THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

In 1987 in a considered compliment, Philip King confidently described Christy Moore as Ireland s most popular entertainer. Four years later, as the century stutters through its last decade, one might go even further, to suggest that Moore may indeed be the most important Irish singer-songwriter of our time.
Indeed, at some point in the future, when cultural analysts seek to understand the social/sexual and political changes which took place in the 1980s in Ireland, they could scarcely do better than to turn to Moore s work. His emotional power, his insight, his sense of humour, of history and of self combined to make him a true barometer of the era.
Moore s own response to such high praise is typically self-deflating. I wouldn t pay one iota of attention to that kind of statement. It s certainly not my view of things. Mind you, if other people believe that, brilliant! he laughs. But what really tickles my ego is when Shane MacGowan or Siniad O Connor or Johnny Lydon say they ve been influenced by me. That s when I say Jaysus I ve done something with my life!
There was a time when that might have seemed like a risky statement for a folk-singer to make but Christy Moore refuses to draw lines or erect barriers between folk and rock.
I don t see any divisions at all, he says. To me it s all the same. There s no difference between a rock musician and folk musician at core. They throw different shapes and occupy different stages, in a different context, but it s still music that stirs the emotions. And whether it s Pavarotti who touches your heart with a big sound beautifully delivered or Maggie Cassidy who touches you with her rawness they are, fundamentally, two people using the human voice to move an audience.
Whether it s Bob Dylan, Jimmy MacCarthy or Bono it doesn t matter. I don t accept those divisions in terms of musicians. Louis Stewart plays guitar totally differently to the Edge, but each produces a soundwave that cuts into your head and travels down to your heart and toes. At core we are all connected.
Folk purists, on the other hand, might argue that their music i more essentially political. Right. But what are purists? asks Christy rhetorically. They re elitists whose heads are stuck up their own arses. You have people like t hat who see themselves as superior whether it s in terms of folk music, rock music, country music or classical. But anybody who is like that is just an elitist, thinking the music I like is better than the music you listen to . Extend that to its logical conclusion and it s so I myself must be better than you . That s all a load of crap. Music is music. That s where it begins and ends.

Christy Moore was born in Newbridge, Co. Kildare just after the Second World War had finished. His father, originally in the Free State Army and his mother, at one time a member of Sinn Fein, both ended up representing Fine Gael. Was the household a highly political one?
I was aware of political activity, particularly around election time but it was more local politics of an everyday practical nature rather than being rooted in any kind of ideology. Fine Gael, Republican or otherwise. My father didn t fit into any particular mould of what a politician was, or is, to me. But then he died when I was 11, in 1956. Yet he had a tremendous influence on me and has, up to the present day. He was omnipresent in my life growing up and was a major influence in Newbridge. It had a terrible effect on the place when he died.
What effect did his death have on the young Christy Moore?
It obviously left a profound impression, he says, shaking his head and instinctively switching into a mode of quiet recollection. When I look back on it I can remember it all so distinctly. He went into hospital one Sunday night to have a toe-nail removed and he was dead Monday morning, having died under the anaesthetic. I was in the Christian Brothers school at the time and Fr. McNally called Brother Brendan out and though there were 60 of us in the class I got this terrible feeling. Even though they were outside the room I shivered.
Then the Brother came in and said Fr. McNally wants to have a word with you and i went out and he said I think you better go home. Your mother wants to talk to you . That s all he said. And when I cycled home I saw that black yoke on the door and when I went in the house was all in darkness and I remember thinking This is how George Crowley must have felt . His father had died the year before.
Moore pauses and then goes on, speaking even more faintly.
I didn t see him laid out that day, or ever. And I didn t go into the graveyard because my mother felt it was better that I didn t. Obviously she was distraught and only did what she thought was best, and maybe she was right, but I ve often wondered about the possible repercussions. I don t know if I ever really grieved because of the way it all happened.
Speaking to you now 35 years later, I feel I would like to have seen the corpse, to touch it. My father s death was very traumatic and I m not sure if I ve ever fully delved into that. But, on the other hand, although I still feel my father s death I m not sure I should go back 30 years and confront it.
Apart from his death I can t really remember anything harsh about my childhood, he adds. All I recall is an idyllic feeling that says a lot for my mother. And it s only now that I have children of my own that I fully realise what she did and how well she coped, particularly after my father s death.

Donal Lunny, a friend of Moore s since childhood, has written in the introduction to The Christy Moore Songbook that sessions were frequent in the Moore family. His mother Nancy loved, and still loves, creating opportunities for people to sing and play. Thus encouraged albeit initially in a more genteel direction, Christy flourished .
Genteel is not a word I would have used! Moore laughs. It suggests something cosy and inoffensive and decidedly middle-class. There was a touch of that but the first songs I ever learned were things like Kevin Barry and The Meeting Of The Waters and hymns and so on. It wasn t traditional music I was into in those early days. There always was music there but it was show tunes and pop songs. I remember popular music before rock n roll!
That said, Christy Moore reveals that he was a bit of a teddy boy in the mid- 50s. I saw Rock Around The Clock in Newbridge AND Nass AND Celbridge, he laughs. I was very into rock n roll and Radio Luxembourg 208, from the moment it all hit Ireland. I bought Elvis 78s from the beginning. I remember the thrill of buying Hound Dog and later the trauma of having to change over to 45s, getting the first one Elvis A Mess Of Blues . I also remember having an amazing time dancing to those early rock n roll records. It was wild.
Was he a bit of a 50s wild-boy in terms of women and drink?
Of course that was part of it, he smiles. I started drinking very young and there was always a lot of lovely women around and it would have been weird seeing Kildare women and not trying to get off with them! Strangely enough my Catholic school upbringing didn t really leave a mark on me in terms of sex. I worked very diligently to break those particular chains! By the time I started getting off with women I was no longer worried about mortal sin. By that stage I only worried about mortal sins when I wasn t committing them!(laughs).
But it s true, I had no problem with my own sexuality from the point of view of the Catholic Church. The only problem I had with sex and the Catholic Church was that it prevented me from having all the sexual experiences I wanted as a young man. But that wasn t because of any conflict between the church and me. It was more a result of conflict between the church and the people I wanted to have sex with!
It isn t an issue he sees in a purely humorous light.
A lot of Irish women writers have written about this from the other side, he adds, how women had more problems in the 50s and 60s coming to term with their bodies. But I wouldn t have been aware of that or sensitive to that side of the argument at all at the time.
So how has Christy Moore s attitude to women changed over the years? Was it originally sexist, chauvinistic, thoughtlessly placing the man s desires on whatever level above the woman s needs?
Yes, guilty on all counts, he answers. And as I ve achieved liberation from my attitudes towards women, as I ve become educated over the last 15 years, I ve realised that I was tremendously sexist when I was younger. But those were the attitudes that were normal at the time. Who, in Ireland, in 1961 believed women were equal to men? Even women didn t, or if they did they weren t telling me. Part of the root of that attitude to women stemmed from my upbringing as a Catholic. The patriarchal perspective, the belief that women definitely were not equal in the eyes of the church and that they were, in fact, totally different people, who were there to serve, sexually, and in every way. It was years before I broke away from those shackles. But then my attempts weren t helped by the fact that for a long time I was working in folk music. I remember getting a shock once when i herd Gay Woods on the radio saying that the whole folk scene was so macho and male orientated that it was ridiculous. She was right.

In 1961 while he was still at school Christy Moore began to spend his summers in England, hoping to accumulate as much money as possible to tide him over the rest of the year. But once I d get over to England I d concentrate on making as much music as possible and getting as much drink into me as I could, he laughs.
After finishing school, Christy worked in a bank but during the National strike of 1966 he jacked that in and moved to England where he soon discovered other stimulants with which to balance his taste for alcohol. He smoked dope on a daily basis for over 10 years and he also rated LSD as useful in terms of its mind-expanding potential , until he experienced the trauma of a particularly bad trip.
I d taken acid on top of a lot of drink and all I could think of was this suicide pact I felt I had with the fella who was with me. He finally had to pull the phone out of the wall because I d called a doctor, and then I d tried to call the police. It was terrifying. That was about 1977. The early experiences were in the mid to late 1960s and I didn t finally let go until the late 70s.
Over a period of time I took every drug that came my way, except heroin, he reveals. I was never addicted to, or strung out on any drug. The only drug I trucked with that was addictive was cocaine. There was a time I found it very, very difficult to go on stage without it. Yet looking back now, I feel I ve nothing to gain from taking drugs of any kind. Everything I need I can get from life without drugs, mind-expanding or otherwise.
|I haven t taken any drugs since the last time I spoke to Hot Press. I ve taken all I want to take. I wouldn t recommend them and I d hate to give anybody the impression that drugs can help you in any way to be creative or to get more out of life. That s an illusion which only ends up in hurt and pain for yourself and for those that are close to you. That s why I hate to see the use of drugs glamourised in any way, as they often are in rock n roll. I don t know how it is getting drugs now. But when I did it you always had to go off quietly and meet someone. You d go to Berlin or New York or Sydney and the first thing on your mind was where can I get some action? It s not glamorous. It s sordid and illegal. You ruin your health, you re under constant threat of being busted and you meet some ugly, nasty people. And quite a few people I knew, famous names and not so famous, died from drug abuse. Is that glamorous?
However if Christy Moore was living the rock n roll lifestyle over that ten-year period the music he was making from the mid 60s until he returned to Ireland in 1971 was purely folk-based. Why had he ignored rock n roll?
Because, although I was listening to Elvis, Buddy Holly, Terry Dene, Gene Vincent, Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele up until 1960 I then heard the Clancy Brothers and end of story! I didn t listen to any other music until I came back to Ireland in 1971. I was in England at the peak of the swinging 60s but I didn t listen to The Beatles, I didn t listen to The Rolling Stones, or even Bob Dylan. When all that new rock n roll was happening I was buried in jigs n reels!

Christy Moore s breakthrough album PROSPEROUS, recorded with Donal Lunny on acoustic guitar and bousouki, Andy Irvine on mandolin and Liam Og O Flynn on uilleann pipes, though intrinsically true to Irish traditional music was fired by a fresh approach to the genre particularly in the album s opening salvo The Raggle Taggle Gypsies/Tabhair Dom Do Lambh . Alongside the traditional tunes and one of Moore s earliest compositions I Wish I Was In England , it also contained Woody Guthrie s The Ludlow Massacre and Dylan s Tribute To Woody .
Woody Guthrie was a revelation to me particularly the fact that he could take something that was specific to an area and turn it into a song that had universal resonance, as in The Ludlow Massacre . You can sing those songs 70 years after the event and they are still relevant because, at base they around about injustice. He inspired, for example, my Stardust song which is a memorium to the people who died in that fire but which also asks questions about a society that would allow that to happen. But he s not the predominant influence, stylistically.
And yet Christy Moore acknowledges that the lessons he learned from Guthrie s political commitment remained an important influence after PROSPEROUS gave way to Planxty, and beyond.
Part of that influence was that I reached a point where I no longer felt satisfied getting up on stage and singing with Planxty. It was a big high for the first three years. Playing in the Carlton to 2,000 people was fucking amazing. But I needed something that was more substantial in my work. I needed songs that had more contemporary influences, that had their roots and their reference points in the present, rather than in the past. And, primarily, songs that were political. I felt an obligation to sing such songs because no one else was singing them at the time.
There was always a lot of paranoia in Planxty in terms of political issues and making political statements through songs. Only Our Rivers Run Free was about as radical as we got! This was a dictate within the band, it was part of the deal. Overall I value my years with Planxty and I was fortunate to be in a band with people I loved and we made some good music. But as to how important Planxty was that s for other people to say. The band carried on after I left but as far as I m concerned the only real Planxty was the original line-up. All other Planxtys were but a pale imitation of that. And I had to leave because I needed to make political statements through my music.

Looking back, Christy Moore is not proud now of what he was doing in England between 1966 and 1970.
A lot of the time, to my shame, I was the stage Irishman who went on and sang sexist, bawdy songs, he says. At the time I wasn t aware that I was feeding into the stereotypical image the English had or have of the Irish. And even in terms of the nature of the songs, some of the material was so banal that I now realise I was Ireland s fucking answer to Les Dawson.
There were times I was obnoxious on stage, he elaborates. Sometimes I hated the audience as a mass of people and occasionally, though not often, I d even come down off the stage and take someone on, usually coming out second best. I also was drunk all the time and that s how it came out. I hated every fucking thing. I hated the world and I hated myself most of all.
I don t remember being filled with hatred when I was a young man or when I worked in a bank or went to England in the first place. I was full of the joys of life. But I became dependent on drink and some time in the 1970s I lost touch with all reality other than my desire for drink. I was a very confused person, very fucked up.
How bad was this addiction to alcohol?
I couldn t go through a day without a drink. For ten years of my life every time I went on stage I was drunk, even though it may not have seemed that way. I certainly was drunk by the end of the night. And although at the time I thought I was delivering good gigs I now realise I wasn t as assiduous as I could have been. It was the same in the studio. A lot of partying went on in studios in the 1970s. A lot of stuff went down and I can hear it now when I listen to those albums.
I once got so drunk I didn t even turn up for a recording session with Planxty. That s how little I thought of my music! On the third Planxty album Phil Coulter plays keyboards on the tracks where I didn t turn up because I was so pissed! That s no way to remain a functioning professional musician of a functioning anything! I was very lucky to escape. For many years I tried to stop drinking and never quite managed it. It s only over the last three years I ve finally kicked off the shackles of alcohol and found it s possible for me to carry on a life without that crutch, that weight on my back.
Christy admits that throughout the 70s and into the 80s, including his time with Moving Hearts he was totally intimidated by his fellow musicians and accepts that this must have added to negative feelings about himself.
I never had much confidence in myself, so I was very intimidated by the musicians i Planxty and, to a slightly lesser extent, by the musicianship and artistry in Moving Hearts. I now realise where my strengths are. I know I can go out there with just my voice and guitar and my repertoire and generate as much power as any of those bands. And this realisation has made it easier for me to play with other musicians and not be in awe of them. I realise so-and-so is a better guitarist and I can feel positive about the fact that I m playing with someone brilliant, but before I d just stand there thinking I m not good enough to play with this guy .
I was in a negative mode in most of my life. I felt inferior. I remember at one stage, during the making of the first Planxty album, being told that Donal was going to play the guitar parts and I took it as such a slight against myself that I cried. I was so insecure I felt they re going to get rid of me now, they re going to ask me to leave the band . And, in fact, Donal did play my guitar parts on a few of those songs on that album. Nobody could say that to me now. I would decide. I d say I think you should play these parts because I can t . But at the time I thought it was the end of everything.

With Planxty having run its course and Donal Lunny s other main vehicle in the 70s, The Bothy Band, split up, the pair reunited in Moving Hearts a band dedicated to the concept of creating an effective link between Irish traditional music and the world of contemporary music. It was an awesome undertaking which the band came very close to realising but while the live gigs were magnificent and the albums excellent, the business side was never right.
A lot of people expressed interest in Moving Hearts, Christy says but were put off by the fact that they couldn t talk to a manager and that we always waited for 10 people to make a decision. But the other side of this is that, politically, we were, by and large, ideologically unified.
Which meant that Christy Moore could now make effective political statements through his music.
The first year of the band saw the lead up to the hunger strikes and in the second year the hunger strikes were happening so we had to sing about that. The whole country was affected by it and as we all had similar feelings about such issues there was no problem about making political statements. And there never was a lack of record company support, in Ireland. WEA released anything we wanted to release. They released material that no other record company in Ireland would have released at the time, particularly On The Blanket , which was recorded the night Martin Hunter died.
The Republicanism which surfaced in Christy Moore s work during that period carried on into his solo career around the time of his breakthrough solo album RIDE ON he recorded a bootleg album, SPIRIT OF FREEDOM, which was originally released in a limited issue .
The money was to go to prisoners dependents to buy a vehicle to ferry them back and forth. That was the original intention, he explains, and in my naivity I thought that I could release the album and WEA wouldn t get to know about it. But six months later the then MD, with a copy of it in his had, said What s this? . According to the terms of my contract it was their property so I had to give them the master tapes and they released it as an album.
Could he ensure that the profits be used for buying that vehicle rather than, for example, for purchasing arms? I didn t physically oversee the project but I would have handed the tapes over and said: This money HAS to go to purchasing a vehicle . But then how does anyone know where money from anything goes? Suppose I make an album for WEA and a subsidiary of the company is involved in the production of arms for the Arms Race, what way have I of knowing whether or not that subsidiary of Warners in America is, or isn t, using the profits from Ride On to develop new weaponry? So the answer to your question, as in that scenario, is no I didn t ultimately know where the money was going.
I don t know how much weaponry costs but profits from the project must have been in the region of #10,000, which would have been the approximate cost of such a vehicle. I don t know how much weaponry you d get for that but I suspect it wouldn t help carry on any kind of war for long.
Would Christy Moore have any objection if weapons were bought with the profits from his records? Now I would, he says. I can t put myself back to 1983 and say this is exactly what I would have felt . All I can say is that now I could have an objection.
At times such as the Enniskillen bombings does Christy Moore question his definition of Republicanism?
At times like Enniskillen, if not all the time since then it is in a constant process of re-definition, he says. And bringing it up to date, thinking of how Tom Oliver was killed and how a kitchen porter was used in a proxy bombing, I find I ve reached a point in my life where I can t fucking take it any more. After Enniskillen, and now, I find I no longer can support the armed struggle. It s reached a point of futility. It doesn t seem possible to carry out an armed struggle against the enemy. It s an armed struggle in which too many little people are blown away.
Do those he supported 10 years ago accuse Christy Moore of selling out, of having lost his guts?
I haven t encountered that yet but when I do I ll say It can t be helped. This is how I am, how I feel in 1991 . You must tell the truth, whatever the consequences. Of course I still can t tolerate even the thought of one side of the community in Northern Ireland being able to suppress the other with the presence of a foreign army. It doesn t seem right to me and never has, since I was a child. Nothing has happened over the past 20 years to make that more palatable to me.
I can t handle it when I go up North and I am stopped by British soldiers. I can t handle the fact that the view we have of the North in the 26 counties reflects no understanding of what s going on up there. All we ever hear about is what the IRA is up to. Let s examine closely what s happening on the other side. They re talking about internment again! There have been thousands of Republicans interned, hundreds locked up for possession of weapons yet we never had a British soldier charged for shooting children with rubber bullets. That causes deep confusion within me, and anger. I can t handle it. And as I talk to you now about it that old sense of hopelessness sweeps over me and I see no way out of it all. I understand why the struggle goes on but I can t see where it will end.
But the point is that I m not subsumed by it as I used to be. There was a time in my life when I was preoccupied with the war in the North. But I m not preoccupied with it anymore. Now, I really do bring it down to a question of all the little people who are suffering and dying. That, to me, is the bottom line.

Christy Moore s concern for the common person runs through all his solo albums from 1984 RIDE ON to 1991 s SMOKE AND STRONG WHISKEY. Songs about strip-searching in Northern Ireland sit alongside others that highlight political injustices in South Africa and in Dublin. In the context, it s been suggested that his last album VOYAGE was politically lightweight, emphasising the romantic and the personal instead.
That s not how I see it, he says. Farewell To Pripchat , which is about the Chernobyl disaster could hardly be described as lightweight. Nor could Missing You . But a lot of people were angry with me for recording The Voyage because they felt it wasn t a Christy Moore-type songs, which means someone out there is making the statement that I cannot write or sing a song of love for my family.
Seemingly some people consider expressions of love as wishy-washy and I myself would have gone through a long period of my life when I d have been very uncomfortable with terms of affection. My macho codes wouldn t allow me to say I love you or I m afraid or I m a coward . Apparently it s fine in folk or rock culture to express hatred and rage but I ve had enough of that. Expressions of love are another facet of self-expression that I should have the right to choose. And I do, through songs like The Voyage .
On SMOKE AND STRONG WHISKEY, Christy does two Shane MacGowan compositions, Fairytale Of New York and Aisling .
I love Shane s lyrics. They really affect me. He has a way of creating imagery that I really hook into, as in A Pair Of Brown Eye s. And the things he writes about I feel I ve experienced. I ve been there that s why I want to sing his songs.
There are other people whose albums I ll always buy, just to hear what they re doing. Dylan, Elvis Costello, Leonard Cohen and Van Morrison. I wouldn t listen to them in relation to my own work, I just love the way they sing. They touch me, move me, have that power we spoke about I really love the way Van Morrison sings.
Morrison music is largely defined by the singer s continuing spiritual quest not something with which one would normally associate Christy Moore.
Until quite recently I was spiritually bankrupt, he reveals. During a whole period of my life I believed I WAS God! Not in the David Icke sense, more that I believed I knew everything and that no one could tell me anything. But now I believe there are powers outside of me. It s not a return to the old faith, or its core concepts. I ve no trouble with the concepts believed in by Catholics, Protestants, Jews but none of that is for me. Yet what I have now is the tolerance to allow people to have their own space provided they don t ram it down my fucking throat, or down anyone else s throat.
And I do have again a spirituality of my own life, which I must have had as a youngster, yet lost somewhere along the way. But then I was forced to go to Mass and to believe in ever-fucking-lasting hell. I had to rebel against that. Yet now I see other, more positive sides to the story. I realise that having a base in Catholicism equipped me with a language in terms of concepts like spirituality and grace and aspiring towards something higher, better. Elements of that very much mark my writing and the works of many Irish writers. When I mentioned the heart attack he suffered in 1987 in the context, Moore laughs aloud.
You can forget the Christy-on-the-road-to-Damascus tag! The heart attack itself was a chilling experience and it was very, very frightening and I was in a terrible state of fear afterwards. But I still went back to my old ways soon enough. It obviously wasn t sufficiently frightening for me to have learned an immediate lesson from it. It took about a year for me to get my act together.
But I needed that time to take stock of things. To finally realise how much goodness there is in the world, how many caring people, how much love. Things I d never really taken time to notice before. So overall it gave me a tremendous appetite, and desire, for life. When you are confronted by death you no longer take anything for granted. Now when I m out walking, or swimming, or when I m with my family I cherish that time. I ve more of a meas on it than I previously had.

Christy Moore is a wealthy man and doesn t mind admitting it.
Over the past seven, eight years I ve made an awful lot of money more than I need to live, he says. Yet of the money generated through my performances and recordings I d be as anxious to get as much of it as there is, because I ve been terribly ripped off down through the years and I ve learned from tat.
How would he feel about his artistic legacy if that heart attack had killed him in 1987? I ve probably written a couple of hundred songs but I ve only recorded about 25 of them. Maybe Lisdoonvarna is the best song I ever wrote. A lot of people don t think it s a serious song, but it is. I don t sell it short anymore, whereas I used to say Oh it s just something I rattled off . It s not. It s a song of mine that has passed into the tradition. It s the same with certain other songs I do. People shout lines from these songs at me and I know they have a resonance beyond just my life.
I do have a style of writing that is peculiarly my own, for better or worse, he adds, and I m proud of it. And in terms of what I leave behind I believe some of these songs of mine will surely live longer than I will. That, in itself, is a gratifying feeling. To know that even a handful of my songs, in years to come, will mean to other people what certain songs meant to me when I started singing.
Those songs were written by people whose names I don t even know. And although it may seem trivial or simplistic it has occurred to me that some day people may sing one of my songs and not know who I am. My name, my memory won t come into it. That too is an appealing thought. You can t leave more behind, artistically, than the fact that the song finally matters more than the singer, that the song finally became part of the people and, hopefully will remain so, after the singer s gone.