Introducing Kelly 

Kelly Burke is a multi-instrumentalist, fiddle, pipes and bouzouki player, flautist, and singer, originally from London. He moved to Manchester in the 1980s for university and has been an active member of the Manchester Irish community ever since. In addition to his extensive experiences performing Irish traditional music, Kelly plays the oud with Arabic musicians based in the North West. 

“Mike McGoldrick was just coming up, Des Donnelly was coming up and all that, Sean Regan, all those dynamic players. Those were part of the Manchester scene and I suppose it’s sort of maintained a healthy dynamic along with quite an inventiveness that I think Manchester probably had, because there was so much music influence from other quarters as well, from jazz to punk to all sorts.” 

Kelly's Musical Life Kelly came from a musical family and was brought up surrounded by a variety of music genres. 

“I was born in Hammersmith and I grew up and went to school around Hammersmith in the sixties. And we were brought up in quite a musical family, although there wasn’t a lot of Irish and sort of traditional music. It was music hall songs and stuff like that. And then I got into classical and jazz as a kid as well, so I always had that alongside. And then I was playing in a céilí band from about fifteen and then I was sort of playing around in the London scene and that was pretty vibrant.” 

Kelly’s earliest experiences of Irish traditional music coincided with a surge in well-known Irish musicians playing around the pubs of 1960s London. It was because of this that Kelly started playing the fiddle. 

“There were some great players. People like Bobby Casey were around. The big players if you like, Brendan Mulcaire. They were up in North London and we were South London. We had people like Roger Sherlock and John Bowe and the fiddle player that really got me going was a guy called John O’Shea (or Sean O’Shea) and he played every Thursday night in the White Hart in Fulham.” 

It was primarily the appeal of Manchester’s music scene that encouraged Kelly to apply to study there as an undergraduate. Since relocating from London to Manchester, Kelly has never left. 

“The guy that interviewed me wasn’t very impressed with my grades and he said, ‘Why do you want to come to Manchester?’ So I said, ‘Well I heard the music is good’. And he was an old skiffle man, so he said, ‘Well ok I’ll go along with that then’! And so I did three years of anthropology at Manchester University and, of course, the music was pretty lively.” 

Manchester’s Irish music scene was similarly thriving, with many great players in and around the city. It was less vast than the London scene, which, for Kelly, was a huge advantage and it was here that he started playing flute alongside fiddle. 

“It was much more friendly, much more open and I think the other thing that attracted me, it was very small. London was too big really. Manchester was quite small. There was about four, five sessions, well, I mean, you could go to a session pretty much every night of the week. And there was meeting other musicians, other players. And Manchester seemed to have a lot of fiddle players for some reason.” 

“Although I was playing mainly fiddle – I met and lived with quite a few fiddle players as a student – I started getting interested in the flute. A big friend of mine, Garry Walsh, encouraged me to have a go at the flute, so I did.” 

The Purpose and Motivations of Kelly’s Music-Making 

“There’s a sense of belonging that is very hard to, not describe, because I see that in other communities, but it’s part of, it’s like food isn’t it, it’s food for the soul.” 

An important element to Kelly’s music was to demonstrate the diversity in Irish music and its links to wider music trends, often away from the usual stereotypes. 

“We were definitely not showbands playing showband material and if anybody asked us to play the Fields of Athenry, we’d tell them to go away. You know, it was one of those. So I suppose there were people that - the musicians that we were around - would more likely play Bob Dylan or Ry Cooder songs, not necessarily “Come all ye’s”. And they were in that sixties sort of slight folk generation.” 

One of the important musical traditions Kelly is keen to maintain in Manchester is uilleann pipes. 

“I’m involved with uilleann pipers in the North West as well and that’s a great network of players. Piping is one of those. It’s unusual, but sometimes we’ll have three pipers in a session, if there’s a pub that is big enough. Or even if it’s not big enough, we’ll get in there and blast it out! There was a couple of travelling pipers that were quite famous in Manchester and there’s a bit of a tradition in that respect.” 

A big motivation for Kelly’s music-making is the continuation of tradition, uniting different generations, respecting older musicians and making space for youngsters to come through. 

“You could have sometimes three generations of family in a pub playing together. Or, if the grandparents are sitting and watching and socialising and listening to parents play, the kids are sometimes playing as well.” ‘It’s about bringing people together. I think it’s about a sense of community. I think there’s a sort of family, there is a family of musicians, who are literally your family. They’re your community as well as your touchstone I guess." 

Irish Music-Making in Manchester 

Kelly’s journey of performing in Manchester coincided with a certain professionalisation happening in Irish music that would see pubs actively encourage musicians to play, assured of the popularity of their music. 

“One or two people would be paid to anchor a session. Do you know, so, we’d get paid at the end of the night, whatever it would be. Might be 30 quid, might be 50 quid whatever, to anchor the session and bring a crowd in.” 

Kelly feels that the reception and interest in traditional session music in Manchester went wider than the local Irish community. 

“You’d get some pubs that would be certainly known as Irish pubs, so I guess that tended to cover most of the people that would be coming in, but they weren’t exclusively so.” 

Kelly sees a dynamic Irish music scene in Manchester, linked to older traditions and places, but where newer players come through and assure a positive future. 

“I think it’s still a healthy music place really. And there’s a lot of venues. Recently there’s been quite a lot of people like Grace Kelly and there’s Paul Daly, who’s a brilliant flute player from Roscommon. And there was quite a lot of the older generation, that my wife’s family knew, that would have music in the house if there was birthdays or christenings or anything like that.” 

“When you see people passing and the people whose funerals you play for, you realise that then you’re taking on that mantle.”