The Yellow Bittern

THE YELLOW BITTERN, a new feature documentary from Alan Gilsenan, is a revealing and surprising portrait of the last surviving member of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and the man that Bob Dylan called “just the best ballad singer I’d ever heard in my whole life”. This intimate, confessional and highly cinematic film charts the remarkable rise to fame of these devil-may-care Irish singers, from their small-town beginnings in County Tipperary in Ireland to the folk hey-day of Greenwich Village in the Sixties where they absorbed black musical influences, played for JFK and out-sold the Beatles. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem would go on to influence a host of popular artists from Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger to The Pogues, and become a powerful iconic presence on the Irish cultural map.