Paul Brady

Singer-songwriter Paul Brady is an Irish icon whose songs have been covered by Tina Turner ("Steel Claw" and "Paradise Is Here"), Bonnie Raitt (the title song of her album "Luck of the Draw" as well as "Not the Only One" and "Steal Your Heart Away" and more), Brooks & Dunn ("The Long Goodbye"- co-written with Ronan Keating), Jimmy Buffett ("The World Is What You Make It")...the list goes on and on. This is Paul's story.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Search podcast.
My guest today is singer songwriter Paul Brady. Paul, last year,
you put out an autobiography, Crazy Dreams. What inspired you
to lay down your story at this point?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Well, I suppose it was to try and remember what
happened to me. It's so easy to forget what goes on,
and I spent you know, I used to take notes
all the time, not a diary per se, but I
would always sort of when anything exciting happened, I would
sort of write it up. So I just wanted to
keep a record and as much to try and understand

(00:49):
myself as anything else.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
What did you learn about yourself writing the.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Book That I'm a bit of a lone wolf. I
guess that that that I sort of dabbled in and
out of everything. I was kind of a multi lingual
musically speaking, and you know, not everybody that I knew
in the music business was like that. I mean, I

(01:16):
came through three or four different types of music in
my career. But all the time, I suppose I felt
that I was a bit of a lone wolf. And
for better.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Or for worse, tell me more about being a lone wolf,
not only in the music business, but in life.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Hmmm, well, I suppose you're happy in your own company
for a start, you're happier. I suppose listening and talking
and a lot of what passes for the mainstream you

(01:59):
tend to sort of worry about and see through, and
you tend to want to be I'm sort of on
the on the periphery of everything, you know, And that's
the way I've always been. I've never I've been terminally
non aligned in terms of politics, in terms of musical tastes,
in terms of social morays. You know, I've just been

(02:24):
someone who's you know, I've plowed my own furrow.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
I guess. Well, in the book, you're constantly calling on
friends to play on the records, to go on the road.
You know, you talk about being a lone wolf. Is
that difficult for you to have social anxiety? Or it's
just in your views and lifestyle that you're a lone wolf.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
I think it's just in my views and lifestyle. I mean,
I'm a sociable animal, you know. I like a bit
of crack like everybody else. And you know, I tour solo.
I play solo quite a bit. But I also love
playing with the band, and you know, I'll go through
like a year playing solo and then I'll miss the
camaraderie and and the kickoff the ass of the band,

(03:10):
you know, and so I'll spend a year doing that.
And I mean again, I'm fortunate in that that I
found it easy to do both and saw the beauty
in both. You know.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
Okay, there's a lot in the book about Ireland, in
Northern Ireland, and I just read a book called The
Beasting by Paul Murray, very highly reviewed, and you realize,
as much as we think outside of Ireland we know
what's going on, we really don't. So explain to my

(03:45):
audience the difference between Northern Ireland and the Republic of
Ireland where you sit on that.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
Oh, dear, dear, dear, well, Well, Northern Ireland is part
of the United Kingdom, and a lot of people think
that's a good thing, and a lot of people think
it's not. And that has sort of been at the
route of a lot of antagonism and over the last

(04:21):
one hundred couple of years. But you know, in the
last couple of decades things have quite done quite a bit.
People are much more accepting of each other. And whereas
it's not like walk in the park, the relationship between
the two parts of the country. You know, things are
a lot better than they wear. I mean, it's as

(04:45):
much connected with the United Kingdom the problems as anything
else than I mean, and the United Kingdom is having
their own problems at the moment. A lot of people
in Northern Ireland think that England doesn't really care about
them and just to soon see them go. And but
that's that's this is a very long one. You know,

(05:07):
you might as well try and talk to me about
the Middle East diabob because it's that complicated.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Okay, so you're talking to a American. We're ignorant. Let's
start a little bit back. Tell me about the Irish
War of Independence.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Oh, dear, well, the Irish War of Independence was the
next in a whole many series of revolutions, failed revolutions
since the arrival of Britain. And you know, in the
fifteen hundred and sixteen hundreds, and of course, you know,

(05:53):
it never really left the public imagination, the notion that
we wanted to be Ireland, to be for the Irish.
And you know, the nineteen sixteen Revolution was just the
most recent one of all those attempts, and you know,

(06:15):
in one way failed it failed, but in another way
it it heralded in independence of a sort up until
the mid forties, when Ireland became a republic, or the
south of Ireland became a republic.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Okay, when did the division of Northern and Southern Ireland
take place?

Speaker 2 (06:40):
Nineteen twenty two? I think yeah, round about you know,
the revolution was in the nineteen sixteen, and then the
War of Independence was it sort of grumbled along for
a couple of years, but blew out right into the
open in nineteen nineteen. It went on and on until

(07:02):
twenty two, and that's as far as I can recall
when on Northern Ireland the statelet was kind of invented.
And then of course there was the Irish Civil War
because that invention was on foot of a treaty that
was signed and half the people in the Republic of

(07:24):
Ireland agreed with the treaty and the other half didn't,
and so that ushered in the Irish Civil War nineteen
twenty two twenty three, and that was pretty gruesome. But
you know, since then there haven't been any outright wars.
But you know, it's only in the last decade or

(07:47):
so that things have kind of settled down to, you know,
a state were not everybody's terrified all the time.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
Okay, you grow up in Derry, which to my understanding
is Northern Ireland. I grew up in Connecticut. You spend
time in Norwalk, which is not far from where I
grew up. But I'm not in Connecticut thinking about I
was thinking about the Vietnam War, but I'm not thinking
about whether Connecticut is part of the United States or something.

(08:17):
You're growing up in Northern Ireland. To what degree is
politics of presence in your mind and going around.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
Well, it's I mean, it's it's there all the time,
because you know, politics dictates the social fabric and.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
You know.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
But the other upside of it was that, you know,
I lived on the border. I lived in Straban actually,
which was a few miles south of Derry. I went
to school in Derry. But one of the upsides was
that that you had two cultures you could share, you know,
I mean, living right on the border, I was able
to share in the culture of Ireland and the Republic,

(09:03):
and also in the culture of Britain and the BBC
and pop radio from England and all that, and so
you know it wasn't all a black and white thing.
There were ups and downs.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
And tell me what the friction is between the Protestants
and the Catholics.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Well, it's, oh, well, it's about different, it's about it's tribal,
simple as that. You know, it's simply tribal. It's a
different tribe. You see, when Britain conquered Ireland in the

(09:49):
seventeenth century, they ushered in hundreds of thousands of people
from from across the water and took the land of
the Irish people and and in what was called the plantations,
the plantations of Ulster. So basically that was a whole
tribe coming in and throwing another tribe on the scrap heap.

(10:13):
And you know, as we all know when we look
around the world, even in the contemporary scene, you know,
tribalism is still very much alive.

Speaker 1 (10:25):
Okay. So we know that subsequent to World War two,
things were in black and white in the UK and
there were you know, lack of certain things, etc. What
does the average American know about Ireland? There was a
potato famine in the eighteen hundreds, and then you read

(10:46):
books about our houses in the twentieth century. What was
the standard of life when you were growing up.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
Well, you know, my parents were school teachers, uh primary
school teachers, and so they both had had a kind
of an annual salary. So like whereas we weren't sort
of rich or anything, you know, we didn't want, we

(11:15):
were comfortable enough. We could take take a vacation, you know,
a couple of times a year, and you know, but
but people were a lot poorer than that than they
are now. There wasn't as much opportunity to to make money,

(11:36):
and it was a lot more primitive times. You know,
Ireland was just a new state, you know, only a
couple of decades by that stage, and we were it
was a very poor country and so people didn't have

(11:56):
a lot to throw around and it was a struggle.
But you know, I was one of the fortunate generations
because in the late forties Britain decreed that anybody that
was had got a certain degree of privss in school exams,

(12:19):
got a free got a free education, college scholarship to university.
So that gave a whole generation me included of the
forty somethings, the fifty somethings, the chance to go to
third level education which utterly changed the social and educational

(12:40):
and political map of Northern Ireland. And so I always
feel grateful for that.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
Okay, I don't want to harp on this issue, but
you're going to elementary school, primary school. To all the
kids you're going to school with, do they all have
indoor plumbing?

Speaker 2 (13:01):
Well yeah, yeah, you know, there might have been a
couple of toilets out the back, you know, But but
people had electricity and running water of course, yeah, and
you know, and food and heat. You know, it's you know,
it's just it wasn't a rich society. I was unique

(13:26):
in a way. Most education, even to this day, both
in Northern Ireland and the Republic, is segregated into first
first of all gender segregation and secondly religious Catholic schools
Protestant schools. You know, that was the way it was

(13:51):
all the time. But I went to a school which
was mixed religion and mixed gender. And because it was
a school set up by Quakers in the nineteenth century
who owned a linen mill in the in the village
of Sian Mills, which was three miles south of where
I lived in Straban, and my mother was one of

(14:12):
the teachers there. So I went to school with girls
and boys, elementary school with girls and boys, and with
all religions, and of course, like all children, you think
that's the way everybody is. And it was only until
I got a lot older that I realized that that
was a very unusual thing to happen. And I again,

(14:37):
I'm extremely grateful for that, because I grew up not
thinking that the other tribe had two heads.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
You know, Okay, you're growing up. How much television is
there and how much radio is there?

Speaker 2 (14:59):
Well, there's a lot of We didn't get a television
until nineteen fifty eight, I think it was I was
just going to boarding school, and the whole thing at
the time was, oh, television will distract the kids from
their education, and it's you know, it's a big intrusion

(15:22):
into into the life. So but but I said, when
I came home from for Christmas holidays that that year,
my first year in boarding school, there was a television
in the house, a black and white television which had
Irish Television one or two stations, and also had the BBC,

(15:46):
so we were able to see all the all the
music that came from the BBC in the sixties, you know,
the fifties, sixties, Top of the Pops, you know, all
the big you know, when the when the British pop
music booms started in the late fifties earliest sixties. We
were able to see all that on television in Northern Ireland,

(16:10):
whereas in the Republic they didn't get to see that
because they didn't get the BBC there. So we you know,
I mean, there was a broad multicultural feel growing up
where I grew up.

Speaker 1 (16:23):
Just so I understand is Northern Ireland is controlled by
the UK. They didn't get BBC. They did get BBC
Northern Ireland. Oh, the Republic of Ireland didn't, right right,
I want to make sure that I had that clear, Okay.
So throughout your book there's a long discussion and emphasis
of traditional Irish music. In America, we don't really have that.

(16:45):
Maybe country in Western but you're listening to the radio
growing up, what are you listening to?

Speaker 2 (16:55):
Well, I would dispute that you don't have it in America.
In every single hamlet in America, in every single town
and city amid the Irish community, there is a hugely
healthy Irish music scene and there are festivals all over
the States all summer long, large festivals that deal with

(17:16):
Irish music. But that said, I mean, Irish music was
just a part of the music that I heard when
I was growing up. I mean, like I said, it
was British and American pop music. You know. We used
to listen to Radio Luxembourg, which was originally a European
station which then started to broadcast out of London. And

(17:43):
what happened was that a lot of the American soldiers
who were stationed in Germany would have all these records
that were coming out in the States in the late fifties,
you know, Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochrane, Jean Vincent,

(18:05):
all that kind of stuff was was coming into Germany
with an American serviceman and that ended up on Radio Luxembourg,
and so we heard I heard all this kind of
stuff well, you know, in the late fifties, and so
I was totally I was like a blotting paper. I
just soaked, soaked it all in and all kinds of

(18:30):
music I listened to, you know, I mean, I didn't
sort of differentiate between genres of music. It didn't make
any sense to me to do that it was just
is it good or is it bad? Is it fun
or is it awful to listen to? I just took
it all on board and found, like as I said earlier,
that I was multi lingual. I was I was able

(18:52):
easy to be fluent and a vast and a big,
big variety of music.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Okay, so I'm a little younger than you. I was.
Certainly I'm a little late for Elvis, but I remember
the Beach Boys in the Four Seasons. But when the
Beatles hit, it was literally a revolution in America. What
was the bug that got you going on popular music
that you said, Wow, this is something I have to

(19:22):
dedicate all my time to.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
Well, it was just totally visceral. I mean, I mean
the first time you hear little Richard singing long, tall
sally like, I mean, you're going what you know, I
have never heard anything like this before, and by god,
is it exciting. And it was just hugely exciting and inspiring.

(19:47):
And you know, I felt, hey, I want a bit
of that. I want to I want to open my
mouth and let I yell out and see what comes out.
And so I started singing, and you know, just for fun,
and I got a guitar from the eleventh birthday, and
I taught myself because there were no other guitar players

(20:10):
near me, and the only lesson you could get was
classical music, and that's not really what I was into.
So I kind of taught myself three or four cards,
and I just kept learning through my teens and and
playing at parties and you know, and it wasn't really
until I went to college in nineteen sixty four that

(20:33):
I you know, Harbard sort of seditious thoughts about being
a musician rather than a teacher.

Speaker 1 (20:41):
So you say your parents were teachers, how did they
afford for you to go to boarding school? And what
was your experience at boarding school?

Speaker 2 (20:52):
Well, the education at boarding school was free. They had
to pay for the accommodation, and you know, they just
made that sacrifice because it was an opportunity that they
didn't have, and so I'm grateful to them for that.
But I hated boarding school for a start. As I

(21:14):
said earlier, I'd come from an elementary school of mixed
religions and mixed gender. This boarding school was was a
Catholic boarding school, and it was all boys, and I saw,
I mean, it was just immediately to me how stupid
this is. You know, where's the other half of that
of humanity?

Speaker 1 (21:36):
You know?

Speaker 2 (21:38):
And I just I didn't like being in a school.
It was all just one one sex and one religion.
And you know, there wasn't an awful lot of interest
in the arts in this school. It was it had
a good reputation for academia for you know, mathematics, in English, poetry,

(22:03):
all the sort of the basic things, but they didn't
really value music. And I just felt that, you know,
I wasn't even allowed to bring a guitar to boarding school,
you know, because guitar means rock and roll music, which
is bad, you know. So I mean that was ridiculous,

(22:23):
and so I just basically didn't like boarding school. I
couldn't wait to get out of it.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
Okay. In the book, you talk about going for summer
vacation with your parents at the beach and they're being
show bands and then ultimately playing with the showbands. What
exactly is a show band.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
Show band is a bunch of musicians, you know, maybe
an eight piece band. You might have a drums, bass, keyboard,
tenor sacks, trumpet, trombone, a couple of guitars, and a
singer and well maybe three or four singers maybe the
other instrumentalists would would sing backups. And you know, they

(23:07):
would do all the hits today, you know, they they
would whatever was on top of the pops English television
the week before, the show band would learn it, and
the following weekend at the dances they'd be playing cover
versions of the British and American hits and and some
Irish hits too. I mean, people were starting to write

(23:29):
songs in Ireland and so there wasn't much of an
infrastructure for musicians to write their own songs at the time.
And there was a huge dancing culture in Ireland. Every
weekend and every town in Ireland there were dance halls

(23:54):
where all the young people would go and meet, meet
up and and that, and that's for the show bands play.
And there were like hundreds of show bands in Ireland
at the time, and you know, some of them were
extremely good. In fact, a few of them went to
Las Vegas and the Royal show Band played in I

(24:14):
see a couple of seasons in Las Vegas, and you know,
and the Tour of America. But they were essentially an
Irish phenomenon.

Speaker 1 (24:23):
And how did you end up playing in a show band.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
I didn't play in a show band. I played in
a hotel, just a sort of a little cabaret band
in a hotel in nineteen sixty two sixty three, when
I was like my early teens and I was too
young to play in a show band. It was only like,

(24:47):
as I said, when I went to Dublin later in
the decade. I was seventeen years old, eighteen years old
when I went to UCD in Dublin, and that's when
I started to play in serio music outfits. But I
know I didn't play in the show band, just a
little cabarety band.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
Okay, how do you end up going to college in Dublin.

Speaker 2 (25:09):
Well, that's an interesting question. My sister, three years older
than me, went to Queen's University in Belfast, which was
I suppose where logically I should have gone if I
got to if I passed my exams. But I did
pass my exams, and the year I applied to go

(25:30):
to Belfast to Queen's Universities in Belfast, there was a
superfluity of people applying for the arts faculty. There were
too many applicants for the number of places, so the
college in hisst wisdom declared that people born after a

(25:51):
certain date in the late forties would have to go
back to high school, boarding school for a and repeat
their final year again. And there was no way I
was going to go back to boarding school to repeat
my last year. So we started looking around and my

(26:15):
parents said, well, let's try Dublin. Let's try UCD in Dublin.
So I applied to UCD and I got in. So
in October nineteen sixty four, I ended up in Dublin City,
first time I had ever been in Dublin. I'd never
been more than seventy miles from my home until then,

(26:37):
and I was on my own in Dublin as a student.
And that was, you know, intimidating, but also extremely exciting.
And that's where I first started to listen to rhythm
and blues bands, and because there was loads of them
in Dublin, and that's how I started to play music

(26:58):
in a band.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
Okay, so you're going to school. Tell me about you
start joining bands and playing out in venues. Tell me
about that.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Well, I mean, like there's a small time, you know,
we were semipro. I mean a lot of the people
in the bands had daytime jobs. I mean, I was
supposed to be a student. I wasn't doing and he's
just studying, to be honest, because as soon as I
got to university, I kind of went, what am I
doing here? You know? I was doing an arts degree
studying French Irish language and archaeology, and I wasn't more

(27:36):
interested than that than well, I just wasn't interested, And
so I started going to what was that question again?

Speaker 1 (27:47):
Well, you're in college, and to what degree are you
playing out in clubs in other venues? And does that
become your life and how does that happen?

Speaker 2 (28:00):
Well, yes, I I joined the band, and, like a
lot of bands in those areas, you know, we lasted
six months and then I went. Then we all imploded
and became another band and called ourselves a different name.
And after another six months, I joined another band. So
I was in three or four bands over the space

(28:20):
of two college years, and we were playing maybe twice
three times a week. Sometimes. There was a real upsurge
of venues for what were called beat groups at the time,
as opposed to show bands, which were the professional guys
with the snazzy suits and all that. We were the

(28:43):
grubby beat groups, and we played we played soul music.
We played Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Ray, Charles I, Cantina Turner,
marvel Ettes, and of the British blues things, John Mayol,

(29:04):
Spencer Davis. We did covers of of all that stuff.
And so that's what a lot of the bands in
Dublin were doing at the time, the younger bands who
weren't professional. So there were tennis clubs, there were rugby clubs,
there were a few, you know, maybe half a dozen
beat music performing clubs, and there were all classes, you know, schools, stuff,

(29:32):
you know, where people played. At the time, nobody took
it very seriously. Nobody thought it was going anywhere. Nobody
actually even thought about the future. It was just we're
having fun playing the music we love, and that's that's
what kept me going for two years until I was,

(29:54):
you know, someoneed by the registrar of UCD to explain
why I hadn't been at lectures for the previous year
and a half. And my parents got word of this
disgrace and there was an immediate hiatus in my time
with the bands in Dublin, and there happened to be

(30:21):
sort of about a six month period where I wasn't
in the band, but I bought myself an acoustic guitar
and I was back in Dublin in my final year
at college and I was playing and what we're now
just springing up all over the city, things called folk clubs.
We're talking now sixty six, and of course it started

(30:43):
earlier in the States. I think Dylan's first album was
sixty two or something. But it just shows you how
long it took things to travel in those days. Information
musical information like that didn't happen overnight the way it
did hear. So there were the folk scenes started in
Ireland and there were folk groups that were suddenly at

(31:07):
the top of the charts in Ireland. There was a
whole two or three year period where it was just
all Irish folk music in Ireland, and I was swept
up in that, which was very exciting, and I fell
in love with it and became a very strong arrow
in my quiver of music from then on and still is.

(31:28):
All of the seventies, basically, while the world was into
glam rock, I was into hardcore Irish trad music until
really the end of the seventies, when I decided I
wanted to I'd had enough of that and I wanted
to see if it could be a songwriter.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
So how did it end with you in college?

Speaker 2 (31:54):
Badly? I just I failed my fine exams and I
didn't go back to repeat because at that stage I
had already become a member of a top A chart
topping Irish folk group. I'd been asked to join that,
and suddenly I was making a decent living and I

(32:17):
was on television and my parents sort of kind of
saw some kind of logic in that amid their disappointment,
because I mean, let's face that, they were teachers, you know,
so they wanted me to have a degree to fall
back on was the term, you know. But when you're
that age, you don't want to you don't want to
think about falling back on anything.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
So how do you end up in the Johnstons?

Speaker 2 (32:41):
Well, that was a series of accidents. I was in
an apartment above one of the members of the band,
and we used to play poker at night and he
would keep me informed of the the personnel fractions that
happened within the band, and one point one of the
members left and I had already been opening for this
band as a solo folk singer in some of the

(33:03):
clubs in towns. So they were aware of my music,
so they asked me to join the band, and this
would have been summer of sixty seven and then from
then on I was a professional musician. That's I've been
a professional musician since then.

Speaker 1 (33:22):
Okay, what is the status of the Johnston's at that
point and what.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Is the goal? Well, the Johnson's had just had a
number one hit in Ireland with the Ewan McCalls song
called the Traveling People about the Trap, about the Gypsy
community and the travelers as they're called here, and so

(33:46):
that put them at the top of the charts in Ireland.
They so we were playing all over the country, making
big money and on radio and television all the time.
And then we were discovered by a British label called
Transatlantic Records, owned by Not Joseph and this was a

(34:13):
really progressive label in the UK at the time. It
sort of had a lot of the the the upcoming
British folk artists like Pentangle, like Bert Jansk, John Renbourn,
Billy Connolly was was in the band with Jerry Rafferty

(34:36):
called the Humble Bombs. They were on Transatlantic Records too,
the Dubliners for a while, we're on Transatlantic Records and
not Joseph heard about the Johnstons in Ireland and we'd
done a couple of concerts in London. He came to
see us in London, so he offered us a record deal.

(34:57):
So we we had our first international record deal in
nineteen late nineteen sixty seven early sixty eight with Transatlantic Records.
So we went to England to make our first album,
which was called the White Album because it was a
white sleeve on us. And we made about five or

(35:19):
six albums maybe even more for Transatlantic from nineteen sixty
seven through nineteen seventy three seventy four, and then the
band split up.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
Okay, you're a guy who hasn't been one hundred miles
from home. You go to college at Dublin, you're kind
of in and out of college. Suddenly you're on TV
in America. That was a dream. What was it like
to suddenly be on TV and to be on the radio.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
Well, you know, you know, as part of the beauty
and madness of being that age, you know, you go,
you take it for granted, you go, oh yeah, and
I mean I always I always had confidence in my
musical gift, and I call it the gifts because I
really mean that, you know, it's something you're given, and

(36:19):
but I never had confidence that it would get noticed.
I suppose that's that's part of the lone wolf mentality too.
So for the first time, the music that I felt
was really good, that I that I was making got
started to get noticed. So that was exciting, and I

(36:40):
was I was touring a lot all over the continent
with with with the Johnston Scandinavia, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France
and uh, you know, we just took a nurse tride.
I mean it was exciting. Of course it was siting,

(37:00):
but but I didn't think it was undeserved.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
Okay, you're a young twenty something on the road. That's
a legendary situation. Are you partiking of the substances in
the offerings on the road.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Well, to a Modica, I'd have to say, I'm you know,
I'm an irishman, so I like my drink. And you know,
there was really nothing much going around Ireland at the
time except a bit of hash and grass, and the

(37:42):
whole coke thing didn't happen until mid seventies, and fortunately
I just was able to avoid that. I had no
interest in COCD and coke at all. Just made your
teeth tingle. You know, I totally uninterested in coke, So
I escaped all that. It was lovely, but you know, no,
I I was sort of, you know, modest in any

(38:08):
of my obsessions. And I never really got hung up
on Anathan, thankfully.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
How about the group Bees?

Speaker 2 (38:19):
You know an odd time sir, it's hard to resist.

Speaker 1 (38:28):
You want to you want to stay with that? It
was hard to resist.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yeah, sure you're that age. Sure that's what you are,
you know.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
And when do you start writing songs?

Speaker 2 (38:40):
Well? I had the thing about the Johnston's was not
Joseph wanted them to be a contemporary act like the Seekers, uh,
whereas it was a very schizophrenic band. We were so schizophrenical.
We actually put out two albums on the one day.
One was a hardcore trad album Irish Trad, and the
other was an album an orchestral the arranged album of

(39:03):
cover songs of Jacques Brill, Gordon Lightfoot, Ian McCall, Leonard Cohen,
Joni Mitchell. We had a hit single with Jonny Mitchell's
both sides now and in Ireland, and it got up

(39:24):
to the mid fifties in the States. And then suddenly
Electra Records remembered that one of their acts, Judy Collins,
happened to have a recording of the song on her album.
I think it was called Wildflowers. So they threw that

(39:45):
out and we tussled with her for about three or
four weeks, and eventually Judy Collins's version became the hit
in the States. So that was as close as we
came to having a hit single in America. But I
like to think that in some way I contributed, We

(40:05):
contributed to her success in that her record company wouldn't
even have remembered the song on her album if we
hadn't been tickling the charts.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
So once again, when do you start writing songs?

Speaker 2 (40:24):
Well, I'd been listening to Jerry Rafferty and Al Stewart,
people like that in London, and I tried to write
a few songs on In fact, they had written some
songs with the Johnson's in their last couple of albums.

(40:46):
There were some songs of mine in the early early
mid seventies. You know that one song in particularly called
Continental Trailways Bus, which probably was one of the standout
songs of my time writing there, but I never really
took it seriously until one day I was driving along
and I heard this song on the radio, which turned

(41:08):
out to be Baker Street, and I just totally freaked
pulled the car over the side of the road, stop
the engine and listened to this and I said, what
is this? And it was Shirry Raffany. I said, I
know Jerry Rafferty. He's on the same label as me,
and he's only a folks singer. How did he come
up with this? And I was totally blown away by

(41:30):
the song? And then I got his album City to City,
which was just a stunning album, and I just said,
you know, hey, bye bye traditional music. I want to
see if I can write songs like this. So I
started to write songs in late seventy eight early seventy nine,
and by the end of seventy nine I had enough

(41:53):
songs to put together a band in Dublin and start touring.
And by the end of nineteen eighty I decided I
got a record deal and I did an album and
it came in early eighty one. The album is called

(42:14):
hard station.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
Let's go back. You're in the Johnstons. All of a sudden,
this Thingali enters the picture. You go to the US
to get a record deal. You're living on nothing. Tell
us about that period.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
Oh, that was a dark period in my life. You know, definitely,
I was very impressionable. I was in my very early twenties,
and you know, I kind of I suppose all the
thing I discovered about myself was that, you know, I
don't like change. I'd rather stick with something that's not

(42:57):
entirely one hundred percent rather than look for something else
in the dark. So that's why I probably stuck longer
in the band the Johnson's than I that than I
should have. So it was a very difficult time. I mean,
it's complicated because of things I'm not sure I want

(43:22):
to go into here, but uh, just it was the
worst time to be trying to get a record deal
in America because it was it was the time the
first energy crisis hit hit the oil industry, and vinyl
became prohibitively expensive, and a lot of the American labels

(43:42):
were not only not signing new acts, but they were
dropping their own acts wholesale because of the cost of vinyl,
and so that was it was. We were on a
heightened and often looking for a record deal at that time.
Even though we did a private addition for Clive Davis
in his office. We did an acoustic audition for Clive

(44:05):
Davis and he said, I'll get back.

Speaker 1 (44:11):
To you classic, But you're living as kind of fly
by night people in the US. You're running out on
hotel bills. Rent tell me about that.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
Well, I'm not sure I want to go into that
very deeply. I mean, it's not a period of my
life I'm very proud of. And I know the statute
of limitations has probably rung out. We'll probably leave it
at that.

Speaker 1 (44:39):
Okay, But the guy who ends up being involved with
the woman in the act, you're accepting it face value.
At what point do you realize this guy's a liar
and a crook?

Speaker 2 (44:53):
Well, I can't you. I cand of knew it. I
never really felt that. I never really felt happy with
him in the band, but at the time not Joseph,
the record company boss, was very excited with him and
wanted to see if he could turn this into songwriters

(45:18):
and have hits and stuff like that. So, like I said,
I just kind of went with the flow. And I mean,
you know, I put up with a lot more than
I should have, but you put up with an awful
lot of that age. You know, it seems to be
going okay, you know, and so let's not rock the boat.
That was a mistake.

Speaker 1 (45:46):
During this window, you're back in Ireland and you meet
the woman who becomes your wife. Not only do you
meet her, she comes a couple of times to the US.
How'd you meet her? And what did she say about
your situation when she came to the US having an
outside view?

Speaker 2 (46:05):
Well, we met at the funeral of a famous Irish
traditional musician called Willie Clancy down in the west of Ireland,
in County Claire, and I was back in Ireland for
Christmas and he died in January. So I went down
to the funeral with a lot of friends of mine

(46:26):
and we were having some fun later on after the
funeral in one of the local pubs when the Skill
arrives in from Dublin with another friend of hers. They
were also music fans and they had come down just
to you know, join in the gathering. So that's where

(46:47):
I first saw Mary, who went on to become my wife.
And still is. And I went back to the States
the end of January. She came over that summer. She
was still doing her Masters in Trinity in Dublin and

(47:09):
so she had to wait to finish her exams. And
she came over and we were living at the time
in Norwalk, Connecticut, and she immediately saw that this was
this was a MADS situation, and you know, I knew
it too, but she kind of really made my mind up.

(47:33):
And from then on we basically worked steadily to getting
an exit. It was difficult because I had nowhere to go.
I had left the whole scene in Ireland. I had
nothing to step into again if I if I left
the Johnson's. To some extent, I was a little bit
embarrassed by all that. Didn't want to go back home

(47:55):
with nothing. But eventually I got asked to join another
and which were big in Ireland at the time, called Planksty,
and that was my ticket out of hell. And I
found myself back in Ireland in nineteen seventy four again
in one of the top bands in the country. I mean,
how lucky? Is that?

Speaker 1 (48:16):
Very lucky? So tell me about your tenure with Planksty.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Well, that was I mean that was part of a
whole decade of involvement in Irish traditional music, which was
you know, I put out an album with the colleague
of mine, Andy Irvine, who was one of the members
of Planksty. Planksy didn't last that long. Planksty Mark three
I call it, which was what I joined, only lasted

(48:43):
for about a year and a half. And then I
kept playing with one of the members of that band
and the Irvine. We made this album in the late
seventies which went on to become a kind of a
folk classic, which which was really the album that introduced

(49:03):
my music to Dylan because he heard that album. He
was friendly with Happy Troum, Happy and Artie Trum, with
these brothers who were contemporaneous with Dylan in the village
in the early sixties, and Dylan would call in Unhappy
Troum on his way up to Woodstock every so often

(49:24):
and say, what are you listening to now? And Happy
had just got this album by Andy and me, so
he gave it to Dylan, and so that's how I
came to Bob Dylan's notice, and so that album became
a classic, and then I did an album of my
own in the late seventies, which sort of became a
classic too, in the sense that it won the Melody

(49:46):
Maker Folk Album of the Year nineteen seventy eight, and
the melody Maker was probably with the New Musical Express,
the two leading British music papers at the time, so
that was a big coup. And so you know, that
whole type of music interested me hugely, still does and

(50:07):
kept being going through the seventies. But by seventy nine,
as I said earlier, I kind of felt that I
spent enough time doing that and I wanted to see
what else I had going on inside me, and I
wanted to become a songwriter.

Speaker 1 (50:23):
Okay, you meet an agent who's a turning point in
your career, tell us about that.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
I mean a book an agent. Yeah, yeah, Well I
met with Paul Charles, who at the time was I
think he was at a festival. I met him and
he was the agent for Lloyd and Wainwright at the time,
and he caught me on stage and I was at
the height of my fame in Ireland at the time,

(50:54):
just crossing over from folk into rock, and so he
made an offer to become my book an agent, and
he was based in London, and I mean he was
book an agent for lots of huge acts, you know,
like Crosby, Stills and Nash, Tom Waits, a lot of

(51:18):
the acts that came in from America. He was the
agent for us. So look, it was a very prestigious
agency to be with. And he started to book me
in the UK and through Europe and I it lasted
for I don't know, fifteen years, a very good relationship

(51:40):
and I'm very grateful for him. He largely contributed to
a lot of whatever success I garnered and still have
it this day now.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
He wanted to be the manager too.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
Yeah, well, I mean that didn't feel right to me
because you know, as I say, it's the manager's job
to beat up the agent, you know, and so there
was a clear cut conflict of interests there. But you know,
I mean he he stepped aside when when when another

(52:18):
management option came to the fore, which was dire strates
management company called Damage Management, and they they they took
over the management and you know that worked fine, and
I was with them for another five years.

Speaker 1 (52:39):
Okay, but Ed mcnell ran the agency. But you were
with Paul Cummins, who was more of a tour manager
for Dire Straits. Do I have it right?

Speaker 2 (52:49):
Yeah, Well, at the time he became my manager, he
was tour manager for Dire Straits. But he wanted he
wanted something for He wanted an act for himself, you know,
as well as Dire Straits. He wanted his own little thing,
you know, so he he offered to manage me. And

(53:10):
like he mean, obviously he liked my first album and
he fell in love with a lot of the songs,
and you know, we got on very well. And and
so we we sat out on a road of artists
and manager. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:28):
And what was the goal then, because at the time
his biggest Dire Straits was in the US. People don't
realize they were the biggest band in the world at
that time. They were playing stadiums in the rest of
the world when they were not that big yet in
the US. But what was the play you know, would
they say, we're going to turn you into the new
Jerry Rafferty. What was the goal here?

Speaker 2 (53:51):
I mean the goal was vaguely get as successful as
you can have hit records. You know, the record company
wanted me to have hits. I was you know, I toured,
I opened for Dire Straits and one of their biggest
ever European tours. As a solo act acoustic guitar, I
walked out on stage in front the twenty thousand people
every night in nineteen eighty three, and so that kind

(54:16):
of blooded me, so to speak. Nothing nothing phased me
after that. Once you stood on the stage in Italy
with an audience of twenty thousand people who, let's face it,
are only there to look at themselves, you know, and
you get away with it, and you get a few
people going, hey, hey, hey, you know you're not afraid
of anything.

Speaker 1 (54:36):
Opening you open for Dire Strait, You opened for Eric Clapton.
Are you making fans or are you just getting paid?

Speaker 2 (54:45):
Well, I'm making fans, yes, I mean people came to
my gigs, my own gigs ten years later who said
to me, like, you know, the first time I ever
saw you was when you open for Eric Clapton, you know,
and so you're always reaching people, you know, And but

(55:08):
you know, at the time, I never expected anything, you know.
I mean, I just wanted to write music and make
records and sing and have fun with the band and
make some money. Yeah, but I never really thought long
and hard about global fame or success. Didn't really didn't

(55:33):
really think of it was going to happen.

Speaker 1 (55:35):
Okay, going back a little bit in Ireland there are
some successful acts. Van Morrison has them and then goes solo.
There's Thin Lizzy. To what degree are you aware of
that is a fraternity or is everybody separate? And you
just have a worldview that's just another hit actor. He said, Oh,
that's the Irish. They can do it.

Speaker 2 (55:55):
I can do it.

Speaker 1 (55:58):
That.

Speaker 2 (55:58):
It was a bit of both, you know. I mean
we weren't you know, we weren't exactly buddies. Although I
did get a nice postcard from Switzerland from Rory Gallaher
saying how much he loved my first album, which was nice.
Came out of the blue. You know. Yeah, I loved

(56:19):
Van Morrison, I loved Rory Gallaher, loved Finn Lizzie, Phil Lennett,
all those man's great players. And you know I was
just doing my thing. They were doing theirs.

Speaker 1 (56:38):
Okay, now there's a breakthrough for you. When Ed from
Damage Management meets with Tina Turner's new manager and suggests
steel Claw, tell us that story.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
Well, I had to recall I had written a song
called steel Claw about the underbelly of of of early
eighties Dublin. Uh and uh it was on my album,
my second album, and uh, I had well Ed McNall was,
who was the supremo in in damage management my managed company,

(57:22):
went to dinner one night with Roger Davies. Roger said,
you know, he Roger had first got a song from
Mark Knopfler called Private Dancer, which went on to become
the title of of I Think our comeback album and
certainly one of the biggest hits on it.

Speaker 1 (57:43):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
And so Roger Davis said that Ed, you know, have
you got any other acts that have songs? So Ed
happened to like the song steel Claw on my album.
He gave he gave a tape of it to Roger,
and Roger played it for Tina, and Tina loved it.
And they got back and said, look, yeah, Tina loves
the song. It's really all right up the street. She'd

(58:05):
like to change a word or two here, She'd like
to make it about San Francisco instead of Dublin. Is
that okay? And I say, you know yeah? And so
she recorded the song and I got a copy of
a tape of her recording, and I thought it was great,
and I was a huge fan obviously, as I told

(58:26):
you earlier, I'd been singing covers of I Can Tina
Turner songs, you know, in my early teens in Dublin
and the first band was and so I was a
huge fan of Tina Turner's and it was a huge
honor to get her singing your song. But then two
weeks later I got a message from management saying, oh,

(58:47):
Roger has decided to bin the whole album. He feels
that stylistically the production is too dated, and he's just
decided that he wants Tina to start again and record
a whole new album. So that that was very disappointing
for me, you know, and here was my big chance

(59:09):
of getting the cut down a Steena Turner album, and
it's wrestled out of my grasp. But then about six
months later, to my surprise, I got another phone call saying,
you know, Paul, Tina's just recorded a whole other album
and she's been all the songs from the first album
except one, and guess what that one is? Nice to

(59:30):
tell me and he said it's steel Claw, your song,
and I said wow. So that was lucky, very very
lucky and the song landed up on Tina's Private Dancer album,
which went on on to sell Squilliams and was my

(59:53):
first a major hit as a songwriter, and that helps.
Before that, like with Carlos Santana, had recorded a song
of mine, you know, but this was like serious, a
serious hit at a time when there was serious money
to be made in publishing in the record business. So
you know, somebody was looking after me at the time.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
Did you own the publishing.

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
No, I know, I had a publishing deal where you know,
the publisher had to split and I had a split,
you know, But but I mean I the song was mine,
and you know when the publishing deal was so the
song was mine again, you know. So yeah, very fortunate.

Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
You mean, I remember Carter blowing smoke up my ass.
So I got a new Tina Turner album. No one
expected that album to be successful other than him. All
of a sudden, what's it like when it becomes mega successful?
It's your song. You can see the money waiting down.
That must have been an amazing experience. It's not like
you know, having you know, someone color record who's white hot.

Speaker 2 (01:01:01):
At that time, Yeah, it was like the biggest thing
that ever happened to me career wise at the time,
and it was only the beginning, because she recorded another
song of my on her follow up album, Break Every Rule,
this time produced by Mark Knopfler, who was very good
to me. And so it went on from there, and

(01:01:26):
suddenly I started to become known as a songwriter who
wrote songs that you know, had a depth to them
and had a chance also of commercial success. So a
lot of people started the cover songs, and I suppose

(01:01:48):
the last time I counted, I suppose I've had about
one hundred and ten covers since I started writing songs,
So that helped a lot.

Speaker 1 (01:01:59):
Before we move on the second song, Tina cuts his
Paradise is Here. I love that song. How did you
come up with that song?

Speaker 2 (01:02:11):
Well, I was written a mystic called Christiana Murdy at
the time and a book called as far as I remember,
Beyond Violence, and yeah, there was a there was a

(01:02:32):
concept in it which appealed to me where he just
he was discussing, you know, how people live in the
future and then the present, and the idea was there's
no such thing as the future. This moment right now
is actually the first moment of the future, so therefore
the present it's the only thing that matters, and if

(01:02:54):
you have to live, you have to live right in
the present. And that had a big impact on me,
you know, psychically and spiritually at the time. And I
was going through a lot of an age where I was,
you know, trying to figure out a lot of stuff
for myself about you know, what I was, what I felt,

(01:03:16):
you know, and this made a lot of sense to me,
you know, to not be living in the future all
the time, and it just it made sense to try
and dream up a situation or a relationship situation where
one of the partners was living in the future all
the time and the other wanted to, you know, get

(01:03:40):
it together right now. And that's was the initial inspiration
for the song, I suppose, I mean, I was expressing
my feminine side at the time, because the song, really
it's probably best as a woman's song, and Tina, you know,
made that obvious when she sang it. I mean, because

(01:04:02):
more often than not, it's the man who's living in
the future and the woman who wants him to live
in the present. So I must have been expressing my
female side when I wrote that song.

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
Okay, then you make a record with Gary Katz, who
was famous, started with Jay and the Americans, was friends
with them, The Maids, all these records with Steely Dan.
How do you get hooked up with Gary Katz?

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
One of my colleagues in the record company I was
with at the time in the UK was very friendly
with Gary Katz, and you know, they were buddies. And
this guy from the company liked my album, the previous album,
and he said, why don't you send some of your

(01:04:59):
demos to Gary. So I had a whole bunch of
songs written, which eventually became the album Trick or Treat,
and I sent them off to Gary Katz and he
loved them and he said, let's do a record. I'll
come out here and do it, and let's do it
in the LA. And so I suddenly found myself in
LA making a record with Gary Katz's producer, and with

(01:05:22):
Jeff Porcaro and drums, and David Pitch on keyboards, and
Jimmy Johnson and Freddie Washington playing bass on different tracks,
and Mike Landau playing guitar. You know, I'm going ahead,
this happen, you know, And but they all love the songs,
and you know me because I mean, at the time,

(01:05:42):
I was writing in a whole variety of styles of songs.
I was writing in pop style and blues style, and
rock style and country style and funk style. I mean,
I was I was sort of thrown everything at the wall,
just just for the for fun to see, to see
if it would stick. And all the guys in the

(01:06:03):
band love loved the songs, and we had a great
time making the record, and we eventually ended up in
Bearsville over in New York, which stock and then finished
the album in the Hits Factory in New York. This
would have been nineteen nineteen eighty nine to ninety. Yeah,

(01:06:27):
And so the album came out and it got a
lot of notice, but you know, it didn't set the
world alight, but got a lot of nice attention.

Speaker 1 (01:06:39):
So what was your experience, because there was a lot
of money involved and it sounded very contemporary as opposed
to some of your other projects, which were made with
lower budgets and were more singular in terms of style.
Did you feel like you'd lost control or you said, no,
I'm riding this train, this is good.

Speaker 2 (01:06:58):
No, I love I loved, I mean, I mean, I
thought stylistically very much at home in Trick or Treet.
You know, there was nothing that was being voisted on
me that I didn't love, you know, And in fact,
I was probably golding them on, you know, and I

(01:07:19):
loved it, you know, because I'm a huge tally Dan fan.
I always was, and I loved that kind of music.
And I was just felt so excited that that the songs,
the vehicles that I gave them were inspiring enough to
them to play the beautiful music they did, you know.

(01:07:40):
I mean they played some beautiful music on that album,
absolutely gorgeous music.

Speaker 1 (01:07:45):
There's a song on there called Can't Stop Wanting You?
How words on a summer night, you and me having
a fight one drink at all can't come out before
I knew what we were fighting about. And then you
talk about the guy. Tell me about the backstory of
this song.

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
I guess, just a row, you know, I mean you
watch people, you know, it's a row you had with
your missus, you know, at the time, and because you had,
I suppose different points a view on certain subjects. Oh,

(01:08:33):
I don't know. I don't like to paraphrase songs on mine,
you know what I mean? A song is a very
subtle thing, and I think to explain it is kind
of neutralizes it and takes the mystery out of it.
So I'll let you guess what it's about.

Speaker 1 (01:08:49):
Okay, So you make this album, it's called Trick or Treat,
you do a duet with Bonnie Ate, which it becomes
the title song. Was that song already written and were
you planning not to do it as a duet just yourself?

Speaker 2 (01:09:04):
Ah? Yeah, I had. I had that song written probably
two years before, and and in fact, i'd sent it
to Bunny because she's asked me how to any songs,
and I sent it to her with a few to
perhaps her cotting it, you know, But she came down

(01:09:26):
to studio and it, you know, it just seemed natural.
She just suggested singing ana verse and it worked out perfect.
And I just love that Jewett. I just I think
the song is perfect for the duet, and I just

(01:09:48):
love the way she takes off and makes it her
own in a song that I felt I pretty much
made my own, you know too. So there were two
very strong colors in that and that recording, and I
always liked that.

Speaker 1 (01:10:03):
Okay, But how do you meet Balie reid.

Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
Well it was through her best player, hug Hutchinson, who
was he liked to call himself hibern new Field, which
is someone who likes things Irish from the Latin for Ireland, Hibernia.
And he was always interested in Irish trad music. He
was very much aware of what I was doing in

(01:10:30):
the seventies as a trad act, and he loved he
always loved Irish music. And a mutual friend of ours,
Tomorrow O'Connell, an Irish singer who now lives in Nashville,
told hutch that I was coming to la and hutch said,

(01:10:55):
I'd love to meet him, So so I called him
up and we met, and he invited me down to
a concert that Bunnie was doing with Jackson Brown and
the Santa Monic Pacific Auditorium. It was a benefit for
something or Older, which a lot of Bonnie's concerts are,
and he took me back stays afterwards, and that's where

(01:11:18):
I met Bunnie. And at the same time, she was
standing with Meryl streep So, I'm going here is Bunny
rid him marriage streep Hey.

Speaker 1 (01:11:30):
So when you met her at the Santa Monica Civic,
did she already know who you were, had you already
sent the song?

Speaker 2 (01:11:37):
Well, she My memory is playing tricks on me here now. Ah.
I can't quite recall whether she had heard not the
only one before that or not, and whether this was
just the first time we'd met. If I'd known you're

(01:11:58):
going to ask me this question, I would probably thought
harder about it. But I can't quite remember the sequence
of events. Okay, as I say, said, you can't walk
on to it.

Speaker 1 (01:12:07):
How did she end up coming to the studio.

Speaker 2 (01:12:11):
Well, you know that happened after the meeting at the
backstage in the Civic auditorium. I asked her, when you
come down and listen to stuff, you know? And she
was very happy to come down and did it. And
then she said, have you any songs yourself for me?

(01:12:33):
And I had just written the night before a song
called the Look of the Draw, and I still hadn't
even done a tape of it myself. I just had
it in my head. So I sang it for her
on acoustic guitar in the studio and she just said, wow,
that song that sounds like an album title. She said,

(01:12:56):
Love of the Draw, And she took the song and
record and call the album afterwards, and there you go
another but a magic that happened to me.

Speaker 1 (01:13:07):
Okay, just to be clear, she was the one who
suggested she sing on Trick or Treat.

Speaker 2 (01:13:12):
You didn't ask her, I can't recall, Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:13:16):
So then she puts out Look of the Draw which
is even better than the breakthrough Nick of Time. You
have those two songs on it not the only one
in Luck of the Draw on it's the title song.
How does that feel? And how do you feel any
changes now that you have all this success as a songwriter.

Speaker 2 (01:13:36):
Well, I'm you know, I mean, obviously you know. I'm
I'm a married man of two young children. I have
a mortgage, and it's great to be making a living frankly,
and I'm I'm enjoying playing live a lot. I'm not

(01:13:56):
enjoying the record business, to have to say, I'm not
enjoying the music business in terms of the records and
radio and stuff like that. I'm finding a lot of
pressure on me to change the kind of music and Megan,
and I'm finding a lot of pressure on me to

(01:14:20):
reach the status that I don't feel as me and
I don't feel comfortable with. So I started to experience
a lot of stress within the record business. But but
I still was writing songs all the time and enjoying

(01:14:41):
recording them and enjoying covers very much so, but I
was definitely going off the record business.

Speaker 1 (01:14:52):
So were you pitching your songs or were people finding you?
Or was your manager publisher pitching your song?

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
Finally enough, most of the vast majority of my covers
of the songs that I already recorded, came from people
hearing my records. My my reputation as a songwriter spread
among the musical fraternity in a way you know that

(01:15:24):
was really organic and got me on a lot of
interest and got a lot of covers for me. My
publisher got a few covers, but frankly, not all that many,
and most of it came from my own recordings.

Speaker 1 (01:15:43):
But you weren't the type who was sitting at home
and saying, I have this song, this would be good
for somebody. Let me feel how to connect to that guy.
Let me send the song just hit to that person.

Speaker 2 (01:15:54):
No, I mean I I you know, I never promoted myself.
I never pushed myself. I never.

Speaker 1 (01:16:06):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:16:07):
I went to Nashville for a while in the early nineties,
wrote about fifty songs there, and most of them are
probably sitting in drawers ever since. You know, I just
the whole songwriting factory thing just left, you know, it
left me cold. I felt that I didn't want to
write songs that way, and I just that it wasn't

(01:16:28):
my thing. And I was, you know, I was quite comfortable.
I was making a good living, and my reputation wasn't
exactly hurting, all right. I wasn't world famous, and you know,
my record company was thinking maybe they'd signed the wrong act,
and you know, but I was, you know, I didn't

(01:16:55):
feel natural trying to compete within the world of the
the top top hundred, you know, and feel comfortable doing that.

Speaker 1 (01:17:04):
You talk about writing Luck of the draw the night
before Bonnie hears it. Do you write your songs on
inspiration or do you cobble them together over time?

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
Well, you know, most of my most of my earlier
songs are total inspiration. And then you go to a
period where you're fed up going down the mine and
you start to look around you at other people and
see what they're doing with their lives, and that inspires
you then to write about other people, but in a

(01:17:40):
way that makes it feel like it's coming from you,
and then later on I enjoyed the whole business of
co writing, because you know, you get this stage sometimes
where you know you're fed up traveling through the depths

(01:18:02):
of the earth trying to come up with yet another
original idea, when you could be having fun writing with
someone else. Whose who whose ideas you see? I I
as much fun making music as I do write in lyrics,
and quite often I love somebody to send me a lyric.
I mean, my latter records have been made up of

(01:18:26):
a lot of co writes, which which I really enjoy.
It shows a different side of myself musically, because when
when you're writing all the song yourself, you kind of
subconsciously limit yourself in some way. I can't explain it exactly,
but when you're writing with someone else, there's no limits.

(01:18:46):
And I wrote in styles with other people that I
wouldn't let myself write and when I was writing a
song on my own. I mean a perfect example of
that will be The Long Goodbye, which I wrote with
Roland Keating. I mean that as a classic pop song,
and I wrote most of the music in that song,
so I could make that kind of music, but I
wouldn't let myself make that kind of music if I

(01:19:09):
was writing a song on my own, because I would
have felt, oh, that's to poppy, Paul, and they won't
buy that, you know, from you. And so I always
had these conflicts about how close I wanted to go
to pop music, and you know, I ended up going
I just want to write what I want to write myself.

Speaker 1 (01:19:28):
You know, Okay. In the book you go on and
on that when a record comes to the end, to
the mixing stage, you tend to become very anxious and
have a hard time letting go. You've made a lot
of records, tell us about that.

Speaker 2 (01:19:47):
Well, you know, it's not as bad now as it
used to be because I have a lot more control.
And when I make a record now, I make it myself,
make it my own studio. I put it out when
I want to put it out, you know, which, more
often than that is probably the worst time to put
it out. But I couldn't care anymore. I just want Nowadays,

(01:20:08):
it's easier for me to make a record. But in
the old days, yeah, in the old days, you'd you'd
be in a studio for a limited amount of time,
and you'd have these musicians. They are all expensive musicians,
so you felt you had to, you know, you had

(01:20:30):
to come up with something in a very short space
of time. And quite often I found that very stressful.
And those little pings kind of have just straight as
those little pings kind of change my my. I forgot
what we were talking about that.

Speaker 1 (01:20:49):
Well, as I say, you were talking about the records
being mixed. Not happy, You want to react, you want
to spend more time.

Speaker 2 (01:20:56):
Yeah, yeah, Well, when you live, when you live with
a record, you know, for as long as I would
live with a record, you know, and when you know
everything that's gone on in it, you know, you can
hear the squeak on the bas drum pedal, you know,
for God's sake, you've got all this stuff coming at
you out of the speakers, and you know, it's very

(01:21:16):
hard to finally just say all right, that mixes the one,
you know. And I would always go definitely temporarily insane
when I finished an album. And that's why, you know,
I let other people mix my albums, because you know,
you're too far inside something you can't really you can't

(01:21:37):
really hear it anymore. And so it's a lot easier now,
But in the old days, it was very hard, I
have to say.

Speaker 1 (01:21:46):
So now you have your own studio, you're making the
records yourself. Aid do you mix them yourself? And how
do you decide when they're done today? When you have
all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:21:56):
Well, I don't, you know, I don't mix them myself. No,
And I think that's a very good thing. And if
you you know, I work with the mixing engineer and
we would mutually agree when it was finished at a
pace that that is where there's total absence of pressure,

(01:22:18):
you know, and you sleep on it, and you know,
you sleep on the mix for a week and you
listen to it again and you go, maybe just tweet
tweak it out of EBITs, But other than that, you
know you're happy with this? Then yeah, I mean I
let things go an off a lot quicker.

Speaker 1 (01:22:31):
And now, okay, we live in the internet era where
anybody can make a track, put it up on a
streaming service. The biggest acts in music history, most of
them don't make new music, and those to be who do,
the album can disappear in a day. So does this

(01:22:53):
affect your mindset? Does this affect your motivation? Not remotely? Absolutely,
not remotely. The things that that affect me. Are what's
happening with my family right now, you know? And how
often am I going to see them? I have a
son that lives in New Zealand with three children there

(01:23:15):
three grandchildren. I have a daughter that lives in the
UK with two grandchildren. You know, I'm at a stage
where family for me.

Speaker 2 (01:23:25):
Is you know, I'm not I'm drawing back to some
extent from the from making music, and to me, family
is a very important thing at the moment, and I
don't manage to see half enough of them. We go
out to New Zealand once a year to see my

(01:23:48):
son and but it's a long way away. And yeah,
we're going back again in January for three weeks. That'll
be nice.

Speaker 1 (01:24:00):
How often do you work live now? And what does
it take to get you out.

Speaker 2 (01:24:05):
Well? I mean I the first half of this year
I worked quite a bit. I actually did three nights
in New York in a new building called the Irish
Arts Center, which is a small theater up on the
upper west side Tenth Avenue up there, and and I

(01:24:31):
played a lot in Ireland this year. But then in
July I had some knee surgery which has in a
way kept me off the boards for a while, and
I won't really be going back live until early next year.
I'm getting together with my band, I'm doing a series

(01:24:54):
of dates in Ireland, and you know, I have no
great desire, Bob, to tour America anymore. It's very difficult
for an artist at my level. The United States government
doesn't make it easy for people coming in. They take

(01:25:15):
a huge amount of of of your growth and tax
and it's it's difficult to I mean, I would probably
make more money in a night in Ireland or the
UK than I would make touring the stage for two weeks,
you know what kind of way. And it's uh, I mean,

(01:25:37):
I'm I'm getting on. I'm in my seventies, you know.
I mean, I'm I'm still having great time performing, but
I've I'm not interested in world tours anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:25:51):
Not really, Are you going to die on stage or
at one point you say I'm done.

Speaker 2 (01:25:59):
Oh, I'll keep going as long as I can keep going,
you know. I mean, you know, I'm a singer and
I throw ships. What else can I do? You know?
I write songs. I keep going as long as my
body stands up to it, you know. And I mean
I'm not doing too bad. I'm in the mid seventies

(01:26:20):
and I'm still, you know, having fun playing music.

Speaker 1 (01:26:28):
Are you scuba diving?

Speaker 2 (01:26:30):
Well, I haven't scuba dived since November of twenty two,
and a lot that's largely between about COVID and stuff
like that. But I swim three or four times a week,
and I snorkel at the weekends, and I mean, and

(01:26:50):
I'll be quite happy to go scuba diving again when
we when when something turns up that seems attractive.

Speaker 1 (01:26:58):
And you referenced early you're about turning away from being
an international rock star. And there's also in the book
where you say you have an agent and the agent
books you, and the promoter wants a restriction that you
can't play other gigs in Ireland, and you say, I'm done,

(01:27:19):
I'm firing the agent. I'm gonna do it differently now.
Tell us about that.

Speaker 2 (01:27:25):
You know, that's just I mean, people have, you know,
relationships that work for a certain period in your life
and then they don't work, you know, and that's natural.
It's just changed as I see it. It's partly that
I just felt that that I was neglecting my fan

(01:27:50):
base in my own country by only playing in it
once or twice a year, and you know, according to
a logic that that would make sense if you were
an international act coming to Ireland, you know, and I
just that didn't suit me any longer, and I felt

(01:28:11):
I was I wanted to play my home country a
lot more and That's what I'm doing and I'm having
a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (01:28:24):
So you're doing your own thing? Do you have still
have a hunger? Well, I want to get another song covered.
I still want to be part of the action. Or
are you saying I'm just doing my own thing and
I don't care about the rest?

Speaker 2 (01:28:37):
Well, the second, the latter. Really, I mean, I'm I'm
not you know, I I don't want to break into
new territories. I'm I'm. I'm very happy with the dynamic
that that exists in my career at the moment. I'm
happy enough. I'm comfortable enough. I'm I'm. I was very

(01:28:59):
lucky in my career. So yeah, I'm I'm happy with
where I am and you know, I will make another
record when it seems right.

Speaker 1 (01:29:13):
Okay. For those people who aren't aware of you, you're
an icon in Ireland and they've gotten many awards, titles,
So let's say somebody says I want Paul Brady and
you're unavailable, then do who do they call?

Speaker 2 (01:29:36):
Wow? Well, you see, that's a hard one to answer,
because Paul, there are two or three Paul Brady's as
far as Irish people are concerned. There's the there's the
fella that sang Irish folk music throughout the whole seventies.
There's the there's the fella that wrote the song Crazy

(01:29:56):
Dreams and wrote the song Nobody Knows. And there's a
fella you know that that you know plays live on stage.
I'm a sort of an unusual article altogether. You know,

(01:30:17):
there's that there are few. There aren't too many musicians
who have covered as many musical basis as me, and
and you know, made a little bit of an impact
in each one of them. So if somebody was looking
for me, it would depend on what to say to
me they were looking for as to who they'd ask next.

Speaker 1 (01:30:38):
And in Ireland, if you're walking down the street, if
you're going to dinner, are you recognized?

Speaker 2 (01:30:45):
Oh yeah, all the time, but in a nice way.
I'm never hassled, you know, it's nice. I just want
to get to get my card tested. Today. You know,
you know, you have a three year test for your
car's roadworthiness. You know, right, it's called the National you know.
And I'm sitting there waiting and it comes this call

(01:31:13):
BMW and I look around. I says, yeah, ask me,
and the guy says, Paul, really, I'm a big fan
of yours. I'm coming to your shows next April. You passed,
we'll leavenute that. Paul.

Speaker 1 (01:31:27):
I want to thank you for taking so much time
talk to my audience.

Speaker 2 (01:31:33):
Can I just add the last thing here? There's no
suggestion that the only reason I passed my car past
was because he was a fan of mine.

Speaker 1 (01:31:43):
Well, well we'll be the judge of that.

Speaker 2 (01:31:47):
Bob. Great talking to you, man, and thank you for
all your your nods in my direction over the years.

Speaker 1 (01:31:52):
Thank you absolutely, you're a real talent. Hopefully more people
will connect the songs with the man after this. Until
next time, This is Bob left six

Speaker 2 (01:32:25):
Sh