Paul And The Road To Damascus

What a long strange trip it's been! Fifteen years on and Paul Brady makes his real debut album. Fifteen years, it's such a long time. Fifteen years! Think on it and consider what a child can learn in all that time.

Fifteen years is five thousand, four hundred and seventy-two days, is one hundred and thirty-one thousand, three hundred and twenty-eight hours, is seven million eight hundred and seventy-nine thousand six hundred and eighty minutes, is four hundred and seventy-two million seven hundred and eighty thousand eight hundred seconds. And that's not counting leap-years! Jesus!

And this is the rub, this in fact is the crux. It doesn't matter. Throw all those figures down on the table and add them up. Multiply by five and calculate to the power of ten. That kind of figure is beyond comprehension. So is the magic that makes music matter. And when it comes to that magic, time ceases to exist. Music is a process of reorganising time anyway!

Hard Station is Paul Brady's real debut album and it has rendered all those years irrelevant. Hard Station spells the word T-R-I-U-M-P-H. That's what matters. Suddenly all that time has contracted, it has collapsed, because great music, or great art, renders concepts of time redundant. That spells the word T-R-I-U-M-P-H.

That much is understood. Celebration is appropriate. We'll drink champagne till we all fall down! And we'll fill ourselves up with crazy dreams for tomorrow.

Then, we'll do some remembering.

Over the past three years, people have witnessed a gradual transformation in the public character of Paul Brady, through the early to middle to late Seventies he'd been recognised as a traditional guitar player and singer of extraordinary quality. But in nineteen seventy-seven or thereabouts, it emerged that he was writing songs with serious intent. He began to perform in public a mixture of Irish and American-oriented material a little later. The result was a curious and impressive amalgam, though a feeling of unease lingered. Maybe he didn't really know what he was doing.

But Paul Brady is a resolute and meticulous individual and everything was being planned and controlled - in a way that would have frustrated or thrown less steely or determined characters. Brady originals emerged slowly but surely and equally certainly, it transpired that they were songs of real quality. The process was so painstaking it seemed absurd to an outside observer, someone removed from the traumas the change of emphasis involved for an individual of Brady's accepted status.

He'd left it too late. Maybe he didn't have the songs. He was certain to fall between two stools. He was going into the studios!

He was in the studios (Windmill Lane in Dublin, check 'em out). He was still in the studios. Anticipation mutated into apprehension. He was still in the studios - what the hell is going on in there!

But the word filtering back from independent sources was good. Rough mixes sounded superb. Something very special was in store.

A cassette of the finished product was available. It arrived Thursday, an interview was set for the following afternoon. That evening expectations were defied. From twelve to three in the morning, I listened to a superb album of songs, with a mixture of awe and satisfaction. Any remaining fears were dispelled. I was touched deep down, deep down inside and I was almost moved to tears more than once or twice. It was a success!

Those feelings were tempered with a sense of possibilities not fully realised, of instances where the implicit strength of songs was diluted or deflected from hitting the target, bullseye!

But, no denying it, what enveloped me from the speakers was mostly or fundamentally... great, that was enough for me then and it still is.

I could go into this interview without any sense of apology.

It was when he joined Planxty, that Paul Brady's name irrevocably became public property in Ireland. But like many others who adopted traditional music as their own during the Seventies, he had in fact begun his career with a series of rock'n'roll bands.

From Strabane in County Tyrone, he was in college in Dublin when he worked semi-professionally in bands like the Kult and Rockhouse. It came to a point where he had to choose between continuing his education and making a profession of music and he chose the latter.

Not with a rock band, however. Rather he became a member of the Johnstons, and enjoyed considerable success with what was undoubtedly one of the better ballad groups of the era. It's an involvement which he recalls with little fondness.

*I never enjoyed the Johnstons, at all, on reflection,* he says. *I wasn't really doing anything. For a long time, I was mainly in a supportive role - I just sang harmonies on a few songs and plonked guitar.*

Having scored a series of major hits in Ireland, including number ones with 'The Travelling People' and 'The Curragh Of Kildare', the Johnstons split, with Adrienne Johnston and Brady himself departing for the States and working there for two bizarre years - a period which is clouded in obscurity as far as the majority of Brady's fans are concerned, whereas in fact it's crucial to an understanding of his development.

Either way, his return to Ireland saw him gravitate towards the traditional scene, as he joined Planxty - a hugely successful group who were in fact grinding towards a halt at the time.

*I was the last to join and I didn't know at the time but I came back to a group that was on its last legs.*

There were levels of irony involved - Planxty were doing gigs attracting huge attendances in Europe and then returning to Ireland to play to *thirty people in Athy,* as Brady recalls it. And while the fact that the group's business affairs were in a mess was a vital catalyst to their finally calling it a day, there was more to it than that.

*It's easy now for me to see, with the benefit of hindsight and seeing where (the reformed) Planxty are now and where their heads are at, why this thing was so... it was basically a whole load of people with varying, different views and attitudes towards life and music, desperately trying to find some common way - some direction to go in. Some wanted to stay there, others wanted to get out - and I wanted to get out.*

He was in an invidious position from the start, having to replace a man of Christy Moore's stature and popularity. But he's anxious to dispel the notion which gained some currency at the time, that there was animosity between himself and Christy.

*Christy had a lot of fans who'd say, 'your man Brady, he may be a musician alright - but he can't handle the crowd like Christy'. So there was this constant pitting of me against Christy and people then assumed that Christy and I didn't like each other or were jealous of each other or something. Which was never the case at all...*

Nevertheless it isn't an episode for which he feels any sense of nostalgia, although it did give rise to his next adventure - a period of nine months, spent in the company of Andy Irvine, performing together around clubs and festivals in Ireland and on the continent - which, leaving his present achievements out of the reckoning, is the phase of his career which he most enjoyed.

The duo also made a highly respected album together, titled Andy Irvine And Paul Brady (the purple album!), which still sells at a constant flow. This was followed by a period working solo in the traditional idiom, marked by the Welcome Home Kind Stranger album, following which the process of re-orientation began.

We're back to those fifteen years and an inevitable question. Does he regret that it took so long in getting around to making his first album of songs?

*On one level I do, yes,* he says. *But not really, because, I feel that I was a slow burner in terms of reaching an awareness of who I am as a person. I have to say that I really didn't have it together until now, so that anything I would have written before this wouldn't have meant a lot to me anyway.

*I also don't regret the amount of time I spent in traditional music at all because that has largely coloured what I'm doing now and I wouldn't be capable of writing the same sort of songs if I hadn't been involved with traditional music.*

What's interesting and it's generally been under-emphasised in discussion of Brady's career to date, is that between the ballad-phase of the Johnstons and the traditional stint with Planxty, there was a period when he was involved in writing 'contemporary' material. It was during those two years spent in America, those two lost years that are surrounded in a sense of mystery and bitterness. What was going on then?

*The way I generally answer that question,* he says with a rueful laugh, *is by saying that I spent a couple of years trying to get my head together.*

Having it ripped asunder might be more appropriate, as the sentiments of 'Crazy Dreams' - and peripherally 'Busted Loose' - suggest. In fact Brady had become involved, via Adrienne Johnston, in working with a bizarre American, Chris McCloud - a lyric writer for whom Brady supplied melodies and chord sequences. Having spent some time getting to know McCloud personally and in fact having by and large constructed the arrangements for a projected Adrienne Johnston album of which McCloud was the intended producer, I can comment with reasonable authority on his character and personality.

If McCloud isn't psychotic, he's certainly close to it. An obsessive and, on the surface at least, intense individual, he operated under the guise of a crusader for the rights of the artist - specifically the songwriter. Constructing elaborate schemes around this projection of himself - and he was meanwhile amassing debts left, right and centre and in effect living off the goodwill he was somehow capable of generating.

There was a Svengali-like aspect to his manipulations and like Brady in America, I was caught up in this to some extent when McCloud surfaced in Dublin in 1974 or thereabouts. When you realise you've been had, and especially where it involves the realm of ideas or something that is as intrinsically bound up with the notions of honesty and integrity as artistic expression, then it can be a radically disillusioning experience.

*It shattered me,* Brady says simply. *It changed me utterly, as a person. Now one has to assume that one is happy with what one is at any given time, but I was a very, very different person before I met McCloud than I am now.*

You assume that you've got a good insight into people, that you have a feeling for what's admirable or what's reprehensible - and then POW! It can mess up your mind and leave you with a much less assured, confident or complete sense of yourself.

Which goes some way towards explaining why the magnificent creative flowering which Hard Station represents was such a long time coming.

*The whole experience of writing songs in partnership with Chris McCloud was so unreal, self-conscious, dishonest and such a formula kind of thing - writing songs to a formula in his mind - that it turned me off, it shattered me with songwriting for years and I was very happy to scuttle off back to traditional music and wipe my brow and say 'thank God I'm out of that'.*

Is he more hostile as a result?

*I don't think I'm hostile. I'm probably a little paranoid. But at the same time I got a hint of things during that period that are beginning to come out now. I put it all on ice because I wasn't able to deal with it at the time but in terms of writing I felt, well, 'Yes, someday I know you can do it. But you need to get out of it for a while'.*

If would have been a singular relief to Paul Brady when Chris McCloud suddenly disappeared off the Dublin landscape, if there hadn't been an unresolved question of the distribution of royalties, relating to the Johnstons, and allegedly received by McCloud. But that's another story...

It may have been a long time coming but Hard Station is worth the wait. The songs are of the essence, Brady's sureness of touch in writing seldom failing. There's a density and power there that only the terminally self-important could fail to register.

His voice comes on strong too, celebrating the freedom of movement won with his decision to forsake acoustic music for rock. Away from the conventions and constraints of traditional formalism, he soars and swoops, testifying and protesting with both vigour and panache. He seems right at home in his new clothes. But the break isn't as clearcut as all that, to Brady's way of seeing things.

*If I hadn't spent a long time listening to and singing traditional songs, I wouldn't have written in the particular style I've evolved. I like good strong melodies. There's probably a lot of people who'd say that strong melodies and rock'n'roll don't go together - I don't believe that. I believe that melodies can be strong and still punchy. I find that a lot of rock'n'roll falls down in terms of melody.*

It's a weakness he finds in Jackson Browne's work, though certain of his songs have a lot in common with Browne's in approach. In fact his musical preferences are both interesting and surprising - the two he singles out for mention on this occasion being Randy Newman and ... David Bowie.

*I love Randy Newman. It doesn't bother me any more that his music and his arrangements are coming from the same place all the time - that kind of Southern Church harmony type of thing he's into - because it's his songs, it's what he writes about. He's probably my favourite lyric writer - he's savage and he's honest. I'm very impressed with his writing.*

But his interest in Bowie is especially important in that it was in reaction to the latter's image-manipulation and theatricality that so many Irish musicians retired, confused and alienated, to traditional music in the early Seventies. Brady in fact stopped listening to rock music for a long time.

*There's a lot of music there, coinciding with the time I was in traditional music, that I go back to with interest now. It's weird going back now to what was a huge album, that was very, very influential on a large number of people's lives and you haven't heard it, so that you can go back to this album entirely free from that time space in which it was influential and listen to it just as a piece of music. I get great enjoyment in doing that.

*One of the people I'm really interested in now is David Bowie. I love what he does with albums. I love what he does with sounds and I love his attitude towards the songs he writes. His attitude towards life - it's white hot all the time. I'd like to incorporate that kind of spirit into what I do. Be a lot more outrageous and daring - not for the sake of attracting interest but just, it's very exciting to be out there and I want to resist being conservative.*

In that sense, the move from traditional music seems conclusive.

*I don't find many messages coming through to me from that area,* he says simply.

Is traditional music a limited pool from which to draw?

*Very definitely. I feel there is a bottom to the well.*

That feeling seems to be in the air.

*I think probably people are arriving at that same opinion, that there's an end to what people can do with traditional music without it no longer being traditional music. Whether or not that's been reached yet is a matter of opinion.*

Whatever about that, he's more immediately interested in the fresh young rock that's emerged from the new generation of Irish bands in recent times.

*There's an energy there that doesn't owe an allegiance to anything that's gone before and it's free to go whatever way it wants to go. Although on one level music might suffer because it's got minimal influences or hasn't been guided in certain directions, it also has that freedom to develop itself. That's very exciting.*

These attitudes are reflected in the progress of his own songwriting, which is developing out of self-analysis into a concern with wider themes. 'Nothing But The Same Old Story' is a mini-epic on the ostracisation and condescension suffered by the Irish in Britain, a song with a sharp political edge, rendered even more relevant in the context of current tensions on the H-Block issue.

*If you talk about life at all, you talk about politics, don't you?* Brady responds rhetorically. *You can't escape the fact that Irish in London are considered inferior beings, generally speaking. I mean Irish people of a navvy class, they're looked down on by English people - that's political.

*I wrote the song about a year ago. I remember listening to Marian Finnucane on 'Women Today' and she was interviewing some London Irish people, asking them what it's like to be Irish in London, so to speak. And the whole gamut of opinions was run... And I just started thinking about living in London in the late '60s and I became momentarily enraged at the blindness of it all - that what in effect is a very alive, witty, poetic race is considered to be inferior by another race.

*I want to get away from 'intensely personal songs',* he adds. *Most people begin by writing about themselves and then when you get bored writing about yourself, which you do very quickly, you write about other things. 'Nothing But The Same Old Story', to me, is my favourite song on the record. I don't feel that on the record it comes across as well as I'd have liked but...

*I'd like to feel that I could write more songs like that. Perhaps I'm closer to that kind of a song and that kind of a sentiment and that kind of anger than I often get to express. I'm probably much more like that - a lot more than people see or I let out or whatever. But that's my favourite song on the album.*

He doesn't see himself encountering a problem coming up with material for a second album. The more he writes, the more his confidence and his fluency grow.

*Now that I know that I can write songs, I'm less hung up about it, so that they happen much quicker now. I can only write in certain situations. I have to approach it like an office job, where you go into a room for four hours in the morning, come out and have lunch and go in again. That's the only way I can work. If I force myself, sooner or later things will happen - whereas if I don't, I can go for months.*

He's a careful craftsman, in other words - and it shows in the songs. It also shows in his attitude to a record titled Hard Station.

Because he is so conscious of his craft, Paul Brady is a very self-critical individual. He wasn't happy with the live gigs he did late last year, on his first stint with the Paul Brady Band, for example.

*I'm very rarely happy with anything I do,* he accepts, *very rarely.*

What about the album? *In so far as I can be happy with anything, I'm happy with it. Yes.*

But it emerges later, when I get down to criticising specifics - making the point that the implicit power of 'Nothing But The Same Old Story' is missed in the mix on the album, for one - he agrees.

Which is important in one respect. Those listening to Hard Station from a 'rock' standpoint, without a prior knowledge of Brady's work or without a sympathy for his starting point, may find the album lacking in weight or dynamics here and there. It's a limitation, however, of which he's aware. My own feelings about Hard Station are extremely positive - Paul Brady has a lot to be proud of, a lot to be happy with, a lot to celebrate.

But Hard Station as is, doesn't fully represent what he's capable of. It's an album to love and cherish, an important Irish rock album and a fine record of original songs by any standards - but it's also a pointer to the fact that Paul Brady can do so much more, given this experience as a reference point.

See you in fifteen... months?