If words came without a tune, they'd put music to them. If a lyric came with music we didn't always change that. If we liked the words but not the tune, then we'd manipulate the tune a bit. The main criterion was that the song would have been traditional in some culture. They came across different versions of folk songs, frequently collating these to produce a new version of a song such as Molly Bawn, recalls Irvine.
Some people didn' t approve.
And life on the road wasn't a barrel of laughs. The number of people Imet meet who say they loved us is enormous, but the reality is that Sweeney's Men weren't all that popular in their day. Later we started getting gigs in dance halls as guests of showbands, playing to 2,000 and 3,000 people during the half an hour when the showbands were on their break. Irvine still shudders at the memory. Audiences were frequently drunk, and there were always sound problems.