What happens when the heart just stops?

I met Paul Clancy playing football. He was one of those guys who had lost his hair, or most of it, young, but he still had a wonderfully boyish presence about him.

I didn’t know he was a musician when he came to play ball on a Wednesday night at the regular Hot Press astroturf session in UCD. It happens that way sometimes: I’d admired National Prayer Breakfast from afar when they were making a big noise and got to know the lead singer Patrick Freyne through his writing for the Sunday Tribune and then Hot Press. But the connection between Patrick and Paul was never made for me, and so his secret past as an operative in the NPB rhythm department remained undisclosed.
On the seven a side pitch he was the kind of guy you hated playing against. He was a live wire, quick as an eel, with great footwork, an enviable work rate and energy to burn. He also committed the cardinal crime of wearing glasses on the pitch so that you didn’t necessarily want to go in too hard on him, in case the glasses would be the first victim. Not that this was a tactic on his behalf: he was tough as nails and capable of taking a battering if it came and giving it too. It was just that he was short-sighted and needed the glasses to see. Some of us get comfortable wearing contact lenses. Others are slower to start putting their fingers in their eyes. And for others again, it’s just an expense that they can do without. I don’t rightly know to which category Paul belonged, just that he was that rarity – a bespectacled footballer.
The glasses had to come off when he lined out officially for Hot Press Munchengladbach on a few occasions. I always felt that he could have become a really great player for us if he’d been available more often and we’d had time to find his best position on the big pitch. He could have been a fine winger. Or an effective striker if he got the hang of the movement and positioning involved and learned how to beat the offside trap. He had pace to burn. But for one reason or another, he could only make it sporadically. Who knows? Maybe there were Saturday afternoon rehearsals that he was too shy or modest to advertise. Either way, we hadn’t seen him in a while. ”I haven’t been playing football for the past few months,” he said in a text in October of last year. ”Problem with my hip. I’m hoping that in 2010 I’ll be fighting fit: or sooner if the gods are kind.” In the heel of the hunt they weren’t.
Paul was a friend of another sometime regular on the Wednesday night sessions, Kevin Connolly. You mightn’t know it from the touchingly humorous video for ‘The Best Bit’, a track from Monsters (his debut album under the Herm moniker), but Kevin is a very good footballer, a cultured centre half in our scheme of things, who came out more frequently for the Munchies. I knew that Kevin was a musician with something a bit special to offer. I think it was an injury that eventually decided that he had done enough footballing, but again there must have been a tug. It isn’t easy being a musician in Ireland, especially one playing the kind of imaginative, art-fueled indie music which is Herm’s metier and most band activists have to work at other things as well to feed themselves. Finding time to make music is a penance in itself.
The two long-time friends came together for artistic purposes recently in Clancy, whose debut album Road To The Heart has just been released. I had just got wind of this, through Adrienne Murphy’s album review for Hot Press, when Patrick Freyne phoned in the tragic news of Paul Clancy’s sudden death. It took a while to sink in: when it did, it reminded me of that terrible moment when Bill Graham, the legendary Hot Press writer, collapsed in the shower on the Saturday morning of the FA Cup Final in 1996. He was really looking forward to getting his work finished and in, so that he could slip away to watch the game. Instead, when his big heart gave out, we were all plunged into the most horrific days of our collective lives in Hot Press. So when Patrick delivered the news, I knew only too well how Paul’s close friends and family must be feeling. It seems to make no sense, thinking of him on the football field, full of verve and running, but Paul died of a heart attack too.
The Clancy record is a beautiful, low-fi experience redolent at different times of Dylan, Cohen, Beck, Bonnie Prince Billy and, on the lovely ‘Led Astray’, latter day Johnny Cash. The voice has that broken, lived-in quality that makes you fear that it will crack asunder at any moment mid-song but never does. The record is contemplative and, I guess, mature. But you can sense too, the boy-inside-the-man, with the winning smile on his face, that I saw playing football, and feel the warmth and brightness of someone who believed in the power of music and the importance of love. “If there’s hope in your heart/ Then it won’t be long,” Paul sings on ‘Hope In Your Heart’, in itself a reassuring thought. Here, as on ‘Led Astray’ and similarly his version of Daniel Johnson’s ‘True Love Will Find You In The End’, the album draws on church music, and on balance that old frontier healing spirit prevails. Where religion is concerned I don’t know whether Paul kicked with his left foot or his right, or like myself with no foot at all – but the melodies of the hymns of yore are there to be plundered and Clancy did that with good grace.
Paul and Kevin called the record Road To The Heart. It says much about what he wanted his music to achieve, undertaking the task of mapping the journey that everyone in search of love must undertake. It is a journey that Hot Press writer Pavel Barter would have been entitled to believe that he had completed with his long-time partner Siona Carey: their love had been consummated again in the gift of a baby daughter Edie, born just five months ago. Over the past week too, however, Pavel’s life was turned upside down and inside out, and twisted, broken and shattered, when a heart attack snuck up on Siona during the night: she died in Pavel’s arms as they waited for the ambulance to come, the love of his life stolen from him...
If you haven’t lived through an experience like this, then it is impossible even to begin to imagine the monumental sense of loss. In the end, when our friends, lovers or life partners are taken from us by illness, accident or fate, we are forced to deal with nothing less than the essential mystery of life. We may try to find comfort in all sorts of ways – but the truth is that no answer is adequate. What has happened has happened. That is all we really know. It just is. And there is no escaping from it.
The grief can be incalculable. And no words of consolation can dispel the rank injustice of it. Paul should not have died. Siona should not have died. Bill should not have died. But there is nothing that we can do – that you can do – except pick up the pieces as best you can and carry on.
It is a time for friends to gather around, to circle the wagons, and hark to those who are most hurt and most vulnerable. It is a time for loving those who are left behind even more than ever before. In this way, we can honour the people who have been stolen from us by life’s cruelest caprices. In this way we can try at least to protect those that remain. Life is tough. The blues can hit you at any time, as the road unfolds into the future, but to know that we are truly loved provides some kind of bulwark, some kind of anchor.
We had hoped three weeks ago that we would be celebrating Paul Clancy’s emergence as a serious rock’n’roll voice with Road To The Heart. Now we have to see it as his legacy, a celebration of the impulse to love and be loved. Meanwhile, the road goes on forever...