"The thing that really turned me on to the flute in the first place was being in the White Hart one Sunday
morning and Sherlock was playing, and he took off the top joint of the flute and gave it down to me to have
a go at - and I would have been about nine." That was around 1973, and Mick Mulvey had just started
playing a bit, first on his hated school recorder, and then on a Clarke's tin whistle his mother bought
for him. His father Tom worked as a maintenance carpenter with Roger Sherlock in the Galtymore dance
hall in Cricklewood, and being mad on traditional music, and living at the time just up the road from the
White Hart in Fulham Broadway, he was for several years a regular at the sessions where Roger, Raymond
Roland, Liam Farrell, P. J. Crotty, Danny Meehan and other top musicians in London played. Back in the
house on a Sunday afternoon, and still high from the session, Tom would run through all his ceili band
records, and thus, like it or not, the six-year-old Mick had no chance to avoid the music! At the age
of nine, way under age even to go in a pub, Mick became a regular, too, and at ten he was knocking
out a few tunes on an old three-quarter flute his father had brought back from his home in Leitrim.
Eventually, the flute albums of Seamus Tansey and Matt Molloy bowled him over, and he experienced
his "road to Damascus" at the age of eleven, when he saw and heard Matt Molloy in the flesh at a Bothy
Band concert. "The first concert flute I got was off of Roger. It was a hard flute, and that really was the
best thing ever happened to me in terms of playing the flute.
Because it was hard to play, it really developed the blowing technique."