Downtown: Hank celebrates Speak To Me all over again!

Hank Wedel has been a fixture on Cork’s music landscape for decades with different strands – his solo work as a songwriter; his weekly Monday evening session with Ray Barron in Charlies; and his multiple music groups such as Open Kitchen and Princes Street.

He is revisiting one of his much loved songs Speak To Me with an online streaming release and an accompanying music video.

Hank credits two reasons for doing it.

“Over the past couple of years since the shutdowns stopped, my youngest son’s generation have started coming to my live shows. Him and some of his friends have been asking me, ‘how come Speak To Me isn’t available on Spotify or Amazon or Apple or any other streaming platforms?’

“The reason is pretty straightforward. While a lot of my back catalogue is only available on Bandcamp, it’s not on the streamers. I did put my last two albums on the streaming sites, but I’ve had nothing really scheduled around releasing the earlier stuff, however with that younger generation asking I’m going to start bringing things out more.”

Being asked to do a specific show helped decide the date to release Speak To Me, Hank continued.

“Carol Barrett Ford, who was the other vocalist on the song, is now the vicar of St John-at-Hampstead in London and has regularly been asking me to come over and do a fundraising concert in her church. But she wanted to sing with me, to show her parishioners that despite the fact that she’s an Anglican vicar — and a very good one — she has also got a bit of an artistic, musical past about her. So I arranged for Speak To Me to come out to help that, as well as be a publicity thing for that concert on June 7.

“It’s us revisiting that song in particular and some others she did with me around that time, but we’re really concentrating on this song. Carol sings this big, long wail in the middle eight, the bridge goes, ‘come on now, speak to me’. I didn’t tell her to do that. She was singing the harmony with me all the time, and then when we were rehearsing it, she just decided to start doing that, so I’m sort of like paying tribute to my work with Carol and to her new position, and this sort of enthusiasm about that song that’s always been there since I wrote it when I was 17 in Mallow.”

While the music industry makes a lot of money from reissuing old albums, with alternate packaging or additional outtakes or even rerecording it, Hank doesn’t want to follow that model, indeed he doesn’t get hung up on ‘new songs’ versus ‘old songs’.

“I’ve never looked at music — my own music or anyone else’s music — quite like that. Like last night, I was playing in Kerry and I played my own songs like Listen, The Time We Share and of course Speak To Me but also Tennessee Waltz and The Mountains Of Mourne. I mix it all up when playing live, and when it comes to releasing music all I know is the recordings sound good. If they were good enough to put out then on tape or CD or vinyl, they are good enough to be online.

“I intend on putting focus on other parts of my back catalogue song by song, as well as continuing with writing and recording new stuff, new stuff with new people. I’m in that position. I’m 62 years old, I can do that.”

Working with new people has always driven Hank, an ardent er of any young Cork musician or touring band, he regularly lets them him on stage or at the Monday session.

“I do love collaborating, I realised when very young that music is best when shared and ed around, I find it very satisfying to meet people through song and music. That’s the only way I can describe it, either old familiar friends or people you’ve just met. Speak To Me is a song that really lends itself to collaboration actually.

“I wrote it with a guy called Donal Desmond. The mechanics of it is that the song has a descending, sort of bass line in it, and then we broke it up with an ascending bass line in the middle of it. All I can say is that from the moment I finished it way back, people like hearing it, people like singing it, and people like playing it.

“One thing that transformed that song for me was when Mick Geraghty was in Princes Street, and he started playing slide guitar on it. And that got me thinking, ‘well, this has got something that people are going to be able to play with’.”

“Every lead guitarist I’ve ever played with, whether I played with them for a long time or I just met them on the night, I just have to call out the key and start playing it.

“Declan Sinnott loves playing it and Sean Long, who plays in my current band called Down In The City, he loves playing it. So what I like about the song is that it has inspired great players and great singers to play with me, and it’s been with me since 1979/1980.”

The accompanying video Hank made for Speak To Me features archival footage of him and the musicians performing in studios and live performances in the late 1980s.

The has been quite notable. “The video has done very well in my realm. There’s over 16,000 views of it, that’s not huge in of what other people have, but it’s big enough in my realm, and I’m quite happy with it, and a lot of people like that video and have commented. So, in one way, I’m raising awareness of my back catalogue, but in another way I’m just celebrating music every time I play.”

Speak To Me is available on streaming services from Wednesday, May 28.

Hank Wedel plays with James Carr on Saturday, May 31, at 9pm in Corrigans Bar on MacCurtain Street as part of the Rebel Roots festival.