“A New Wave of Children’s Songs” – Irish Times Fri Dec 12 2008
Below is an extract from a feature by Sylvia Thompson in The Irish Times on Friday December 12th, 2008. Sylvia attended a performance of There’s A Snail In The Garden at Greystones Theatre and reviews it and the eponymous CD as well as discussing the show and Shakabang with Dermot & Bairbre. The Full article can be read online on the Irish Times web site. You can also click on the image on the right to see the article as it appeared in the newspaper.
Two Irish musician comedians are making original music for kids that doesn’t talk down to them – or make their parents cringe, writes Sylvia Thompson
A PROTEST SONG for modern traffic-bound children, an eco-tribute to snails, a boogie-woogie number about brushing your teeth and a ditty about the fluff in your belly button. A new collection of songs for children, written by Dermot and Bairbre Carmody and performed by stand-up musical comedians Dermot Carmody and Morgan C Jones, charts new territory in music for children in this country.
“I felt there was a limited repertoire of music for children here, a shortage of fun, up-to-date, 21st-century music that children would relate to,” says Bairbre Carmody, a piano teacher who previously played for comedy and theatre acts, including jazz singer Agnes Bernelle. “A lot of the music for children is based on 20th-century folk music. It’s conservative and old-fashioned, so I asked Dermot to write some songs.”
Dermot Carmody rose to the challenge and, according to Bairbre, wrote the songs in a week.
“It’s vaudeville for children,” he says. “Children respond to music in the same way as adults do – you don’t have to dumb it down for them.”
And, in fact, one of the things you notice when you listen to the CD, There’s a Snail in the Garden , is that while the lyrics are child-focused, the music would easily fit with regular bluesy lyrics.
Once the songs were recorded and made available on iTunes, the idea of performing them for young children and their families was born.
“It took a while to get the format right for the show,” says Dermot Carmody. “We wondered whether we should have a narrative or bring in clowns, but then we realised we had a comedy double-act already, so I wrote a routine for two silly daddies on stage.
“Morgan and I both have small children, so we know the territory. But we’re not party entertainers and we were keen to have something that the parents will enjoy as well.”
Judging by their second public performance of the new material, in the Greystones Theatre recently, it works. The children in the audience immediately identified with the “two silly daddies” notion and willingly went along with the humorous banter between Carmody and Jones as they introduced each song. The adults were entertained too.
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