Tony O Sullivan is no stranger to the music business. Former singer with acclaimed Cork act, Soon, Tony has been singing for a lot longer than that:
My first ever gig was at my Communion, when I led the choir for the Nicene Creed in Latin. I sang in front of 300 girls on the left and 300 guys on the right and I suppose I got a taste for the little bit of attention, he laughs.
Tony formed Soon, his first real, serious band , in 1993, when he returned to Dublin from London with a bunch of songs and a headful of dreams.
We were a really good, interesting band who stood out from the crowd for the right reasons, says Tony. We were probably a little too diverse for our own good, which was my fault, as the songwriter.
Soon picked up a lot of positive press coverage, not least from the late Bill Graham, who wrote of them, I like them for their ambition and imagination . . . and I can foresee genuinely classic records ahead.
Unfortunately, Soon never got to make those classic albums, but Tony has finally created an album which will surely have Bill smiling in heaven.
Bill s favourite song from the Soon days is on the record: Five Go Off To London . Typical of Bill, he chose a five-and- a-half-minute spoken word piece with a jazz, linear groove, detailing how five people went off to London and only four came back. The fifth member was Donnelly, who was a singer with Nun Attacks many years ago, then formed Five Go Down To The Sea and finally Beethoven, who were the first signing ever for Setanta. A few months later, Donnelly drowned in London, says Tony sadly.
Soon never realised their potential. Tony and guitarist Martin Dunlea tried to keep the band together, but it eventually proved too much.
We were putting an awful lot of our time and dole money into rehearsals and it was very hard to hack it, he says. We were broke and eventually needed to wind it down. We had the dreaded joke record company interest which put even more pressure on us. I felt we weren t ready for it then, and I don t even know if I m ready for it now. That s why I didn t even demo this record. I just decided to make an album without going cap in hand to anybody, because for me, a record company is a glorified bank loan.
The album that Tony had to make is The Good Old Days, a lovely, uplifting record which nods in the direction of Jacques Brel for inspiration, full of everything from unbridled pop to smoky, jazzy affairs, all served up with a fair dollop of lyricism and not a little cynicism, again mirroring Brel. Tony first came upon Brel s music while in a French village near Cahors.
I had a French girlfriend who, in classic French cinema style, dumped me while I was there and I had nowhere to stay, smiles Tony. Luckily I had hit it off with the lads in the village who thought I was really cool because I was from Ireland, and one guy invited me to stay with his family up in the mountains.
One day I was feeling absolutely miserable and sorry for myself, playing my part to the hilt in the movie in my head. This guy s dad came in and supplied the soundtrack, playing a song by Jacques Brel, who I d never heard of before, about a guy who s been dumped. I looked at the first two lines and I was immediately smiling. Then I heard this voice and got into Brel as a result. His lyrics are about real people, his own experiences. Far be it from me to put myself in the same ballpark, but my songs are also about real people. I m not into fiction writing.
Tony s themes, like those of the famous Belgian, tend to reflect the romance and the acidity of life, often in the same song. Life s like that, he shrugs. You can feel romantic on Monday and the next day you re down.
The album opens with the title track, a gloriously uplifting affair which will hopefully be a single later in the year. The intro features the voice of the late Leonard Sachs, who presented the old-style music hall show of the same name on BBC many years ago, and the song itself is a soaring, infectious slice of pop brilliance.
As for the prospect of hearing these wonderful songs live, that ll hopefully happen later in the year, albeit with a smaller line-up than that used to record the album.
Playing live is a different discipline, admits Tony, but the songs started off with just piano and vocals, so it just takes a bit of imagination on my part and on the part of the music fan. I like that: going to a gig and hearing an interesting interpretation of a song, as long as it doesn t disappear up its own arse. Plus, I ll be there, which is always an advantage. Either that or I ll give up the band, return as the Australian Kooky, and make a lot more money than if I d gigged it as my own material. n
The Good Old Days is out now on Kooky Records.