Paul Brady’s live album is worth the wait
I WAS slightly anxious about speaking to Paul Brady. More than one journalist has staggered from an encounter with the doyen of Irish adult-orientated rock, shaken and incredulous. As a songwriter, Brady is endlessly smooth. In person, it is said, he has bite.
Such misgivings were misguided. Brady (67), whose hits include ‘The Island’, ‘Crazy Dreams’ and ‘Nothing But The Same Old Story’, will never be mistaken for ebullient. However, he is polite and thoughtful, that rumoured chip on the shoulder conspicuously absent. He turns combative just once, when asked how he juggles a career in music with a ‘normal’ life as a married Dublin suburbanite with two children. Here, he bristles slightly — wondering how anyone’s life could be described as ‘normal’. Each of us is extraordinary, in our own way.
Otherwise, Brady is affable. Maybe he has mellowed. He seems to think so. “I’ve had ups and downs [in his relationship with the press]. There was this idea you maybe weren’t worth considering unless you were a massive global star. But I don’t think about it nowadays,” he says.
Brady has never lacked for high-profile champions. Tina Turner famously covered ‘Paradise Is Here’ on her 15m-selling 1986 album, Break Every Rule. Other admirers include Bonnie Raitt, Mark Knopfler, Curtis Stigers and Van Morrison — all guests on his new live album, The Vicar Street Sessions: Vol 1.
“It means a huge amount to me,” Brady says. “Probably more now, that I’m getting on a bit. I’ve always felt musicians and singers and writers got me in a way that critics never did. I always felt a huge sense of warmth and acceptance.”
The Vicar Street Sessions is culled from a record-breaking 23 concerts at the Dublin venue in 2001. The gigs constituted a victory lap for Brady, who’d had a tough initiation into the music business. Having started as a folkie, in the early 1980s he’d re-branded as a singer-songwriter, only to end up in a running battle with his record company. By the time of Vicar Street, he’d set up his own label — and was taking on the music business on his own terms.
“I was 30 years into a career. A point when a lot of people might have thought about finishing. It was a good period. I was at the end of a spell that had stretched from the ’80s through to the ’90s, when I was with various major record labels.
“I came out the other end of that tumble dryer and found myself on my own label. I was more contented — less concerned about what anyone thought about me. I was able to say ‘this is who I am’, rather than that it was some sort of record-label marketing thing”.
WORTH A LISTEN
Why the 14 years between performance and live album? Mostly because, later in 2001, RTÉ was to screen a six-part documentary about Brady and hadn’t wanted a deluge of ‘product’ distracting from the accompanying soundtrack LP. Then, before Christmas last year, he happened to be listening back to the Vicar Street recordings — out of curiosity more than anything. He was struck by the technical quality of the tapings.
“It’s a natural human instinct to reflect on the past,” he says. “You get to a certain age and there is a compulsion to put things in order.”
Back in his major label days, there was ever-present tension between Brady and the record company. Executives didn’t know how to pigeonhole the Irishman. Was he a confessional troubadour? A plugged-in folkie? They were stumped.
“That’s what record labels do — put you in a box,” he says. “They are less and less interested in finding something new. In this industry, something new always happens by accident. Then, they try to dig up their own version of that.”
“By the mid-1990s, I was at the end of my relationship with Universal. I didn’t see any point in continuing. It was nothing but grief. They wanted you to be this, they wanted you to be that. I did my best to turn myself inside out and make everyone happy. I got so fed up — I thought: ‘I don’t care, this is my career from now on’,” he says.
HOME BIRD
Brady is from Strabane, Co Tyrone, and lived in London in the early 1970s (and received a considerable amount of anti-Irish prejudice). But he’s been based in Dublin for the past 35 years. “Events made my mind up for me,” he says. “I had two children, we wanted to live in Ireland. I didn’t want to move to London, didn’t want to move to America, though there were times in my career I discussed moving to San Francisco.”
With a young family, touring was tough. “It was difficult being away — I missed them, they missed me. I don’t do long tours any more. I’ll play a few dates here and there. I’m certainly long past the time I would go out on the road for months at a time,” Brady says.
He writes all the time, though it’s been five years since his last album, Hooba Dooba. While all his records are personal, this was more searing than usual, and it contained the song ‘Mother and Son’, which is one of the rawest he has ever written.
“It was about my relationship with my mother, about our difficult relationship,” he says, sighing slightly. “I don’t think I’m particularly unique. Many families have a dynamic like that. My mother and I were similar people — we tended to rub each other up the wrong way. Now that she has gone, I don’t feel any bitterness. In a way, ‘Mother and Son’ is a love song,” he says.
Brady will occasionally perform it live, alone at a piano. The response is always striking. “People will come up and say, ‘That song, it just destroyed me’. It has a profound effect on the audience.”
And there are few better tributes than that.
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