BOBBY LEE: A MUSICAL SPIRIT
He may be one of the best Irish guitarists of his generation and constantly sought out by some of the top names in Irish music, but Bobby Lee has no interest in the fame game. Why? “The ego can play tricks on you,” he says. “My songs belong to everybody.”
With Cork heroes Open Kitchen and Hooky, Bobby has recorded and toured internationally, made numerous TV appearances and supported the likes of David Gray, Mercury Rev, The Kinks and Rodrigo y Gabriela. He was named as Irish guitarist of the future by Donal Gallagher brother of the late great Rory and has also worked with a few of the top names in Irish music. These include Kila, Ronan O Snodaigh, Liam Ó Maonlaí, Dee Armstrong and the late Warwick Embury.
While all this might seem like a CV prepared for a job at the fame factory, the only fame he’s interested in is that of his songs, saying he’s simply a vessel for the message within them. He is helped in delivering that message by The Bobby Lee Band which has gained a small army of fans both in his native Cork and around the country with soul warming live shows, available on his self titled debut CD. Bobby, who cites Jesus Christ and all his mates as his biggest influence, hopes the songs can make a difference in people’s lives.“They open doors for me and I hope they will do the same for people who have the heart to hear them.” A highly spritual songwriter, his songs spread the messages of God, hope and love.
It all started in his home town of Killeagh east Cork, when he was bought his first guitar at just 11 years old after being inspired by seeing his father Peter play House Of The Rising Sun. “Just watching his fingers dancing. I was blown back ,” he says. By 1996 after 12 years of playing, he had developed sufficiently to be hailed as “Irish Guitarist of the Future”. The competition was run through music shops with a TV camera placed in the guitar sections where anyone could sit down, play and have themselves filmed. The tapes were then sent off to Donal Gallagher,Rorys brother for selection. For his part, Bobby went along to Crowley’s music shop on Cork city’s McCurtain Street and played a piece of his own named “Riddle Me This”. A little while later and out of the blue he received a phone call from the organisers telling him he’d won. The prize was a guitar and amp, and a trip to London to Fender’s 50th anniversary celebrations at the Wembley Conference Centre. There he received the award in front of a glittering audience which included Hank Marvin of The Shadows, Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Albert Lee and a host of others.
“It was a wonderful thing but quite nerve wracking at the time,” he says now of the experience. “It means a lot that people appreciated the gift that’s travelling through me, that they would bestow me with something like that.” But he adds, “Titles don’t mean much to me to tell you the truth. What one achieves is different to what one is and given”. Music is a relationship for me. Something I like to share with other people. That’s what the award signifies in my heart. “It’s a way of reaching out and relating to others.”
He had reached such a level of competence not through diligent, painstaking practice, but purely from playing for fun whenever he could. This ensured that as he effortlessly put the hours in, his skills emerged as a by-product of a labour of love. He didn’t take guitar playing too seriously when he was 11 and maintains he still doesn’t now. “My attitude was just do it,” he says. “Yes, you have to practice and I put a lot of time in when growing up, but out of love for it.” For him, it was more a case of hearing a solo then deciding he just HAD to be able to play it. “I’d listen to a solo from Thin Lizzy or something and then sit down and work it out note for note.” In this way, he learnt music from the ear and his own feelings and instincts rather than from rule book.
“I don’t think I ever had any rules around me,” he continues. “There was no-one saying I had to play it this way or that way. I had my blues scale and however many frets there were on my guitar and I had all the music that I loved listening to.” He simply, cast aside many of the complications people associate with music and with songwriting. Instead, he just observed, learnt and gradually but inexorably developed as a musician. “I think at the beginning you’re drawing on all sources around you to be inspired,” he says, “But you gradually grow and once you come to a certain point you let your fingers do the walking.
As his ability grew and the physical aspect of the music began to become second nature, he was able to forget the physical and let in the spiritual. Rather like a racing driver at the top of his game who is able to perform highly technical tasks without thinking, allowing his entire focus to remain on the race and not on technical concerns such as gear changes.
This doesn’t come without serious application, but for Bobby, as with anyone else with a gift and a drive, it was still never about work its more than that..
He saves the work for the presentation of his songs as he strives to provide the best conditions in which they can flourish. “I like to be surrounded by musicians who understand and can relate to my music.” They have to like the songs and enjoy them. It’s important, not for my sake but for the sake of the songs, that they’re played and performed in the best way possible.” In the past, as it may be in the future, The Bobby Lee Band is essentially Bobby and whoever happens on stage and in the studio with him at any given time. However, he currently has a stable group of musicians in lead guitarist Chris Percival, bassist Colm Walshe and cousin Fergal Lee on drums and percussion. Then, of course, there’s himself completing the foursome on guitar and vocals.
“Four’s the magic number,” he says. “It keeps the space. Musicians like to play and the fewer musicians there are on stage, the more space they each have to play and the more room a song has to breathe. Also, people can’t take a song in if there’s too much coming at them.
Above the universal language of music is the message and this for Bobby is what it’s really all about. “I’m not defining myself as a musician that’s what I do not what I am,
Music is the child that fathers me really”. Music is my child and I have to nurture it and take care of it for it to bloom and blossom and for me to be fathered.
At the core of the music is his relationship with God. That took time to develop, but now he says, “I think I was always spiritual but not unknowingly”. I never looked at it growing up, but being creative is motivated by and naturally spiritual.”As he grew older and became a little more introspective, this side of him began to assert itself more and more. Through conversion of heart he had to surrender to what he believed he could believe in. “My whole attitude and my attitude towards God changed,” he says. But it wasn’t just that God entered into Bobby’s life. “I entered into a deeper consciousness.
Once he was able to see himself and finally acknowledge and feel the spirit which lay inside, things started to make sense. “Once that’s clear you see the heart of self and every other self,” he says. “You see heart clearly, you see things clearly. “This is Christ’s way.”
At the time these changes were happening in his life, he became conscious that they were asserting themselves in his song writing. Looking at what he’d written in the past, he had a revelation. “I looked back at my songs after all that had gone on was shocked. Unawares to me I’d been writing from and about that place within myself all the time but didn’t have the eyes to see it. He says “Awareness is where it’s always been no-where or now here”.
Now he wants to share his experience of God with everyone, saying, “God is at work in music in a big way, in people’s lives and in all things. Songs are a great vehicle for faith. They’re like parables. Songs are observances as much as experiences.”
All this gives him confidence in the music, trusting that it comes from a place beyond the conscious, so he can just allow it to happen and trust that it will work. This, he says, is where the importance of the feel and sense of the music rather than the sound of it comes in. “Music comes from a place that cuts through the flesh. It’s a physical action in a spiritual process. It’s energy, its vibration. When music is played with praising love and praising God in your heart. It strips one bare. It has the power to do that because it’s something that travels and lives through and before all of us. It’s driven by that, rather than driven by the thought that I’m going to play well and impress you. It’s an expression more than an impression. “I’m not looking to impress people, I’m looking to express God.” He says, in common with his thoughts on Christ, the primary job of music is to bring joy and maybe stir the soul a little. Explaining, he continues, “Christian to me is a wholeness. It’s a being.Asked what branch of religion he comes from, he says, “I am who I am”, “It’s not the branch that matters it’s the ground it’s planted in a Christian, a Buddhist, a Hindu.’ They’re all just labels. The Way is much more important than the name and that’s what the music signifies.” He feels that looking at a label and adopting it in relation to God can hold people back in their relationship with him, themselves and with others. “I don’t call myself anything. “It’s not important to me what I am its important that I am”.
Of everything he’s been through and achieved so far to get to this point, Bobby has no hesitations about what he’s proudest of. “Surviving I’m alive,” he laughs. Apart from that, he continues: Being invited into the lives of other musicians and people to play or work with them. That means more than anything to me. Also the fact that I’m still playing and loving it. I don’t see it as a business. I see it as a destiny really. “It’s not a job, it’s a life.”
So asked what he wants to do with the music in his life, he leans back, thinks a little, then laughs. “What does the music want to do with me? I’d be asking myself that question all the bloody time. I want to bring it to people. Bring the message of Christ in joy and wholeness.
“There’s a lyric in my song. To by holy, not half and to be whole, not half [check the lyric]. I want to bring that to people. To bring a sense that it’s all good. Step outside of one’s own mind and look with the eye of love.
It is his message of peace and understanding that Bobby is hoping to project everytime he pens a lyric, jams a riff or takes to the stage. As he plays and as the fame grows, it belongs not to Bobby but to the one who created him. “I’m just an instrument for music”. If there’s any fame to go around, the songs should get it, not me.” Bobby’s music will take your soul, look after it for a few hours and then hand it back with a smile that says, ‘Yes, everything’s going to be alright.’ And you know what? You believe it.
bobbyleemusic.com/www.myspace/bobbyleemusic.com
