Book review: A musical life less ordinary

Keith Donald kept diaries throughout a hectic working life that began when he joined his first showband, The Federals, in the mid-1960s

Keith Donald founded Moving Hearts with Christy Moore and Donal Lunny.

• Music and Mayhem
• Keith Donald 
• Lilliput, €18.95 

Raised in East Belfast, Keith Donald was 11 when he took his first drink and spent the next three decades battling alcoholism.

Sexually, physically, and emotionally abused as a young boy in a local preparatory school, he was a keen clarinet player who found shelter and escape in music, jazz in particular.

Both drink and music dominate what has been a fractured, charmed, and often remarkable life and now, into his 80s and managing a cancer diagnosis, he’s going public. 

Reaching far into a mental hard drive that’s somehow survived years of misadventure, the result is a quietly absorbing memoir.

For someone who was so drink-dependent for so long, his story makes for a sobering read. 

In part an autobiography, public apology, and sermon, it reads like Keith Donald played: free-form, instinctive, and visceral. It should never work, but it does.

The author’s long career — spent on the showband circuit, as a theatre musician, session player, social worker, and arts administrator — was constantly prone to implosion. 

But any regrets have long been tempered and he signs off tellingly at the end: “I feel totally at peace.”

Donald kept diaries throughout a hectic working life that began when he joined his first showband, The Federals, in the mid-1960s. 

His love of music, passion for learning, and obsession with jazz were matched only by a voracious appetite for alcohol.

In my 20s and early 30s my main achievement was surviving the drink.

Therapy and psychoanalysis have brought him to a point where he can now begin to make sense of himself and explain a man who’s long been “a bit of a mystery to myself”. 

And so, what may first appear like a litany of drunken escapades threaded with a linear biography is, in fact, a carefully considered cleansing. 

At its core is a re-imagining of his lost years: Donald recognises now that he skipped his adolescence and moved straight from childhood to alcoholism.

“I was eight when I left preparatory school,” he writes. ‘I was 63 when preparatory school began to leave me.”

Like many who survived the Irish entertainment circuit from the mid-1950s onwards, Donald is a terrific storyteller with a finely-tuned sense of the absurd. 

Seeing the light through the shade, the book balances the dark realities of addiction with a battery of scarcely believable yarns assembled and honed over decades.

Many involve his time with Moving Hearts, a ground-breaking Irish band he founded with Christy Moore and Donal Lunny, and with whom he is arguably most commonly associated. 

Freebasing elements of trad, folk, jazz, and rock, the band’s signature sound was dominated by the twinning of two unlikely sources: Davy Spillane’s uilleann pipes and Donald’s soprano saxophone.

But despite the magic the band routinely created on-stage, the havoc it left behind — Moving Hearts operated as a co-operative and was a commercial basket-case — still seems to rankle. 

No scabrous score-settler, the unequal distribution of management responsibilities within the group is the closest he comes to pique.

Keith Donald’s story, unfortunately, isn’t unique. The history of popular culture in modern Ireland is scalded by tales of abuse and addiction. 

What sets Music and Mayhem apart is that it is one of only a handful of testimonials — Gerry Anderson’s Heads and Derek Dean’s The Freshmen Unzipped are others — that counter the partisan narratives and lazy cliches that dominate its telling. 

Many of those who worked the showband beat, in particular, attest privately to a setting that was often dominated by hedonism, sexism, greed, and exploitation. 

Apart from the sounds — which Donald describes as “a form of musical purgatory” — musicians were regularly indentured by gamey managers and dance-hall owners on the make.

Sober since 1991, Donald’s insights, in particular into the reality of life as a jobbing musician during the first flushes of counterculture in modern Ireland, are especially welcome. 

By refusing to yield to cheap nostalgia and instead telling what at times is a brutal story, he has done himself — and history — no little service.