Paul Brady is sitting in his home studio, showing me the scrapbooks that his mother, Mollie, faithfully kept from the beginning of his six-decade musical career. The studio is set in the beautifully landscaped garden of his home in south Co Dublin, a creative haven for the songwriter from the Border town of Strabane, in Co Tyrone.
Brady, who will turn 78 in May, recently celebrated 50 years of marriage to his wife, Mary, a Dubliner. They’re facing the usual dilemmas of a couple their age. “Mary wants to downsize; I want to downsize, but I don’t want to lose this,” he says, gesturing around the studio. “I find it difficult to make these decisions. It’s easier to ignore them. But you can’t. I have to decide what I am going to do for the next bit of my life. I’m finding that really hard, to be honest.”
His mother’s personal chronicle of his career was useful when it came to compiling Paul Brady: The Archive, a collection of more than 60 songs – demos, collaborations, live tracks and previously unreleased recordings – on four CDs. It includes rare versions of some of his greatest hits, from Arthur McBride to Nobody Knows, The Lakes of Pontchartrain to Crazy Dreams – from the era of The Johnstons, his first professional band, through Planxty and his solo folk and rock years – that even the most ardent fans may not have heard.
Mollie Brady’s scrapbooks are the ones that were knocking around in the 1970s or 1980s. They have coloured pages and puppies or kittens decorating the front covers. Over the decades, his mother carefully pasted in every interview, article, review and poster connected with her son’s career. He has filled The Archive with these and other memorabilia. The scrapbooks are, on the surface, a painstaking work of maternal pride and love. But the story, as with all familial lore, is more nuanced than that.
Brady has spoken a lot over the years about his fractious relationship with his mother, a teacher. He is more reluctant to go into it now, feels he perhaps gave her too hard a time. “We were maybe too alike,” he says. “Temperamentally.” He got on better with his father, Seán, who bought him his first guitar as a Christmas present when he was 11 years old – “it was easier with him”.
His dad was also a teacher and a skilled amateur performer of plays and monologues. Brady says he got his love of performing from him, “a true showman. In another generation he’d have been a professional”. He adds that while he is usually “fairly quiet and private, I become a performer on stage, and that’s a different discipline. I got that from my dad”. He famously calls his stage persona the Beast. I get a glimpse of that later.
Brady’s 70s have, for the most part, been a period of looking back. A few years ago he wrote a memoir, also called Crazy Dreams. The Archive is another act of reflection. It’s visually beautiful, filled with the flyers, ticket stubs and posters that Brady has kept. They tell of gigs with his early bands in his University College Dublin days, when the self-taught musician played with groups such as The Kult and Rockhouse instead of studying for exams. There are posters for concerts with The Johnstons in the 1960s, including a support slot with Joni Mitchell at Royal Festival Hall in London, one of her first gigs outside North America.
Another flyer has The Johnstons on equal billing with a then little known David Bowie. The memorabilia moves through the 1970s, when he produced the seminal folk album Andy Irvine/Paul Brady. His first solo album, Welcome Here Kind Stranger, brought him attention and acclaim, and in 1981 he showed off his songwriting chops going in a rockier direction with the album Hard Station.
The list of artists who went on to cover Paul Brady songs is impressive: Tina Turner, Bonnie Raitt, Carole King, Art Garfunkel, Cher and Joe Cocker. (He has said that Turner paid for his house and Raitt pays his pension.) A Rolling Stone article from 1986 with the headline Paul Brady is Ireland’s Best Kept Secret tells the story of his career progression. “Bob Dylan, Tina Turner and a host of other artists think Paul Brady is one of rock’s most gifted songwriters. So why haven’t you heard of him?” the article inquires.
That he never became globally renowned does not seem to bother Brady, although it certainly bothered his mother. When I remark, looking through the scrapbooks, that she must have been so proud of him, the singer looks dubious. “She probably wanted me to be more famous,” he says. “One of her questions one day was, ‘Paul, is Elton John really a better piano player than you?‘”
I blundered my way through my 20s and let things happen. It was only when we married and had kids and a mortgage that I started growing up
I laugh at this. I can’t help it. “That’s not funny at all,” he says. “When your mother asks you that, it indicates she’s somehow disappointed in you.” Did it piss you off? “It pissed me off big time,” he says. I wonder if it made him want to prove something, but he says it had the opposite effect. “It made me totally ambivalent. I just didn’t know which way to go. But hang on: this is when I was in my teens and 20s. I grew out of it.”
Brady says something else about his mother. “The only way she could value me was how successful I was in the public eye ... I was never going to be world famous in that sense, which is why I had a difficult time with big record labels in the 1980s. They were always trying to push me into directions I didn’t feel comfortable in. So I left the music business in the mid-1990s. I don’t even feel I’m part of the music business.”
Looking back, he says, he’s glad he was never John famous. Bob Dylan, who once enlisted Brady’s help to play The Lakes of Pontchartrain on guitar, admired his approach to fame. “Some guys got it down. Leonard Cohen, Paul Brady, Lou Reed – secret heroes,” Dylan once wrote.
On seeking fame, Brady says now, “Those feelings would lurk in the background and annoy me sometimes, but really my main function was to be a writer and write songs I felt proud of, that were saying how I felt about the world around me. Frankly, I am glad now that I managed to sneak through rather than be constantly under the spotlight in the media ... I’m happy where I am.”
We talk about his teacher parents wanting him to have something to “fall back” on and their annoyance when they found out he wasn’t attending lectures at UCD. They came down to Dublin for a showdown with their son. He told them, “‘I’m sorry, I want to join this band The Johnstons,’ and reluctantly they let me join.” In a couple of months “we were on The Late Late Show, and Gay Byrne was talking about me”. And was your mother happy then? “Well, yeah, she was. But I still wasn’t ’ John.”
He has written in his memoir about the eventual toxic demise of The Johnstons and the coercive control and bullying he experienced while a member. It was in the early 1970s, shortly after leaving the band, while playing a session after the funeral of the piper Willie Clancy in Miltown Malbay, Co Clare, that he met his wife, a folk-music fan who was visiting the area with a friend.
It was an auspicious day for both of them. Mary was completing a master’s in social science and had that day handed in her thesis, on alcohol, at Trinity College Dublin. (She later did another master’s at UCD.)
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His career was flourishing, but, “I didn’t have a clue who I was at the time. I blundered my way through my 20s and let things happen. It was only when we married and had kids and a mortgage that I started growing up, and felt the urge to write about how I was feeling.”
After leaving The Johnstons he spent a year-and-a-half in Planxty, the folk supergroup. Christy Moore had left, and Brady was his replacement. Then came his solo career and his reputation for superlative lyrical storytelling.
The idea for The Archive came from Malcolm Mills of the Last Music Company, in England. “He likes dealing with artists like me, whose music he enjoys but who haven’t been famous to the man on the street.”
He mentions a few of the 63 tracks. “The Road to the promised land, which eventually appeared on Hard Station, the original demo has a totally different feel ... There’s a live version of Nothing But the Same Old Story with Dónal Lunny, which a lot of people thought was a special performance.” There are collaborations with Kate Rusby and Carole King.
Some of the recordings are “rough as a badger’s arse”, but he loves these demos, because sometimes in the more formal recording process you can “lose the spark”. There’s a demo of a song he wrote with the late Dolores O’Riordan, called Freedom and Love. “She came to the studio one day and brought cakes her mother had made,” he says.
The Archive is “for real fans, for people who like to know how things started off. It’s not for everyone”. Only 1,200 copies are being pressed. There are songs he’s particularly excited for fans to hear, such as an early demo of Travellin’ Light from his album Oh What a world, which he recorded in the late 1990s. He stands up, heads over to the mixing desk, puts on the song and starts to dance and sing along.
I’m not normally a dancer, but there’s something about Paul “the Beast” Brady boogieing to his song that gets me off the sofa bed. (He sometimes sleeps in the studio.) The tune blares out as Brady grooves and points to his audience of one in front of the mixing desk, while I bop along self-consciously on the other side. It’s a joyful few minutes witnessing the difference between Brady the performer and Brady the man in the garden at the back of his house, dreaming up songs, obsessing over chords.
“That song was written in the morning, then recorded in the afternoon and mixed that evening.” Does he remember the head space he was in at the time? “I just love that kind of music. Smelly rock’n’roll, that’s what that song is,” he says, smiling.
The Beast has still got it, going on this display. The release of The Archive will be celebrated with three gigs at Vicar Street. He’s a physical performer and needs to keep moving on stage. “Andy Irvine and Christy Moore sit down now for their concerts, but I can’t,” he says.
One of Brady’s most famous songs, The Island, doesn’t feature on The Archive, because “there was only ever one recording of that, the one that everybody knows”. A favourite of John Hume, his former French teacher at St Columb’s boarding school in Derry, it was written around the time of the hunger strikes.
I like where Paul Muldoon’s head is at. He’s totally mad. The songs we wrote together were songs I would never have written without him
The Island is a courageous, politically charged song that was controversial for being critical of the armed struggle. “Up here we sacrifice our children / To feed the worn-out dreams of yesterday / And teach them dying will lead us into glory.”
Growing up a Catholic in Northern Ireland, “you were a second-class citizen. You weren’t into violence, but at the same time you knew you were getting the raw end of the stick. And anybody that was prepared to fight against that, well, you were sympathetic or you weren’t – you don’t want killing. It was very, very hard, and I wrote the song to explain myself to myself as much as anything”.
How does he feel about the prospect of a United Ireland? “I think it will happen, but I don’t think it’s the top of anybody’s list at the moment. Except a certain section. I think it will be money and livelihoods that will make the final decision. There’s a huge coterie of Irish nationalists who don’t want a United Ireland.” We don’t hear much from them. “No, because it’s not a cool thing to be. Writing The Island wasn’t a cool thing to do.”
The anti-violence stance of the song made Brady a target at the time. “I was attacked in the Purty Kitchen in Dún Laoghaire one night. This fellah from the North came up, said, ‘You turned your back on your own,’ grabbed me by the throat.”
Growing older mostly makes Brady think about his children – a daughter in England and a son in New Zealand – and several grandchildren across the two countries. “I have three grandchildren in New Zealand who I will maybe see 10 more times in my life, if that.” He clearly misses them. Does he have a good relationship with his son? “Well, yeah, but the point is that you have to see people to develop a relationship.”
Family is the most important thing to Brady now. “I’m kind of losing the urge to create,” he says. “I like writing with other people now, so I don’t have to go down the well myself.” A few years ago he collaborated with the poet Paul Muldoon. “I like where his head’s at. He’s totally mad. The songs we wrote together were songs I would never have written without him.”
He once wrote a song with Shay Healy, Just Behind the Veil, which he ended up singing at Healy’s funeral. Does that make him think about the songs that will be played at his own funeral? “No. I’m very conscious that there’s not a lot of time left, and I think about how I’m going to approach that. It bothers me from time to time.”
Brady has a curmudgeonly reputation, but I find him generous and gentle company. He does say, however, that the failure of Hot Press, the music magazine, to review his last few albums mildly annoys him. “Hot who?” he says, a little high-pitched giggle escaping.
He has only a handful of close friends. “It’s hard to sustain friendships for a whole lifetime,” he says. Brady has his poker friends, including the designer John Rocha and the artist Guggi; they have card sessions once or twice a year.
He is a keen swimmer and goes snorkelling and diving with a group he’s been meeting in Dalkey, in south Co Dublin, for years. He has travelled all over the world with them, from the Cayman Islands to Gran Canaria. “I’m a water baby, always was,” he says, thinking back to long summer holidays in Bundoran, in Co Donegal.
Brady says he has spent a lot of his life “wondering whether I’m doing the right thing at any given time”. When I ask him to elaborate, he talks about “fostering relationships” and the dangers of spending too much time “locked inside yourself”.
“I’ve worried that my obsession with wanting to immerse myself in music over the decades has been too much in terms of the other potential aspects of living, you know.” Does he talk about that to his children? “Well, it’s too late now. My children have gone away.” So that’s a regret, spending too much time in his music? “Oh yeah ... Immersed in my music, immersed in me. I’m by nature self-centred.”
I commend him for his honesty. “Well, I’m reluctant to say it, and I’m sorry I did ... It’s funny. I don’t even feel guilty about it. It’s just I couldn’t be anything else. That’s who I am.”
The Archive is released by the Last Music Company. Paul Brady plays Vicar Street, Dublin, on Friday, April 11th, Saturday, April 12th, and Tuesday, April 15th, and the Mount Errigal Hotel, Letterkenny, Co Donegal, on Sunday, April 13th
