Finbar Furey is a champion piper, actor, conservationist, songwriter, an ex Clancy and an ex Furey...but above all else, he's a storyteller. A teller of tales of all shapes and sizes; his yarns span decades and cover everything from digging cars out of 15 feet of snow in Berlin to fobbing Bob Dylan off to go on a session in New York.

We meet Furey in the club house of a Dublin golf course which he describes as his office. “I don't go any further,” he tells us.

Unsurprisingly for a man who has spent most of his life on the road, Furey is drawn to the closeness and familiarity of home and his office,but at 72 he has no interest in stopping - he’s just realigning his focus from performing to songwriting and film scores.

“I've been gigging all my life. I started travelling all over the west of Ireland with my father when I was 9 or 10. He often picked me up on a Friday after school and we'd go off for the weekend.

He was the last of the wondering musicians, he'd hitchhike down to Clare and you wouldn't see him for a week, and he'd come back with a few bob for me Ma."

He'd pick up tunes wherever he went. He wrote a book for fiddle and pipes with over 200 tunes in it, hand written,” he says proudly.

Finbar’s family had an indelible effect on his formative years as a musician. Furey was schooled at the hands of master players in pubs and Piper’s Clubs throughout Ireland, and having served his apprenticeship he went on to win 3 All Ireland Medals and The Oireachtas for the uilleann pipes.

It was only a matter of time before Finbar got the chance to leave Ireland. That chance came when illness meant that Furey’s contemporary, Joe Henry, found himself without a piper for a Scottish tour.

“I’d never been out of Ireland, so I asked my brother Eddie to go with me. Eddie was in a rock band called The Sparks, they were like the Rolling Stones. They did a week in The Cavern in Liverpool. We went over for 12 days and we stayed for 3 years.  I coaxed him out of the rock band and I don't think he's forgiven me since.”

We were booked up with Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly...All these new kids on the block writing incredible music, so we fitted right in.” John Peel would later name their version of Gerry Rafferty’s song Her Father Didn't Like Me Anyway single of the year in 1972

“We had this groove, this whole new sound, and then of course we looked like the Mona Lisa gone astray with the beards and the hair. We were the bee’s knees.”

Prior to his own success Finbar would serve another apprenticeship - this time in Bob Dylan’s favourite folk band, The Clancys - and once again it was a case of life getting in the way while you’re busy making other plans. During this time an urge to explore his own songs and voice was awakened

“Me and Eddie had a deal - he was the singer I was the musician.” But those lines became blurred when they were asked to join The Clancy Brothers.

“I started singing with The Clancy Brothers in 1968. I loved it too much, I wouldn't pack it in. We went with the Clancys for 28 days and we stayed with them for 3 years. They showed us another world we didn't know existed and we came home full of confidence…I was singing then.”

I started off writing tunes on the pipes, but I always liked the banjo. I had my own style of playing the pipes, but I wrote a lot on the banjo and transferred it over to the pipes or the flute (The Lonesome Boatman)."

“There was an itch in us - we had to write songs. Eddie's a great songwriter.” Finbar’s itch would eventually lead him to him leaving The Fureys after decades of success.

“I live my life through music and imagination and what I've seen in here (points at heart). Sometimes I've been knocked for it but it doesn't bother me. I was always a rebel in music. I always said that music has to move forward...you can't leave it to go stale like a block of cheese."

Finbar is hesitant to talk about why he left the Fureys. “I don't want to go in there. The Fureys isn't a band, it's my family.”

“When I left we were at the top we'd taken it as far as we could. We were doing the same stuff all the time; we got into a rut, which is easy enough to do, but it's very difficult to get out of because people want to hear these songs. And we were going through a management crisis, tied up with contracts. In the end I said ‘I'm leaving’ and they were very good about it.”

The following decade has been a struggle for Finbar. ”I had to build it back up from scratch. I had a very secure job in the Fureys, if you want to look at it that, but this is my life. I knew in my heart and soul it was like when we left the Clancy Brothers - it wasn't going anywhere for us, it was always gonna be The Clancy Brothers."

“The last four years of my life I pushed and pushed for these songs,” exclaims Finbar.  “I could've recorded the old traditional stuff and filled halls, but I've got to put this music out there. I've got 3 books at home full of songs. I've enough to do 2 or 3 more albums.“

Finbar’s new release, ‘Don’t Stop This Now’, features a DVD of one of his sold-out performances in Vicar Street in 2017, and though you could never tell from the performance on stage, the show was far from plain sailing.

“That was a hard night for me because I had the flu. I'd went to see the doctor that morning and he came to the gig and came into the dressing room to make sure I was alright.”

One of the most impressive moments on ‘Don’t Stop This Now’ is Sweet Liberty of Life, which for Finbar is a reflection on the current state of the world.

“When you look at the world at the moment...we gotta look at each other and say 'come on, we're the human race, we all come from the same seed'. This planet is all we have, there's nothing outside of this. We're travelling at 67,000 miles an hour through space and there's fuck all else out there, and even if there was it's too far away for us to get to.

People have to understand how important this place is. I'm green-minded, but I'm very much interested in moving forwards without destroying everything. It's like cutting down the rainforest, you can't replace that, it took millions of years to develop."

And everything is being done for greed - there's genocide going on all around us. Eventually people will have to smarten up. “

The other standout moment on the album is We Built A Home, a proud but maudlin tale of the darkest corner of Ireland’s history, the famine.

“Going back to when I used to travel with my father, he brought me to the famine paths around the west of Ireland. We'd walk the path and talk about the famine. All of these stories stuck with me. Some of the landlords were bastards but they weren't all bad, as we later found out.”

“It's a proud song,” explains Finbar. “This man lost his wife to the blight and in the end he takes a boat to America.”

When we suggest that this song will resonate with people on a historical level and on a contemporary level due to the current homelessness crisis, Finbar can see why people would make the connection.

“It's really up to the government to ensure they put enough homes up for people to live. Homelessness didn't just start in the last few years. I slept rough on the streets of Dublin when I left home. Sometimes you can't go home. Some of these kids leave home and can't go back. I've written songs about it. They go to the big cities to make it and they don't. London is full of homeless Irish people”

Finbar is quick to praise the work of homeless charities and campaigners like Glen Hansard, who Finbar describes as ”a gem”, but he warns that there’s only so much individuals can do, and without proper government assistance charities will always be facing an uphill battle.

“The banks and the government at the time were wide-eyed,”  he says of the crash, noting that “we had all these empty houses and they are all sinking into the ground now and there's still nobody in them. Why can't we fill them? Why can't we give people something; give them their pride back.

I'm just a musician, maybe we might stir them up enough to do something about it. I'm not a politician, and I never would be, but I'm not blind to what's going on in the country."

Furey has done the soundtrack to several films and is currently working on music for the motion picture ‘Cawder’, based on the life and work of American poet Robinson Jeffers.

“He made a great statement one time:  'That would make joy in the world, and make men perhaps a little nobler - as a handful of wildflowers Is nobler than the damned human race,' says Finbar. “The script is amazing. I'm playing the old Irish school teacher. They asked me if I'd write the music for it, so I've written the music and I fly out later in the year to film it. They are trying to get Matt Damon to play a part in it.”  

One of the things that helped reinvigorate Finbar’s career was his appearance on The Late Late Show with Christy Dignam, which has over 3.1 million views on YouTube. “That was at the drop of a hat. I was watching him like a hawk,” explains Finbar. “He said 'my timing is a bit dodgy', and I said 'okay go for it'. And then he put it up in the Key of A and I sing it 4 Keys below. Christy has a beautiful voice so I didn't want to disturb him, so I came in with the harmony. It was beautiful...it was a one-off.”   

However, Finbar reveals that although they didn’t run into the studio to capitalise on the popularity of the performance, there is an album in the offing.”We're working on an album. There's no new songs, it's all traditional. Wait until you hear him singing Raglan Road, Grace, Bunclody. This guy can really sing. The album with Christy is something special.”

We enquire if collaboration is a route Finbar would like to pursue more often

“Well let's come back to why I left the band, you couldn't work with anyone outside the band. I need freedom of music like freedom of speech. I'm open to it. I wouldn't do a whole album with someone again but I'm open to working with people. It’s like the album title says - don’t stop me now.”