BIIRD

All-female trad supergroup BIIRD continue to soar through their Summer run of shows with their performance as part of Bulmers Live at Leopardstown Races on Thursday, the 16th of July. Bringing the trad session vibe from the corner of a pub to a global audience, their energy is unmatched. Their performances aren’t just ones to observe, but one to become a part of, embracing the culture of community and integrity that is central to Irish traditional music. We sat down with Lisa Canny, harpist, vocalist and the brains behind the BIIRD sisterhood, to chat all things trad, life and passionate performance. 

Lisa, how are you? How's life? 

Lisa: Life is good. Life is busy. The summer is flying. The year is flying. The whole BIIRD experience is flying- excuse the pun. 

How did BIIRD, as the 11 piece it is today, initially form? 

Lisa: It's a long time in the making. I coined the name and the concept when I was doing my master's down in Cork. I did a master's in ethnomusicology and I was doing a lot of sessions at the time, just to pay my way through college. I was doing a lot with a great fiddler from Clare, Tara Breen. 

Myself and Tara were doing a lot of the sessions, and I kind of organically noticed it was rare that you had the girlos leading sessions. I think it was the final catalyst for me to do something that I've dreamed about since I was very, very young. 

I was mad into the girl band era. Mostly Spice Girls and Destiny’s Child, TLC, Sugar Babes, All Saints. That was my era. I was mad about that culture, and that culture of girlhood in your adulthood. Having grown up in trad and not really in any other music, that was my musical outlet, my musical language. I didn't really know how to combine the two until much later in life. 

Being down in Cork and doing those sessions, and imagining what it'd be like to have a female-facing, female-forward trad group, became the first exposure to it. It was there that I came up with the name. And slowly but surely, the concept started to build itself. 

It took me 12 years to finally launch it and talk it into existence. Over the years, I started to really hone in on what BIIRD could be and would be and how I could actually make it work. 

BIIRD combines that ‘girl band’ energy with trad and makes this beautiful combination come to life. You can see it in the energy when you're performing - it is a carefree, fun girl band, but also you're insanely good, professional musicians as well.

Lisa: This is what I was noticing, I knew what I wanted to create in BIIRD. I had this image of us on a big stage and us all hyping each other up, playing. I knew it would take a particular type of musician to reach the level of musicianship we needed to be able to break through the naysayers. 

I knew that we needed to get a group of people together that could get on. I also really wanted to create a project that I would have looked up to as a child, because I was lacking that. 

And so I picked girls that I just genuinely fell in love with personally. I admire all the girls for different reasons. They're all so intelligent and so self-aware and they're all so stylish in their own ways. They've got their own varied and juxtaposing opinions on things. 

It's a real coming together of very different people with different upbringings, but with a shared love that has really informed our journey through life so far and has given us this opportunity to meet each other and really connect. And it just all started to click into place. 

I was going back to Ireland for festivals and sessions and finding myself in a session at 4am in a kitchen. The girls were looking on fire, standing on top of a table, belting out the tunes. It was like - yes - that right there is BIIRD! There it is!

How do you translate the signature intimacy of a trad session to a bigger stage setting? 

Lisa: It's very hard to do. I think that there's immediately a challenge in putting trad on a stage so far away from people that you can't tangibly touch it and be part of it. 

But having 11 of us up there, there's always something to look at. There's always stories unfolding between people on stage. I also think there's no superstars among us. We're a group, we're a community and we're representing the greater community in that. There's strength in numbers and when we get on a big stage having 11 of us definitely helps keep it feeling a little bit more tangible and touchable. 

If your Bulmers Live at Leopardstown show was to be the last show that BIIRD ever got to perform, what message would you like to leave people with? What would your legacy be? 

Lisa: If Leopardstown was our last show, there would be no regrets. 

We have set out on what we knew was going to be a wild journey, what we knew was going to be an uncertain journey. What we knew was going to ruffle some feathers, and what I knew to be something that was going to be well accepted and reviewed with the people that I knew was going to love it. So there would definitely be no regrets. 

I think what we would like to leave as a legacy is, personally anyway, for a little bit more artistic intention and courage in the artistic intention that gets put behind trad.

I think that’s part of what I'm trying to do with BIIRD, with the image and with the more intentional choices towards the broader brand and world that we're creating. I'm proud of that and I know that that's something that a lot of trad musicians struggle with because, in any kind of a traditional music, there's a lot of unspoken rules and a lot of lines that are expected to not be crossed. 

I hope that our legacy is that tradition needs to live and breathe, and for it to survive the boundaries need to be pushed by those who are most courageous to do it. You have to have thick skin and you have to have the support behind you. And the legacy of BIIRD could be that, in a group full of powerful women, you can do it. 

BIIRD play Bulmers Live at Leopardstown on Thursday, 16th July. Tickets are on sale now with incredible value packages starting from just €25 + booking fee, available from leopardstown.com/bulmerslive.