The cure for writing a song that bombs is to write another song, and another . . . writes JOHN WATERS
I'M DELIGHTED that The Irish Times, in yesterday's report on the Eurosong shortlist, remembered to remind us all about Helsinki. I had quite forgotten that, the last time I was involved in a Eurovision entry, we "came last". I have, however, to admit to puzzlement on reading that I told the reporter who called me that one "can't be imprisoned by one's fast emotions". I'm not sure, in this context, what "fast emotions" are. Asked, as I recall, if I had not felt "humiliated" after Helsinki, I replied that one should not be a prisoner of one's, er, past emotions.
In late May 2007, a couple of days after Helsinki, the phone rang for the dumpteenth ( sic) time. Happily it was not another reporter, but the great Brendan Graham, the most successful Irish songwriter at Eurovision. He began immediately to tell me about the first time he qualified, in 1976, when the contest was staged in The Hague. The song was called When; the singer was Red Hurley. The Brotherhood of Manwon that year for the UK, with Save Your Kisses For Me. Ireland came 10th out of 15 countries. Brendan described how he felt at the time, simultaneously describing how I was feeling at that moment. He talked about the deflation of the aftermath and the long journey home. Finally, he described how, when he reached his house, he dropped his bags in the hallway and went in to the piano and stayed there until he had written another song. "Write another song, John," he said, and rung off.
So, myself and my childhood friend Tommy Moran wrote another song. Actually, we wrote 40 other songs, but the song we wrote straightaway was called Baby, Let Me Buy You a Drink, recorded by Sinéad O'Connor for the Wells for Zoe fundraiser album, Water For Life, which cheered us up a little.
Our song for Eurosong 2010 is called Does Heaven Need Much More?It's a song about eternity and whether it can be much better than sex.
People ask me: Why do I want to go again? Because the Eurovison is there, and because I find it interesting. It’s a puzzle and a challenge, with high risks and the slimmest possibility of glory.
I like writing songs, and I know we’re getting better at it. In 2007, because Dervish had already been chosen as Ireland’s performers, we had to write a folk song. This year we got to enter a pop song.
On paper, as of this moment, we have a one-in-five chance of qualifying again. We are blessed that our song is to be sung by Leanne Moore, winner of the 2008 You're A Starcontest. Watching her in that competition, I saw a quality you very rarely encounter in pop performers. Greil Marcus, writing about Elvis, captured it by observing that Presley had "a capacity for affection that was all but superhuman", and Leanne has something of this about her. She possesses a song and breathes herself into it, so that the listener enters the song's meaning rather than glancing off its surface.
There are few things in life as interesting as writing pop songs. This is partly, I think, because, when you're doing it right, you're not actually "creating" but acting as a receiver for something that's already written in the spheres. John Lennon talked about the arrival of a great song as being like the apple falling on Newton's head. No matter how often the quarry slips away, there is always the possibility that the next one may be better than Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.
The best songs sound like something nobody's written before, but also seem like they always existed. And the best book about pop music is by Paul Morley: Words and Music: a History of Pop in the Shape of a City(Bloomsbury 2003).
Using as an illustration the Kylie Minogue song Can't Get You Out of My Head, Morley argues that a pop song, to succeed, must have unlimited ambition. It is, he insists, a thing of deep, deepening mystery, which seeks to communicate "millions of unique things about the unlimited worlds of love and lust". Its theme, always, is: "how everyday life and love are a shifting set of compromises between the ordinary and the extraordinary". The best pop songs offer an irresistible reflection of these compromises, bringing the mundane and the transcendent together in one time-capsule.
Does Heaven Need Much More?has all these ambitions. It is a giddy pop song about emotions fast and slow, while also, quite unselfconsciously, speculating about infinity and the meaning of existence. "A great pop song about love," write Morley, "should try to define what it is to feel love for someone else, and should imply how that love will one day come to an end, one way or another, so there is a kind of melancholy lacing the joy; and the song should achieve this in a way that means when you listen to it you can't get it out of your head".
For me, the biggest puzzle is why everyone doesn’t want to do it.