Not The Same Old Story

Picture this. Someone sits you down and makes you re-read all your old love letters and diaries. Then you have to tidy them up because they're all about to be released, in one package, to the public. Scary, right? But that, in effect, is the what Paul Brady has gone through, re-mastering all his solo albums, from Hard Station, (1981) to Spirits Colliding (1996), for reissue on CD, as well as choosing 14 tracks for his 'Best Of' compilation.
For any recording artist, it s a difficult process. You have to face your successes and failures full-on, the magnificent music you made along the way, as well as the total fuck-ups. But when it comes to Paul Brady there is also the subtextual story: the sense that all his albums do fall together like chapters in an on-going diary, something he, himself, has often referred to but rarely, if ever, addressed in public.
In other words, if you run a line from early songs such as 'Helpless Heart' through 'Paradise Is Here' to 'Just In Time', does that chart the arc of Brady's love affair with his wife, its evolution from a state of relative innocence to a point where it seems set to die? Or how true to his own private life is Brady's depiction of the drink-sodden sexual predator that stalks his way through 'Night Hunting Time'? Or when he sings of a guy who lays out "crystal snowflakes" for his female prey in another song, 'The Great Pretender', is he referring to cocaine? And is 'The Island', really, as some have said, anti-IRA?
One reason Paul has never fully addressed these issues in public is because he was never the most giving of interviewees. But something has changed. Certainly the Paul Brady who sits in the Hot Press hot seat today is a decidedly different creature from the Brady I last interviewed in 1992.
Back then he was tense, precious, even petulant. Right now he's relaxed, open, humorous and self-deprecating way.

Joe Jackson: The second track of Hard Station has this line: "there is danger on the road to the promised land." That, rumour has it, is something you discovered as far back as 1981 when, it s said, the record company remixed the entire Hard Station album without your knowledge.
Paul Brady: That's one of those music business myths that gets things arse-ways, as usual! I was the one who insisted on re-mixing Hard Station! I don't know what happened at the time but I was very stressed out believe it or not, I used to get more stressed out than I do nowadays! and I just found the whole process of making that record very difficult. And I never liked the mix.
I felt there was a gun put to my head to get in and out of the studio and release the record by a specific date. So I said oh, alright, put it out . But a year later the record moved from Warner Brothers UK to a new label for release in the States and at one of the meetings about it, someone from the American label said we love this album but would you, maybe, remix it? And I went yes, yes, yes!
Yet, interestingly enough, when we went back to remaster Hard Station I ended up using, from the first mix, a version of the song 'Busted Loose' because I prefer that now!
You yourself have a reputation for being difficult , a perfectionist or a hard taskmaster .
Yeah. What happens is that you talk to musicians and tell them what you're trying to get a sound that doesn't sound like it's a mixture of other styles. Even the best musicians bring along a repertoire of styles of music they've liked and you have to say: look, I don't want it to sound like a George Benson, I want it to sound like a Paul Brady . That's where the tugging and fighting takes place. But, yes, I've always had a strong sense, musically, of how I wanted a song to sound and I didn't want people diluting it too much with their own influences.
So you don't allow musicians to put their own mark on a song?
No. That's not true. At all. The truth is that I like to describe my songs as colours, environments, say to musicians things like: think Arizona and play your music in that landscape . So if they bring in a Memphis lick it sounds all wrong to me. I instinctively have a sense of the environmental landscape that suits a song, Anything foreign to that, I don't want. And I will tell musicians that.
You once described your own playing and singing as only adequate .
My musical strengths are in rhythm and in the structural shape of songs. I am not a musical virtuoso. My rhythmic feel is at the core of a song, but if I want a beautiful splash of colour across that, I need somebody else to do it. As for my vocal performances, I'm happy enough with that on the album. Yet I have to say that, overall, the whole remastering thing, for me, was an amazing experience. Because a lot of my stuff I hadn't listened to, in years. It's like being forced to go back to your shit! Like the dog being forced to go back to the vomit!
You don't mean that all the music in your past is shit, Paul, do you?
Not everything! But on every record there were two or three things that you, yourself, know didn't work. Those are the things that make you say Oh fuck! I didn't get it . But having to go back over it all and face that and, on the other hand, fall in love with some of the songs all over again, was pretty traumatic.
Yet at the end of the whole three weeks of remastering, I did come out going, Yes, overall, I really like all these albums. I'm happy now with what I've done. Whereas until I remastered them all, I wasn't able to feel good about my back catalogue. With exceptions.
Why was that?
For example, True To You was definitely my most experimental album of the early 80s. I'd done Hard Station, found myself in England having signed the big deal and was at the mercy of the A&R department, so now I see that True To You is not my most successful record, artistically. Even though 'Not The Only One', 'Steel Claw' and 'Helpless Heart' are on it and are probably among my best known songs. But that wasn't an album that worked for me. Basically, because I was fucked, too stressed out, making that record. That's why, for The Best Of album, I re-recorded the vocal for 'Not The Only One.'
That said, I owe an awful lot to True To You. Not least the fact that Bonnie Raitt and Tina Turner recorded songs off it, which took the pressure off me financially, helped me pay off a bank debt that had been hanging over my head, changed my life in that sense.
What about the core nature of Paul Brady revealed, say, in a song like Nothing But The Same Old Story . When you sing don't stand too close or I'll tear you to pieces if you cross me , are those, in fact, the truest lines you ever wrote?
Probably, yeah. (laughs) My band once made a t-shirt up for me at the end of a tour and, on the front it said angry man ; on the back: and rage . I've always had a lot of anger in me. It is, I guess, existential anger, sometimes not even well-focused, or understood. It's this sense of I'll never be able to do what I know I'm capable of doing.
As a musician or as a person?
Fundamentally, as a musician, but also as a person. You set yourself these challenges to be super-person but as soon as you get within striking distance of that goal, a side of you will come out and fuck it up.
The side of you that's reaching for perfection! Isn't that exactly what's pushing out of reach the very thing you're reaching for?
Absolutely. In love, in life. That is what happens. But it's only relatively recently I've realised that! My life has been a journey to understand such things about myself. But I'm not, at all, as anal as I used to be!
Speaking of which, were you ever into cocaine?
No.
So references to crystal snowflakes aren't references to coke?
Crystal snowflakes is cocaine, yeah. And that lyric is about that.
Why didn't you use coke if you didn't?
Well, like everybody else, I tried it once or twice and all it did was make my teeth tingle! And the back of my throat feel funny. And I never, actually, got much of a kick out of it. Fortunately.
Why? Because you fear that if you add coke paranoia to the rage of Paul Brady, lord knows what demons would be set dancing?
Very much so. And I'm grateful for the fact that my chemical make-up didn't need coke to give me a rush.
Willie Nelson says something similar about himself. But he does need, he believes, something to calm him down. As in daily doses of marijuana.
It's something that is not, in any way a daily thing, but once, every so often, I like that, too, yeah. But it's never been a big indulgence. My only serious over-indulgence is alcohol.
As in Night Hunting Time where the narrator is a whiskey-soaked predator!
Yeah. I'm a dog! I will go 'till dawn and I don't need coke to do that! I was trying to explain this to myself recently. If you live life feeling vaguely denied, you try to compensate by trying to extract something from every minute.
So you were, at one point, a whiskey-soaked predator on the prowl, sexually?
That song was actually written when I was doing a solo folk club tour of Holland, even before I did Hard Station. But, whatever about what may, or may not have been happening in my mind, I wasn't really ever a sexual predator.
Nevertheless, the song has you lusting after a young girl sipping pernod/Body hunger in her glance . So is that just you in Walter Mitty role or did it actually happen?.
Well, I'm not sure if I am any more, or less, a sexual predator than any man. I think men are sexual predators. It's in the nature of men.
But if we are to read Paul Brady's secret life story into his songs, they could be said to trace the evolution of a man who starts out as a bar-side sexual predator, then ends up composing immaculate love songs to his wife.
You could identify that journey from the songs, yeah. But I think that whatever a man is, he always will be. And if you are part sexual predator, that is your nature. And no matter what your relationships with anyone become that's not something that suddenly disappears. You have to integrate that into the new reality of your life. Everyone has to integrate their demons into the reality of their lives and figure out how much space these demons need, or how to keep them suppressed, whatever. And I honestly feel I am a red-blooded person and love life to the full. I am a sexual person and I hope I always will be! But, at the same time, I try to make sense of all these impulses and come through it all with some kind of balance in my life.
Even so, you are a long time married and a long time committed to one woman.
Next year, twenty-five years married.
So, to what degree, is she the emotional co-author of songs going back as far as, say, 'Helpless Heart'?
She's very present in most of those songs. And I don't feel altogether right about this. Sometimes I feel it s unnecessarily exposing another person. But, at the same time, what else can I do?
Another aspect to all this is that not all these songs we're talking about are beautiful love songs, are they?
No. Some are quite angst-ridden and angry.
So has Mary ever said, sarcastically Paul, thanks a lot, this really helps our relationship.
Yes. But there have been periods, too, when she wouldn't listen to my songs at all. Because they were too painful. For example, if I would express a sense of unhappiness in a song she might be inclined to take that upon herself, as a burden.
Was there ever a period when you couldn't express in words your love for her and she had to find that form of expression in a song?
No. I don't write code words to her in that sense. We have always, fortunately, been able to talk very well. That's the only reason we're still together. All our battlegrounds have been sorted out in a verbal way, rather than me sending coded messages through songs.
But the story of your love affair with Mary does wind its way through these six reissued albums, doesn't it?
Very much so.
And that too was something you had to confront while remastering these albums?
Yes. And that has, sometimes, bothered me. In the sense that when I look back, the predominant feeling I get is of someone who is still dissatisfied, still looking for something else. So I did end up going, Jesus, lad, would ya' ever shut up and be happy with what you've got! (laughs)
That ache of frustration, existential or otherwise, is there in so many of your songs.
True. And I have had to ask myself: is that who you really are? Is it only your dissatisfaction with things that makes you want to write? In other words, are there are so many strands to your life that go ahead but you don't write about those because you don't feel the need to? So maybe I'm a much more balanced person than the songs suggest! But, irrespective of what comes across in the songs, the fact is that after all this time, I very much love this person. Whatever has happened along the way, that is the most constant thing in my life.
And she loves you?
Yes. I'm beginning to believe that!
I've talked with Christy Moore about 'The Island' and he seems to have seen it as so much of a political cop-out on your behalf even anti-republican that he had to write The Other Side as a response and to express what many people were feeling at the time of the Hunger Strikes and so on.
(Sharply) If I was asked to dream up a reason, that could be a reason, but I can't speak for Christy's motives.
But 'The Island' was seen, by many, as anti-republican, anti-IRA, wasn't it?
Yeah. It was a very difficult time. I lost a lot of friends.
Many people might now espouse the position you took in that song. Maybe even Christy, who has since renounced the pro-republican fervour that gripped him during the early 80s. Does that, in any sense, ease the pain of those lost friendships?
It does. Some people in the music business have come up to me and said I was wrong about you. That's a beautiful song and I'm glad you sang it . And that's been wonderful for me. I haven't talked to Christy Moore about it. But then I don't really talk to Christy Moore. Yet fair play to him if he has, as you say, renounced the position he took back then.
But I, myself, was very isolated at the time. Because the basic mood through the traditional music world in Ireland at the time was lads, fuck it, hunger strikes, fuckin' Thatcher, let's get together and help the boys . I used to get phone calls from musicians who had played on records and it was Paul, there's a H-Blocks Rally on at Liberty Hall tonight. You're coming down, right? And I'd go no, I'm not . And you could hear the silence on the phone. I was completely isolated because of that, really hurt.
How much did your own background, growing up in Strabane, dictate that non-aligned position, politically, of The Island ?
That's exactly how it happened. I was brought up in Strabane. I went to a primary school where it was mixed sex and mixed religion. How many people in Ireland have gone to a primary school that was mixed sex and mixed religion? Very few.That's why I am passionately in favour of integrated education. It's a disgrace that it doesn't happen more often. Nothing any of the churches in this country says is, in any way, remotely defensible in terms of this issue. There should be integrated education. That's where it all should start.
So, are you saying that's where you developed your non-partisan stance?
When you're at school for nine years with girls and boys who are Catholic and Protestant, it's bound to influence you. Either way, I never, ever felt it was a black-and-white issue of these are the goodies and those are the baddies . I always saw things in shades of grey. I never felt comfortable with certainties or with people on pulpits. Correspondingly, for that very reason I never liked political song writing.
It's also said that songs that are too locked inside one particular set of political realities, tend to die sooner than those that aren't.
That is totally true. My prime allegiance is towards the music and the song and the muse. Now that may sound really pompous, but I've never, ever felt like loaning what I do to any grander cause. I'm sorry but I always felt that the minute art is co-opted into any grander cause, art starts to get very nervous. It should be fundamentally free of such concerns.
That's not a bad aesthetic!
It's the only aesthetic. And that's something I realised about many of the songs on these half dozen albums. Most of them do still breathe at this level, because they are not issue-driven, they're more humanity-driven, if you know what I mean.
Talking about Paul Brady's aesthetic, certain tracks, say, from Primitive Dance maybe 'The Soul Commotion' do suggest that your allegiance to the word, as a singer-songwriter, keeps you from really giving over to rhythm, rocking out, letting go.
That's always been the tightrope I've had to walk. Between the allegiance to the sense, the word and the rhythm. I accept that, fully. And sometimes it hasn't worked. Actually, I like 'The Soul Commotion' and think that is one of the successes! But there are others where I topple right off the tightrope!
In the new sleeve notes for Trick Or Treat you also say that there was no compromise on that album. But it was unpopular with, say, your folk music fans. Particularly the production work of Steely Dan graduate Gary Katz.
That was, stylistically, a very unpopular record, I agree. But I always was a huge fan of Steely Dan and Donald Fagan and that whole concept of cool jazz-rock. And, even in the beginning, I wanted to hint at that in something like 'Dancer in The Fire . In fact, while making Hard Station I was listening to Pretzel Logic and all those early Steely Dan albums and they were a huge influence on me. So I always wanted to find out how Fagan was putting those chords together and so on. And I must admit that the whole piano arrangement and instrumental in 'Dancer In The Fire' from Hard Station was me trying to do that, trying to make a record like Steely Dan.
So, what you were doing was exactly what you told musicians on that album not to do!
Yeah. But it's my record! It's my trip! I'll boss it if I want to! (laughs). But as for those aspects of Trick Or Treat folk music fans don't like, I'd like to say something about that. I loved my time in folk music. At the age I was, the experiences I had with Planxty, all that, was great, right? But folk audiences are very, very conservative. And they only want to hear certain things. And I was never going to be happy being contained within those parameters. In fact, I remember the exact moment I decided musically, I'm out of here. When I first heard Gerry Rafferty's 'Baker Street.' I'd toured with him, knew him, but when I heard what he did on that record I went fuck you, you got there before me. This is what I want to do. And that's what I've been attempting to do ever since, burst way beyond those boundaries.
Spirits Colliding is acoustic in feel, but still decidedly mellow and more than a match for Hard Station, which seems to be the album most people use as the benchmark in your career.
Thank you. And the fact is that a lot of people came to me, for the first time, as a result of Spirits Colliding. I have a huge fan base now, of people who didn't know anything about my career before that album and who actually say things like Spirits Colliding changed my life" and so on. It's wonderful.
You even brought the Corrs on board for one track, back in what, '93, '94?
Yes. I had gotten to be very friendly with them after I used them first on a song for Somalia, called 'Light In The Dark . There was whole campaign built around that song and that was the first time The Corrs sang with me.
So, with all due respect to your wife, which one of The Corrs you fancy most? Excluding Jim.
Oh God! I'd hate to betray any of them! I love them all! (pause) That is a terrible question to ask a man! (laughs).
To get back to Spirits Colliding, part of its success, obviously rests with the fact that it was co-produced by yourself and Shea Fitzgerald.
I couldn't have made that record without Shea. And I think Shea is a supremely talented person and I hope he manages to turn that to his advantage, more than he has. Without a doubt, he's one of the five or six most talented people, in music, in Ireland. He has a great sense of music. He understands music. He can play music. And he certainly was very important to me in making that record, even in the sense that he kept me encouraged, particularly at times when I wanted to quit and just drop the album entirely.
The vocals are less in-your-face than you often tend to be.
I know what you're saying. And I agree. But that, too, is because I was older making that record. As I was saying earlier, I was very angry when I was younger and demanding to be listened to, on many records. Because I did feel come on, people, this is fucking great shit, listen to what I'm singing here! But by the time I made Spirits Colliding I had worked a lot of stuff out, in my life, and didn't need to try as hard.
That takes us back to the subject of your relationship with your wife. Love songs like 'Help Me To Believe' indicate love is dying, 'Just In Time' suggests you are at the edge of losing everything but 'You're The One' is like a re-commitment to your marriage vows. So is this the most up-to-date analysis we can give to the journey that started with songs like 'Helpless Heart'?
Yes. All the songs you mention co-exist in the same reality.
The new songs certainly reflect more of an adult attitude to love.
Almost adult! Jesus, of all things, don't accuse me of growing up!
Sorry! But a song like 'You're The One' does have this contrast between a world falling apart and to paraphrase Yeats the centre actually holding together because of the love between even one man and one woman.
Absolutely. And what you just described is 'The Island' too. The sense that there is only so much any one person, or couple can do, to influence the world that's around you. It's like be aware of all that but love each other in the face of it all.
Would it be fair to say that over the past few years before you sorted out your back catalogue and appointed Anne Louise Kelly as your manager that you were hell to live with.
I was. But that sense of frustration and anger coming to a head was the pivotal thing in bringing my wife and I to the next stage of our relationship. I could not but be aware of how all that was impinging upon everyone around me.
And did your family confront you about all this?
Yes. That happened. And that process over the past three years has helped me get to the other side of all that.
So was getting the master tapes of your albums back from Mercury a war?
It was a total, frustrating war. And it made me want to quit the music business. It was two-and-a-half years of basically being jerked around. And the only reason I managed to get them back was because I met someone, in a position of power, who had something Mercury wanted, badly. As a favour to me or out of a sense of obligation or love, whatever he said right, they won't get this till they give you your records .
Ed Bicknell, wasn't it? A partner of your former manager, Paul Cummins?
Yeah. Paul Cummins was my day-to-day manager whereas Ed would have come in and done the big deals. Any time my publishing deal was to be updated he would go in and beat them up! But he didn't have a hands-on approach to my career. And I think when it all fell apart with Paul Cummins, he didn't know what the fuck had happened. Secondly, he felt a bit guilty that things turned out as they did. So I went to see him, said I can't get my records back and he said I'll see what I can do .
What happened with Cummins. How did it end?
He rang me one morning in November 1995, just after the release of Spirits Colliding and said "Hello, I can't do this anymore" and put down the phone. Then about three months later he went into the management company of Dire Straits and did the same. He was having a crisis, within himself, about the music business. He didn't want to be in the music business anymore. I don't think he was able to deal, anymore, with being responsible for someone else's life.
So did Cummins dropping you adversely affect your record contract?
Completely.
Once he left, they pulled out too?
Yeah. Weeks later. And this all happened when the first single from Spirits Colliding was coming out. 'The World Is What You Make It' was the theme song for a British sitcom that was playing to 13 million viewers and the record was play-listed on Virgin radio, in England, and they couldn't even get Mercury to answer their telephone calls. So, basically, the plug was pulled on Spirits Colliding. That was very difficult for me because, as I say, I felt this was one of my best records, the record where I felt I'd, finally, learned how to make a record. And for two years, I didn't know if I ever wanted to make another record at all.
Were you ever in so black a mood that you became suicidal?
Not suicidal. But it was a very black period. And what got me through it, frankly, was starting to really focus on co-writing with other people. Within two months of Spirits Colliding, I had a chance to go to this castle in France where songwriters from all over the world get together people like Will Jennings, Carole King, whoever and you're teamed up with someone in the morning and expected to not only produce a song but demo it that night! It was an amazing experience. Someone comes around at breakfast, with an A4 notebook and actually says, right Paul, you'll be working with Carole King today . And that whole process turned out to be so inspiring. Within a week of being at the castle I'd written seven songs and suddenly realised this is the most exciting thing I've ever done.
That was in May 1996. Then I went back in September that year and again in 1997. During that period I wrote nearly 50 songs and that is what kept me on this track. I honestly was not going to do another record if I didn't get the back catalogue back.
When you say it was essential that you get your back catalogue, is that simply so you could re-issue the old albums and the 'Best Of' to drum up interest for the new album that will follow?
Last year, if you went down to HMV in Dublin, you couldn't get even one Paul Brady record. So I went if I never make another record, okay, but I'm fucked if I'm going to just watch my whole life go down the swanee because some asshole in an office in London can't get it together enough to even see me on the balance sheet . So I knew I had to get my records out of there, in a way, to justify that I was an artist at all.
But as for the 'Best Of' compilation, it's more of a practical, business-driven thing. In the sense that Spirits Colliding did not happen at a retail level, so if I want to go back with a brand new album, I have to give retail something that is a soft option, something they know is going to walk out of the shops. And my new record company did say it's time; there isn't a Best Of Paul Brady on the market so let's start off with that . That is the point.
But you did re-record, for the 'Best Of' collection 'The Lakes of Pontchartrain' and 'Arthur McBride.' Was that because you didn't want to enter into a war with Mulligan records?
Yes. For a start, artistically, it was a challenge to me because I knew I could do those songs the very same as I did them 20 or so years ago. But I also said I don't want these people involved in my life.
So has the Mulligan experience also left a bitter taste in your mouth?
A lot of people in Ireland have a bitter experience with Mulligan Records. In fact they've actually lost the master tape of my album Welcome Here Kind Stranger. They don't know where it is.
But there is a happy ending to all this. You are in the enviable position of being able to record your new album at home, at your own pace, which, in itself, must be the kind of artistic freedom you've longed for, for years.
Absolutely! I just wish it had happened 30 years ago! And I do feel quite content with the set-up right now. But, at the end of the day, I'm not the sort of person who ever wants to say look, nobody can tell me what to do .
Or claims to hate the music industry.
I don't hate the music industry. I'm aware that, in order for people to access your work, you need the music industry. So I've always wanted to co-operate. And I m happy now to be in that situation, but only in so far as it is appropriate. In fact, I really do feel that, right now, I'm in a better position, artistically and in every other sense, than I ever have been during a lifetime in the music business. And what's really inspiring is that working on the new album which probably will be finished around the end of October but not released until next March is an absolute delight to me, pure pleasure. In that sense, it's like starting all over again. n