trying to innovate on his ideas and expand them.
At the moment it’s tuned in D major for a couple of tunes we had picked out and it’s sounding pretty good. It’s got two scales on it at the moment and we can move that around, we can tune for different things. At some point I do want to try and explore it a bit more and see if there’s another set-up for these bridge positions, that’s a little more like what I’ve seen in pictures of Michael.
It’s a little bit of a mystery which makes sense given that it’s Michael, he’s a bit mysterious you know — Thomas Haugh
Thomas — The instrument having a new lease of life I think is appropriate. We pass through but the instruments often last a lot longer then us. Music is a very transcendent thing. In my view to have an instrument carry on into the next generation — for what it gives to people in recordings and performances — is pretty special. It’s a sad thing to see an instrument languishing or falling apart even.
When I listened to the interviews I found it a little sad and disappointing that in Michael’s own lifetime he wasn’t fully celebrated. The resurgence of interest in his music now somehow compensates for that — Thomas Haugh
Stano — I didn’t want to be a parody of Michael, I’m trying to figure out how we can develop what Michael did without being a pastiche of what he was doing.
I was getting piano chords and putting them together and I got a guitar player, Eoin Scott to play arpeggiated lines because of the way the Mo Chara rolls. That was the basis for getting the instrument back. We went to a friend of mine, Joe McGrath up in Hellfire Studios and we set up there for two days. We just went looking for ideas basically, Thomas responded to some of the chords. We jammed out ideas and bits and pieces, it looks like I’ll have two albums on the go at the moment.
One will be very experimental, we had the Mo Chara set up in a room and Thomas had his pedals set up, we had run the Mo Chara through an amplifier into a stone room, it was up very loud and it was feeding back, it gave it an amazing otherworldly texture, it sounded nothing like what Michael had done.
I felt it was pushing the boundaries of where the instrument could go — Stano
Stano — In the studio we had a grand piano down the end of one room and the Mo Chara was up the other end. Thomas was tuning the instrument and he’d play a little melody on the Mo Chara and go down then and check it on the piano. I was recording Thomas as he was walking up and down the room playing a bit of piano and bits and pieces. I had my backing tracks made which were the chords, textures and soundscapes and I just thought, Jesus there’s something after happening here, that’s when the penny dropped, I’ve never heard anything like this before.
Thomas also plays a Hurdy Gurdy and I was blown away when I heard this instrument, I thought it sounded like traditional Irish music, it sounds a bit like Uileann Pipes but it has a carnivalesque, otherworldly sound. I wouldn’t mind getting some traditional Irish songs like Danny Boy, She Moved through the Fair, Carraigfergus and to just take the melody. I want to get eight of the traditional songs, Thomas suggested I Am Stretched on Your Grave, basically get the melodies of these songs, play them on the Hurdy Gurdy, and then piece that together and overdub Michael’s instrument on top of that.
Michael played on my first album (Content To Write In I Dine Weathercraft, reissued 2018 Allchival), and I got on really well with him. There’s a whole resurgence of interest in his music so I thought there’s his instrument just sitting there. It’s an instrument that should be played. Hopefully when I get my album out maybe Thomas could take the instrument and record with it on his own, or maybe we could find someone else who would play it. I heard a story years ago about Jazz players, who were saying that if an instrument is not played it loses its tone. A lot of the old Jazz guys used to get the bass and lean it against a speaker, as music was played the instrument would vibrate, it kept it in condition.
The Mo Chara is a living instrument and when we got it back and Thomas restrung it you realise that it is such a beautiful thing. The skill to make an instrument like that — it looks very simple but it’s not — Stano
Stano — The original instrument that he had is no longer with us, it’s long gone, that was made from part of a wooden door, it would have been amazing to see that instrument and we know that there is another version of the instrument with Michael’s family. There are two versions of his Mo Chara left. Hopefully down the line we might be able to get the other instrument as well. I think this instrument should be in the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA), Michael’s album is there and his history should be there also.
He is a part of Irish traditional music, he’s a missing link — Stano
Note: For further information on the ITMA and the history of the hammered dulcimer in Irish trad read…
Stano — The instrument should be put somewhere like that and then if someone really interesting comes along, a new generation of traditional players, they should have access to the instrument.
Thomas — Music is a very humbling thing because it’s an endless thing, it’s an infinite thing.
The greatest of musicians will always say that they are always learning and it you think about the instruments themselves they are just these kinds of vessels for that — Thomas Haugh
Thomas — There’s something really precious about them, Michael’s instrument isn’t an expensive instrument to reconstruct or anything like that, meaning that he was able to make something as divine as music from something that came out of skip in Germany — that has its own profound quality in how we think about music and its value now and into the future, how we look back at the recordings that we have that we can carry forward and that can form the basis of inspiration for new recordings for people. All of that I find humbling and I’m very grateful for it being in my life and part of the world.
It would be great if other people took it into their projects and made projects with it. That’s what I feel about the instrument — that it’s fitting that it continues and it’s playable it’s now in usable shape you can do a lot with it, fit it into different modes of music.
© Paul McDermott 2020, All Rights Reserved
For further information:
Further Reading: for more on Michael O’Shea and Stano read…
Long Read Oral Histories
Further Listening
© Paul McDermott 2020, All Rights Reserved
