A
PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
Shaun Davey is recognised as one of Ireland's leading composers
of music that combines popular appeal with genuine cultural significance.
His work, The Pilgrim (sequel to The Brendan Voyage, 1980) with
Ben Kingsley as narrator, was described by one critic as a splendidly
executed performance." Shaun talks to Aidan O'Hara about his music.
" I learned
to play music by ear even though I was given some formal music
lessons at school, which made me very lazy in terms of learning
to read." It wasn't exactly the answer I was expecting when
I asked successful composer, , to tell me about his musical
background. He added: "I broke my music teacher's heart." Hardly
surprising, and his poor teacher, recognising young Davey's
latent talents, must have been driven to distraction by his
refusal to practice his scales and sight reading. Anyway, this
candid confession of Shaun's will come as a great surprise,
and indeed as a bit of a shock, to the many who admire his brilliance
as a composer of acclaimed concert works like The Brendan Voyage,
The Pilgrim, and Granuaile. And while it may well scandalise
music teachers, it will encourage others, who refuse to travel
the usual hard road of discipline required of most musicians.
But Shaun Davey would be the first to sound the warning that
his route to musical success isn't necessarily the easy route
to follow. Talent is one thing; the will and the drive to succeed
is another; and he has both, in strong combination.
Shaun Davey
was brought up on the southern shore of Belfast Lough near Cultra
on the outskirts of Belfast. "An interesting place, and I watched
the ships go up and down every day. My father worked in a bank
and was transferred to Dublin. I finished school in Belfast
and then joined the family in Dublin. And I've been here more
or less ever since. What sort of music did he hear growing up?"
There was a record collection which was the key. I mean, there
was a mixture of classical music, Chopin and Beethoven, and
Gershwin, and some dance music. So I listened to that as a boy.
And then I grew up in the sixties when there was a revolution
in pop music. I enjoyed listening to a lot of the rhythm and
blues that came in and was playing on the radio and was quite
accessible in Belfast. And Van Morrison was about a year or
two older than me, so I witnessed the development of his band
called 'Them' at the time.
When he
came to Dublin he was taken to hear traditional music for the
first time. "Finbar Furey was the first I heard playing the
uilleann pipes, and I remember sitting in this room at the top
of the building in Trinity where I was studying, and Finbar
and his brother were playing. And I just remember being so incredibly
moved by something that I knew I didn't understand. I didn't
know anything about this traditional music. The sound was new,
and yet the actual notes I felt I understood, and the form,
too, very strongly, and in an intuitive way"
What had
he planned to do after his secondary education? "Well, I thought
I was going to be a painter for two years, so I held off going
to university, but I eventually crept in and came out six years
later with an MA in history of Art," A subject he taught in
Trinity and at the College of Art for a couple of years before
finding a way of earning a living through music.
The seventies
were an exciting time in traditional music and Shaun began meeting
more and more of the people in the front line of its development.
"By the time I woke up (to traditional music), Sean O'Riada
had died. The Chieftains were carrying on. I even remember meeting
with Sean O'Se and working with him on one occasion. Planxty
were going strong, traditional music was becoming popular, and
I suppose glamorous in many ways. But it was glamorous because
it was becoming a very powerful voice indeed."
The route
he traveled towards this goal of becoming a composer of a unique
form of Irish concert works was as unorthodox as that of his
early years. "The reason I was able to leave teaching and work
in music was simply because I was able to work at providing
music for advertisements. So I spent years doing that. And during
the course of that, the goals I set myself were to develop as
much musically as I could within that framework, and to learn
as much as I could and part of that was to learn notation. And
one other thing there was a great need to be tuneful; and even
within thirty seconds, a tune can have a beginning, middle,
and an end. And if ever the history of jingles comes to be written,
the best jingles will be found to have exactly that, a beginning,
middle, and an end. Just like any piece of music."
And how
did Shaun come to write The Brendan Voyage, his first concert
work? It came about, he said, because he wanted to write a piece
of music based on real experience, specifically Tim Severin's
crossing the Atlantic in a leather-skin boat. "I wanted in that
piece to explore my understanding of the uilleann pipes, and
my understanding of the orchestra, and put the two together
in a way that had not been done before. And I also wanted to
write a piece of music that was performable I was trying to
make it up as I went along, and the fundamental difficulty was
how to carry a whole tract of music in my head and write it
all down before I either became totally exhausted or forgot
it. That was the discipline.
It was
during these years that Shaun developed a musical relationship
with Rita Connolly and Liam O'Flynn. "Liam is the lynch pin
of my career in the sense that when I want to write music for
the uilleann pipes I went to him, because I knew him from Planxty,
and admired his playing a lot. And if he said no, he didn't
want to pursue the idea, I probably would never have tried to
write The Brendan Voyage. The fact is he said yes, and we've
remained collaborators ever since. I met Rita as a session singer
back in 1977, I think, and she first sang songs for me in The
Pilgrim which was written and performed for the first time in
1983. She had three songs in that, so many people said to me,
why aren't you writing more songs for Rita Connolly? So, two
years later I wrote the music for Granuaile for her"
Two other
musicians Shaun admires are Liam O'Maonlai and Carlos Nunez,
both of whom appeared in the recent performance of his revised
working of The Pilgrim, in Blanchardstown. I admire Liam O Maonlai
because, apart from the fact that he is a great singer, he is
in my view one of the greatest singers of songs in the Irish
language. He produces something unique through the language
when he sings. And again, as with my reaction on hearing the
uilleann pipes for the first time, alas and unfortunately, I
am not an Irish speaker because it wasn't provided in the education
I received. But I recognise it intuitively as being a great
and an astonishingly fine language. And I admire it and love
the sound of it."
I was surprised
to hear Shaun say that far from being a relatively recent arrival
on the Irish music scene, Carlos Nunez, the great Spanish piper,
played in the first performance of The Pilgrim when he was a
boy of eleven. "He's now a superstar in Spain, and of course
the world." Shaun points out. But lest there be any doubts about
who he admires most of all, he adds with emphasis: "Rita Connolly,
now my wife, is my favourite singer." Shaun Davey has written
the music for many successful films and TV series, and towards
the end of our conversation, when I asked how that part of his
work was progressing, he responded with startling candour: "Film
and television offers have dried up." But then he added that
his work for the theatre continues to thrive. "I wrote the music
for a show running on Broadway, James Joyce's, The Dead. That
play won't run forever, so I am open to offers!"
Shaun Davey
has received a People of the Year award for his contribution
to Irish culture, an Ivor Novello Award for his score for The
Hanging Gale, an Ivor nomination for his music for Twelfth Night,
two BAFTA nominations (The Hanging Gale and Ballykissangel)
and, recently, a Tric Award for Best UK TV Theme (Ballykissangel),
Is there anybody out there listening.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Irish
Music magazine
Back
to Top - Reviews
page
The Living Tradition
Article and Interview
The following is taken from an article written by Colin Harper
which appeared in the
January 1995 issue of The Living Tradition magazine.
Rita Connolly is
a singular talent, and a hard act to pigeonhole. For a long
time she was barely an act at all, confining her recordings
and public appearences to the role of soloist in the equally
remarkable works of her husband - composer, songwriter and producer,
Shaun Davey. The pair met when both were involved, in the mid
70s, in the now legendary folk/rock act Midnight Well. The band
was a floating collection of several musicians who have since
become well-known individually on the Irish Music scene, and
although they did make a record (produced by Davey), fate decreed
that Rita would join immediately after - leaving her largely
unrecorded until the
early 80s. One of Davey's first major works - and Connolly's
first significant recording - was The Lorent Festival Suite,
released in edited form as The Pilgrim in 1984. The work brought
together elements from the traditions of all the Celtic nations
of Europe and put them in a glorious orchestral setting. Connolly's
vocal contributions were an all too brief highlight, but introduced
her to a wider public and likewise gave notice that here was
someone quite apart from any other Irish singer of her generation.
Most remarkable of all, however, was the fact that both were
completely untrained in their professions: Davey as a composer
and orchestrator; Connolly as a singer.
Since Midnight Well,
Davey (Belfast born and a graduate Art Historian of all things)
had determined to teach himself composition. Compositional income
being initially thin on the ground, both he and Rita worked
for a while in advertising - Shaun writing jingles, Rita as
a voice-for-hire. In hindsight, this proved an invaluable discipline
for both. "I suppose my training would have been from all
those years of doing commercials", she said, "being
required to sing low notes, high harmonies, you name it - everything
was there! And when I became musically involved with Shaun in
his more serious work, that actually helped me. I was able to
sustain things that I wouldn't have been able to do had I not
done commercials". The Pilgrim is now available on CD for
the first time, in a sparkling new version - largely re-recorded
at a New Year's Eve 1990 concert performance in Glasgow featuring
additional material, and with spoken-word links drawn from ancient
monastic writings. The overall effect is like hearing a virtually
new work, with greater thematic unity and a scope much grander
than anything else the partership has thus far produced. The
sheer scale of the thing is unparalleled in anything remotely
definable as folk music and would probably send shivers down
the spines of most classical impresarios too, but the result
is one of an immense vision fully realised. The cast of thousands,
as it were (actually 200 - but isn't that enough?), includes
a full scale choir and orchestra together with vocal soloists
(including Connolly) and instrumentation from the full range
of Europe's Celtic traditions - bombardes, clarsachs and pipes
of all varieties - plus lyrical content (likewise from largely
ancient sources) in Cornish, Welsh, Gaelic and all points in
between. It may or may not appeal to the simple tastes of the
hardened traditionalist, but it is certainly the outflowing
of a musical integrity drawn from the same love and not at all
a crass or commercially motivated venture.
In fact, although
Davey's reputation in his chosen field has grown considerably
since The Pilgrim's first outing, he's still regarded by the
British and Irish compositional establishments as something
of an outsider. Having said that, commissions from theatre,
festival and broadcasting sources have flowed consistently in
the Davey direction and by 1985 he was in a position to write
and record what many would regard as his - and Rita's - masterpiece,
Granuaile. A fully orchestrated song-cycle, based on the life
of 17th-Century Irish pirate queen Grace O'Malley, it showcased
to dazzling effect the uilleann piping of Liam O'Flynn (the
ex-Planxty man who had previously featured on Davey's first
and best known work The Brendan Voyage and most particularly
the voice of Rita Connolly. Davey had taken the very essence
of Irish traditional music and thrown it together with richly
evocative imagery and orchestration. Many have found the work
profoundly moving: "This is the thing", said Rita,
"people come back again and again and say this to us -
that they found it moving. And it happens all the time - the
reaction we've had to it has been extraordinary but, having
said that, the sales haven't exactly been rocketing! I mean,
it's a steady seller and there's certainly a big band of followers,
and people who've appreciated and bought the album - but it's
the same trouble with all Shaun's music: it's difficult to market..."
Granuaile served
to present Rita as a truly exceptional singer, emerging, so
it seemed, fully-formed as a major talent with very little build-up
visible in the way of live performances on the usual "hard
road to the top". Partly this was the nature of the music
- staged performances of Granuaile and the Pilgrim have understandably
been restricted to major events and arts festivals (including
Edinburgh) - but, on the other hand, it's served to give her
a certain mystique, if only by default: "Well, it's not
like it's never happened before in the music business, now,
let's face it!" she said (with amusement, and obviuosly
not for the first time!). "I mean, the Alan Parsons
Project - they never did any live gigs, did they? Enya does
little or no live work either..." True enough. Enya's success
has been a marketing triumph for the notions of image and mystery,
but Rita remains adamant that her own music - only now being
launched in earnest - stands or falls on its merit alone.
The first solo album
Rita Connolly (1992) was to some extent the result of public
demand, and should be the first of many under Rita's own name
- though it did take a bit of arm-twisting: "Well, John
Cook (Tara Records supremo) had been after me for a long time
to do an album, and there'd been a very good reaction to me
in any of Shaun's work, so eventually he managed to kick-start
me into doing something, and I did it! It did take a long time,
but we finally came up with the album and I'm really, really
pleased with it... It was kind of weird. There was no demoing.
John Cook was wonderful - he was prepared to trust that I could
do it, because he knew that I knew what I was doing in the studio,
having had so many years experience at it - I wasn't fooling
around." Eight songs were recorded - mostly Rita's own
songs - with full arrangements and no expense spared. A notorious
perfectionist at heart (not always a bad thing - unless you're
John Cook's accountant!), Rita kept only three of these tracks
and all but started again when Shaun's own schedule made him
available: "...and I thought, well, what if we do it together?
So that was decided and then we had to decide what to do! We
laid out a kind of map - of ideas, songs and styles of music
that we'd like to do... Gradually, bit by bit, the songs came
together, so that by the time we got into the studio we knew
exactly what we were going to do, we had it all figured out.
Shaun's brilliant that way - he doesn't just have a rough idea,
he has a very good sketch".
The resulting album,
including the recent single "Dreams in the Morning",
is a further testament to the Connolly/Davey partnership, featuring
a wealth of influences and ideas and no less than 33 top-notch
musicians - though not all on any one track! The voice and arrangements
sparkle as always, and it's certainly her most "radio friendly"
setting to date - generally succeeding without sacrifice to
the customary warmth and personality of the music. Although
traditional material was part of the package, it was only one
part - vying with soft-rock, lead guitars and a dash of Lennon
and McCartney. Once again, those of an ultra-traditional sensibility
have been warned...
Still, after years
of semi-anonymity and musical magic in the shadow of Davey,
it is indeed a very welcome and exciting prospect to see Rita
Connolly prepared to step, at last, into the limelight at all
- and not only that, but to come round to the notion of actually
playing some concerts: "Well, I'd sort of gone to ground
because I'd been studying, doing an Open University Arts degree
- history, art, literature, music, philosophy... It was great
- and the discipline's been very good for me too. I completed
the year in October past, so I've no excuse for not doing the
gigs now!" Indeed not. A nervous, but eventually marvellous
one-off performance at Dublin's Tivoli Theatre last November
was recorded for broadcast (during April past) on BBC Radio
2. The broadcast was due to be preceded with two further concerts,
in Limerick and Dublin, but unfortunately something best described
as "marketing differences" between Rita and her promoter,
Pat Egan, led to the cancellation of these dates. More live
shows, nevertheless, are expected sooner rather than later -
as is a second solo album, geared more specifically towards
acoustically based, small band performance. As with Davey himself,
Connolly is already proving difficult to market. Despite a background
in traditional music, she would see herself as a singer quite
different to the likes of Dolores Keane (whom she admires greatly)
or the late Sandy Denny (whose music, perhaps surprisingly,
she doesn't rate at all). A particular influence from the contemporary
scene would be Joni Mitchell, and while Rita's own songwriting
is less prolific and in a less ambitious vein musically, the
clarity of voice is a noticeably shared asset.
Now that she's committing
herself fully to a musical path - folk based, but not so easily
definable - conquest of the Irish "adult" contemporary
market should prove a readily achievable goal. But doesn't she
find it frustrating, knowing there could be a potentially vast
market for her music in Britain? "No, not at all. I think
it's frustrating to John Cook, but I don't find it frustrating
at all! I think if I were out there working my butt off at gigs
and so on and I wasn't selling albums I'd feel very unhappy;
because I'm not doing that I feel 'Well, how are people supposed
to know I exist?'". One track in particular, Amiens - Davey's
impressionistic reflections on the First World War - could,
I suggested, have made a great single: "Yeah", she
said, "I think it's just very hard to promote it in the
right way. I'm sure if I got out there with nothing but bra
and knickers on it would sell no problem - from a girl of even
my figure! But I'm not prepared to do that, sorry folks - sorry
John!". As she cast a mischievous glance across the table
at the mild-mannered boss of a respectable record label, draining
his cup of coffee and imagining the loss of either her integrity
or a vast sum of money... Well, we'll give him the benefit of
the doubt!
Back
to Top - Reviews
page
Of
wings and prayers
Colin Harper talks to Shaun Davey about his music and motivation
for The Irish Times in 1994
| Fact File
BORN: Belfast 1948, a contemporary of other Northern
cultural icons like George Best, Alex Higgins and Van
Morrison - although his social graces are rather more
conventional: "I have a different background, so
I behave in a different way."
MOVED: to Dublin when a teenager and grew up listening
to his parents' record collection "which included
Beethoven sonatas, Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue - there's
an interesting one - and then the first music I heard
on radio, after Joe Loss and Max Jaffa which I grew up
with an absolute loathing for, was blues: Howling Wolf,
Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, The Yardbirds - I enjoyed
them immensely."
FIRST ARTS: Originally wanted to be an artist,
and graduated from Trinity in 1971, winning a scholarship
to the Courtauld Institute of Fine Art (London) where
he took a Masters Degree and somehow managed, at the same
time, to record his first album. Entitled Davey &
Morris, and featured latter-day Windmill Lane supremo
James Morris along with various members of The Strawbs
and (almost inevitably for that era) Donal Lunny. Mint
condition copies are now changing hands for £200!
Davey himself owns two, and plays them to no-one: 'It
really borders on blackmail material," he says
SELLING MILK: Before and during the process of
making his grandiose reputation Davey wrote advertising
jingles, including one, The Pride Of The Herd,
for the National Dairy council, which later became a top
selling hit - and apparently the genesis of The Brendan
Voyage. |
"I DON'T believe in God" Shaun Davey says matter-of-factly.
The fact is offered obliquely, in the context of explaining
his background, but it will probably come as a surprise to many
of those familiar with the man's music. Hearing Rita Connolly
and a host of angels singing "Christ within me..."
as the glorious epilogue to Davey's recording of The Pilgrim
- a work that is founded almost entirely on texts of faith from
the Middle Ages - it seems extraordinary that this could be
the product of an unbeliever. His passion, however, is not for
the soul in its afterlife, but for eeking out a sense of culture
in this one.
"It's nice to have had the opportunity, in my lifetime,
to record so many things, and to help steer them through with
the people they were written for. There's no reason to be concerned
with what happens after that..."
Things have changed for the maverick individual who wrote The
Brendan Voyage, 15 years ago. However he may be regarded
in serious music circles the world over (and its not always
seriously), his respectability as a composer for theatre is
well established - with scores for two RSC productions -while
in terms of the ethnic / orchestral epics which tend to reach
the record stores, he's ploughed a lonely furrow for long enough
to convince anyone who cares that he's not some joker with a
bunch of 1970's concept albums and some half-baked ideas.
"As I recall, very few of the concept albums were actually
about anything," he says with more earnestness than the
subject deserves, before he wandering off on the subjects of
albums like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and
Rick Wakeman's The Six Wives Of Henry The Eight.
And just what is The Pilgrim about? "Wings and
prayers," he says, sounding willfully obscure and enjoying
every minute of it. But he is conscious of the fact that in
rewriting and rerecording his most ambitious and least performed
opus for the digital medium, he has all but rescued from oblivion
a work of exceptional qualities - not least in its balm to the
savaged soul.
"Well, you see, I believe that Christianity has been a
very good force," he says, "a very good thing I believe
very much in equality, but the fact is that I am unable to accept
the concept of God." And just how does he arrive at something
so spiritually moving from a position of such stoic detachment?
"Oh well that's easy," he says, "because the
most moving music you'll ever hear is music that is not sentimental.
You know some things are better left unsaid - in a way, you
don't always want to lay your soul bare. Well, so it is with
music. Things need to be done in a more oblique way."
The concert may indeed be oblique, but there is nothing fey
about the sheer scale of The Pilgrim. It premiered at
Lorient in 1983 and everything about that very production reeks
of a doomsday scenario narrowly averted - a 200-plus cast who
saw the score only days beforehand, a barrier of languages,
a stage that needed to be rebuilt with its back to the wind;
a cost of £100,000 to stage.
The original album, salvaged from the event, was little more
than a document to folly. His next work, Granuaile was
a pub session by comparison and it, plus The Brendan Voyage,
were the ones that saw regular performances in subsequent years.
The Pilgrim remained almost entirely unrepeated and unrepeatable
until New Year's Eve 1990, when an opportunity to reassemble
everyone for a concert in Glasgow presented itself. An intense
bout of rewriting and the foresight of Tara mainman John Cook
has resulted, at last, in a truly worthy presentation of this
most dense and least narrative of Davey's creations.
It is, if not his most immediate work, then certainly the most
definitive single document of the man's vision, though he denies
this himself. And it's all there bar the kitchen sink: "Well,
the kitchen sink is not there," he says, with the conviction
of a man who may actually have considered it at some stage,
"but it is, I think, nearly right - it's as close as it
was possible to get. There's about 10 per cent of it, 15 per
cent maybe, which in my view needs to be completely rethought,
rewritten and rerecorded..." And will he ever do that?
"Probably not."
Interviewing Davey is a demanding business. He will stand his
ground alone, over years on the staved pages of his craft, but
he will never - willingly - say more than he needs to.
The interview as a whole, is conducted as a process of statement
and denial in pursuit of elaboration, and well beyond the drudgery
of mere questioning. He is weary from a heavy period of working
on his next, and probably final, large-scale creation (as yet
unnameable for contractual reasons) followed by six weeks in
the studio producing an album for his partner, Rita Connolly.
The interview becomes a cat and mouse situation, but he begins
to enjoy the challenge. Devil's advocacy is one way to the truth,
but he master Davey plays Christ in the wilderness. How would
he react to charges of gimmickry? "Well, it's a question
of degree." What is his place in the contemporary classical
fraternity? "I don't think I have a place in the contemporary
classical fraternity." Granuaile is a moving experience...
"Is it?" What is it that you're trying to do? He laughs.
"I don't ask those questions of myself anymore!" Stalemate.
Has he really created an entirely new genre of music? "Sometimes,"
he says, "I think that there are things that I would write
that nobody else would. I think that between Rita's singing
and my writing for her, we have invented a particular kind of
song which wasn't there before. But I'm not going to make any
claims about what I have written. I know that it was waiting
there to be done and anyway if I make claims somebody's going
to say 'Yes, but Sean O'Riada did it before you...."
The "O'Riada gambit" is one sure way of prickling
the composer's cool exterior, but he has to think about a recent
comparison (in terms of genius, integrity and a pioneering vision)
to Jimi Hendrix. How did he feel about that? "I didn't
understand it."
Mush less does he appear to understand - or want to consider
- the prospect of his own impending portrait on the walls of
history: even the suggestion that he has already, an accredited
place in Irish music: "I don't have an accredited place
anywhere! listen, I can walk round my home town of Bray and
nobody knows who I am..."
But given the legendary status afforded to his heroes and predecessors
(Ennis, O'Riada, and others), does not the very weight of history
hang heavy upon his shoulders? "No! I don't particularly
go around comparing myself to these people because I can't even
begin to do that - I don't wish to; it doesn't help me to do
that - so I don't have the pressure of thinking 'Oh Christ,
I've got to be as good as Jimi Hendrix' right?"
There may be a stolid exterior but Shaun Davey - for all his
solitary stature and the cultural intensity of his vision -
is not a man entirely bereft of humour. In terms of dryness,
that humour would give the Gobi desert a run for its money,
but surely no man is an island? "Well okay, there are times
I feel 'God, Beethoven was so good - how can I even be in the
music business? How can I look myself in the eye and still try
to write music when I can see how good they were? That is a
kind of pressure, but it's a fact of life; you have to get on
with it."
And yet the pressure of working in solitary fashion for months
on end, on colossal projects like The Pilgrim must be
immense: 'There is no hiding place," he says, "when
you are standing in front of an orchestra and they're playing
your piece. It is not a time for excuses. It either works or
it doesn't. If it doesn't work, it will 99 per cent of the time
be your fault, and that's not very pleasant. You have to accept
that that is going to happen from time to time. If you don't
put up with it then you stop doing it and, to be honest, I'm
not sure that I want to put up with that risk for the rest of
my life ... It's a very tiring process. You can be looking for
some sort of satisfaction from a personal progress that isn't
always there and there may be - in fact I'm sure there are -
restrictions on my ability to develop as a composer for an orchestra.
"I've had sufficient motives to brave the storms so far,
as it were, and I'm not sure if it's going to be worth the pressure
any more..."
He is well aware that his reputation can survive for some considerable
time on "auto pilot" - on the back of repeat performances
of existing works. "One looks at things from year to year,"
he muses, "and first and foremost one has to make a living
with what one's got..."
And he knows he is now in a position to make choices and changes
to his lifestyle. He rejects the notion of a "greatest
hits" album as "unattractive", but admits to
an irritation that his compositions for theatre remain, as yet,
largely unrecorded: "I feel frustrated that people who
like The Brendan Voyage can't get to hear these things..."
He has the very definite air of a man who wants to tie up loose
ends and do something else - of a man who has - perhaps, reached
a crossroads. So aside from the unnameable work, is this vision
of The Pilgrim the end of an era - is it the last of
the great works? "I will not become involved in a work
that is so difficult to stage, in a hurry, in the future."
So it is? "well, yeah, okay - it is."
