An uilleann piper, with one eye on tradition, takes to the big stages

Seán McKeon sits in the front room of his house in Whitehall, a set of uilleann pipes wrapped around him.

His fingers resting along the holes of the chanter, the bellows pressed between his waist and elbow, the drones and regulators partly resting on his lap just out to his side.

“That's my dad, that's him as a kid, learning from Leo Rowsome,” he says, gesturing to the wall.

It’s a large framed photo of a very young Gay McKeon, his own fingers resting on the chanter of another set of pipes.

Rowsome, the legendary player, teacher and maker of pipes originally from Harold’s Cross, looks on, pointing to Gay’s fingers – instructing.

Seán McKeon smiles widely as he talks about the characters in the picture.

He knows he is a link in a long and proud chain of traditional Irish musicians who have worked to keep a precious tradition alive, through hard times and good.

McKeon started on the tin whistle when he was six, and the uilleann pipes when he was eight.

“I used to leave the pipes out on the table and tell my sisters to tell Dad that I had been practicing,” he says, laughing.

Now, at the age of 40, for the first time, he has decided to go full-time with music – taking a career break from primary-school teaching from this summer on.

In the last year, McKeon has appeared on huge stages around the world playing in the bands of Damien Dempsey, Amble, Christy Moore, and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Elvis Costello.

As well as his own solo shows, promoting his recent album Salamanca, released last September.

It’s a collection of songs he’ll be showcasing at a gig in the Sugar Club, next Friday 19 June.

“I never wanted to be doing gigs and it turn into a grind,” he says.

“It's been like 16, 17 years of cultivating relationships and being around music,” he says, “a lot of opportunities have come up this year.”

And it’s all stuff he really wants to do, he says.

Salamanca

On his last solo album, 2013’s To the City, he included some backing guitar on the arrangements.

For 2025’s Salamanca, he left the focus purely on the pipes, and nothing else.

“They're a really unique instrument you know and I suppose the history of them is that, like, they were a solo instrument,” he says.

“I love that thing, there's something very vulnerable, where you see somebody just on their own, and it's them pushing and pulling the rhythms, the tempos,” he says, “they're trying to create a moment, it's like a tight rope or something.”

He practices a lot, he says, “technique, orientation, all that kind of stuff”.

He found himself really enjoying just getting stuck in alone, and wanted to showcase what the instrument can do on its own.

McKeon recalls Jake Clemons, saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, and nephew of E Street original Clarence, trying to knock some sound out of the pipes.

Thinking his saxophone fingering might give him an advantage, he borrowed McKeon’s instrument.

Eventually a confused Clemons exclaimed, “What the fuck is this?”

“It’s particularly unique,” McKeon says.

While there are forms of pipes around Europe and elsewhere, the uilleann pipes are a distinctly Irish creation, he says.

Other pipes were war instruments, but as uilleann pipers need to sit down to play, it kept them from the front lines, he says.

“We were the lazy ones. We weren’t going out in front of any army, we were happy to sit back and just entertain afterwards,” he says.

As an instrumental album, there are obviously no lyrical themes weaving through Salamanca, but each piece of music carries weight and meaning for McKeon, he says.

Some of the pieces are hundreds of years old, and can stand up beside anything Mozart ever composed, he says. “They’re dripping in beauty.”

So, he wanted to make sure he treated them with respect, while adding his own personality and creativity to them.

“You wouldn't be putting something in just because it's difficult to do, but it's like, can you put something into the melody, that's going to enhance it in a way,” he says.

He recalls a story that piper Robbie Hannon would tell of McKeon and his older brother Conor, when they were children.

Hannon was staying in their family home and passed the two brothers as they were playing Nintendo, carrying his pipes in a case.

According to Hannon, the brothers pointed at his case and said, “See those, we hate those!”

McKeon laughs.

“Like, we were having the greatest musicians in the world staying in our house and playing, and we had zero interest,” he says.

“But what I'm saying is that, like, you become quite reflective later, like access of opportunity is just so important,” he says.

Conor McKeon grew up to be a gifted piper, and won the TG4 Young Traditional Musician of the Year in 2001 – a prize Seán would claim himself four years later.

The second piece on Salamanca, the centuries-old “Trim the Velvet”, was one he would hear his father and mother Mary, a gifted fiddle player, play in the house around that same time, he says.

The personal connection to that piece, to his youth learning from his parents, compelled him to include it, he says.

The title piece, “The Salamanca”, is a well-known traditional Irish reel, and would have been recorded by a lot of well-known pipers down the years, he says.

“So even that itself was like, right, I'm gonna have a crack at this,” he says. “I want to put a stamp on it and challenge myself for it not to be the same as how Séamus Ennis recorded it, or how all these great pipers came before recorded it.”

Uilleann piping, then and now

In the not-too-distant past, the future of uilleann piping seemed in dire peril, says Gay McKeon, Seán’s father.

There was a serious shortage of uilleann pipe makers, so youngsters couldn’t get their hands on a set to learn.

“When I was a young fella learning in the ’60s, there were less than 20 young people in Ireland playing the uilleann pipes, and less than 100 in total in the world, including adults,” he said by phone on Thursday.

When Leo Rowsome died in 1970, there wasn’t a full-time maker of pipes anywhere in the world, he says – but thankfully that has all completely changed.

Today, there are around 10,000 pipers in the world – with more outside Ireland than in it, he says.

“And we teach in about 24 locations every week throughout the country,” he says.

In 2011, Na Píobairí Uilleann, of which Gay McKeon is CEO, established PipeCraft, a pipe-making and training centre in Clonshaugh.

“So, there's more and more pipe makers emerging in Ireland,” he says. “The whole scene has changed dramatically, beyond all recognition.”

In 2017, McKeon was instrumental in getting uilleann piping inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Given uilleann pipes are often referred to as the “sound of Ireland”, the next milestone on McKeon and Na Píobairí Uilleann’s list is to build a “Sound of Ireland Experience” on the site next door to their current HQ on Henrietta Street, including a visitor centre and a theatre.

They hope to have it up and running by 2028.

Meanwhile, McKeon says it gives his wife and him enormous pleasure to see their son on huge stages – like playing to 20,000 people with Amble in St Anne’s Park last month – and following his passion and creativity using the tools that they passed on to him from a young age.

And he says he knows well when Seán had practiced and when he had just told his sisters to say he had practiced.

Passion

Last summer, Seán McKeon was sitting in a hotel restaurant on Inishbofin about to have dinner with his wife, two children and father-in-law, when the phone rang.

He stepped outside to take it, in the howling island wind, it was singer-songwriter Declan MacManus – better known as Elvis Costello.

“I was outside and the wind was swirling, there was pockets of the conversation I just couldn’t hear, but I thought ‘This could be the one and only time I have a chat with Elvis Costello,’” he says.

Philip King, of the band Scullion and producer of TV series Other Voices, had given Costello his number. He invited McKeon to play with his band in Vicar Street.

“I literally met him on stage for the sound check,” McKeon says.

The whole thing was emblematic of what McKeon respects so much about Costello – that at this stage in his legendary career, he is still taking risks and not afraid to fly by the seat of his pants.

The Grammy winner later brought him to Chicago to play, and McKeon will be back next to Costello later this year.

But for McKeon, his “second family” has long been Damien Dempsey and his band.

First, his brother Conor had been playing pipes here and there with the Donaghmede bard, but due to his schedule as a sports journalist, he couldn’t commit.

The gig passed to Seán in 2009, and he has been a regular fixture in Dempsey’s live and recording outfit ever since.

“That's probably led to all the other stuff, you know, that I’m doing with other people now as well,” he says.

Playing with Dempsey and the band taught him how to expand his playing style out of the strictly traditional, and at times play the pipes like an electric guitar solo.

“It was great, brilliant for that. And then, like, they're the best in the world,” he says.

Seán McKeon plays the Sugar Club, next Friday, 19 June along with some special guests.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.