Memoir: In the tax-strapped 1980s, to earn some extra cash and boost my record collection, I used to review folk-music albums for The Irish Times. Mostly I went easy on the poor devils who crossed my path, conscious of the long days spent in some draughty recording studio and the fragile hopes resting on my words.
I don't suppose it made me a particularly good reviewer, yet of the hundreds of performers I mentioned in those days, only one person ever took the trouble to write and thank me. That man was singer-songwriter Mick Hanly.
I mention this because Hanly has written his autobiography, and a particularly fine book it is. But it is not an autobiography in the traditional sense. It doesn't begin at the beginning and go right on to the end, as Lewis Carroll suggested, but it does tell his life story nevertheless. The method he has chosen is to take 11 of his songs and explain the events in his life that inspired each composition, hence the reference to sleeve notes in the title. The result is a series of snapshots, betimes poignant and amusing, but always searingly honest.
Hanly was born in Limerick in the 1940s but it was not the Limerick immortalised by Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes. His father, John, had a decent job as a sales rep for Matterson's Bacon factory so the family always had enough to eat. But by today's standards there was little in the way of luxury and money was always tight. The family budget was a hand-to-mouth business, typical of working-class families in that era when every shilling had to be accounted for. Yet, despite these difficulties, his father somehow found the cash to buy the musically inclined youngster his first proper guitar with the profound comment: "Doesn't it keep him off the streets?" It was a Hagtrom 12-string and cost 63 guineas, an enormous sum at the time, paid off in instalments of 10 shillings a week.
Hanly writes lovingly about his parents and the tight-knit family circle, about the Arch Confraternity, his first encounters with girls and schooling with the Christian Brothers. Some of the most moving prose in the book deals with the deaths of his mother and father within 10 weeks of each other in 1991. Incredibly, his wife's father, Mick, also died within that short period.
But darkness also pervades parts of this book. Hanly's decision to become a musician set him on a rocky road and he holds nothing back as he details his struggle to write songs and survive in the precarious music business, a struggle that sometimes brought him to the verge of despair. With the same brutal honesty, he deals with the breakdown of relationships and his growing difficulties with alcohol.
Yet Hanly can also display a lightness of touch. There is a hilarious account of a trip undertaken to Brittany in 1973 by himself, Cathal Goan and Mícheál Ó Domhnaill, who comprised a folk band called Monroe. It was Hanly's first expedition abroad and his struggles with the French language and with the local shopkeepers, and his determination to find the ingredients for a decent Irish fry-up, bring a smile to the lips.
There is also a wonderful chapter called Shellakabookee Boy which details his tender relationship with his stepson, Thomas, and how the young boy's initial suspicion of Hanly gradually matures into a mutual love. No parent reading this account could fail to be moved when Thomas enlists in the US Marine Corps and is sent to the Iraq war.
Someone once said that a reader should be wary of autobiographies because they are written by the main protagonist. That advice can be safely discarded in this instance.
Hanly is no vainglorious braggart singing his own praises but a writer scrupulously attempting to make sense of a life lived well if sometimes not too wisely. And it is the better book for that.
Wish Me Well: Notes on My Sleeve by Mick Hanly Gill & Macmillan, 198 pp. €16.99
Eugene McEldowney is a writer and critic