PAPERBACK SONGWRITER

Renaissance man or shyster? Jack of all trades or master of all he surveys? This is the dilemma that faces Shay Healy these days. In an age when resumés are supposedly only onto a winner if they can be squeezed onto an A4 sheet of Basildon Bond, Healy’s is of Tolstoyan dimensions. And with the collective attention span of the CDI generation under pressure to inch past the 15 minute mark, it’s hardly surprising that he’s finding it a tad trying to catch their eye.

And speaking of 15 minute time lapses, why can’t Shay Healy be happy with his own 15 minutes of fame anyway? Wasn’t the limelight of the Eurovision enough to sate his appetite? Paul Harrington’s disillusioned, but he’s hardly tasted the pomp and ceremony that Healy enjoyed when he rode the crest of the wave that whooshed ‘What’s Another Year?’ firmly past the collective Irish (and Turkish) consciousness to embed itself, limpet-like, onto our massed subconscious.

Singer (though even he himself would admit his larynx was of dubious parentage), songwriter, record producer, film maker, photographer, Jacobs award-winning radio and TV host, magazine editor, comedian, and now fiction writer. Whatever about this man’s talents, there can be little doubt about the activity levels of his thyroid gland. On an hyperactivity index he achieves a frightening fire brigade-red rating that would suggest a daily diet of assorted E numbers and tartarazine in manic dosages. What else could explain such rampant pursuit of excellence across all manner of media? Unless of course you take ego into account . . .

“Any of us who goes on television and who writes songs,” he acknowledges, (not at all meekly), “there’s ego involved. When your ego is on the line and nobody even notices, I tell you, it’s terribly frustrating! It’s horrible. It’s comparable to not getting laid!”

Ego apart, though, one might’ve thought that if Shay Healy’s got a direct line to the inner sanctum of most media round these here parts, how is it that his door raps have met with less than an enthused response? With the release of his second novel, Green Card Blues, he anticipated at least a flicker of interest from the assorted press. But the silence has been ringing in his ears, an irritating tinnitus that just won’t go away. Apart from two brief newspaper reviews, the book hardly caused a ripple on the keyboards and this has riled Healy more than you or I would care to imagine.

“I would have to say that it’s kind of frustrating,” he suggests, with an admirable line in understatement, “and I don’t know what it must be like for people who don’t know anybody in the media, and are trying to get coverage, because I do know people and it’s still impossible.”

Having chosen the genre of crime fiction, Healy is suspicious of a certain ambivalence to this particular paddock among literary heads. Jane Austen it ain’t, but not everyone wants to take a turn around the room with Mr. D’Arcy.

“I think there is an element of snobbery that goes with books here,” he nods, “that if a book isn’t ‘literature’, you don’t pay it any mind at all. But I deliberately wrote what I consider to be an entertainment, so that people who don’t normally read books could enjoy it and get into it, as easily as someone who’s used to reading.”

Crime fiction is hardly the usual bread and butter of the Irish writing fraternity, but Healy didn’t intend to write a crime fiction novel anyway when he first drew the chair up to the WP. He laughs at the recollection of Green Card Blues’ embryonic period.

“It started out as a sequel to my first book, The Stunt, where I took the lead character, Danny Toner, to New York. You see, I had spent three months in New York in 1986 and I was hustling music so I had a real good backdrop to capture the rhythm of the streets of New York, and put this Irish guy into it, and put him singing in an Irish bar. Then when I had the atmospherics right, I set the story out so that Danny was just looking for a gig and looking for a deal, and suddenly he meets a cop, he’s into drugs, he’s into sex, and he’s involved with an IRA man on the run. And suddenly the thing started galloping along at a ferocious speed. And it does! Other people who write books have told me that it’s happened to them as well, and suddenly I’m in a full-blown adventure – and I just couldn’t stop until it was over! And I kill two people in it as well!”

Whether it’s a ‘thumping good read’ or not (as one venerable TV host is wont to repeatedly exclaim), Green Card Blues still locked Healy in his writer’s ivory tower for prolonged periods of painstaking writing and editing. And for the effort alone he reckons he deserves marks, of whatever numerical quantity.

“You expect when you spend a lot of time slaving over a book that you’ll at least get a fair airing. But to see it go out there and just disappear is very frustrating. And I do feel angry about it.”

Healy says that he’s aiming at an audience of 16 year olds upwards. Is part of the lack of sales success due to this CDI generation’s fundamental lack of interest in the written word? Maybe he’s got the medium wrong. Maybe Green Card Blues would reach a far wider audience if it was reincarnated as a TV adaptation, or re-programmed for CD-ROM, so that its audience could have a hand in its ultimate outcome?

“It’s true that they’re switched into a whole different ethos, but I think that’s a pity,” he says, “because there’s something about sitting down with a book, the element of repose that goes with it. If it’s a good book then you’re entirely focussed on it and it’s almost like a form of meditation, which is very rewarding. I think it’s terrible to think that a whole load of people will never experience that, except as pain when they study a textbook.”

And the gains that are to be got from whiling away a few hours buried in the pages of Healy’s literary efforts? He smiles, and flips through the mental card index for a string of plusses to woo his potential audience away from their TV screens and their gameboys, even momentarily.

“If they read it, they’ll get a couple of laughs, they might be titillated a tiny bit, they’ll learn a little bit about the Irish-American scene, and at the end of it all they might even say: ‘Jaysus, sure it only cost six quid and it wasn’t bad!’”

This latest incarnation as penman is one that Shay Healy’d dearly love to make his own, since opportunities bygone were, he feels, squandered.

“Had I handled it better (when ‘What’s Another Year?’ went ballistic, albeit momentarily, I possibly could’ve cemented a career as a songwriter for myself forever, which would’ve suited me, may I say, admirably,” he says with a wry smile, and a hint of disillusionment at a missed opportunity. “But fate and events at the time conspired against it and I got caught up in the relief of success, having had years of waiting in the wings. I didn’t cement it in the first year and it was gone.”

Still, Healy has the distinction of having written the last Eurovision winner that hit No. 1 all over Europe so the flame did burn bright for a time. Healy’s regret, though, is that he failed to grasp the essentials of the recording industry amid the whirligig tours and promotions that followed his Eurovision cleansweep.

“I should have locked myself into co-writing arrangements with a whole load of other famous writers, and consequently become part of that great club. If I had, I probably wouldn’t be here talking to you now. I’d probably be lying in a hammock somewhere, clicking my fingers for my fourth bacardi and coke and asking what time will my lobster be ready!”

The optimist in Healy won’t allow him to be beaten though. To lie down and die is anathema to a born hustler.

“Yeah,” he nods, “I still believe that I have a big score. I don’t know when it’s gonna happen but I have a lotto ticket for tonight just in case that that’s what it is! And if that’s the way that fate is going to reward me for all this hard work, hey, I can live with that.”

So, like Randy Newman, is it really money that he loves? Does that beast, Artistic Satisfaction, come in a poor second to monetary reward, at least at this stage in his career, when a few of the stars have lost their twinkle, perhaps?

“Well,” he ponders, “I think you have to satisfy the artistic need in your own head. If you have a standard for yourself and you put something out that you know isn’t up to it, you deserve every kick you get. It may well be that I’m cursed with competence and if that’s true, so be it. But the reason I do all the different things is because I think I can do them to a level where I’m not ashamed to put it out and say: ‘I wrote this and I’m not embarrassed by it’.”

The element of the seer being perceived as a clown at home hasn’t escaped Healy’s attention either, though he’d probably place himself closer to the jester end of the spectrum.

“I’m glad that part of the problems I’m encountering with Green Card Blues are because Ireland is such a small place,” he nods, “and I’ve been around for so long and I’ve tried so many things, that everybody’s probably saying: ‘Ah, for Jaysus’ sake, would you give it a rest! We’ve a pain in our arse listening to ya!’”

Then again, having crossed the half century mark last year, there may be those who’d wonder what he’s doing pitching a book at the 16–30 year olds when he’s jumped all those particular ditches a long, long time ago.

“Why the hell not, is what I’d say to that,” he chortles. “I don’t have a fixation about returning to the age of 28 again either. I have to tell you that having reached 51, I’m quite happy where I am. I wouldn’t mind freezing it here for a few years though! It’s not about lost youth at all.”

Notwithstanding the ignominy of being ignored by the literary fraternity, Healy is intent on keeping his peann luaidhes sharpened for a while to come.

“If I could have my way,” he explains, “I’d like to be nothing but a full-time writer in about three years, whether that is prose, screenplays, theatre or music. I want to be writing and engaged in nothing else. I have to work just like everybody else, and contrary to what people seem to believe, I didn’t make enough money out of ‘What’s Another Year?’ to retire. People think I’m a millionaire but I ain’t. I’m a working stiff like everybody else.”

Faced with the conglomerate possibilities of writing, does any one particular discipline come more easily to him than the others? His songwriting abilities are, after all, his most documented asset.

“Yeah, I like writing a song,” he says. “I think trying to say something in three or four minutes is really special. I just finished something last night, which is a bit of polish after a week of kicking it up and down. It’s a great feeling to think: ‘I’ve unlocked this now, and there’s a shape on it that wasn’t there before’. I suppose I’m enthralled with music really, and good lyrics more than anything else.”

And that’s where the strains of ‘What’s Another Year?’ re-enter the equation. On my arrival at the studio where Healy is working, I gasp at the realisation that that old chestnut is emanating from the confines of the recording booth upstairs. Can it be that old man Healy’s ensconced in the studio with headphones poised, finger on the repeat button just so’s he can relive his glory days time and time again? Could he be fixated on the tune that’s melted more than a zillion Turkish hearts, leaving them with enough candidates for cardiac surgery to keep the Mater on double shiftwork for the next decade? Happily, the reprise signals a more interesting development in the casebook of Shay Healy.

“I’m hoping to pitch the song to Rick Trevino who’s an up-and-coming country singer from Nashville,” he explains, colouring the project by way of a mention of the fact that he’s rearranging the song with Johnny Logan in Spanish. Country’n’Hispanic, I suppose you could call it. The man is an inveterate optimist.