Andy Dickson

Andy was born in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, but with his father’s employment, the family moved to different towns in England, before relocating to Belfast in 1957. In his junior years at school his ability in music had already been recognised with a school report recording at the age of 7, “Music – Good, a lovely voice”. A Christmas present of a mouth organ had relations commenting on his ability to play it, for as Andy himself said “There wasn’t a note of music in my family”. On to ‘big school’ and Andy, like many other teenagers, was influenced by the local music scene. He taught himself to play guitar and formed a band with several of his school friends. To quote Bill Morrison from his book Big Hand for the Band, “Dickson, A M, played a mighty impressive Flamenco tune on a Spanish guitar” and “an Echo Chamber that made his guitar-picking sound like Hank Marvin”.

After studying at Queen’s University, Belfast for a couple of years, Andy decided to take a gap year and headed to London. It wasn’t long before he was working as a session musician in various studios and busking the cinema queues. He also got involved in the London folk scene. The gap year became several years, and after travelling to Spain to learn more about Spanish music and culture he returned to London and took a job scheduling airline crews. It was during this time that he sustained a hand injury which severely curtailed his ability to play the guitar as he wished. He decided to return to Belfast to complete his degree.Before he returned, he got into conversation with a gentleman at a quay side, who remarked on his guitar case, and said that he had something that might interest him, went away and came back carrying what turned out to be a fiddle case. He handed it to Andy, said a few words and off he went. Andy had his first fiddle.

Now the 1970s, and back in Belfast, Andy was completing his degree in Social Anthropology at Queen’s and at the same time teaching himself to play the fiddle. His sources for tunes were many. He would spend hours in the university library pouring through old manuscripts, travelling the country to Fleadhanna and festivals, as well as attending local Belfast sessions in Pat’s Bar in Sailortown, the Old House in Albert Street off the Falls Road, and also sessions slightly further afield in Bangor. He quickly found a central place in Belfast’s growing folk and traditional music scene, which provided a cross-community haven for the open-minded, eccentric and creative in the divided city. During the 1970s traditional music in Belfast grew in popularity and the session scene expanded out to new venues including Tom Kelly’s in the Short Strand, The Rossa Club in West Belfast, and the Rotterdam Bar also in Sailortown, amongst others. This was the time that Andy began writing down the tunes that he had sourced and soon had several manuscript books filled. He didn’t have a tape recorder at that time and preferred to carry his ‘little black book’ and a pencil in his fiddle case. If there was a tune, or version of a tune that caught his attention, out would come the book and the tune would be notated, to be transferred later to the manuscript books.

Through the 1970s and into the 1980s Andy and many other Belfast musicians were going to sessions nearly every night of the week. Word of mouth soon had many visiting musicians coming to the sessions, from all parts of Ireland and further afield. Andy’s manuscript books were expanding rapidly. Traditional music was now being brought to a wider audience by way of concerts, festivals and folk clubs. During poet and musician Ciarán Carson’s tenure as Traditional Arts Officer with The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Andy was often employed as a driver on Arts Council musical tours. Through these travels as well as his own musical adventures, Andy developed deep connections with musical communities in Counties Fermanagh, Leitrim, Sligo, and Clare, which would come to be major influences on his music, and, in time, on his compositions.