Zen Sounds 053: Michael O'Shea
Zen Sounds 053: Michael O'Shea
The eccentric Irish busker made music like no other on a zither-like, self-built instrument
Prologue
Like the great Ahmad Jamal, who died at age 92 last week, I love music. Seriously, there’s nothing better than finding a beautiful record or an amazing artist I haven’t heard before. Such moments send me into a state of hyperfocus, listening to tunes over and over again, researching every bit of information on the subject, sometimes deep into the night.
Luckily, no matter how long you’ve been doing it and how much you believe to know about music, there’s always more records to be discovered. In fact, I love the feeling of finding an obscure, forgotten gem just as much as immersing myself in an exciting, brand new recording.
In the mid-2010’s, this passion led me to acting as an associate producer for two Krautrock re-issues on the L.A. based Now-Again label: First, the self-titled Paternoster album, a 1972 record by an Austrian student group that played their version of Pink Floyd’s and Soft Machine’s psychedelic rock. After that, we worked on German Oak’s »Down In The Bunker«, a dark and experimental album of instrumental ambient rock – also from 1972 – by a Düsseldorf-based trio that preceded similar efforts by decades. In both cases, I met with former members of the groups, helped with getting the paperwork done, conducted long interviews for the liner notes, had photos scanned and master tapes restored. Those were two of the most satisfying music projects I ever got involved with.
I stopped working on re-issue projects because I started a demanding full-time job, but I stayed committed to finding old gems and researching their back stories for my personal joy. The music always comes first, but as a journalist, I am equally interested in the stories behind these mythical records.
This is how I stumbled across the outstanding album I want to share with you this week. It’s a super rare and obscure album from 1982, but thanks to the folks at AllChival, the reissue imprint of Dublin’s record store and beat label All City, it has been made available again in 2019.
Michael O’Shea – »s/t«
(AllChival, 1982 / 2019)
When I first heard about Michael O’Shea, his story reminded me of Laraaji, the zither player who allegedly got discovered by Brian Eno while busking in Washington Square Park.
Like Laraaji, O’Shea was a street musician. Apparently, they didn’t know of each other, but listening to Laraaji’s early records like »Celestial Vibration« (1978) and parts of the Eno-produced »Ambient 3: Days of Radiance« (1980), there surely are certain parallels to what O’Shea was doing on his only self-titled album, released in 1982. Still, they’re very different. O’Shea’s music creates a world completely of its own, casting sort of a magical spell on its listeners.
On the cover of his album, you see the Irishman wearing a three-piece Tweed suit and a hat, with one of his self-built instruments he called »Mó Cará« (Gaelic for »my friend«), or »Mo Chara«. He’s looking down, so you can’t see his face – which, in retrospect, is a perfect fit for this enigmatic artist who died way too young.
Few other photos exist of O’Shea. They show a small, thin man with a shaved head and missing front teeth. He often wore Indian style robes, sometimes cross-dressing in female clothes. In an in-depth oral history of O’Shea’s life by writer Paul McDermott, his sister Rita describes him as a »free spirit« and a »rolling stone«. He wasn’t interested in money, fame, status or power – what he considered real were »people not things«, as he told journalist Mark Prendergast in one of the few interviews he ever gave. His friends remember him as a quiet, gentle and humorous person.
Born in 1947 in a small town in Northern Ireland, his father died when O’Shea was just three years old. Growing up with a single mother as the youngest of four siblings, he was an avid reader, but in school, he soon started missing a lot. Eventually he dropped out at 17 to join the British army, but ended up in prison for unauthorized absence – apparently he had met a girl, fallen in love with her and left the army behind.
In the late 1960’s, O’Shea moved to London where he lived as a bohemian artist, mixing with the local folk music scene and working all sorts of odd jobs to make a living. Spending the 1970’s as a nomad traveling Europe, Northern Africa, the Middle East and India, he made it as far as Bangladesh, from where he brought home a sitar. He taught himself to play it while reconvalescing from a serious illness he had contrived.
Having later sold his beloved sitar for travel money, O’Shea went on to construct »Mo Chara«, a mix of a sitar and a special Algerian hammered dulcimer called the Zelochord. The basic structure was made out of the middle part of an oak door O’Shea had found in a skip in Munich, adding 17 strings, amplification, electronics and an echo effect unit. He played it using paintbrushes or chopsticks, busking in France and Greece. When he came back to London in the late 1970’s, you could find him mainly in Covent Garden, then home to a thriving artist community, and the West End’s tube stations.
The distinctive sound of his self-built instrument has an ancient, traditional feel to it, but because of the added electronic effects, it sounded futuristic and otherworldly at the same time. As Laraaji played zither and hammered dulcimer at a similar time, enhancing his instruments with electronics, the comparison comes up for a reason, but his works sound much more meditative and new-agey than O’Shea’s intense improvisations. O’Shea experimented with different tunings, combining all of his influences – Irish folk music, North African sounds, Middle Eastern scales and Indian microtones.
Steadily busking around West London in the early 1980’s and regularly drawing sizeable crowds, several influential musicians and promoters took notice of O’Shea. This led to a short engagement at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club (which he left after two days), an opening gig for Ravi Shankar, working on a never-to-be-released album with Rick Wakeman of Yes and playing with Don Cherry’s Codona, Archie Shepp and Alice Coltrane.
Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis, both of post-punk band Wire, discovered O’Shea in Covent Garden and offered to record him in their local studio. A year went by until the shy musician took them up on their offer. The poet Larry Burns, a friend of O’Shea, remembers that he »never wanted to be rich and famous, he wanted to be happy and anonymous«.
But one morning in July of 1981, he showed up unannounced and recorded his self-titled album on that single day. Lewis has fond memories of the session:
»It was absolutely extraordinary; it’s still one of the most magical recording experiences I’ve had. I can remember looking around the control room and basically everyone was in tears, it was really, really moving.«
First released in 1982 in a small run on Gilbert’s and Lewis’ independent label Dome to no fanfare at all, it is the kind of album that obscure record lovers fantasize about. Over the years, it gained mythical status and in turn got quite expensive on the second hand market. In 2001, it got re-released on CD with some added tracks, and then again, in 2019, in its original form on vinyl.
The first track, the 15-minute opus »No Journey’s End«, fills the A-side of the record. As many contemporary witnesses confirmed, it perfectly captures the style of playing that O’Shea was known for in the streets. He usually played a version of this song when busking, interpreting it wildly different every time. For the B-side, he laid down a few more tracks and curiously experimented with the studio equipment at hand, guided by Gilbert and Lewis in processing his recordings.
O’Shea’s non-conformist take on music is not easy to describe; it has been called »outsider folk« and compared to Japanese Koto music; Gavin Friday of Virgin Prunes called it »psychedelic but Gaelic, a bit of Philip Glass, a bit of everything«. To me, the album is a singular masterpiece. It left me dumbfounded when I first heard it, as I’d never listened to anything vaguely similar. The closest comparisons – Laraaji’s early records and maybe some of Ravi Shankar’s music – are still unbelievably far off. It creates a special atmosphere that, in lack of other words, I will call deeply spiritual for now.
After the release, not much changed for O’Shea at first. He kept on busking, worked on more material that never saw the light of the day and played backing tracks on a few other albums up until 1985. (Some of these recordings were included on the 2001 CD re-release.) Eventually, he stopped performing and disappeared from the music scene altogether. Nobody seems to know how he actually spent his last years, but one acquaintance recounts seeing him at a rave in the late 1980’s. It should be noted that he had been prone to excessive drinking and smoking most of his adult life.
In December of 1991, Michael O’Shea got hit by a post van right after getting off a bus in London. A few days later, he died from his injuries in the hospital. He was 44 years old. This album remains his main musical legacy.
One more thing
In the last weeks, I’ve been reading – and enjoying – Hua Hsu’s autobiographical novel »Stay True«, first published in September 2022. Hsu is a writer and a college professor, a child of Taiwanese migrants that settled in Northern California in the early 1980’s. We share the same birth year, and we were both really into hip-hop and indie rock in our youth, so I can relate to a lot of the cultural references in this book. I found his depiction of growing up in the Bay Area as an Asian-American kid and the untimely death of one of his best friends extremely intriguing. Urgent reading recommendation from my end.
Happy weekend!
»When you’re young, you are certain of your capacity to imagine a way out of the previous generation’s problems. There is a different way to grow old, paths that don’t involve conforming and selling out. We would figure it out together, and we would be different together. I just had to find people to be different with, a critical mass of others ot flesh out the possibilities of a collective pronoun.«
Hua Hsu, »Stay True«
© 2023 Stephan Kunze
Thanks to Paul McDermott for putting together »No Journeys End. The Story of Michael O’Shea«, the main source of information for this issue.