Letters Home is a two-day, three concert residency for Irish singer Christine Tobin at the Irish Cultural Centre in London on 19 and 20 July 2025.
The project explores themes of finding home, emigration, dwelling, landscape and reconnecting with a cultural background, all with particular reference to the Irish experience.
UK Jazz News: Are you repeating the same programme over the two days?
Christine Tobin: No, Letters Home is the umbrella name for three different shows each with different programmes and their own title.
The first concert on Saturday night, 19 July, is Returning Weather. It charts a journey which is part homecoming, part memoir, weaving song, spoken word and a stellar group of musicians from diverse disciplines together, creating a multi-dimensional sound-world which blends influences from Irish trad, 20th-century art song and jazz. It’s inspired by my return to Ireland after many years abroad and the strange romance of reshaping a sense of identity and belonging. The songs are set in the countryside around Frenchpark, Boyle and Ballaghadereen and there is a backdrop-slideshow of beautiful images that capture the surrounding landscape. The musicians with me on this concert are:
Aoife Ní Bhriain violin; David Power uilleann pipes & whistles; Phil Robson guitars & electronics and Steve Hamilton piano.
UKJN: And the second show on the Sunday afternoon?
CT: The second show on Sunday 20 July in the afternoon is Letters Home. This is a film/music event and the title refers to the letters containing money that were sent home by emigrants to help support the families they’d left behind. It is now well acknowledged that this money made a considerable contribution to Irish economy over decades. To gain greater insight into the way of life and the emigrant experience, I carried out audio interviews with six seniors from the Co.Roscommon area who had worked abroad during the ’60, 70’s, & 80’s for a number of years and who all eventually returned home. It was fascinating to hear their stories, so with their voices as a guide, myself and Phil Robson made a docu/film of photographs, images and relevant footage from that era to illustrate their journeys. The film is paused at certain points and interspersed with live music from myself and Phil playing songs that would have been popular during those times and relevant to emigration. Song of farewell and longing.
UKJN: And I guess the viewer will meet some interesting characters?
CT: The subjects are four men and two women and they are all great people. One of the women Annie, left rural Ireland in her teens in the 1960’s to work for the New York Telephone Company. While most young women who emigrated to the US back then took jobs as housekeepers or nannies, Annie decided she didn’t want to get pigeonholed into that kind of traditional labour and opted to try something completely new. One of the men Michael who is now in his eighties, still working and running his own lucrtive building company, left for the UK in the early 1960’s and found employment with the various big companies such as Wimpey and McAlpine. At twenty years of age, he was sending a £100 a month home to his mother!
UKJN: The themes of Returning Weather and Letters Home are related, right?
CT: They are for sure. They both explore life changing journeys but whereas Returning Weather is the story and music of homecoming and reconnecting, Letters Home explores the opposite, where one is leaving everything familiar behind and there is a sense of sadness and longing but also the excitement of the new.
UKJN: Tell me about the third and final concert, Sailing To Byzantium
CT: On Sunday night, 20 July, we play Sailing To Byzantium, the last concert of this series, and the final stage of our journey. This features my musical settings of 12 poems by W.B Yeats. In the poem Sailing To Byzantium, Yeats speaks of making a journey to the ancient city of Byzantium in search of immortality. We travel with the poet to a place beyond our earthly existence, where art, creativity and higher learning are key to the spiritual realm. On a personal note, I like finishing with the Yeats’s settings because after exploring themes of emigration and homecoming in Returning Weather and Letters Home, experiences we usually have in our early and middle years, Yeats gives us the language and vision to take from those life lessons and search for a deeper, inner and more spiritual wisdom as we journey into our later years. The poems are chosen from his early work through to his final collection and include When You Are Old, written for the unattainable love of his life Maud Gonne; Long-legged Fly; The Wild Swans at Coole; The Second Coming and The Song of Wandering Aengus.
The musicians with me for this concert are: Gareth Lockrane flutes; Kate Shortt cello; Phil Robson guitars; Dave Whitford double bass & Steve Hamilton piano.
Irish Cultural Centre is at 5 Black’s Road, Hammersmith, London W6 9DT
