“I FELL in love with this tiny little parlour guitar,” explains Anthony Toner of how playing the Hooklet, a handmade small body acoustic from Hook Guitars in Bangor, inspired his first ever collection of folk and trad instrumentals, Earlyriser.
“I’m quite friendly with [Hook Guitars luthier] Neil Robinson, who’s a kind of a one-man guitar builder. He’s really good and quite an interesting maker, particularly in the look of the guitars. I think he makes about four or five a year, and they’re quite high end.
“He asked my opinion on a couple of guitars, so I borrowed them for a while. I thought, I’ll record three or four instrumentals and I’ll make a little EP. So I sort of set up a microphone and started recording using this little guitar.”
With over 40 years of playing already under his belt, Co Derry-born Toner had a few old reliables on stand-by to help get the project started - including three inspired by Co Tyrone trad guitar legend Arty McGlynn’s seminal collection McGlynn’s Fancy.
“The Blackbird, Brian O’Lynn and O’Carolan’s Draft were almost like party pieces that I could already play if I needed an instrumental,” explains Toner.
“Then there were a couple of other instrumental things I had written for an album I did with Frank Ormsby [2018′s The Kiss of Light], My Father, Again and Under The Stairs, so I thought, ‘well, there’s five - that’ll do’.”
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However, what began as a short musical experiment soon took on a life of its own once the east Belfast-based musician discovered how much he enjoyed playing the Hooklet - and how good the recordings were sounding.
“Down by the Salley Gardens [another Arty McGlynn favourite] and The Minstrel Boy [inspired by the West Ocean String Quartet’s version] were both quite easy things to arrange in open tuning, so they were kind of late additions.
“At that point, I thought, well, in for a penny, in for a pound - the guitar sounds great with this microphone, so I’ll do another couple. One piece, Charlie Hunter’s Jig, was something I’d learned years and years ago from the late Eric Roche in a guitar magazine.
“That one took me nearly a year to learn, so I decided its time had finally come. Similarly, I had learned John Renbourn’s version of The South Wind from Guitar Player magazine a long time ago.
“So, before I knew it, I had nine pieces.”
The singer-songwriter’s first ever fully instrumental release is a short and sweet affair: all nine tracks breeze past in just over 16 minutes.
“The pieces are all very short because I don’t have a lot of confidence as a player of that kind of material,” admits Toner, who also plays electric blues guitar with the Ronnie Greer Band and turns his hand to country with his trio The Boondocks.
“But when I did a couple of short things, I thought, actually, that’s quite nice’. It’s almost like you get a little flavour and then it’s gone again, you know?
To be fair, with the attention spans of 21st century audiences apparently shrinking by the day, shorter releases could be the way forward. Indeed, on his recent tour of Scotland, Toner found that one of his shortest songs - a version of Tom Waits’s Johnsburg, Illinois, as featured on his recent covers collection Ghost Notes Vol II - was a real crowd pleaser.
“It was one of the biggest hits on the set list for those shows,” says Toner, who will be playing at next week’s Aspects Literary Festival in Bangor with Four, a special live collaboration with novelist Glenn Patterson, composer/multi-instrumentalist Neil Martin and producer/arranger Rod McVey which incorporates ‘music, songs and readings’ .
“It’s only a minute and 10 seconds long, and people are surprised by it - and also kind of delighted. As a songwriter, it makes you think, ‘Yeah, why are you going for a third verse?’. Wichita Lineman only has two verses, you know?”
While Toner admits that he is currently struggling with a lack of inspiration for new songs - “I just haven’t had the motivation to write, I haven’t been able to finish anything,” he laments - it seems that getting to grips with the Hooklet may have helped reawakened his muse.
“It was interesting that after I finished this collection, songs started to appear,” he reveals.
“I think it’s just part of the process of engaging the creative part of your brain. And it is a very interesting thing that you pick up another instrument and you get ideas from it.
“I mean, [Toner’s signature song] Sailortown was written on somebody else’s guitar. It just I lifted it, and that little lick at the start of it seemed to suggest itself on that instrument. It might not have happened on my own guitar.
“There’s something as well about even lifting a really bad guitar, it forces you to play in a way that you don’t normally play. And that’s really good for creativity.
“The more obstacles you can put in your way sometimes, I think, the better.”
As for Earlyriser, it’s actually quite a personal collection tied up in his family history: the title and cover art were inspired by the old Morton’s ‘Early Riser’ flour sacks adorned with the company’s distinctive blackbird logo, which Toner’s paternal grandmother, Mary, used to sow together as extra bedding for his father’s childhood bed, while the West Ocean String Quartet’s version of The Minstrel Boy was played at his dad’s funeral service.
“Even if it’s not kind of apparent to everybody who hears it, in my head, there’s a little kind of circle that is formed with this album,” explains Toner, who tells me he still associates the smell of freshly baked bread with teenage memories of ogling the guitars in Ivor Gordon’s music shop, which was situated above a bakery on Long Commons in his hometown of Coleraine.
“My dad told me how he used to wake up to see the image of the blackbird at the foot of the bed. With him telling me that story, the guitars and the bakery, and the fact I now like to bake my own bread at home - to have that blackbird on the cover, the whole thing feels cohesive.
“I didn’t really mean it to be that, but it has happened that way - and it feels nice, actually.”
Earlyriser is out now, available via anthonytoner.bandcamp.com. Anthony plays with Four at Bangor Castle on September 26 (sold-out) and at SongHouse, Cromore Halt, in Portstewart on September 29. See anthonytoner.net for tickets and full tour details.
Earlyriser - track by track
- Charlie Hunter’s Jig: An instrumental from the island of Mull (I think) - I learned this arrangement from a magazine lesson by the late Eric Roche.
- The South Wind: An old Irish tune, arranged for solo guitar by the late great John Renbourn - he published this version in Guitar Player magazine. I once had the great pleasure of supporting Renbourn at one of his Irish shows, and told him I had laboured to learn this tune from Guitar Player. That night he played it and dedicated it to me - and performed it at twice the speed I played, complete with internal mid-chord string bends. I was relieved he hadn’t heard my version.
- Brian O’Lynn: I’m not sure where I picked up this version, but I always loved the tune and the sly humour of the title character.
- My Father Again: I wrote this piece, inspired by the Frank Ormsby poem of the same name - it originally appeared (with Neil Martin on cello) on my Kiss of Light album, which featured guitar, cello and flugelhorn instrumentals - and poetry readings by Frank.
- O’Carolan’s Draught: I’ve always had about four tunes that are almost like party pieces that I can play if I needed an instrumental - including this one.
- Down by the Salley Gardens: This one was a late addition and quite a simple arrangement in open tuning.
- The Blackbird: Slightly faster than Arty McGlynn’s original take on this old tune, but almost identical in setting, kind of in reverence from what Arty did with this melody and so many others.
- Under The Stairs: I wrote this piece, inspired by the Frank Ormsby poem of the same name. Again, it appeared in a different form on my Kiss of Light album.
- The Minstrel Boy: Mostly inspired by Neil Martin’s ravishing arrangement of the Thomas Moore tune for the West Ocean String Quartet. Their version was played at my father’s funeral, and I suppose he was on my mind when I was thinking of suitable tunes for this collection.
