From the Harp

When Ursula Burns claims to have “dropped out of the sky” into comedy, you have to check yourself from taking her literally. Not because she strums her harp angelically, sings beautifully and once played on a fire escape in London as the building burned down. Nor because she appeared unheralded by the Fringe brochure on the Free Fringe last year, yet ultimately garnered a Malcolm Hardee Award nomination for comic originality.

No, it's just her sheer otherworldliness. More fey than Tina, she's had “years of being away with the fairies”. Joining a circus of “waifs and strays” at 14, she performed in England's last horse-drawn theatre company and learned the harp from her mother as they harmonised W.B. Yeats' poetry. “I haven't watched television in 20 years,” she admits. “I don't know who the best comedians are or what material they're doing.”

After decades recording solo albums and touring with the likes of Van Morrison, Billy Bragg and Loudon Wainwright III, last year Burns uploaded some songs to YouTube, which a stranger forwarded to the Irish Musical Comedy Awards. To her lasting surprise, she was invited to attend the live event, won the contest and found herself fêted as a comedian.

Still, she's no flash of Celtic twilight. Songs like 'I Do It For The Money' will disabuse anyone of the idea that this Ulsterwoman's only about the artistry. What's more, her advocacy of divorce and pleas in vain to God not to be borne into the “war zone” of Belfast in the 1970s. She reflects that while she's “actively striving for light, I really have to stop myself from getting upset about the state of the Earth, the state of politics, the state of everything. If dark things are coming out in the show, they're possibly reality.”

Her comedy career isn't entirely a happy accident either. While her mother and grandfather were harpists, Burns's father was a singer of comic verse by the likes of Tom Lehrer and Crawford Howard. Even her first album, 1998's Sinister Nips, with its title tune about domestic abuse, contained elements of humour. “Mysterious songs with funny lyrics,” she recalls. “But I didn't realise they were comedy at the time.”

Compellingly, it's her Paraguayan harp that actually channels her wit. “When I moved on to making piano albums, my songs lost that,” she explains. “This harp has a really deep bass which has led me to develop my own unique style of playing. It's a mix of South American and Irish flavours that draws out the cheekier, funnier side of my playing.”

Wonderfully, it also inspires a screechy, cod-Hispanic accent on numbers like 'Hospital Song', a bizarre romantic ballad where the protagonist asks if his sweetheart wishes to go and watch the nurses at the Royal Victoria Hospital café. That the song is based on a genuine incident, a Belfast babysitter asking the children if that's what they'd like to do, only makes it weirder. “I bundled them straight in the car,” she marvels. “Went home, made dinner, went to bed, woke up in the middle of the night with the song. Just from that one line.”

She elaborates: “As soon as that harp came through the door, that side of me sprang again from the depths. It gives me confidence.”

Indeed, so intimate is Burns with “Harpy”, who has four cracks in his frame and is nearing the end of his working life, that “it's like an extension of my body. When there's something up with it, I feel it very upsettingly. That said, I also work it really hard, I don't wrap it in cotton wool. I have to break down the fuddy-duddiness of the harp's image.”