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Cold Blow And The Rainy Night

By Planxty


  1. Johnny Cope
  2. Dennis Murphy’s
    The £42 Cheque
    John Ryan’s
  3. Cold Blow And The Rainy Night
  4. ‘P’ Stands For Paddy, I Suppose
  5. The Old Torn Petticoat
    The Dublin
    The Wind That Shakes The Barley
  6. Baneasa’s Green Glade
    Mominsko Horo
  7. The Little Drummer
  8. The Lakes Of Pontchartrain
  9. The Hare In The Corn
    The Frost Is All Over
    The Gander In The Pratie Hole
  10. The Green Fields Of Canada

Fourteen comments

Cold Blow and the Rainy Night

This is a great record. I may be biased, it’s one of the first trad records I owned, but I love it. Planxty always seemed to me to be perfectly trad, but completely off step with “normal” trad. Most trad records are either one or two melody players and a guitar, or another next Bothy Band. Planxty was somewhere in between there, in territory that nobody seems to have covered since. Great stuff.
-jon

Cold “below” and the rainy night..

(I hope this is in the relevent section, apologies if not!)

I have just been listening to my battered vinyl copy of Planxty “cold blow….” and happened to notice that the actual record label is titled “cold BELOW and the rainy night”! Does anyone know if this was intentional?

Also the record sleeve lists “The frost is all over” but no mention of it on the record label.
Has anybody else noticed it or have i got a weird rarity?

Re: Cold “below” and the rainy night..

My vinyl cipy of after the break has the sets of reels mixed up on the sleeve. I’m thinking that that’s what got me into not being bothered about the names of tunes

Posted .

Re: Cold “below” and the rainy night..

and there was me thinkin i was sittin on a fortune.

Wasn’t there loads of prolems with their managment
and how things were being produced (tunes names mixed up)
Wasn’t that part of the reason they split up - although I believe there were some personal differences as well.
They didn’t get much out of it either (in the way of money).

Wasn’t Phil Coulter involved in it as well not in a good way (surprise!). They he sell their rights or something ?

Anyway, I was delighted to see them play again, and hopfully
getting paid this time.

The song indexed as B Neas’s Green Blade is actually “Baneasa’s Green Glade”, one of Andy Irvine’s compositions: Baneasa’s a place in Romania, where Irvine stayed in early days (a wonder Ceaucescu didn’t lock him up..!)
I think of this one as “the blue album” - obviously because that’s the dominant colour on the cover, also because of the dark, brooding, held-back nature of some of the arrangements, culminating in the slow song “The Green Fields Of Canada”, which absolutely dominates the album.

their 3rd LP, 1974. is that right?

Correct….

1974 is the date on my LP record.

Planxty, “Cold Blow And The Windy Night” (Recordings)

I’ve just revisited the song The Green Fields Of Canada ( from this album) on YouTube. I’d remembered it was an impressive track, but I hadn’t remembered it was *so* good…not only the words and the air, but every note and nuance of their performance. The whole seems to amount to a spectral witness of what is described.

There are many ‘best tracks’ in recorded Irish song; I’d say that this is not only one of them, but also one of the most penetrating.

Re: Cold Blow And The Rainy Night

probably planxty`s greatest recording….for some reason, they though it was a weak record but when you look at what`s on offer, you soon realise how good it was….lakes of ponchetrain, p stands for paddy i suppose, cold blow and the rainy night, green fields of canada, johnny cope….liam o flynn`s piping was criticised….are they mad?…..wonderful intricate fingerwork on gander in the pratie hole and johnny cope and what about that slow air at the end of green fields of canada on the flat pipes…you can almost hear the weeping of the emigrants in o flynn`s evocative playing….and johnny moynihan`s laconic voice and playing can be heard right through the album…although christy moore and donal lunney were cutting their links with planxty, both contributed here.
all in all, magnificent.