Black In The High Life Again

For over twenty-five years, Mary Black has been a household name in this country. She has also been a huge success internationally, regularly touring in America, Australia and across Europe, attracting large, broad-based audiences. The secret of her phenomenal success – apart from a natural, sweet-sounding voice and a likeable personality – is down to an accessible blend of folk, traditional and contemporary influences, while her definitive interpretations of the work of Irish songwriters such as Jimmy McCarthy, Noel Brazil and Mick Hanley have made the likes of ‘Ellis Island’ ‘No Frontiers’ and ‘Past The Point of Rescue’ standards with which she will always be associated.

“I’ve come to a stage in my life now where maybe people see me in a different light,” she ponders, sitting in a busy pub near her Dublin home. “There’s an acceptance from people who might not have rated me very much in the past. Maybe it’s because I’ve been around so long and I’ve done alright and I’m not offensive (laughs). There’s a respect for me now, which is nice. There are a lot of young people, particularly young girls coming to see me in concert. These are people whose parents would have been fans of mine and who were raised with the music. They’re going back to the music they grew up with.”
She looks back over the successes of the last quarter of a century with a mixture of wonderment and disbelief.
“It’s only when you stop and think about it that you realise how amazing and how big it was at times. I mean, when you’re doing a couple of nights in the Royal Albert Hall, or five nights in The Point, or ten nights in the Olympia, you don’t think at the time, ‘wow, this is amazing’. Because you’re juggling so much between home life, albums, tours and promotion, you just keep going. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing,
“I think there was a natural progression,” she adds. “There was a slow, gradual rise and then a long plateau of it being quite good for a few years, starting in the early ’90s – and then it slowly began to dip again.”
At one point in the 1990s she made a serious bid for Stateside success, recording an album, Shine, in LA with noted producer Larry Klein and West Coast session musicians. Did she consider moving permanently to the US at that time?
“Ah, I never would have wanted to live anywhere else but in Ireland. I think part of the charm about what I did was that it had an Irish-ness about it that might have been lost if I moved away. And if it had gotten too big, it might have affected my life in a way that I mightn’t have liked. The thing to remember is, it wasn’t mainstream music in America. It might have been in Ireland – but in America it was a genre that definitely wasn’t in the mainstream.
“The record company in America really did invest a lot of money in the Shine album and made an expensive video. And it paid off. I still tour in America quite a bit. For the last twenty years I’ve toured in America and it’s always been very good for me, especially in the big cities like Boston, New York, San Francisco.”

Her new album Stories From the Steeples – her first in six years – continues her tradition of showcasing the work of young Irish songwriters and features three songs written by Coronas frontman Danny O’Reilly – who also happens to be Mary’s son!
“Some of his songs are favourites of mine and I remember thinking I’d love to do some of them,” she explains. “Anyway, I plucked up the courage one day and asked him, ‘How would you feel about me doing one of your songs?’ I thought he’d say, ‘Ah mam, come on – imagine it, your mother singing your song’. It’s a bit scarlet, like. But he said, ‘Well, if you can do it, go ahead’. I said, ‘What do you mean if I can do it?’. I was determined to do it after he said that (laughs). ‘The Night Is On Our Side’ is just a really nice song. What’s lovely about it is, my other son, Conor, is playing bass on it, Danny plays guitar on it and Róisín, my daughter is singing a nice little duet as well. It was a very special moment for me with the whole family involved.”
How does she feel about her children becoming involved in the music business, given her own experience of its vagaries?
“I never pushed them into music, but I never discouraged them. The main thing is I wanted them to go to college and have something under their belts rather than at sixteen or eighteen going into the music business. Near the end when Danny was in the last year of college he was so close to dropping out when the music was taking off. But I told him, ‘You’d never know how it’s going to work out in the long run’. It’s not just about talent, it’s about luck and being in the right place at the right time. I’ve always said to have a go but don’t take it too personally if it doesn’t work out. Thankfully with Danny, well, he’s done OK so far. They all have degrees now and I’m really happy with that. Danny has a business degree, Róisín has a music degree and Conor is a surveyor with Dublin City Council.”
Another collaboration on her new album, which is sure to further her popularity with a younger audience is the Imelda May duet, ‘Mountains To The Sea’.
“My daughter Róisín was doing support to Imelda, whose nephew is in Róisín’s band so that was the initial connection. I went to see them and met Imelda and we hit it off straight away – two inner city Dublin girls and all that,” she smiles. “And then she invited me to see her in the Olympia last Christmas. She called me up on stage to sing ‘White Christmas’ which was lovely. So that was the only connection I had with her. I started to record this song ‘Mountains To The Sea’ and thought I’d love to sing it with her. It’s really all about the life she has at the moment and the life I had in the past, with all the travelling. So I asked her and she said ‘Yes, it would be an honour’.”
In the long gap between this album and the previous one, has she noticed the way the music business has changed as far as record sales are concerned?.
“Obviously, sales have completely tapered off and you have record stores closing down left right and centre. The writing is on the wall in that respect. Obviously I would suffer from that in some ways but my audience are very much a CD-buying audience – and we’re all set up for the iTunes thing too. On this album, I’m getting more airplay than I’ve got for years so that’s good. I also have a little bit of kudos with younger audiences now that they know Danny is my son. That connection doesn’t do me any harm at all (laughs).”

Stories From The Steeples is out now on 3ú Records. Mary Black plays the INEC, Killarney on December 2.