I'll paraphrase what I said when CW first came out : over-produced, twee, pretentious crap. This is Michael Flatley's and Bill Whelan's "Riverdance" legacy -- multi-million-dollar productions of mass-audience pabulum. Yechh!

I love Irish traditional music, (but I'm not a purist by a long shot) and I'm young enough to appreciate the various fusions that have been created by innovators like Donal Lunny. But this does more damage to public perception of the music than even Flatley's abominations did (Lord of the Dance, anyone?).

It's horrible to think that this is what's shown to the world as a representation of "Celtic" music. There should be a law requiring the producers to start the show with a prominent disclaimer along the lines of "We spent a lot of money making these chicks look good, and hiring 73 musicians to back them. But by no means should this show be mistaken for an accurate representation of the current state of Irish music."

Yes, the girls can sing OK, yes Mairead can play the fiddle, yes they're even somewhat nice to look at. And it pleases me to see that erstwhile Coolfin drummer Roy Dodds is still getting paid for leppin' about. But the overall effect keeps making me gag. (I also fault PBS for going for the lowest common denominator in ther music specials. Now they've got "The 10 [or is it 12?] Irish Tenors"... puhleeeeze!)

For fantastic singing and playing of modern-day "Celtic" music, listen to recent releases by Roisin Elsafty, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, or Eddi Reader (review forthcoming) instead. And you might ask on thesession.org's discussion forum what players of real Irish music think of this...

Cheers,
Michael