A Week in Ireland

It’s a different world up here in seat 32A. Goodbye 68F – once you’re out of that back cabin, you’ll never give the poor bastards back there a backwards glance. We have just taken off from London, heading west towards the city of Chicago. Where Irishmen in their beds are dreaming of their mothers back home. Behind me, a group of UK lads cheer as the entire in flight movie system fails and has to be rebooted, resulting in business class losing their personal entertainment and the rest of us a Bruce Willis flick. A family moves down the aisle very slowly, three generations shuffling towards the bathroom at the same time, forming their own moveable queue.

I’m only slightly dazed from a week in Ireland full of literature, shows, old guitars, Nashville songwriters and driving the Ford Buble 900 miles around the auld sod from corner to corner. The holy trinity of directions supplied by shows, sisters and sympathtic shibboleths. A week of three-hour sleeps and five minute soundchecks.

I arrive at George Best City Airport in grey early morning light on a flight from from Memphis, Tennessee via Chicago and Heathrow. It’s not the never-ending Monday this time, but rather the hardly-begun Tuesday. I’ve been flying for 24 hours but somewhere along the line have lost a whole night. Instantly I am catapulted into the UK’s world of self-fulfilling tabloid scandal, with unfaithful footballers and mendacious politicians on every news stand. Whatever next – Keith Richards with a bottle in his hand, or a high court judge in a brothel? In my swirling whirling world of imagined jetlag, meeting someone who writes songs for Garth Brooks in a semi-detached house off Belmont Road is completely normal.

This week Belfast is musically twinned with Nashville – its sister city – with a planeload of hat-wearers arriving for a festival. A normally suspect hotel becomes a hangout for the musicians and verily Ralph McTell is witnessed talking with guys in Western shirts and expensive acoustic guitars. As well as concerts, I am due to take a songwriting workshop. When I ask someone where it happens I am told, “The International Musical Centre for the Interpretation of the Performing Arts”. “Where’s that?” I ask, “a wee room above Harry Ramsden’s chipper.”

The supra-butty environment isn’t ideal for working on songs, especially since one of the students has just been at a workshop where all possible secrets of the songwriting art have been revealed by a slick Californian. The student interrupts the class continually and tells me one of my songs “ticks most of the Nashville boxes”. This is not what I had in mind – I tell him I am trying to open them all up to art and inspiration. It’s questionable whether I’m having any success, when a seventeen year old boy asks me what he should be writing about in order to have a hit song.

Botanic Avenue in the rain, and Belfast’s Left Bank seems to have been taken over by convenience stores. Apart, that is, from independent bookshop No Alibis, where I am going to read next Monday evening. Later on, driving to Dublin in the Ford Buble, I am overcome by exhaustion approaching Drogheda. In the old days the road was winding and frustrating. You drove through every village slowly. International cross-border traffic would stop whenever a granny pulled out into traffic with her groceries. Now there’s a motorway and you can drive at 90 mph all the way to Dublin, only stopping to pay a toll. It’s strangely monotonous, and I feel my eyes closing. Turn off the road into a laneway and immediately fall asleep. I wake up an hour later, with a rabbit looking at me out of the grass.

*

Next morning, Thursday, after a rehearsal with my sister Cathy, I am on the N11 going back into town, listening to RTE and trying to get to grips with the latest scandal to rock the Irish nation (and nowhere else). It’s one of those complicated political stories which regularly surface due to a leak or an enquiry. It involves acronyms and junior ministers in a coalition government I am not familiar with. Yesterday in Belfast it was Gordon Brown bullying, and cuckolded footballers – here’s it’s all leaked letters and financial favours. The recession moves on apace in Ireland – even in this the traffic jam beside Lansdowne Road.

I make it back to Belfast in time to see a workshop taken by the slick chap who holds all the secrets of successful songwriting. He tells us as many as he can in an hour – the rest we can buy in his book. It’s a lecture not a workshop, based around his analysis of the Country Music charts of 2009. 66% of number one songs are about love, 80% sung by men – that kind of statistic. He ends up telling us that the ideal ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ country song would be up tempo and about love, sung by a man, and with a structure of ABABCB. With a melody which repears simple phrases over and over again. I split to get to a Radio Ulster interview.

That night there’s an ‘in the round’ session in the Art College Students Union café. I point outside and tell the English singer and Amercian songwriter who are doing the show with me that this used to be a no-go area. They look puzzled, as a lonely policeman scurries down the road in the rain, the only person in sight. There was a bomb in Newry the other day, and a murder on a road across the border in Donegal. Chilling reminders of the bad old days.

Tonight I played ‘Six String Street’ for Terri Hooley, ‘In A Groovy Kind Of Way’ for Kirsten Dunst (and the English guy who sings it on the soundtrack of ‘Bring It On’ as she’s getting dressed to go out) – and ‘If You Want It’ for all of us. A great session during which people materialised out of the gloom to sing and clap along.

*

Friday morning and I meet with Glenn Patterson to discuss the upcoming ‘in conversation’ event. Glenn can effortlessly process large amounts of information, preparing the shape of the evening’s conversation in his head. I guess that’s a novelist’s skill, and one I envy. The Nashville guy’s formula for a hit song seems easy in comparison.

I rehearse with Rod McVey, another friend-since-schooldays, bandmate, piano and organ player co-producer of my first five albums. History is something we have, as well as friendship, and going over new songs and making notes on the old ones was a total pleasure. He plays the riffs on the albums, and that means a lot during shows (if I see Lloyd Cole it’s extra special hearing Neil Clark play the ‘Forest Fire’ solo).

I get a lift to the venue for soundcheck. Another cold wet Belfast evening, with parents and old friends, sisters and cousins gathering to warm it up. We play as a three piece, Rod, myself and Cathy – makes me think of the ‘Destination Beautiful tour. It’s an emotional concert, with tears welling up every other song. ‘If You Want It’, ‘When I Come Back’, ‘I Will Wait’, ‘Berlin 6 am’ especially.

Afterwards, a family gathering. I spot Ralph McTell in the bar. I go over and ask him if he remembers the guided tour of Sun Studios in Memphis – that’s where he asked me to take a photo of him standing in front of Elvis’ microphone. A sweet moment for me, since the first song I played in public was ‘Streets Of London’ in the school chapel, my sister Ali on recorder.

And here comes Ali now, interrupting Ralph by saying ‘Sorry, Andy you’ll have to come now,’ I smile, knowing she doesn’t realise that this is the writer of her peerless recorder solo.

*

Saturday is the first blue sky morning of my time away, with the sun splitting the sky above Belfast Lough. I act relaxed, without knowing quite how long it takes to drive to Galway. All I know is that there’s a brand new motorway heading west from Dublin. Driving on it feels like driving in Spain. I phone the venue and realise the show is thirty minutes earlier than I had thought – the crucial half hour which makes all the difference. I break all speed limits (everybody’s doing it) to get there.

Something else keeps me awake – what Radio 4 calls “Lenny Henry’s ‘Othello’”. Shakespeare doesn’t get a look in, but from Act I Scene I I am hooked. Every line calling me from school classrooms and corridors. Our English teacher’s formidable voice booming out the key lines. The plot comes back to me more slowly, as events escalate towards Desdemona’s brutal murder. Above all, the handkerchief – I am shocked that in the intervening years, I have completely forgotten the handkerchief.

As usual with Shakespeare, it’s difficult to imagine teenagers getting to grips with the emotions involved. How embarrassing must my school essays have been. It’s great we were made to study it though, and revisiting it this afternoon (as with King Lear last year) is a mind-opening process.

Listening to ‘LH’s O’, at regular intervals I find myself asking, “Am I the only person in the British Isles listening to this?” The English rugby team are playing Ireland at the same time, and it’s a beautiful sunnhy afternoon. I call Mum to see what she’s doing – sure enough, she’s glued to ‘LH’S O’. Truly, I am never alone.

*

I have a lot of personal history in Galway. It’s not that I’ve spent a lot of time there, but the times I did stay were intense and tender – in that order. Driving into town this afternoon through the docks and up past the Spanish Arch I can remember each one of them. The first show, with Hothouse Flowers, in Salthill. Playing Monroe’s Tavern with free entry and a thousand rat-arsed drinkers. Staggering across the road to the Atlanta Hotel afterwards. ALT playing Galway Arts Festival, one of our very best concerts. And then my solo gigs at the Roisin Dubh. Seeing my sister in the Druid theatre company. Cuirt literary festival when ‘The Music Of What Happens’ came out. A drunken conversation with Pat McCabe at another. Tender? That would be the wonderful time spent with my love in a little bed and breakfast near the Spanish Arch.

He or she who wishes to write poetry and finds he or she cannot do so when walking the streets of Galway or looking out over the bay is in serious danger of never being able to write at all. For the streets and houses are full up with art and culture. Auld chat and humour. James Joyce, Norah Barnacle and all that. Even post-Celtic Tiger, where the gloss has worn off the newness of the ‘improvements’, it’s still the most exciting and ‘Irish’ city on the island.

The Crane, meanwhile, is one of the friendliest concert venues I’ve ever played in. The room above the bar breathes music from its worn floorboards. The PA helps project the guitar and voice, but you don’t need it. You can stand back from the microphone and let the room itself carry the music. I read poems and sing songs from way back to the present. It’s a very special evening – one of those ones when anything is possible.

People buy books, old friends are there. A French girl called Cecilie tells me she likes the show and disappears into the night. I mix sound for the next band. The place is packed. I hook up with a theatre guy with a great voice who’s singing along wth ‘Jackson’ by Johnny Cash. We go to the next bar and I leave him talking to a pack of travelling Canadians. It’s 3.30 am as I stumble towards the B&B past students drinking cider and playing on swings and roundabouts in a kids’ playground.

*

Sunday finds me parking near the Spanish Arch and walking down by the painted terrace houses behind it. This morning is attractive like a Real Ireland card. I find my thoughts blur like my eyes these days. I’m not complaining – I like life to be a little smudged. It makes the present tense more indistinct, and the future as unclear as, in reality, it probably is.

Tourist Board skies and a clear road to Dublin. Half an hour after arriving I am on court number three at Shankill Tennis Club, playing the Nephew. The strangest thing is feeling the freezing intake of breath when serving, remembering the 40 degree days when I last played in Melbourne. Cathy and I rehearse again. Then it’s into town for dinner at Ali’s and soundcheck in the L-shaped room upstairs at Whelans.

Tonight I play solo, with Cathy as a guest. Songs from all over the catalogue like in Galway, with more of the focus of Belfast. Less dreamy than Galway, a little harder. There are enough people in Dublin to make it fine, and none of my old crowd. Paul came from Holland and a couple of Scottish lads.

Monday and it’s sunny again. I race back up to Belfast where meetings run into one another – the festival, a singer-songwriter I am producing this summer, the book people. The book people, since this is the day of the ‘in conversation’ event at No Alibis bookshop. Glenn has suggested passages I can read. We’re going to talk about how the book is closer to a novel than a rock memoir. Although the structure is episodic, there’s a build-up and an ebb and flow more like song structure which develops and intensifies towards the end. We talk Eliot, Joyce and Kerouac. David Barker, the cameraman who shot both the ‘Religious Persuasion’ and ‘Get Back Home’ videos turns up straight from the airport and films the whole thing.

Mid-afternoon I call Glenn and asked him what he would be wearing. “Not sure haven’t worked it out yet,” he told me. I swear I could hear him changing. I replied that I hadn’t made up my mind either. We turn up at 6 together with the same stripey tops on and even similar jackets. At last – we’re in a band together.

The ‘in conversation’ interview you may see sometime on film. There were readings, songs, questions from the floor – wonderful. Signing books at the end and then running down Botanic Avenue for drinks in a hotel bar getting itself ready for breakfast.

Tuesday morning and I head for another production meeting before heading back to the bookshop and leaving the Ford Buble back at George Best City Airport.

*

An Irish week is full of poetry. Reading back it seems I can only write what actually happened it in prose. It’s what lies between the paving stones which is where he real action lies. As the plane turns away from the airport I can see Mum and Dad’s house far below, I even fancy I can make out the dove with the broken wing. He fell out of his nest a couple of days ago, and has been waddling around the front garden flapping his one working wing and trying to avoid cars. We fed him water, chased him off the drive, cooed at him. I fear he won’t be around next time I come back, his neck puffed up with feathers against the bitter cold. His mother fussing around without being able to heal him.

I am looking down from the plane toward the little dove, our roles reversed as I bank and wheel across the lough, headed for London. More than a world away.