Andy Irvine

For more than six decades, Andy Irvine has worked as a performer, collector and instrument innovator in Irish folk music. Born in London in 1942 to parents from Merseyside and Glasgow, he has been a founding member of Sweeney's Men, Planxty and Patrick Street, among others. His repertoire draws on Irish, English, Scottish, Eastern European and American old-time sources, and he plays mandolin, mandola, bouzouki, harmonica and hurdy-gurdy. Alongside Johnny Moynihan and Dónal Lunny, he helped adapt the Greek bouzouki into the Irish bouzouki with a new tuning.

Before music took over, Irvine was also a child actor, appearing in A Tale of Five Cities and the ITV series Round at the Redways. At thirteen he was studying classical guitar, but the skiffle boom and Woody Guthrie pulled him towards folk, and he learned harmonica from Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Later he worked with English luthier Stefan Sobell on instrument design. In October 2018 he received the first Lifetime Achievement Award at RTÉ Radio 1's inaugural Folk Music Awards, and he still tours widely, from Ireland and Britain to Japan, Australia and New Zealand.