Culture That Made Me: Phil Coulter on Derry, Van the Man, and swinging London
Phil Coulter's fingerprints are on legendary songs such as Luke Kelly’s rendition of Scorn Not His Simplicity, Planxty’s albums and, of course, the anthem Ireland’s Call.
Phil Coulter, 79, grew up in Derry City. In 1965, he partnered with Bill Martin in London to form one of the most prolific songwriting duos in music history, creating hits for Cliff Richard and Elvis, amongst other stars. Back home in Ireland, his fingerprints are on legendary songs such as Luke Kelly’s rendition of Scorn Not His Simplicity, Planxty’s albums and, of course, the anthem Ireland’s Call. His autobiography Bruised, Never Broken is published by Gill Books.
My first smart move was that I was born in Derry. Music is part of the fibre of life there. I grew up in the post-war years. It was drab. Money was tight. People in Derry who couldn't afford anything else were always good at entertaining themselves. In our neighbourhood, when there was an excuse for a celebration, a big hooley, it would happen in our house because we had a piano.
I've vivid recollections as a kid standing outside the door of the parlour when there was a party going on. My father played the fiddle. My mother vamped along on the piano, as often as not in a different key to the one my father was playing. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were enjoying it, that everyone was enjoying it. Music was a living, breathing thing, something shared – that enriched your life.
In my teenage years, Derry was a hot spot of unemployment. The first question asked at an interview was: “What school did you go to?” which was subtext for “Are you Catholic or Protestant?” One of the few job interviews you could go to and not be asked that question was when you auditioned for a gig in a band.
At the time, there were more showbands in Derry per head of population than anywhere else in Ireland. Guys who might have been on the dole were semi-pro and getting paid wages, bringing a few quid into the household. The idea of music as a means to earn a living was a lightbulb moment for me.
Whether it was in music, theatre, fashion, there was an explosion right across the board in London in the 1960s. The city became a magnet. The music business was no different from the fashion industry and the others in that it attracted people from outside of London, to go and see what was going on and play a part in it. Y
ou had guys coming down from Liverpool, Manchester, Scotland, across from Ireland, looking to get a piece of the action. There was a whole new injection of energy. The music business before that was controlled by the variety club scene. There’d be orchestras sitting down reading from charts. My generation had this great, can-do attitude: “Let’s have a go.”
What made me a songwriter was learning my craft in London. I had a contract that called for six new songs to be demoed every second week. They’d be played to our boss, a man called Jimmy Phillips. He wrote “Smile, though your heart is aching....” with Charlie Chaplin. If you were writing a pop song, you had three minutes to do your business. He was continually badgering me to keep it simple.
One memorable Monday morning, after one of my songs had proved to be too complex, he called me over to the window, looking out at the traffic below. There was a truck just outside the window. He said: “Look at that truck driver. Now, he's the man you want to be thinking about when you write your pop music. Not your music professor.”
I remember coming into one of the rehearsal sessions in a small Decca studio when the American record producer Bert Berns was going through a new song with Them called Here Comes The Night in 1964. The alchemy Bert Berns produced with this rough-and-ready band. H
e was walking amongst them playing this little Baby Taylor guitar, and getting a groove going. I remember just feeling this magic of the song coming together. Van Morrison's voice at the top of it. That was a Road to Damascus moment. It wasn’t like hearing a song on radio. It was my first time to hear a song in its raw state, before it had been polished up, knowing: this is going to be a hit.
Grudgingly, I went to Glasgow’s King’s Theatre to record a live album of this folk singer who told gags between his songs called Billy Connolly. I organised The Rolling Stones’ mobile truck to record it. While doing my soundcheck on stage, Billy said later: “Neither of us were very impressed with each other. We circled each other like two dogs.” As far as Billy was concerned, I was a hit-record producer up from London, full of himself.
I got out my stopwatch, my clipboard, my timings. You have to be very precise logging live recordings. I double-checked the mic positions, got back in the truck and pressed the tape so it was rolling. I sat there, listening. Within 10 minutes, I threw away the stopwatch and I dropped the clipboard. I nearly wet myself. This was the funniest guy I’d ever heard.
Growing up, I was well into cowboy pictures. My favourite movie of all time without a shadow of doubt is The Magnificent Seven. I paid 12 times to see it. At one stage, I could recite whole screeds of dialogue from that script. I could list the different actors who played The Magnificent Seven.
It was a classic western-based, of course, on Seven Samurai, the Japanese classic. Them against us. The small group against the assembled forces. All the individual performances: Yul Brynner. Steve McQueen. A wonderful movie.
The Great O'Neill by Seán Ó Faoláin is the story of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. That era of The Seven Years War, the defeat at Kinsale, the Flight of the Earls was probably the most significant period in Irish history.
All these years later, we're still suffering the results of it because the plantation of Ulster sowed the seeds of what we have now. When O’Neill was at the court of King James he used to be conversing in Latin, charming the queen and then coming back to the O’Neill stronghold in Tyrone where himself and Red Hugh O’Donnell would be planning their next move against the Brits. He was devious and bright, playing different cards. Ó Faoláin’s book is beautifully written. I was captivated by it.
