Samuel Taylor Coleridge was no stranger to crazy dreams, not all of which were induced by opium. But he was considerate enough to bequeath us an explanation as to why his strange, beautiful poem Kubla Khan is so short. Interrupted during its composition by a knock on the cottage door by an unnamed “person from Porlock”, the poet couldn’t get his mojo working again, or so he claimed. Porlock, a village in Somerset, gained infamy.
Some have wondered who this unwanted visitor was, or even if he existed in the corporeal realm. Was he perhaps a convenient scapegoat, a Coleridgean creation? But the reincarnation of that Porlock pest may have been hanging around Slane Castle on July 8th, 1984, when Paul Brady was summoned into Bob Dylan’s backstage trailer by a beckoning wave of the Zimmerman hand. As Brady and Dylan conversed of that loveliest of folksongs, The Lakes of Pontchartrain, a ballad about which an entire magic-realist novel deserves to be written, into the caravan staggered a loud, drunken Irish journalist, if such a thing can be imagined.
Dylan fled, sensible man, and the promising get-together was abandoned. I could venture a guess about the name of the scuttered hack, but I wouldn’t want to involve The Irish Times in legal complexity.
It was not the first time Dylan and Brady had met. This readable, lively, likable memoir details with admirable coolness the previous occasion, one night backstage at Wembley, on which this fine son of Strabane found himself showing Dylan a selection of unusual guitar tunings, a lesson that culminated in Brady literally shaping Bob’s fingertips on the fretboard. (Not like that, Bob. Like this.) When you are teaching Our Lord and Master to play the guitar, you have something to tell the grandchildren about.
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As for his writing, he is not Scott Fitzgerald. Nor does he need to be. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t write megahits for Tina Turner
Brady has a rake of other stories to tell, and he tells them in exactly the voice any admirer of his deft, supple, intelligent songwriting would imagine: serious, understated, unpretentious, self-critical, sometimes a bit prickly, always generous.
These days the celebrity memoir is many people’s favourite form of fiction, affording a firework display of self-exculpation, gibberish and score-settling, but there is a plain, matter-of-fact tone in Brady’s prose that proves oddly winning over the course of the book. Self-deprecation is the mode but there is no cloying false modesty either. A list of major accolades is headlined Various Pats on the Back. As for his writing, he is not Scott Fitzgerald. Nor does he need to be. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t write megahits for Tina Turner.
His childhood as the son of Sligo man Sean Brady and Tyrone woman Mollie McElholm, both schoolteachers, was happy. Mollie sang Percy French stuff and Eileen Aroon. Sean’s preference, wonderfully, was for Latin American torch songs. There was a piano in the house, and “a little pink Dansette” record player. The radio ushered in a pantheon of voices, from Nat King Cole, Eddie Fisher, Harry Belafonte, Eddie Cochrane, Little Richard (”yes, yes, yes, the greatest of them all,” Brady writes) and Slim Whitman to Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. Reading this book made me notice things about Paul Brady’s beautiful, smoky, stony singing voice that I hadn’t the words for before; I now know it’s partly the influence of these crooners and gritty rockers.
Getting himself a guitar but not a chord book – he didn’t know such things existed – he taught himself to play, using his own fingering style, and bashed out Elvis’s All Shook Up, Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode and the Everly Brothers’ Wake Up Little Suzie to his classmates, one of whom “knew three more chords than me. The pressure was on at age eleven”.
Senior schooldays at St Columb’s in Derry followed – someone needs to write a book about the role of that school in Irish culture – and there were trips to the Donegal Gaeltacht, where a teacher, Mr McKeown, told him: “You speak Irish like a native... of South Borneo.” Young Brady appeared in school Gilbert and Sullivan productions (sadly, no pictures of those appear in this beautifully illustrated book) and contributed fine poems to the students’ magazine. By the age of 15 he was earning money playing music for vacationers in Bundoran.
Blues explosion
Later came a move to Dublin’s student flatland and what would have to be tactfully called a mixed career at UCD. The British blues explosion rolled and thundered into Ireland. Outfits such as Pentangle, Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span were taking the folk tradition in new directions, some scary, many hairy. ‘It was an exciting time in Dublin,’ he recalls. “There was the feeling that musically we were all on the verge of something new.”
The something new turned out to be his band, The Johnstons. Before long they were gigging in England, on one occasion at Kempton Park racecourse, on the same bill as Joe Cocker, Jerry Lee Lewis, Deep Purple and Jethro Tull. That day, the horses must have been frightened.
Subsequent shows with the sublime Joni Mitchell, empress of open-tuned guitar and of much else besides, validated Brady’s own approach to his musicianship, his whole creative ethos. A quotation often attributed to Goethe says that a poet needs roots and wings. Paul Brady has always had both.
Life in the VIP lounge appears to have very little attraction. There’s a certain Ulster flintiness in his suspicion of what he sees as fakery and show-offs, a refusal to get over-impressed too quickly
There followed collaborations with legends and luminaries including Planxty, Andy Irvine, Eric Clapton, Carole King, Mark Knopfler and the peerless Bonnie Raitt. Not that Brady is any star-hugger. He loves his fellow musicians for their musicianship and has an endearing fondness for telling people that he once spent a night in Elton John’s bedroom, but life in the VIP lounge appears to have very little attraction. There’s a certain Ulster flintiness in his suspicion of what he sees as fakery and show-offs, a refusal to get over-impressed too quickly.
A painful 1980s encounter with an up-and-coming Irish rock star in an RTÉ radio studio is recollected, at which a slightly refreshed Brady gave the youngling a mouthful for what he perceived as his “posing crap” and “alpha male” attitude. Brady regrets that his behaviour on that occasion would preclude “any development of a close relationship with a band and a man (Bono) I grew to admire... I am not proud of being one of those at the time who were mistakenly convinced U2 would never happen.”
But there are plenty of moments of great and deserved pride. You sense that one of them was Ceiliúradh, the April 2014 concert in the Royal Albert Hall as part of President Higgins’s visit to Britain. I was fortunate to give a reading by way of introducing Brady that evening and can attest to the spine-tingling energy that is unleashed when a solo artist is voicing the experience of an entire audience of thousands. In his recent eloquent and important tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth, President Higgins spoke about the significance of the twin official visits of which Ceiliúradh was a part, saying that while there must always be reconciliation, there must never be false amnesia.
Brady’s song Nothing But the Same Old Story is one of the most powerful testimonies we are ever likely to have of late 20th-century Irish life in urban England. As many of us who lived on the neighbouring isle in the 1970s and 1980s know well, every single line of that song is true. More than any other song, the audience wanted it sung that night. Their homes were in England; they had English spouses and children. They longed for better days, new starts, an era of forgiveness, but they wanted that song included, a part of the story. No one who was there will ever forget his performance.
Each verse rises up a full octave, double-backing and winding as it goes, to climax in a long, plain vowel like a gull’s shriek
“I have often heard him speak of his being possessed by ‘a beast’ when he performs,” remarks Paul Muldoon in an interesting and graceful foreword to this book. If you’ve been to a Paul Brady concert, you’ll have glimpsed that demon yourself, a phantom come into the room. It’s an absence becoming a presence, and it can’t be faked or bought. Only the truest live performers have it, a way of inhabiting what is being channelled. The poets Paula Meehan, Mary O’Malley and Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi have it. It’s what Francis Hardy has and slightly fears in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, a gift to touch and make whole. “I don’t mock those things,” Hardy tells us. “I’m not respectful but I don’t mock.”
Rebel-yelling
One night in November 2010, Brady appeared with a number of other artists at Dublin’s Peacock Theatre, a small space. His task was to open the second half of the show. As people filtered back in after the break, they were excited that a mystery guest would be along, but they didn’t know who it would be. He came on to the stage, subvocalising, half whooping, like a battle cry, now rebel-yelling, zoning in, his gaze on the floor, not at the audience, and unleashed an unaccompanied song called Young Edmund in the Lowlands Low, an early 19th-century murder ballad recorded on his 1978 album Welcome Here Kind Stranger. Each verse rises up a full octave, double-backing and winding as it goes, to climax in a long, plain vowel like a gull’s shriek.
As Edmund he did go to bed And scarce had fell asleep
When Emily’s cruel Father Into his room did creep
Then early the next morning
To the beach, sure he did go
And he sent his body sinkin’
Down in the Lowlands Low.
The performance that night at the Peacock had something of Son House and something of sean-nós. It was stunning. He opened the second half of the show the way dynamite opens a safe. Much waffle is talked about artists’ creative evolution but what was on display that night was the profoundest truth of all: if you’ve nothing to evolve from, you’ve nowhere to go.
With grace and downbeat flair, this book traces a unique artistic achievement and a long, strange, wonderful trip: Paul Brady’s journey from a music-loving Strabane teenager’s bedroom, through the halls of folk, then the stages and clubs of Europe, to the pantheon of internationally celebrated writers of major hit songs. It will be treasured by his legions of fans all over the world. I hope someone is getting a copy to Dylan. He’ll love it.
Further reading: Three music-related books
Fermata: Writings Inspired by Music, edited by Eva Bourke and Vincent Woods (Artisan House, 2016) is a book of spellbinding beauty, featuring poems and prose by scores of Irish writers whose relationship with music has to some extent influenced their work. A luminous introduction by the late Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin sets out with brilliant clarity the role of drama, tension and surprise in music. There’s no genre snobbery or purism. The collection is open-hearted and capacious, from Dermot Bolger on Seamus Ennis, and Sinead Morrissey on Shostakovich, to Joseph Woods on Chet Baker, and Vona Groake on the “music and silence” of a garden. If you love music, you need to have a copy of this gorgeous book in your collection. Words are sounds before they are anything else.
Last Night’s Fun (Jonathan Cape, 1996) is a candidate for greatest book ever written about Irish traditional music. The prose of flautist and poet Ciaran Carson is wistfully lyrical and evocative, full of rainfall and place memory, like an exquisite slow air. Carson’s knowledge of his subject is immense and his sensitivity to the meaning and nuance of Irish words is so extraordinary as to become finally moving. If you’ve ever stayed up until dawn listening to songs and gone into work shattered, having slept or fitfully stirred on a shakedown by the wall, this is the book for you. A masterpiece.
Playing the Octopus (Carcanet, 2016) is poet Mary O’Malley’s eighth full collection. In the years before the book’s publication, readers of the wonderful journal that is The Stinging Fly saw and enjoyed some of these poems, but it’s fascinating to see them again in the wider set of contexts and interplays and chimings a full-length aggregation of work affords. This rich, various cluster of fine, often moving, always skilfully worked poems has everything we go to Mary O’Malley for: truthfulness, seriousness, playfulness, too, and then a particular sort of hesitating and hard-won wisdom, a pushback against nonsense or sentiment or fakery, the beauty of plain words placed in careful order, carefully – and always, the bliss of musicality. Fiddles carved from windfall, bodhrans, the blues, Báidín Fheilimí, uilleann pipes and sea shanties, Frank O’Hara’s lunchtimes, jazz chants, “go down, ye blood red roses”: what Mary O’Malley calls “the whirligig roustabout music” is in every page and line. This is the book of a musician who is working with words, and they sing, but never falsely.
Joseph O’Connor won the 2022 American Ireland Funds AWB Vincent Literary Award. His next novel, My Father’s House, will be published in January.
