I was born in London. I
spent the first five years of my life at 50 Sidney Road, Stockwell.
I have some memories of it. We lived in a dark basement flat.
No wonder the sunlight in the small garden at the back is a vivid picture
for me still. My father was a tracklayer on the railway …
eight men to carry and lay a twenty two foot length of double rail and
it was hard work. I still know the names of some of that rail gang.
Barkis was the ganger and he was a real bastard according to my da.
There was Sean McDermott also from Derry and Joe Murphy from Carlow and
a big Ukrainian called Johnny.
I take after my mother’s side in looks. That is to say I look
more like a Mayo man than a Derry man. My mother was from County
Mayo in the west of Ireland. They met and married after the war
and I was born in 1949. She was very religious and saw England as
a godless country I’m afraid. That’s probably why we
moved to Derry in Northern Ireland in the mid 1950s. It was my father’s
hometown.
Derry in the 50s and 60s was an awful place, a real pit of private despair
and gross public dishonesty, though I had no real sense of that at the
time. It was a poverty stricken, unemployment - ridden festering
sore. It is no surprise that when the troubles broke out they started
in Derry. My father found just 18 months work in Derry when we went
there to live. Other than that he was a migrant worker for 8 or
9 months of the year, in London mostly but also in the north of England
and Scotland. It still angers me that religious and political bigotry
made him a second class citizen in his own city.
I went to Bridge Street school and then St Columb’s College, a brutal
terrifying place which I survived by keeping my head down and working
hard. Some of my teachers were fine, some even inspirational.
John Hume was my History teacher for nearly six years. I have to
say that most of the monsters on the staff were priests and they succeeded
in putting me off religion for life.
Summers were spent in County Mayo among my mother’s people on a
farm. Like James Joyce in Paris murmuring the names of Dublin streets
I still walk those fields of childhood in my mind…Maighne Mor, Ruan,
Garrett’s Land, Cnoc An Chonai, The Noggan and Grawn. For a townie
like me it was like living in the garden of Eden … the horse, the
crazy gander, the two sheepdogs and the goat that arrived one morning.
It was thought it might have strayed from a traveller’s encampment.
The cows in the field went pure mad, lowing at the sky and running up
and down with their tails in the air because they had never seen a goat
before. We kept him till the end of his days because it was believed
that goats were lucky. It was as simple as that. I suppose now it
can be told. Patrick, the man of the house, was a bit of a moonshiner
. He had the poitin still set up in the barn and one day the sow
got in. They are very inquisitive and intelligent animals are sows
and yes looking back we were obviously at the forefront of free range
farming at the time. Anyway in went the sow and tumbled the still
and drank the lot. She was unconscious for two days and I would
guess woke up with a massive hangover. No hair of the dog available
I’m afraid.
Always in the distance there was my magic mountain, Nephin, up there above
Lahardaun and down at the foot of the farm was the little browny black
river, the Dubhowen. Haymaking, saving turf, even thinning turnips
which I hated, yes it was hard work at times but I loved the place.
And there would be the odd day out at a fair in Killala or Ballycastle
or Crossmolina. I was really happy there.
I loved Derry too and I still do. It’s my home place.
It has these great city walls and the big winding river and its hills
and valleys that create the most beautiful street vistas and views.
It’s a friendly place and bitterness between its two main communities
is far less intense here than in other parts of the north despite the
terrible atrocities that the troubles brought to this town and its surrounding
villages. I grew up in the Bogside, 137 Bogside, the house with
the big step beside McBrearty’s coal yard. Old Mrs Kelly down
the road told me one day after we had gone into her house to watch the
Lone Ranger on television that she remembered as a young girl watching
the people dancing in that very street when the news arrived that Gladstone
had won the election. That must have been 1886 ... “Home Rule
For Ireland”. I believe that makes me part of what is now referred
to as folk memory.
Music! My father was very musical. He was a fine singer and
had been in a pipe band when he was younger. He introduced me to
lots of music I might otherwise have missed. The first film I ever remember
seeing was Cole Porter’s “High Society”. Crosby and
Sinatra largely passed me by in it but I thought Louis Armstrong was brilliant
and I am still mad about trad and swing jazz. It’s probably
the most infectious music in the world. Another childhood film that
impressed me greatly was the patriotic “Mise Eire”.
I saw it in Our Lady Of Lourdes Hall on the Lecky Road. It wasn’t
so much the content that impressed as the passionate orchestral soundtrack
that Sean O’Riada created for it out of the old Irish folk tunes.
From then on I knew that Irish music was beautiful.
I grew up in the 60s and I believed in the Beatles and I still do.
They were something quite rare in pop music. They were the most
popular and they were also the best. In 1967 I bought a Spanish
guitar, a Tatra Classic, for £3 in Molly’s pawn on the Cross
Lanes. A school friend, Paul Elder, taught me the basic chords and
also showed me the rudiments of piano playing and suddenly I was strumming
Clancy Brothers ballads, Beatles songs and many of the acoustic anthems
of the young Bob Dylan …“Spanish Harlem Incident”, “To
Ramona”, “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”
and “One Too Many Mornings”. The thing about Dylan was
that he was a gateway that opened into a brave new world … Woody
Guthrie, early Tom Rush, Leadbelly, Hank Williams, Memphis Minnie, Doc
Watson, Blind Willie McTell. By the 70s I was singing and playing them
all.
I went to university. I went to Queen’s in Belfast and did
a History degree. I became a teacher and taught for a solid 15 years.
I reckoned by then I had paid my full debt to society so I organised
my escape. The jailbreak happened in 1987. For part of that
15 years I lived in London teaching English at St William Of York School
off the Caledonian Road. It was the later 1970s. During the
time I was there punk person Johnny Rotten, leader of the Sex pistols,
became our most famous past pupil and Kevin Maloney who was the deputy
head decided to have a look at Johnny’s old school reports. One
teacher had written, “John is a very bright boy but he is having
difficulty in this class. Might do better in a small group”.
Little did she know!
One day the Drama teacher Mary Walshe declared that she had decided to
stage a Christmas show which she would write herself. She needed
songs and she wanted them to be original. I got the position of
composer. I had never written a song in my life and was quite happy
to go on rendering “Johnny B Goode” and “ Hard Hearted
Hannah” for the rest of my days. But I had to get to work
and I wrote eight songs for the Christmas show and discovered that I had
some compositional talent. The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote
of his own experience, “A man dabbles in verse and finds it is his
life”. So it was with me. A Christmas show in a tough London
school changed the direction of my life. I became a songwriter.
I came back to Derry and got involved in radio. I wrote topical,
comic and satirical songs for the BBC for years. They were mostly
written for BBC Radio Ulster’s Talkback programme but I did quite
a few for RTE in Dublin and wrote a song a week for nearly 4 years for
BBC Radio 5 in Manchester. At one stage I was writing three topical
songs a week. I would get up around 0630 and listen to the news
and check the ceefax. I was always hoping that something weird and
wonderful with comic possibilities had happened overnight. Then
I would have to start. Who am I going to be in this song?
Am I a commentator or one of the people involved in the story? Can
I do that accent? Can I play that style of song? As you can
see a comedy song is as much about performance as content. The best
ones are a perfect marriage of both. I would write it in a couple
of hours and win lose or draw I would be in my local radio station at
1030 that morning to record it. Down the line it would go to Belfast or
Dublin or Manchester. I became a song factory. I needed the
money because by then I had quit teaching. I keep a few of those
songs in my repertoire still. I think the great Tom Lehrer would
be proud of a couple of them. But I don’t ever want to write
another topical song.
My involvement with the BBC also led to my becoming a radio presenter.
It began with a half hour music programme on my local station BBC Radio
Foyle and that evolved into a two hour show called “ Friel’s
Fancy” on BBC Radio Ulster. I am proud to say that it won the
1993 Sony Award for best music programme. It has been described
in The Radio Times as “an opinionated guide to the popular music
spectrum”. I play jazz, blues, folk, rock, Celtic, musicals,
Hollywood soundtracks, country, roots, world … in fact anything
that comes my way that I like. I do all the research myself and
it can bring out the worst in me because I am a pedant. My colleagues
in Radio Foyle roll their eyes to heaven as I say with a good deal of
gravitas, “Did you mention Nina Simone’s 1959 version of “My
Baby Just Care’s For Me?” Well, it was written by two
great American songwriter’s Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson in 1928
in New York for a show called “Whoopee” which was a vehicle
for Eddie Cantor”.
But I am a songwriter first and above all else and these days a writer
of real songs. I write them slowly because that’s the only
way I can write them. I get maybe a single phrase of a melody on
the piano. Gradually I build it till I get the complete verse.
Then I get the chorus or the verse becomes the chorus which means I have
to write another verse. The one thing I do know is that once I get
the tune started I will have a melody at the end of it. The words
are more often more difficult. They can take a lot of time and I
have had tunes for years that I could never find words for.
“The Waltz Of The Years” was my fourth
album. There was “Logrhythms” in 1985. I was well
over 30 when it appeared but I regard it now largely as juvenilia.
“Stepping Stones” in 1993 was a strong album. It was
ignored but one song on it attracted a bit of attention and radio play,
“ Farewell Mayo”. It was a song about those childhood
summers in Mayo. It was around that time that I switched completely
from writing songs with a guitar to writing songs with a piano. I
believe it is a change that has made my songs stronger and more melodic.
“Word Of Spring” followed in 2000
after another long gap and for the first time I felt I had found my true
direction as a songwriter. Finally I had found my own voice both
musically and lyrically. It’s an album that was received with
a good deal of warmth and I made some substantial friends with it. The Waltz Of The Years built on that foundation and now my new album “Here Is The River” will hopefully take my songwriting and Thran Records up onto the next level of the big ladder.
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