'I saw Rory at 17 and said, that’s it': Cork musician marks 50 years in industry

The first time Mo O’Connor saw a guitar was in the 1960s, at a festival in Lismore.

“I was maybe eight or nine. I was singing in a competition, and we went to the Wine Vaults after,” he recalls.

“There was a session going on. Paddy Clancy, one of the Clancy Brothers, was there. There was a guy from Dublin with him, and he had a guitar. I remember I was amazed. I’d never seen a guitar.”

Mo, born in 1954 in the cottage next door to where he now lives in Conna, north-east Cork, went on to have a five-decade career in music that took him from Ireland to America and as far afield as Sao Paulo and Siberia.

But it wasn’t until his music-loving father passed away that he picked up a guitar himself.

“After a Rory Gallagher concert, I came home, and I said, ‘That’s it, I want a guitar’. He was 17 at the time.

“To go to the City Hall to see Rory Gallagher live was an experience. He was a showman. He had long hair, which was radical at the time. And we dressed like him, those grandfather shirts we used to buy in Cork in the Coal Quay.”

Mo’s mother paid £3.10 for a second-hand guitar.

“I became obsessed. I think it was probably a way of coping with grief. I was playing day and night.”

In 1975, he got his chance to become a paid musician.

“A local guy, Oliver Tobin, came into the pub one day. Said, ‘I’m starting a band’. He was part of the Impact Showband that Rory Gallagher played with.

“I played with Oliver for a few years, full-time. Dance halls, bars, smaller dance halls in West Cork.”

A self-described ‘wandering star’, Mo joined The Loudest Whisper in 1978 (the band is still active today), but soon went freelance and even played alongside Noel Redding, bassist of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, in venues like the Wolfe Tone Lounge, Clonakilty, and The Hooded Cloak, Macroom.

“The ’70s in Ireland was probably like the ’60s in America,” says Mo. 

“People didn’t have designer clothes. People dressed the same, rich or poor; it was a very levelling kind of thing.”

Mo’s biggest break yet came in 1981, when New York band Mason’s Apron asked him to come to America with them. He stayed there for 15 years.

“I went for six months and came back with six people: myself, my wife, and four kids. I was playing full-time, sometimes every night of the week.”

In New York, Mo plied his trade everywhere from bar mitzvahs to mafia christenings, from dive bars to gentlemen’s clubs. Living abroad even taught him things about home.

“If you’re living in Conna or wherever, you’d know no-one from Donegal or Galway. But when you’re in New York in the ’80s, you get to know people from everywhere. I met people from Tyrone, Antrim, both sides of the peace wall. We found our humour was the same. You got to know Ireland more than if you were living at home.”

Mo met his wife Denise “in that age-old dating emporium: a bar.” They moved to Boston in 1985, where their four children were born.

When the couple upped sticks from America and moved the family to Mo’s home place in Cork in 1996, he picked up right where he left off.

“I was doing solo gigs, fitting in with different people, going to London with different bands. I was involved in Natural Gas, the band that had the song The Langer. I played bass and banjo on that. We were No.1 for four weeks in 2004.”

While Mo acknowledges the darker side of the Ireland of his youth (a poem of his was included in Stay With Me, a 2019 exhibition honouring those who suffered in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, mother and baby homes, and industrial schools), he is also quick to point out how tolerant ordinary people often were.

“There was a drag act in Ireland back in the ’70s called Mr Pussy. He was selling out the Twilight Zone in Fermoy and all these cabaret joints. I’d be down the road with my neighbours, farming. You could be out at hay, and the conversation would be, ‘Are you going to the Twilight on Friday night for Mr Pussy?’ ‘Oh, I am, yeah, he’s mighty craic.’ The place would be jointed.”

He sees that same open-mindedness in rural Ireland today. He mentions Erica Coates, a north Cork farmer and trans woman who made headlines in 2020 when she spoke publicly about her transition.

“When she arrives at the mart in a dress to sell a few sheep, she gets a standing ovation from the lads in the wellingtons and the flat caps. That’s the Ireland I love.”

Now 71, Mo graduated with a music degree from UCC in 2016, plays with the local choir, and also hopes to release a poetry collection next year.

He is the chairman of his local road bowling club and runs a voluntary Delta Blues event in his local area. “If music has been good to you in your life, you should be able to give back,” he adds.

Above all, Mo believes in staying true to oneself as an artist.

“The question you must ask yourself is, ‘If I’m the last person left in the world, do I still want to do this?’ I’m still into music. Nothing else gives me that.”