Interview with Alan Stivell

A seventy-year career behind him. His music has struck a vast audience for decades: three generations from all over the world, and who knows how many more to come. Aged 81, with 22 studio albums and countless projects of great cultural significance—including one in the pipeline and many in mind. Alan Stivell needs no introduction: from childhood to the present day he continues to play, sing, and compose. Our experience at the Paimpol festival opened like this, in the company of an immense musician, among the greatest in international folk. All of this the day before one of his most energetic and well-attended live performances of the last decade: the festival's key event. A very sociable and kind man who gave us a whole forty-five minutes of delightful conversation. “I am not proud, but I am happy to have made Breton music known”: so talented and famous, yet so alien to self-celebration, dedicated exclusively to the historical-artistic continuity of the traditions of Brittany, the Celtic nations, and the world.

We know that your father, drawing from historical sources, built your first harps. How important was his figure and his work in your artistic career?

My father had a dream—a bit utopian for him—to revive the Celtic harp in Brittany, which hadn't been played for centuries, so he started building them. I was a child, and not only did I fall in love with the instruments he built, but with the whole Celtic culture in general. I was nine years old (not exactly yesterday, you see!), and my long story began from there.

Speaking of your youth: at just thirteen years old, you were the youngest artist to perform at the Olympia in Paris. What memories do you have of that event and that period?

My first important performance was actually in 1954, at just 10 years old: I played for UNESCO in the Cathedral of Vannes, in Southern Brittany (71 years ago!). Both there and at the Olympia I was extremely shy. It was enough for me to keep my eyes fixed on my strings and everything was fine: but if I had raised them to look at the audience in front of me, I wouldn't have made it!

You started your record production by combining Celtic music with rock. Indeed, for much of the seventies you collaborated with the electric guitarist Dan Ar Braz, who added a very important component to your sound of those years. How did your collaboration begin?

To answer you properly I have to start the story from much further back, when rock 'n' roll arrived in Europe (remember, I'm old!). I was a big fan of all that brand-new music, so much so that at fourteen, in 1958, I decided to electrify my harp (jealous of guitarists who could have an electric guitar!). The dream of combining rock with Celtic music was born in me, but, being only fourteen, I didn't know any musicians with whom I could develop this idea. The only ones I knew were the Breton musicians in Paris who played bagpipes and bombarde with me, not guitar and keyboards! So I didn't know how to do it. A few years later (around the mid-sixties) there was a total revolution in pop music in England: it had taken the exact same direction I wanted to take! From a more standard rock 'n' roll they moved toward experimental sounds that combined classic, exotic, or ancient instruments with rock (the Indian Sitar being the most iconic example). Artists like the Beatles or Donovan showed us how what previously seemed impossible to us was actually completely doable. They paved the way for me. So—almost sixty years ago now—I finally felt ready to begin this path at a professional level, along with my harp. In 1966 I was in Paris and there I met the American guitarist Steve Waring, with whom I started playing live. That year I also officially started singing (in addition to playing). In July I met Dan Ar Braz in Brittany, who had never played professionally before but who, from 1971, would start playing guitar with me instead of Steve. So at the end of the sixties, our first live shows were in very intimate and small venues: we played everything acoustically without amplification (guitar and harp included, of course). It was not yet possible to experiment with this long-awaited fusion of mine with electric rock. Time passed and finally, in 1970, I released my first professional album, Reflets (excluding my '64 album Telenn-Geltiek): I included many arrangements for different instruments in it, including a bit of Steve's electric guitar (but just a touch). From the following year I started building my official backing band, with musicians partly Parisian and partly Breton (since I lived a bit in Paris and a bit in Brittany): among them were the Breton guitarist Dan Ar Braz and the Parisian Gabriel Yacoub (who two years later would create Malicorne). So we were truly ready, at the end of 1971, to record this new experimental Breton rock. We started with the traditional Pop-Plinn, which we played that year at the Olympia in Paris: the live album we released from that concert was an explosive success. Many people have a wrong idea of how this mixture of traditional music and rock was born. It seems the most logical hypothesis is that I was a farmer playing traditional music on his farm and that at some point I met rock musicians by chance! But in reality this was the big dream I carried with me since the late fifties. I looked for the musicians on purpose, I wanted to create and direct a group focused on this, I worked hard on the arrangements. At the same time, it was a very precious opportunity for me to learn from other musicians, from their advice and their experience. Dan did an amazing job with me: he played both acoustic and electric guitar magnificently; along with him, all the other very talented musicians deserve huge credit for the success of my project.

We believe that your music, if not listened to superficially, already reveals in itself the intentionality of this project: in the role of the instruments, in the melodic passages... And, besides the guitar, the role you gave to the Hammond organ is crucial in defining your iconic sound of the early seventies.

Coming to the present day, on your latest album Liberté-Roazhon you collaborated once again with the National Orchestra of Brittany. What ties you so strongly to the classical-orchestral dimension, and what role do you think it plays in your vision of music in general?

Before discovering rock, I lived immersed in an atmosphere where classical music was extremely present. Specifically, we also listened to a lot of "Breton-classical" music. Towards the end of the 19th century, in fact, many composers began to include elements of traditional music (from their own country or others) in their compositions, like Borodin in Russia and Bartók in Hungary. So a few years later several authors did the same in Brittany: Jef Le Penven, Paul Le Flem, Paul Ladmirault… So when I started playing the harp in 1953, the idea was that making Breton music meant composing it exclusively with classical standards (this applied to all traditional music in Europe): at the time there was no alternative. So I myself started writing scores with some embryonic ideas for a Celtic symphony. And even years later, when I started producing my first albums (with influences from rock and other nations, as I said before), the idea of composing a Celtic symphony one day always remained alive in me. I finally managed to compose it in 1979 under the title Symphonie Celtique Tír na nÓg, and we played it for the first time at the Lorient stadium in 1980 for the Interceltic Festival. Imagine that there were 10,000 people, 3,000 of whom had come from Italy! That was the year I did the biggest concerts of my whole life, filling parks and stadiums, many of them right in Italy.

Where in Italy, precisely?

I remember that in Rome there were 12,000 spectators and in Milan 14,000! All of my success was due in large part to the advent of free radio stations, which arrived in Italy earlier than in France. They were driven by an ideology opposed to official culture and pop radio. These radio stations decided that I was the right musician to promote to fight commercial music, so they "adopted" me by broadcasting me very frequently. And thousands of young Italians got to know me. There is a very funny fact linked to this. Throughout the seventies, on the long wave of the counterculture and '68, an artist's political stance was fundamental for the audience. You always had to be further to the left than others: in short, no one was ever left enough! Right in those years Angelo Branduardi became famous in Italy and, because he gave very large concerts, people started accusing him of doing show business and selling out to the record market. But at the same time, I don't know how, for all of them Alan Stivell was instead purely artistic, cultural, and not at all dedicated to profit! Whereas in Brittany exactly the opposite happened: several young people and students accused me of making music only for money, unlike Branduardi who was artistic, cultural, and disinterested!

Fantastic, emblematic of that decade! Even today in Italy your name is very celebrated and known: much more than other international artists of the era such as Fairport Convention or Pentangle.

Exactly: and that's because free radio stations promoted me much more than these other British artists. The desire to promote me was also born from the fact that in those years, especially in Italy and Germany, there was already a niche interested in the Celtic world that followed mainly British or Irish groups like the Dubliners. But with me something different happened: perhaps because of the sound of the harp, which brought back the dreamy and legendary atmospheres of the North Atlantic.

You spoke of Branduardi: what memories do you have of your collaboration with him? What relationship do you have with Italian and foreign music?

My dream has always been to create a connection between Breton culture and the rest of the world: both in the sense of reaching as diverse an audience as possible, and of being able to collaborate with artists from all over the planet. Discovering over time how many people were interested in this music and culture made me very happy. So when Branduardi said that he started playing following in my footsteps and those of Bob Dylan, how could I not be happy about it! I am happy about this, not proud: they are two very different concepts. Because in fact my only aspiration was to convey my love for Breton and Celtic culture; the credit goes entirely to these songs that I made famous. And they have indeed influenced people like Angelo in Italy or North African, Corsican, Czechoslovak musicians who sang them back (sometimes in Breton, other times in their own languages: some even in Ukrainian and Russian, truly peculiar!). Specifically, Angelo took the melody of Son Ar Chistr in his song Gulliver (adding a few small modifications). Son Ar Chistr is today the most globally famous Breton song: it has also been played, for example, by a traditional Piedmontese group and, just staying in Italy, there are many times it has been used. I recorded it in 1970 and it soon became famous: some people know it comes from British tradition, but not everyone. Most people think it's Dutch, Danish, or German because it's extremely well known and sung in the pubs of those nations as a drinking song. This fame actually arose from the Dutch group "Bots" who, after listening to my LP, decided to record it in 1974 in a translated version (titling it "Zeven Dagen Lang"): it was a huge success and stayed at number one on the national charts for a long time. But most of them don't know it's Breton: it's not fair!

Do you know and listen to other Italian musicians?

Yes, I know Franco Battiato, for example, and several other artists. But the thing is, I have my own personal and somewhat strange way of listening to music: I hear more than I listen. This is because I've always been, right from the start, scared of copying someone. I feel very influenced by sounds that come from multiple parts of the world and that I often acquire without knowing who is playing or singing. This is my influence: I don't think about individual artists. Obviously I know and appreciate several, many in Italy who are less famous than Branduardi: for example harpists like Vincenzo Zitello or Adriano Sangineto. Adriano specifically gave me a harp as a gift and was the first to make a copy of my Celtic harp; now his son is already starting to record albums as a harpist!

Speaking of the Celtic family, in Brittany the environment and landscape are very similar to England and Ireland: you perceive a clear difference from the rest of France. Indeed, on several occasions you have recorded Irish or British tracks like Sally Free and Easy, The Trees They Grow High, or the Suite Irlandaise: do you believe in a connection between the traditions and cultures of all these areas?

The main goal of my life is precisely to try to make the "Celtic nations" more united with each other and to prove the existence of a connection between their cultures. The first thing, which perhaps many have forgotten, is that the relationship between Brittany, England, and Ireland was extremely close for over six thousand years. Just like what happened—and perhaps even more so—to the peoples of the Mare Nostrum. Cultural interactions, economic exchanges, but also "brotherly" wars occurred daily around these seas (the Bretons, for example, were often in conflict with the Saxons, the Vikings, and the Irish, from whom many pirates came). The Atlantic coast was therefore another Mare Nostrum for millennia: from western Morocco up to the Hebrides in Scotland, reaching the North Sea. The same seafaring peoples often passed through these lands: the Phoenicians, the Egyptians… many settled there attracted by the presence of tin, particularly in Cornwall but also in Brittany. It is important not to forget that for most of history movements took place mainly by sea and much less by land: this well explains Brittany's similarity to other lands on the Atlantic and less so to mainland France. For us this bond is even stronger with Cornwall: we are like close brothers. I fell so deeply in love with all these cultures that I wanted to learn as many things as possible about them. Together, however, I have always had the desire to demonstrate the relationships between them. Linguistically, for example: looking for a common root in Celtic languages is much more complex than in Romance languages, but there are still thousands of terms and many grammatical structures in common. You mentioned the environmental aspect earlier: the people of these lands lived with the same sea, the same rocks, the same climate… so they developed the same way of working, of building houses, of sailing. Not to mention the similarities in myths, legends, the approach to religiosity, in ancient art: the Celtic nations have always been united.

Music, however, is the field where most similarities and, at the same time, most cultural mixtures with elements beyond Celtic borders are found. Many people listen to music with an inaccurate and flawed approach: they hear only the most superficial aspects of the sound and do not pause on the deeper components. But we must not forget that in Celtic music, tunes, instruments, and dances have always been imported from many places (all of Europe, North Africa, the East…). There are no isolated compartments: it is a continuous exchange, internal and external. Bretons have sounds closer to continental Europe, the Irish and Scots play reels or jigs as they are typical of the areas further north, and so on. This process is therefore very difficult to understand with a superficial approach. Often those who learn just a few steps of a reel or a gavotte simply think that they are two different dances, developed in two different nations without one having anything to do with the other. They thus ignore the fact that the reel is actually an Irish elaboration of a Northern European dance and the gavotte is a Breton elaboration of a continental dance. And I have managed in broad strokes to prove that among all the Celtic nations there is the same spirit and style of transformation; all of us make the music, dances, and melodies coming from afar our own by "Celticizing" them!

Thank you, that is extremely interesting to us. Thinking about these continuous influences and cultural exchanges, particularly along the Atlantic coasts, DADGAD tuning comes to mind (it was born as Davy Graham's attempt to emulate the sounds of the oud in Morocco, but then developed as one of the most characteristic elements of Celtic music today) and likewise the bouzouki from Greece.

At this point in your career and with all your experience behind you, how strong is the desire in you to continue exploring the musical world to bring new projects?

I have new projects in mind all the time! You mentioned earlier my latest album Liberté-Roazhon which I recorded live in Rennes with the National Orchestra of Brittany in 2022. My latest project was to find a way to tour it without taking all seventy orchestra musicians with me! So I rewrote all the scores, reducing them from seventy to ten instruments (which is what you'll hear tomorrow here in Paimpol), with the intention of giving the audience an effect as similar as possible! And I must say the result is fabulous, not through my own merit, but thanks to the fantastic musicians accompanying me. The main idea I am working on now concerns a second Celtic symphony, which will slightly revisit the first but will at the same time be very different: if everything goes as it should, I should record it towards the end of 2026. I also have very different ideas, such as a solo harp and voice album. Today, alongside the tour I just mentioned, I am doing another completely opposite one: the Kalon hag ene tour (heart and soul, in English), with much smaller and more intimate events mainly in churches, accompanied only by the keyboardist Tangi Miossec. We intend to bring it to Sardinia and Corsica in early December. But I would also like to bring the big Liberté tour to Italy one day, hopefully next year!

We really hope so! One last question before saying goodbye. We are two young folk musicians and we only started playing live together this year. What advice would you give to two young people like us who want to approach this world?

The most important advice I can give you is: have your own personal approach. The more different approaches there are, the better! Diversity is a very important factor. There is a tendency to think that in folk music some things are acceptable and others are not. But I believe that if a Breton wants to make folk music completely disconnected from Breton or Celtic tradition, he has every right to do so. Or if he wants to include just a subtle hint among an abundance of elements from other places, he equally has every right to do so! For my part, I chose to want to help Brittany and its culture survive; this is the path I chose and that I like. All my life I've been interested in and tried to understand the origin of certain musical elements: what is Celtic and what is not, what is Breton and what is not… It's a lot of work, but it's my passion. So whenever a musician from anywhere in the world chooses to take something from the Celtic world, it is a joy for me! One last thing I want to add is that on my website (alanstivell.bzh), in the cultural complements section, you can find many of my articles regarding my approach to history, music, and Breton and Celtic culture in general. There are also many articles on politics, on what freedom means to me, and much more. My autobiographical book "Stivell par Alan" was also released just these days. We were supposed to publish it in Italy as well, but in the end it wasn't possible, unfortunately. However, it can be found in English and French.

Francesco Moncalvo and Chiara Pezzella “The Trains Fair”