Ballina is 'almost like a hometown' for Steve Wickham and No Crows

From just up the road in Sligo town the increasingly famous band ‘No Crows’ are bringing their uniquely diverse and inclusive brand of world folk music to Ballina Arts Centre on Friday, February 23rd.

Everything from Japanese to Siberian to Italian folk figures in their repertoire, and fiddler Steve Wickham calls it “something beautifully inclusive”.

“We’re all deeply interconnected,” says Steve. “We spring from the same well of humanity, and folk is born of our human experience, which is the same everywhere – the same flaws, the same capacity for love.” 

‘No Crows’ was born in 2005 when Steve Wickham was still touring with The Waterboys – 50 to 60 gigs a year.

“So I’d get a lot of days off, and I’d come home–” he has a cottage and a polytunnel with his artist wife in Sligo “–and play with my mates down the pub, Shoot the Crows, in Sligo town. 

"I knew Felip, who is Catalan, and Eddie for a long time, I’d played with them in a band called Jazz Tam, and I’d played with Anna, who is Swiss, in a band called Cadenza, we started playing music from around the world, and the audience seemed to like it, it was something different.” 

Steve is a multi-instrumentalist, but he is first and foremost a folk-rock fiddler – “a hired gun”, as he calls it – a journey that started when he was barely more than a toddler. Steve’s father was a mechanic with CIE but at the age of 19 he’d taken up the violin, and he started teaching his three-year-old son for an hour every day.

When he was seven, Steve started lessons with Nell Kane at Dublin’s Royal College of Music, and after that, he was practising for three or four hours a day.

“I hated it,” he says. 

He was a keen footballer, and later he was keen on the girls as well, and the violin got in the way of that. 

“But I ploughed on, as kids do, Dad was paying.” 

Then at 14, he had an epiphany. 

“I was in the kitchen playing Bach, and I closed my eyes and started improvising, adding to the Bach, and it was like I was holding the violin while it was playing itself, it was like flying, like leaving the ground. It was a magnificent feeling, and once you’ve felt something like that, there’s no going back, you approach the next lesson having had that out-of-body experience.” 

It didn’t change his mind about becoming a musician. 

“I still felt like I was being shoehorned into something I didn’t want to do.” 

He wanted to be a scientist like his sister, and “went to college for a very short time to be a lab technician”. 

Money was tight, though, so he left and got a job in a bank, working in the international trade department “selling Polish tractors to Irish farmers”.

The music hadn’t disappeared; he was playing in a band on the weekends. His cousin, Hughie Purcell, had an electric guitar – “we played at my grandmother’s funeral, believe it or not” – and a couple of years after that remarkable debut, they had formed a band called Juggler.

“We called our style, medieval rock,” says Steve. 

They played gigs, got a van and a PA, and recorded a couple of demos. Steve bought a pick-up for his violin, so he could be heard over the electric guitar and drums; he had it on HP so every week he had to go to McCullough-Piggots on William Street to pay off another little bit. After the band made some money, he bought an electric violin, which was a whole different animal. 

“The acoustic violin picks up and emulates the human voice, it’s played so close to the chin, but with an electric violin you have the ability to make elemental, non-human sounds, like the sea or the wind, or a banshee…"

Three years later, they decided to turn professional, and Hughie quit his plumbing job, Steve resigned from the bank, Joe O’Connor the bass player left his architect’s firm and drummer Derek Roche gave up work as a fitter. One month later, the band split up.

Hughie and Steve headed off to Copenhagen, then busked their way around the rest of Europe for a year and came back to Ireland. Hughie got a job as a one-man band in a bar in Spain, and Steve got married and stayed in Ireland. It worked out though because he bumped into The Edge at a bus-stop and asked him if U2 wanted a fiddler in the band, and the next thing he was in a recording studio with them “doing the fiddle" for Sunday, Bloody Sunday and another song called Drowning Man.

Meanwhile, he found himself living down the road from 17-year-old Martin Clancy and Ivan O’Shea, and An Tua Nua was born. 

“Another adventure," he remarks.

One of their girl singers was Sinead O’Connor, who was 16 at the time.

They had a few hits on the radio, were signed by Island Records, and then Mike Scott of The Waterboys called Steve up and it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Five years later, Steve had a small daughter – the first of three children – and he needed to get off the road, so he left The Waterboys. He scored a couple of plays for the Abbey Theatre, and had a band called Texas Kellies – “we played in Ballina, in the early '90s, in Longnecks (now the Cot and Cobble)”. But then he met up with Mike again, and rejoined The Waterboys, and for the next 20 years, he was happy out. Touring with Mike and then home in Sligo, playing with No Crows.

Then Covid struck and he had found himself with time on his hands. What a great opportunity to take a fine arts degree!

He’s completed it now and has built up a strong body of work, which he’s hoping to exhibit soon.

“I spent 50 nights in a hotel in Dublin last year, appearing and performing original music in a play called Tempesta, about the Spanish Civil War. So in my spare time, I painted a lot in my hotel bedroom, to the despair of the cleaners.”

Meanwhile, he’s looking forward to playing in Ballina “which is almost like a hometown for us”, with his band members Filip Carbonell (guitar and vocals), Anna Houston (cello and mandolin), Ray Coen (guitar and vocals), Eddie Lee (bass) and Oleg Ponomarev, a violinist who sprang from the Russian gypsy band Loyko.

The band has just released their seventh album. It’s a collection of fan-favourites together with a couple of new tracks recorded during Covid, and Steve loves that it’s their first album on vinyl. 

“It’s a different way of engaging in the music,” he says. “You can’t escape it. You have to put one side on and listen to it all the way through, then turn it over…” 

And as their fans can verify, No Crows are certainly worth listening to all the way through.

* No Crows, a dynamic world music orchestra from Sligo's diverse music scene, comes to Ballina Arts Centre on Friday, February 23rd, at 8pm. Tickets: €20