Meet the Spice Girls of trad: ‘Keeping the music pure is extremely important to us – we’re just giving it a new look’

All-female Irish supergroup Biird on challenging the tired narrative around women in trad and disrupting the music industry

Traditional music group Biird

Over the August bank holiday weekend, 11 members of the all-female trad supergroup Biird were doing a soundcheck before their afternoon set at All Together Now. Looking out at the 5,000-capacity tent, fiddler Ciara Ní Mhurchú feared the worst. “We were like, ‘Oh no, it’s gonna be empty!’”

The group had only performed live together a handful of times, and this was their second ever Irish show, as well as their first festival appearance. “Honestly, I hustled my way onto that stage, and then literally only in the buggy on the way over, I was going, ‘What if I’ve really overdone it? I went too high, too big,’” recalls Lisa Canny, the multi-instrumentalist and seven-time All-Ireland champion who put the group together.

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