Last year, Sligo-born Tommy Fleming released his second album, Rest- less Spirit; a landmark occasion for any musician. At 28, he had already worked with Phil Coulter, Frankie Gavin, De Danaan, Mary Black, and Maura O'Connell.
One of his songs, The Water Is Wide, was topping the charts. Restless Spirit was selling well, and Fleming had just been offered a part alongside Stephen Rea in a film called Blue Note, about Irish musicians with Mafia connections based in San Francisco. It was a good year for his career.
However, 1998 turned out to be memorable to Tommy Fleming for entirely different reasons. On November 26th, three concerts down on the promotional album tour, Fleming had a car accident on the way home to Sligo.
"I'd been at my brother's house outside Ballina, and I took a short cut home which I didn't usually take. I was just changing a tape on the stereo when I looked up and saw a dog crossing the road." Instinctively, he swerved. "I veered off the road and went into a tree."
Fleming reckons he lost consciousness for a few minutes. "When I opened my eyes, flames were leaping from the bonnet, hitting off the windscreen. I couldn't get my safety belt open, and the car door was damaged, so it was really hard to get out of the car, but I got out somehow." Twenty yards' distance from the car, Fleming looked back as it went up "in a complete ball of flames".
He walked for nearly two miles before being picked up by a couple in a car. "I didn't realise there was anything serious wrong with me. But when I got home and called my sister, Belinda, she came to the house and said she didn't like the look of a gash on my head. She thought it might need stitching. So we went to Castlebar General. By then I had a severe pain in my neck, and when I complained, they strapped me to the spinal table."
Tommy Fleming had broken his neck. He was transferred to the Mater and fitted with a "gerome halo"; the name of which alone casts up surreal images. The gerome halo is a complicated and intimidating-looking apparatus, designed to keep the neck and head immobile while the broken bone mends.
It is best described as a large crude-looking metal cage, which comes down over the head and shoulders, and is literally screwed into the skull in four places to keep it in place. This is where modern medicine can still resemble the medieval era.
After two weeks of lying in bed, Fleming asked to go home. "I did spend those first few days wondering if I would be paralysed; thinking about things like how I'd have to convert the house for a wheelchair, and wondering what would happen to the album now that I couldn't keep the rest of the tour dates. And I thought about the fact that I could have been knocked unconscious and died in the fire.
"I thought about those things for a few days and was very quiet, which isn't like me. Fear was definitely part of the emotions. But I started thinking positive, and believing I would be all right. It was the biggest challenge ever in my life. I thought: if I can get over this, I can get over anything. There's no point dwelling on the past, because it'll always be there, whether you think about it or not."
When Fleming went home to Sligo in the gerome halo, he came in for some typical Irish ribbing. "The first day I walked into the pub, someone looked at me and said, `Tommy, we're having a few problems with Sky TV at the moment - would you ever go up on the roof for an hour?' Then there was `How's the scaffolding?' and `Ah, here's the Man in the Iron Mask'."
He wore the halo for three months, sleeping propped up on a bank of pillows. "I used to be the type of sleeper who is always tossing and turning, but I had to lie still with the halo on. That was difficult, but my body got used to it."
He gave up taking phone calls, because it took too long to work the phone in through the metal. "And I kept forgetting I had it on when I went through doorways, and banging the metal off them. Getting into cars wasn't easy either. I couldn't drive, but my cousin, Amanda Walsh, turned up and drove me wherever I wanted to go for those months. She was wonderful."
Medical insurance covered the hospital expenses. "Some people told me I could get a lot of compensation. But there was no third party involved - and I don't think the dog would be giving me much! Compensation was never something I thought about at all. To me, the compensation I got was my life and my mobility. A million pounds could never make up for the lack of that."
In February, the halo was removed. It had done its job successfully. "It was the biggest moment of relief in my life. My sister was with me, and she just kept laughing when it came off. Before, I used to have my hair really short and gelled, but of course it hadn't been cut for months. I looked like a red-haired Afro by the time the halo came off." He still bears the marks of the screws, with two deep depressions either side of his temple. Hair hides the others.
Tommy Fleming will be doing four concerts in May, and then taking the rest of the year off. "My plans for this year are to make a 100 per cent recovery. I'll do some research for the next album, which I'm hoping to bring out in summer 2000." Meantime, Restless Spirit has kept on selling. It went platinum and is approaching the double platinum mark.
Fleming was unable to sing while wearing the halo. "The day I got it off, I went straight to the hotel where I was staying and jumped into the shower. It was so exciting, just as simple a thing as having a shower. It was my first shower in months. I felt so free again. And I started singing. Until then I didn't know if I'd be able to sing again or not. I sang Bring Him Home from Les Mis, to see if I could still hit the high notes. I could,": a case of the bird being freed from its cage.
Tommy Fleming plays the Olympia on May 9th, Sligo on 13th, Castlebar on 14th, and Galway on 15th.
