Piano Man Man

Phil Coulter? That bland, boring bastard? That may well be the knee-jerk response of many hotpress readers on seeing the man s name in this magazine. Coulter himself would probably admit that this reaction is understandable given that he has recorded no less than fifteen New Age albums in the lineage of the best-selling Classic Tranquillity: hardly cutting edge stuff.

And yet there are many sides to Cool Philter to cull a phrase from Shay Healy. And it is these sides which are the focus of his Songs I Love So Well show, currently running at Dublin s HQ and touring nationwide in September.
Two years ago, for example, Coulter won a Producer of the Year nomination from Q magazine for his work on Siniad O Connor s album, Universal Mother. He also was chosen by Van the Man to produce the Morrison tribute album, No Prima Donna. In fact, their working relationship stretches back to 1964 when Phil Coulter played those legendary organ licks on Here Comes The Night by Them. Coulter also played percussion on Gloria and composed, for the group s second album, I Can Only Give You Everything , a song that has since been covered by The Undertones. The riff from this track is central to Beck s composition Devil s Haircut : Coulter receives not only credit as its co-author but healthy cheques from Beck s publishing company! And if that doesn t give Coulter some form of rock cred maybe we should also mention that the Troggs covered one of his songs. As did MC5.
In fact, in 1974, when the king of rock n roll, Elvis, was beginning to yield to the drugs and despair that would finally kill him, the man gave vent to such feelings, in part, by recording Coulter s song My Boy .
In addition, Coulter kick-started the career of the Bay City Rollers with ditties like Saturday Night . And he composed UK Eurovision hits that helped consolidate his own career: Puppet On A String and Congratulations .
The latter, along with two other Coulter tunes, Scorn Not His Simplicity and The Town I Loved So Well , were recently chosen, by the listeners of RTE s Ronan Collins show, as three of the Top 100 songs of the 20th Century. The Town I Loved So Well came third, beaten only by White Christmas and My Way .
Needless to say, Phil Coulter probably didn t turn up in any millennium polls put together by music critics.

Joe Jackson: Hasn t there always been a divide between what the general public likes and what critics try to tell people they should like!
Phil Coulter: Very much so. And outside of Lennon and McCartney, the only songwriter to get three out of the top 40, in that RTE poll, was myself. That made me very happy. Because the people who voted were the regular Joes who listen to radio and buy records.
I only once made a record to try to please critics. After my teenybopper experience working with the Bay City Rollers, Kenny and all that slagging about manufactured boy bands I got involved with Slik, who were a different proposition because they were good musicians! A Glasgow band, led by Midge Ure. Our first hit was the number one, Forever And Ever , but then we got all the snidey stuff: here we go again, Bay City Rollers Mark Two . So I said it s time to show there s a bit more fucking meat on the bones here.
So what sort of meisterwork did you come up with?
The follow-up was Requiem , a complex record, in the Queen mode. It was a great piece of work. I thought the critics will love this . And they did! Yet the record died on its arse! So if I needed confirmation that this is not the way to run a business, that was it!
But once you become a songwriter, that is your profession. You do say: this will feed, clothe and educate my kids.
That s the bottom line. If, along the way, you create something of consequence, substance, which achieves critical acclaim, that s a bonus.
Since Dylan, the main gauge of substance seems to be is the song authentic? Does it come from the life of the songwriter? So, many people may suspect there is nothing authentic about your work. That you re just a hack .
That kind of analysis does my work a great disservice. Some of the greatest songs in the world were turned out by professional songwriters like Cole Porter. He wasn t a dilettante.
And even if you typify a hack as a guy who churns out songs on a production line, that would be Irving Berlin. He was, musically, unsophisticated but had the common touch, creating songs for the man-in-the-street. Does that make his work less substantial? No.
The best of your songs do reveal you to be the kind of hook-driven, melody-loving songwriter that emerged during the early days of rock n roll guys like Leiber and Stoller.
Absolutely. One of the most exhilarating nights in a theatre I ve ever had, was on Broadway, a few years back, when I saw their show, Smoky Joe s Cafe. I came out thinking Fuck! Each one of their songs was better than the last! That reminded me of what pop music is all about. To do your business, in a song, within three minutes, takes great discipline and skill.
So, yes, if I was to cite my main influences it would be guys like Leiber and Stoller, more than Porter or Irving Berlin. They re the real heroes of songwriting. They created something joyous and accessible.
What inspired your infatuation with that kind of pop music?
My love of the classic pop song probably goes right back to Fats Domino. I vividly remember sitting down, as a teenager, trying to figure out the piano intro to Blueberry Hill. That s where it all started for me. With Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis.
The piano was part of my family life. Because my dad played fiddle and my mom vamped along behind him, on the piano. And I was sent to piano lessons at the age of seven.
Fortunately my father, chastising me for some misdemeanour, stopped those lessons and I found my way back to the piano, teaching myself things by ear. Fats Domino! Rock n roll! Those are my real roots.
Rock n roll and also showband music?
The showbands really took off in Derry. Why? Because unemployment always was endemic in Derry. And whatever work there was didn t go to Catholics. So one way a guy could get a few quid was by playing in dance bands. In other words, the idea of music as a means to earn a few quid was part of our culture.
You also were one of the first Taigs at Queen s.
Not only that. When I went to Queen s University around 1959, though rock n roll was well under way and I thought this place is going to be jumping with bands , all they had were fucking groups of tired musicians, hired from the Musicians Union, sitting with their faded tuxedos, beer stains on the lapels, playing Jimmy Lally orchestrations! I thought fuck this, do they not realise what s going on? So I started my own band. And when I did, there was that response of what do you expect from a Taig? But I said, fuck it .
Sure, I loved Beethoven and the years I spent studying orchestration, harmony, counterpoint at Queen s, means I now can stand up in front of any orchestra and say I know this shit but from the start my heart was in rock n roll.
Even so, Puppet On A String is a long way from Blueberry Hill or Great Balls of Fire !
My first job, as a songwriter, was as a general dogsbody for Phil Solomon. And he represented Them, The Bachelors and Tom Jones! Solomon also got Bert Berns to come from America, to do sessions. In fact, working with Bert was my introduction to watching a producer at work. I worked with him on Them sessions, playing organ, singing backing vocals on Here Comes The Night , whatever.
When you recorded Gloria , did you know you were creating a rock classic?
No. It s like, later, when some young, effusive Irish folkie, was talking about the Planxty records, he said to myself and Liam Sg O Flynn God, it must have been great, you were making history . And Liam said no, we were making records!
Bert Berns obviously was a shadowy character in terms of Van s life. Did you have any notion of Bert s connections ?
No. And I didn t care. I just knew he was a fucking wizard. An alchemist. He wrote Here Comes The Night for a start!
I know that the early Them rehearsals and recordings were clumsy, to say the least. Yet I distinctly remember walking into the Decca studios in West Hampstead, for a session Bert had with Them, and he was doing a run-through of Here Comes The Night. That was the first time I got fucking hair standing up on the back of my arms. I knew this was a hit! And it was Bert Berns who injected that into the recording.
I have no doubt Van had a bad time with Bert. But I also know that when Bert first got Van over to New York it helped him, overall. Those were dark days for Van. He was abandoned, in Belfast, because he d broken with Phil Solomon.
I remember Van, in my house in London, after a particularly disastrous American tour and he said he was having nothing more to do with Them. He went back to Belfast and did very little. I m not saying that situation would have maintained but it s a possibility.
But I believe that Bert Berns getting him out of there and into the milieu of New York led to Van s re-emergence.
Do you believe those stories about someone like Van asking for royalties and being shown the barrel of a gun?
That probably is true. But my first training ground in the Phil Solomon organisation was a little like that. That s just the way the music business was, in those days. Yet I was glad to be in the game. So if he said I have to own half the songwriting income , I d go okay.
Likewise, if you wanted to get a song recorded by Tom Jones. Gordon Mills, his manager, said if Tom records it, I want half of your royalties.
Did similar scams apply when it came to multi-million selling hits like Puppet On A String ?
By that stage we were signed to a legit publishing house, Keith Prowse Music. But legit is relative. Various things would have affected the royalties for Puppet On A String . That was the golden age of Eurovision so we re talking about five or six million records. We made big money from songs like Puppet On A String. More money than my father would have made in his entire life. But we could have made more. There were 147 versions of it when we stopped counting.
So you d stand over things like Puppet On A String ?
And Congratulations. If only because every fucking time there is a party nowadays, someone gets up and sings that song. How does that make me feel? Great. That s exactly the kind of timeless song I set out to write.
A lot of people dismiss those songs as facile.
In fact, I put a tremendous amount of work into things like Puppet On A String. We researched the Eurovision, realised it had been won in the past by the big lyrical ballads and said no one does that better than the Italians or the Spanish. But there also were the cute songs and I thought maybe we can out-cute them! Hence Puppet On A String. And we also analysed previous Eurovision winners like (sings) Vooooolare. As in, long note at the front, good idea. (sings) IIIIIIII wonder if some day that. Same thing. That s how seriously I took this job!
How did you respond when fame and riches came your way?
Began to play the songwriter and didn t write a song for three months, thinking this is cool . Till our publisher Jimmy Philips of KPM Music reminded us there was work to be done!
Did you go crazy, over-indulge in drink, drugs?
By today s standards, not crazy. There were none of the great extravagances such as fucking buying Porsches or doing coke. My coke came out of a bottle and was mixed with Scotch!
But would you be inclined to reveal such things if they were true. As in, say, the fact that the manager of the Bay City Rollers, Tom Paton, was riding some of the guys in the band?
I wouldn t have known any of that, at the time. There were warning signs on tour. As in the fact that they had a laundry boy , some seventeen year old.
For who? The manager?
Well, it was an excuse for having him on the road with the Bay City Rollers, for whatever reason! But I didn t get that close to them. I didn t go on the road with them or share their hotels. I wrote songs for them and produced their records then handed them over to the record company. That s all I was contracted to do. So I really knew nothing about their sexual proclivities or the fact that they were getting ripped off, or whatever.
Later, when you found out they had been exploited, sexually, and that their manager ended up in jail, how did you, as a father of teenage boys, respond?
He didn t end up in jail over The Bay City Rollers. He said it was someone over-age. But I have no great desire to go into that. It s all a bit sordid for me.
Though, yes, I have boys and I know there is that tradition of exploiting young guys in pop, so I would warn them about such pitfalls. But, among my circle of friends, I know many gays and I don t have a single problem with that. I find them great fun, great company. Always did.
When you started hanging out in London clubs like the Revolution in the late 60s you were married, weren t you?
Unfortunately for my wife!
So you weren t a good boy as far as fidelity was concerned?
Not as good as I should have been! But, again, it s all relative. What I mostly did was a lot of drinking, a lot of late nights, whatever. And, for me the real buzz came from hanging out with groups like The Hollies. I swear! The real thrill was playing the songwriter, wearing shades, hoping I d bump into Paul McCartney, thinking I m one of these boys now! Yet I did, as I say, drink a hell of a lot.
Did you ever go as near the edge as Richard Harris, in terms of drink? He, after all, temporarily lost his mind, waking up one morning thinking he was Cromwell, while shooting the movie of the same name.
I didn t go as far into the drink as he did. Yet I went as far as I d want to go. And I had more than my share of alcoholic experiences, with Harris. And without him.
I remember one time, at a weekend party in my house in Highgate, I was playing cards and I had a bottle of Gin and some tonic water. At one point I reached down to pour myself another gin and tonic and there was no gin! And I thought, through this drunken fog, wait a minute, a full bottle of gin, over a game of cards? And I m the only one drinking gin? This is not good .
There was another moment of truth when I was bombing down Marylebone High Road, drunk, in a BMW at two o clock in the morning, coming back from some nightclub, doing 95 miles per hour. Those really were wake up calls, in terms of the drink. I still drink but not to that extent.
The album, My Boy, that you worked on together told the tale of the break up of Harris marriage to his first wife, Elizabeth, and the pain that caused to their children. Did that album also reflect the break up of your own first marriage, which involved three children?
No. That was me being a songwriter. But my marriage did break down, subsequently, so the position I d projected myself into, to write those songs, did turn out to be true, for myself, in many ways.
But then I d been around Harris often enough, and nursed him through enough drunken bouts, to understand his pain. And my friends have also gone through marriage breakdowns.
Did you ever write songs rooted in that break up, where you can say this is Phil Coulter tapping into his own shadows ?
I wrote a lot of stuff but it never saw the light of day. In fact when I look back on the songs I ve written, I see the early songs have nothing of me in them. The breakthrough probably was Scorn Not His Simplicity which, I often wonder, would I have written if I didn t have Luke Kelly to sing it?
Luke was a man of great integrity so I wrote Scorn Not His Simplicity for him because I knew he wouldn t trivialise it or demean it. And writing the song was my way of dealing with the whole thing.
The whole thing being the fact that your son, Paul, was born with Down s Syndrome and died before his fourth birthday?
Yes. And I have to confess that for the first six or nine months after he was born, I pretended he didn t have Down s Syndrome, which was pretty unhealthy. That was my defence mechanism. And that is what I seem to do in times of crisis, when all your worst nightmares come true. So Scorn Not His Simplicity was some sort of exorcism.
Your brother Brian drowned as a result of a wind-surfing accident and your sister Cyd died in pretty horrific circumstances. Did you keep your emotions at bay, then later write a song to try to come to terms with that kind of pain?
Definitely. Because I think it s dangerous to write about those experiences too soon. Emotionally, you re in too much of a turmoil. I wrote a piece on my Highland Cathedral album, for my sister, called In Loving Memory , which is very reflective, poignant. But, in terms of my brother s death, the way I dealt with that was to write Home From the Sea a song about lifeboats. Because had there been a lifeboat in Lough Swilly, he d be alive. That s why myself and some friends put pressure on the RNLA to put a boat and station there. And I did some concerts to get the start-up funds.
But to continue to pump in funds I wrote Home From The Sea which I m really proud of, because it has since become the lifeboat anthem in the British Isles.
Why wasn t In Loving Memory more angry? Given that your sister, a social worker, was murdered by a client?
That is the kind of song I would have written, had I written it immediately after her death. And that s my point. I definitely felt anger, bewilderment, whatever, when I stood, on a pissy wet night, on the pier in Buncrana and saw a crane lift her car out of the water. In fact, I took a step above myself. It was like looking at a bad B-movie. Surreal. Like something I was watching rather than actually experiencing.
What, exactly, happened to your sister?
The car was driven off the edge of the pier, by her, with the guy who was her client, forcing her to do it. That s why she was missing for several days. It was totally bewildering. Nothing in my experience had enabled me to cope with anything as bizarre as that.
Did music help you to cope?
I m sure that, as I ve done is many of those situations, I did gravitate towards the piano and batter and bash, get a lot of stuff out of my system that way. Yet I had reached a stage in my life where I d found a place in my heart and soul, where I could put all that pain and though the wound is always weeping, you do lock it away. And when I had, then I wrote In Loving Memory .
Have you ever forgiven the man who murdered your sister?
No. And there are a lot of unanswered questions about that whole thing. I don t think anyone will know what she went through in those final hours. But I do know it was during her ten-year-old son, Stephen s, birthday party, she got the call to say this client was in need of help. So she put the ice cream cake back in the fridge and said this shouldn t take too long, we ll finish this when I come back . But she never came back. It was some kind of suicide trip by that guy and, as often happens, the compulsion was to take the carer with him. [Coulter becomes emotional talking about his sister. The interview is put on hold for a short while. The accompanying photographs are taken.]
Let s get back to the music. Earlier, you seemed to downplay the importance of, say, the Planxty debut album you produced, which, for many, did redefine Irish music.
I didn t mean to downplay it. I knew it was something special when we were recording it. And I always was anchored in Irish music. O Riada was hugely important to me. The first time I heard Mise Eire it was like being hit with a shovel. Because this was Irish music in a way that hadn t been done before.
In fact, when Paddy Moloney, in your hotpress interview, didn t fully acknowledge his debt to O Riada, it betrayed a great lack of generosity of spirit. For anyone to say, who is now working the field of Irish traditional music, that they weren t influenced by O Riada, is nonsense. Particularly someone who was part of Ceoltoiri Chulainn.
So, to get back to Planxty, I was fully aware we were doing something ground-breaking with those three Planxty albums. Though convincing Polydor to give me the budget to get state of the art studios, to capture all that musical detail, was no easy battle. I m glad I fought to get that.
Over the past thirteen years you ve released at least fifteen New Age albums. Does it bother you that they are seen as totally lacking in substance?
No. I understand it. Because there is an awful lot of crap in New Age. When Windham Hill emerged it was all very futon and quiche! Four tracks on an album and one of them was someone holding down a synthesiser chord for three minutes to the sound of rippling music and you d say what the fuck is going on there? That was all atmosphere-driven, with very little content.
But New Age now encompasses so much more. It s melody driven, inclusive of folk influences and World Music. And I don t see my instrumental music as soulless.
Your press release refers to you as the King of Celtic Music !
I hate that. The whole Celtic thing makes me creep. It s just a tag record companies and marketing guys jumped on, following Riverdance, and it led to a lot of music that was utter shite. But I was building up my audience as far back as 1987, with the Classic Tranquility album. Long before Riverdance. Though Riverdance hasn t done us any harm.
What do you think of Riverdance?
I agree with the critic who said the music was like Planxty with strings. And when you think of all those odd rhythms, those 11/8 s, that was Andy Irvine s work. He d come back from a trip to Bulgaria and was playing mandolas and bouzoukis and brought all that into Irish music. Yet I don t hear his name mentioned in any of these assessments of how Irish music has evolved.
As for Bill Whelan? He explored those Eastern things, with Davy Spillane, but that was simply carrying on from the early Planxty, early Andy Irvine work. Andy Irvine is one of the great unsung heroes in all this. He was a great contributor to Planxty and, as I say, by extension, Riverdance. But I wouldn t sit and listen to the music from Riverdance. I don t think anybody would.
You produced Universal Mother how highly do you rate Siniad O Connor?
Siniad is a very complex woman. And the way our album came about also shows she s a woman who acts on impulse.
When Van and I were working on the No Prima Donna album we decided to pick the songs for whoever was involved. I said, if we don t, we re going to have twelve versions of Moondance !
So I was given the job of phoning Siniad, whom I d never met, and telling her what song she d be singing. She wasn t comfortable about that because she didn t know the song. Then she arrived in Windmill Lane and there s the likes of Marianne Faithfull, Van, Michelle Rocca and I just thought this may be Siniad O Connor, full of lip and all that, but she s just walked into the studio and she s bound to be intimidated by all this . So I gave her a hug, said I m Phil, nice to meet you . Then I told the rest of them to disappear.
Van said, No, I want to hear what she can do. I said Van, you gotta fucking leave. Take everyone, go to the pub, have a bottle of wine, I ll call you in a few hours and let you know how we re getting on. So they went and we began to work together without that added pressure.
I was as protective, even fatherly, as I could be, talking Siniad through it till we got a great performance. Then, the following morning, there was a fax, saying I swore I d never work in the studio again, I can t get over how chilled out you are. Would you like to produce my new album? That s how we got to do Universal Mother.
What s your unbiased opinion of the album itself?
It was a challenging album to make! Siniad is volatile, with very clear ideas of what she wants to do, very opinionated. But there s also a great vulnerability about her. And I was aware of both those sides.
So my role in producing that album was as much to read those moods and respond to them as they happened. Or anticipate them.
At one point, we were talking about how the album was evolving into a look at the relationship between the mother and child and Scorn Not His Simplicity came up and Siniad didn t realise I d written it! When I told her, she was blown away! She said let s do it! And when we ran through it a few times we just dimmed the lights in the studio and got it in no more than two takes! Just me at the piano and her singing. Very highly charged.
There were moments of tension recording the album but you could forgive her everything when she just opens her mouth and sings. And I remember feeling emotionally drained when she d finished Scorn Not His Simplicity . And she did. When the tape stopped we both stayed in our positions for what seemed like an eternity. Savouring the moment.
Moments like that must compensate for the critical mauling your music often receives?
Absolutely. And when you realise I am part of having just created that! you also remember this is why I got into music! And Siniad was so proud of that recording. There are some songs on the album better than others. But as a project, I, too, am proud of it. And Siniad has a God-given voice. Luke Kelly had the same gift. And as I ve often said about Richard Harris, though he might not be a singer in the orthodox sense, by Jesus, if you re talking about making a song reach out and touch you, when he gets hold of a lyric, you believe every word he s singing.
Many people regard The Town I Loved So Well as your finest composition. But you struggled over that lyric for a year, determined it wouldn t become a rebel song.
It would have been so easy to write a Brits Out and Fuck the Bastards song. I was in Derry the weekend internment was introduced and I wrote Free The People , an anti-internment song. And I recorded it with the Dubliners right away.
But I was too angry about internment when I wrote Free The People. And it s less of a song because of that. I was fully aware that given a few misjudgements, The Town I Loved So Well could have been simply a Men Behind The Wire song.
I wanted to write a more reflective lyric about something that was monumental, historic and hugely traumatic to me.
Essentially, it isn t a political song.
It was not only the scars on the landscape and the fact that whole parts of the city weren t there any more, it was also the loss of the fun-loving, music-loving city I d grown up in. That was eroded. There was this sense of doom, a pall of gloom had settled on the place. People weren t going out at night, bars were empty, everybody was expecting the next blitz. It was hugely depressing. I reworked The Town I Loved So Well over most of a year to get it where I wanted.
Was the republican tag ever applied to you?
I would certainly hope not. That would have been far too simplistic. I come from a Catholic, Nationalist background. But I use the word nationalist rather than republican and that would still be my overview. Though there would have been people who, in the early days, looked on The Town I Loved So Well as a republican song.
But it s heartening for me to know that with the passage of time people in the Unionist community see the song more in its historical context.
What evidence have you got for that?
I perform The Town I Love So Well whether I m in Ballymena or Ballyadrin. In fact, the shortest tour I ever did was two free concerts, called Both Sides Now . One in the Bogside, in Derry, for teenagers studying music. The following day I repeated the process in the Shankill Road. One night I was chatting backstage to Mitchel McLaughlin, John Hume; the next it was David Ervine and Gary McMichael. And I d hope both sides do now see the song as their own.
Has the fact that John Hume made it his party-piece affected that?
The fact that John Hume has adopted The Town I Love So Well as his personal Derry anthem is very gratifying for me particularly as a Derry man, and someone who believes that no one has done more for the Peace Process than John but I wouldn t want it to be seen as simply an SDLP anthem. Or anything so one-sided.
Was there ever pressure put on you to support the republican cause, as with Harris supporting Noraid?
Yeah. And he wouldn t have been the most discerning, in terms of Northern Ireland. There are people who haven t grown up there such as Richard Harris whose perspective on Northern Ireland wouldn t be as nuanced or sophisticated. The same thing when it comes to supporting the cause . I did not support the Provos. And I got flak. I would be touring America and there were those who said I could spread the word. But that s not the word I would want to spread.
So what is?
I can name several Unionist politicians as friends. I ve talked to them at length. I know what makes them tick, what their perception of the situation is. You only get that by taking the time to listen to those guys. To me that s more worthwhile than doing a benefit in the Bogside for the Provos. And for me to go into the Shankill Road and explain what The Town I Loved So Well really is about or talk about the 1798 rebellion and tell that audience it wasn t about Taigs and Prods , it was about the working class rising up against absentee landlords. Or remind them that the United Irishman was started by Northern Presbyterians and that we have far more in common than they might have thought. This, to me, is far more important than doing Wrap The Green Flag Round Me.
Do you really feel, as you say in The Town I Loved So Well , that the landscape you knew as a child, the place you grew up in, was taken from you as a result of the Troubles?
I was in Czlaodh, visiting Peader O Riada some months back, and I realised I do envy his sense of place. He s living where he grew up, with friends, neighbours he s known all his life. That must give him a great sense of comfort. To know you are in your place. I am not. But if I m at home with six kids around the dinner table in Bray, or wherever, that s where I feel my home is. I wouldn t move back to Derry. I couldn t live there now.
Most songwriters, if they d composed even The Town I Loved So Well , would feel they accomplished something of true, lasting value. Do you?
Yes. And if I were pressed to choose one song I am, personally, most proud of it is The Town I Loved So Well . Though, on the other hand, as a professional songwriter, the song I m most proud of is My Boy. Because it was recorded by Elvis.
As I said earlier, during my formative years the two greatest influences were the advent of rock n roll and the showbands. And even though my first flirtation with rock was Fats Domino, later, when I gravitated towards Elvis, I realised he bestrode the whole thing like a colossus. So to be able to say Elvis Presley sang my words, my song that, to me, really is something special. And probably one of my greatest accomplishments.
That and The Town I Loved So Well.

Phil Coulter is currently performing The Songs I Love So Well in HQ at the Irish Music Hall of Fame in Dublin, until September.