What My Kids Taught Me on a Belfast Waterfront Stage This Week
By Written by Peter McVeigh
Yesterday my son picked up a violin on a stage beside Belfast's Waterfront Hall, in front of a crowd he had never met, and did not flinch. His sister got up beside him with a bodhran and sang a cover of a current Irish hit by Kingfishr, working from chords I had found on my phone thirty seconds earlier. Neither of them was afraid. That moment, and the week around it, taught me something about the state of the music industry that has nothing to do with streaming rates or contracts, and everything to do with who actually gets access to a stage.
A City Full of Music, Morning to Night
I knew Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann was going to be special. I had no idea it would be this special.
We are only midway through the week and I have already spent two full days, morning to night, roaming around my own city with my family. As a musician, there is something genuinely moving about seeing music in every corner of every street. Venues are full. Stages have appeared in spaces that were just pavement a fortnight ago, and every one of them is playing something different: trad, folk, session music, and everything that sits alongside it.
I took the whole week off bookings. I am not a traditional musician and had no interest in playing the festival myself. I just wanted to be in it.
My Kids and the Class That Changed Everything
My son has been learning classical violin for a while now and is doing fantastically. His sight reading is excellent and his technique keeps improving. My wife and I decided that signing him up for traditional classes alongside it, mostly to make it more fun and develop his ear, would be worth trying.
It was one of the best things we have done for him. His ear has developed enormously. His younger sister was enrolled too and took up the bodhran. Both of them play as part of a traditional group at school, and today that group performed as part of the Fleadh. It went brilliantly.
The Waterfront Stage
The surprising part of the day came when a friend asked me to do a few songs on a stage beside the Waterfront Hall. I turned up and, on a whim, asked my two kids if they wanted to get up with me. Neither of them hesitated. They picked up their instruments and just went for it.
The joy I felt watching that was unlike anything I have felt before. It is a good reminder that music is not only about playing yourself. Sometimes the joy is in watching someone else do it. A crowd gathered. My daughter wanted to sing a cover of a current Irish hit by Kingfishr, so I pulled up the chords on my phone and we went for it. It went about as well as winging it can go, but neither of them was afraid of making a mistake. They played through the bits they knew, laughed off the bits they did not, and kept going.
There was no stage fright. There was no worry at all.
Where That Fearlessness Comes From
It got me thinking about why it came so naturally to them. The most likely reason is that they have watched me perform, on stages in different countries, on more than one occasion. Music has been around them since birth. It is not a novelty to them, it is just part of life. Their grandfather, on my wife's side, has been a musician for decades too.
Exposure to music, it turns out, gives children something close to a superpower: they do not fear making mistakes. They understand that mistakes are part of playing, and standing on a stage does not feel foreign to them at all.
The Industry Is Not Dying. Access Is.
You might be wondering why I am writing about this on Music Manager Resource's industry articles rather than a personal blog. It got me thinking about something bigger.
There is a lot of talk about the industry dying. Financially, that does not really hold up. There is arguably more money moving through the music industry than ever before. So what is the actual issue? Where is the disconnect between that money and what is happening on the ground?
Music has become something people mostly use to pass time, passively. Headphones in for a run. Headphones in on the bus. A Spotify playlist loaded up for the car journey. This week, in Belfast, there has been no escaping live music. It is everywhere. It is not a solitary thing, it is loud, played in groups, sung by crowds, and that is infectious. You can see joy moving through the streets. You can see it on people's faces. Musicians are booking more work this week than they have in a long time.
What the Pandemic Took, and What This Week Gave Back
Just like my kids, the people of our towns and cities need access to music. It is a reminder that a huge part of who we are is bound up in these tunes and melodies, and always has been.
The pandemic turned a lot of us into more efficient consumers. We saved a bit here and there by not commuting into an office every day, and lost more of it to inflation than we gained. Some people got pay rises that never actually translated into a better quality of life. This week has shown a spark that has been missing for a while, and music is what brought it back.
Music is usually the first thing cut when hard decisions need to be made, in schools, in council budgets, wherever. Belfast is expecting over 800,000 people through the city across this week, and we had already seen an estimated 300,000 in the first few days alone. That is not a niche event. That is proof of demand.
Give Music Back to the Streets
There are a few things worth taking from this. Music is the thing that connects us, that gives us hope and joy, and that helps bridge divides most other things cannot touch. It is also essential, not decorative.
If we can get music out of bars and ticketed events and back onto streets, into schools, into communities, we have a genuine chance to shift something in how our society functions. We need reminding that music is not just for the few who can afford tickets to big events. It belongs to everyone. Councils and public buildings should keep doing the work they are already doing well, and keep making it accessible.
There is room here to design something new. Space for every kind of music, but we need to take what has clearly worked this week and turn it into something ongoing: monthly events, weekly meet ups, public sing alongs, the kind of things that keep a population happy, engaged, and together, not just for one week in August.
Why This Is Worth Fighting For
Exposing people to music has upside in every direction. Musicians get some respect back as professionals, more work, and a real audience. We get to develop our culture together and hand each other another excuse to actually leave the house and see one another. The knock-on effects are real too: more money spent in local businesses, more pride in our own identity, more respect for our towns, cities, and country.
It also chips away at the isolation a lot of us have carried since lockdown, and that can only be a good thing.
If you are a working musician reading this, do not wait for someone to book you into a proper venue before you will play for free in public. The street sessions, the school programmes, the community sing alongs, that is not beneath the work, it is the work that rebuilds the audience the whole industry depends on. You do not need a festival this size to start that where you live either. A weekly session in a local pub, a monthly open mic in a community hall, a school offering a trad or folk class alongside the classical one, all of it works the same way, just at a smaller scale. If you are in a position to start one of those things, or push your council to fund one, this week is the proof it is worth doing.
I would genuinely like to hear if you have seen this same pattern where you are, a festival, a street session, a school programme that changed how a town felt for a while. Post it in the forum. If enough of us are seeing it, that is worth building something around.
Stopping to listen to a musician has power. Stopping and taking out your own instrument to play has power. Putting on an event that lets a scene develop has power. None of it needs permission or a big budget or a festival the size of this one. It needs you to ditch the fear of what people will think, the same fear my kids have never had to carry, and just start.
That is how a new culture actually gets built. Not by one big festival a year, but by all of us stepping up around it instead of waiting for someone else to go first. We are each a brick in the wall.
Peter McVeigh is the founder of Music Manager Resource.