BIIRD: ‘Trad music has stood the test of time, it’s bigger than all of us and it never will die’
Paddy’s Day will mark 360 days since 11-piece trad group BIIRD first officially spread their wings, but the idea was sown almost 13 years prior by the icon that is Lisa Canny. Lisa chats to Sarah Gill about the synthesis of method and magic, the value of authenticity and changing what it means to be a woman in trad.
Crystalline in their vision and masterful in their execution, BIIRD have spent their first year absolutely soaring. On St Patrick’s Day in 2024, the 11-piece group performed to a crowd of 10,000 at Trafalgar Square in London, mystifying the masses with their lively, zealous set and uncompromising dedication to Irish design.
Since then, they’ve been steadily building up their online following with the help of viral videos that bring a trad session from the corner of a pub to a global audience, packing out tents at festivals like All Together Now, and selling out headline shows. They’ve also made an appearance on The Late Late Show and released their first official music video for the tune The Rollover.
BIIRD is founded by seven-time All-Ireland champion harp and banjo player Lisa Canny, who has toured the world extensively as part of groups like Celtic Crossroads and The Young Irelanders and exists as a true force to be reckoned with in the music realm, both trad and otherwise.
First picking up her instruments at the age of four, Lisa grew up in a home that blasted Mary Black, Francis Black and Dolores Keane from the speakers. In college, she studied Irish music and dance, and went on to complete a Masters in traditional Irish music composition. By 19, she was touring the States with troupes born in direct response to the phenomenon of Riverdance, cutting her teeth on huge stages around the world.
If the culture and its people are moving towards something new, then so too is their music.
“I always felt challenged by the representation we were expected to give. We were either in the meringue dresses or in the over sexualised alternatives,” Lisa says. “There’s also the poor pay and mistreatment. Like every other female in the industry I had my own experience of that.”
Traditional Irish music was in her bones, encased by a network of veins that flowed with a love for pop music and girl power by virtue of hours spent listening to The Spice Girls and Destiny’s Child. It was an amalgamation of influences that had not yet been fused.
“I wanted to be in a girl band, but I grew up in the West of Ireland playing the banjo and harp. How do you marry those two worlds? Louis Walsh never came knocking!” Lisa tells me, “Trad music connects with everyone, and I asked myself why it wasn’t cutting through more in a contemporary way. The answer I came up with was that it needed a new image.”
So, between summer schools and festivals, at house parties and sessions, Lisa enlisted some of the most talented female musicians that were surrounding her at the time into what would eventually become BIIRD.
