The Brendan Voyage

Brendan Graham is Ireland’s most successful non-performing songwriter. Co-composer of the enormously successful ‘You Raise Me Up’ with Rolf Lovland, and the author of two Eurovision winners, ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Kids’ performed by Charlie McGettigan and Paul Harrington, and ‘The Voice’ by Eimear Quinn, his songs have been recorded by an endless list of top international and Irish acts, including Josh Groban, Celtic Woman, Katherine Jenkins, Three Tenors
and Westlife.

Even to list these artists, however, is to vastly understate the reality. ‘You Raise Me Up’ has been recorded nearly 500 times, an astonishing record. It has been translated into dozens of languages. It has been on numerous chart topping albums and has been released frequently as a single by different artists. Cumulative sales of the song at this stage are well in excess of 100 million units. It was accorded Millionaire status by BMI for over a million radio plays in the US. It was performed at the Superbowl by Josh Groban, at President Obama’s inauguration and was one of only three songs performed at the tenth anniversary of 9/11. It has been the continuous No.1 selling sheet music in the US for the past five years. It has been used in not one but three major TV campaigns in Japan alone – for Panasonic, for Sony and for Twinings tea. The success of the song is, not to put too fine a point on it, off the richter scale.
In the UK, meanwhile, ‘The Voice’ was introduced to the GCSE music syllabus, and in Italy he had three songs on one chart-topping compilation. The list of his achievements as a songwriter is vast – and growing. And in addition, Graham has also achieved an impressive level of international success as a novelist with his Famine trilogy, beginning with The Whitest Flower.
As one of the driving forces in the early days of IMRO, Brendan Graham has also been a tireless champion on behalf of Irish songwriters and still shows a fierce determination to see that they are given appropriate acknowledgment as the creators of their own works.

Jackie Hayden: What was going on in the music world when you first began to take notice of it?
Brendan Graham: When I was about 16 I had a guitar. We’re talking about the early ‘60s when all that fantastic music was happening. Elvis had arrived and The Shadows were big. I remember the first time I heard Elvis. My dad worked in the bank and every four years we moved around so he sent me to Newbridge College to get some stability. Mick and Tommy Doyle from Castleisland were school friends. We had no car but the Doyle’s had. They’d give me a lift back to college. This day we were driving up out of the Kerry hills, and I was in the back and the radio was playing low in the front when I heard this sound. It was Elvis singing ‘That’s All Right Mama’. I’d never heard anything like it, and it opened up a whole new world of music to me. It was a kind of a lightbulb moment. From then on I began to listen for Elvis. I also remember learning how to play ‘Apache’ by The Shadows on the guitar.
Can you remember the first song you wrote?
After I left school I went to London like a lot of Irish youngsters at the time. This was around 1963 during the height of the showbands. Joe Dolan and The Drifters were beginning to take off with ‘The Answer To Everything’ and other hits. I didn’t have much money. I used to go to this Chinese restaurant in Harlesden for the cheap bowl of soup with the dumplings in it. I’d become fascinated by ‘Eleanor Rigby’ by The Beatles, especially the character Father McKenzie – “Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been...” He was the afterthought in the song, but seemed like a real character. I began to wonder what else he did. So I wrote this lyric called ‘Father Dickens’ about an imaginary priest. I wrote the words out on a red napkin. Tommy Swarbrigg was beginning to write original songs for The Drifters around that time. He was kind of the Moses of Irish songwriting. I didn’t know anybody else in Ireland doing what he did. So I sent the lyrics to him. He added a melody and it ended up on Johnny McEvoy’s album With An Eye To Your Ear.
It must have been a bit of a moment seeing the song on the album?
Well, by then I’d emigrated to Australia , and for Christmas I received a battered copy of the album in the post. And there on the back was my song listed alongside ‘Here There And Everywhere’ by The Beatles and ‘The 59th Street Bridge Song’ by Paul Simon. Unfortunately, an oversight meant there was no credit for me on the album, but at least I had the song on it. That was the start.
So were you tuned in to songwriters back then?
When I was in Castleisland in my early teens there was one jukebox in Murphy’s chip shop. I remember that when the 45s would be spinning around I’d be trying to peer in through the grease-stained glass to see who had written the song that was playing, even the B-sides. So I knew that, say, Lionel Bart wrote ‘Livin’ Doll’ for Cliff Richard. I must have been becoming aware that these songs came from somewhere.
Had you any aspirations to becoming a performer?
No. None at all, although in London there was this enormous ballroom called The Shamrock in Elephant And Castle and this band needed a bass-player. I thought that would be comparatively easy with only four strings, and I did that for a short while. We did songs like ‘Fire Brigade’ by The Move and ‘Home Boys Home’. But performing has never had much of a pull for me.
How did your songwriting progress?
I wasn’t really aware of Eurovision until I came back from Australia to Ballinasloe. Televisions were still quite new here and I remember walking up the street one night and there was a TV in an electrical shop showing Eurovision. I was drawn to the idea that you could have all these countries with songwriters. I decided to write a song for it. I had heard Red Hurley on the radio, probably singing ‘Broken Promises’ and I thought, “What a voice”. I was keen to make a break into music and as I didn’t sing, songwriting might be the way. I thought I’d write a song for Red for the Eurovision. By an extraordinary chance I was dropping a guy home from work and he said, “There’s Red Hurley!” Not realising that he was probably besieged with people like me coming at him, I approached hem and he was very courteous. He brought me into his place and played a song that DJ Curtin recorded called ‘Jacqueline’ which got to No. 6 in the charts and I played him ‘When’, which he really liked – and it came tenth in Eurovision in The Hague in 1976.
Was there a point where you thought – I can make money out of this?
No, it was something that evolved. I was always listening to music, going to gigs and so on. Of course, every song you write you think it deserves to be heard. So when you get the first taste of hearing your song recorded you want to do it again.
How do you deal with rejection?
At first you deal with it badly, because there’s this precious thing you’ve created. It’s why I hate people using the word ‘content’ when they’re actually referring to somebody’s creative impulse. But you learn to understand that the song is being rejected for a reason and you have to get beyond that. I was feeling terribly disappointed that ‘When’ hadn’t done better, but I realised that I hadn’t given Red a great hand to play with. That song has no real chorus and it had to compete with bouncy pop songs like ‘Save Your Kisses For Me’. So when I got home I dropped my suitcases and went straight to the piano and started another song. I realised that nobody cares if you feel hurt. And that perseverance was the key.
Do you have any regular method of working on songs? Do you wait for inspiration or do you work regularly at the piano, tinkering with melodies?
I suppose my main modus operandum is that I don’t have one! I’ve written songs all of those ways. I believe that the idea for the song is crucial. It has to have an angle or a focus.
You’ve collaborated with people like David Downes for some of the Celtic Woman songs and of course you wrote ‘You Raise Me Up’ with Rolf Løvland. Is collaboration something you enjoy?
I like that a lot. There was a time when we weren’t good at collaborating in Ireland, and tended to write songs in isolation. I’m slow and I need time, so the Nashville “sudden death” songwriting approach doesn’t work for me. Rolf was actually the first to bring me a melody to put to lyrics. Every now and then he’ll send me completed melodies to work to. I’ll probably listen to the melody a couple of hundred times to get it to suggest what the lyrics should be about. That’s how ‘You Raise Me Up’ came about. But there’s always room for a little adjustment with the melody too. With others you can start on the idea together and maybe then work separately on melody and lyrics before coming back. I very rarely stay in the room to see the whole thing through.
With all your successes, somebody else, the singer or the recording artists, gets the bulk of the credit and the attention. Do you ever resent that?
Maybe at first you are more precious about your songs and in my early days DJs like Ken Stewart at RTÉ were always very good at mentioning the writers of the records they played. But after a while you realise that the singers are the ones who have to carry your song and communicate it to the people. So for me it’s never been about celebrity or any of that.
You mention the word precious: how much do you worry or care about somebody maybe doing something with your song that you don’t like?
It’s part of the risk you have to go along with. You can’t legislate for it and you often have no control over it anyway. Sometimes incorrect lyrics are sung and that can change the whole complexion of a song. That’s a bigger problem with the proliferation of lyrics over the internet and somebody totally mishearing the words on the record. Sometimes they make no sense! If I was in the studio when the vocal is being put down I’d be paying attention to phrasing and so on.
Have there been special moments that you look back on fondly?
Seeing ‘Father Dickens’ on Johnny McEvoy’s album was special. I was in my car in Marlay Park, when I heard on RTÉ that DJ Curtin’s version of ‘Jacqueline’ was in the Irish charts. That was a great feeling. ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Kids’ winning Eurovision was special too because it hadn’t even got into the Irish final for the first three years I’d entered it. I had quite a battle with the powers-that-be to have it done by only the two guys. Others wanted the full Eurovision orchestral treatment. I felt the song didn’t need that. To me, the song was like a conversation in a kitchen. At one point I think Charlie McGettigan tried to get me to compromise by using a string quartet! I can be stubborn over those kind of issues, but when it won I felt vindicated.
You were working as an industrial engineer by day, so did you find the entertainment business intimidating in any way?
(Laughs) I did totally! I brought a discipline from the business world that made me curious about copyright issues and how that worked. That lead me down very interesting paths!
Among all the successes have there been disappointments too?
You want disappointments?
Maybe one or two!
Well at first you get all the rejections and nights standing outside dancehall doors at half-two in the morning to give the artist a tape of your song – only to find that he slipped out the back ages ago! In the early ‘90s I had a phenomenal demo of a song sung in Nashville by Benita Hill and produced by Cowboy Jack Clement of whom legend has it that he put the thumb-tacks in Jerry Lee Lewis’ piano to give it that hopping sound. One day I got a call to say the demo was so good it was going to be used in the Brad Pitt movie Kalifornia. Contracts were signed and I saw the script of the scene where it’s her birthday and he goes in this deli where’s she’s working and plays my song on the jukebox. I thought, “I’ve really made it now!” Well, I waited and waited and heard nothing more. And then came a phonecall to tell me that when it came to the director’s cut he cut 15 minutes out of it, and it was the jukebox 15 minutes! That was a big, big come-down.
Was that the only big one?
Well, I suppose a major mistake I made happened in the book publishing. I was offered a fantastic publishing deal by Gary Fisketjon at Knopf for The Whitest Flower when I only had part of it written. He was described to me as the Steven Spielberg of the book industry. Despite my then-editor telling me I had to do the deal, I didn’t sign it. I was stupid and naïve and just didn’t understand the industry. When I told this story to an American author he couldn’t believe it. He said, “You turned down Gary Fisketjon! I live in California, and I would crawl on my hands and knees all across America just to put my manuscript into Gary Fisketjon’s hands for a dollar!” So that was a mistake, although I later got the book successfully published anyway. I also turned down a different movie deal for it, but I think that was the right decision. It’s time will come around.
We seemed to have lost our way in Eurovision since the days when songs by yourself and others like Shay Healy performed so well.
There are lots of theories put up that I don’t buy into, like this talk about the Eastern bloc voting patterns. When my own ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Kids’ won
it was said it was because of the eastern bloc
votes (laughs).
So do you discount that block voting theory?
I do discount it. What I do acknowledge is that geographic proximity can play a part. It’s like if you live near a Gaeltacht area you can connect with that song easier than if you live further away. ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Kids’ was not a Eurovision song as such and was actually rejected for three years before it even got into the Irish contest. ‘The Voice’ is not a Eurovision song. I believe if you get the right song, people are the same all over. You can tap into what I call the supersoul. People everywhere respond to it.
Which is what happened with ‘You Raise Me Up’.
‘You Raise Me Up’ is a very good example. It’s a song that transcends national boundaries, race, religion and even languages like Chinese, East Timorese. So there’s something in it that connects with the broadest spread of people. Where we’ve lost the plot is in trying to follow the European model. For a while there was this You’re A Star thing that I never bought into – that it was the artist and not the song. To me it made no sense. For a while they stopped looking for the song. Then there was the other notion that you had to have bells and whistles, masks and feathers, which is nonsense. But there’s still a view out there that we should go for something that’s showy
and flashy.
So is there anything positive about RTÉ’s approach to Eurovision at the moment?
The mentoring idea is good because you can have a song and the idea is good – but it’s not crafted out. But I’m strongly opposed to the notion that songwriters from anywhere can write the Irish entry. It’s like the way professional football has gone with players from every corner of the world playing for, say, Liverpool and they never even know the name until they get their first signing-on cheque. Ireland is rich in creativity and the songs are out there, but they don’t have to be ‘Eurovision’ songs, just great songs in their own right.
Are there new songwriters you hear that are worth paying attention to?
Loads of them, and not just in the context of Eurovision. Imelda May, for instance. I was really impressed when I bought her album. The songs are fresh and she’s coming from a different place and breaking barriers, not conforming to the norms. Laura Izibor is another. Ruth-Anne Cunningham who has hit songs in the USA. And there’s my good friend Declan O’Rourke. To me, Declan is not a songwriter within the ordinary definition of the word. He is a sorcerer of songs, with a Dickensian skill for finding the moment that details some aspect of our humanity. An aspect which, when once we are shown it, we all recognise. Of course there are the stalwarts of the craft, those writers and composers who by their honest toil and skill have, over decades unwrapped beauty for us and unwrapped life and love in all of its realities and all of its possibilities. Other names come to mind, like Fionn Regan, Brian Byrne. Lots of them. It’s extraordinarily healthy and it’s diverse too.
Do you think songwriters have been well served by the industry here down through the years?
I think it’s improved from the amount of ignorance way back. To some extent we were kept in ignorance. It’s up to ourselves not to be whingeing but to get working at it. Songwriters should be doing more to understand the business end of it. Once we create
the music, that music becomes business, a can of beans to be sold. We mightn’t like it. But we can’t forget that.
Do songwriters fear being tainted by showing too much interest in the business side?
It still shouldn’t stop us from asking questions. With some writers there’s almost a deference and an over sense of gratitude when you receive money for your work. I think that’s cultivated to some extent in the industry. A music publisher once said to me that songwriters were only a feckin’ nuisance! Without songwriters he’d have no business! Every time we don’t stand up for ourselves we let every other songwriter down. Some songwriters don’t read contracts. There have been some sad cases where substantial sums of money have gone astray that was rightfully the songwriter’s. I tell them, this is your money, earned from your song. You’re not looking for somebody else’s money. You have to take this on. There’s a passivity we need to get rid of.
Is that new or has it always been the case?
I think it’s always been the case. When you write a song you want to get it heard. You are in a deferential position and it’s hard to get out of that. You want someone else to say it’s a great song. The advent of IMRO with their seminars and workshops means that songwriters are more clued in.
Has IMRO more to do?
There’s always more to do because it’s not a static situation. In fact, there’s now probably more to do than ever. IMRO brings in people from overseas to help educate songwriters about various things. I’ve gone to some of them to learn. I don’t see a huge number of people at them. I’m surprised by that. Publishers are not really interested in educating us songwriters because we can then become a nuisance. There’s a lot of stuff in the industry that’s not transparent, and we see it in the area of what they call black box money.
Can you explain that phrase, ‘black box money’?
You never hear it spoken of, but it’s of great interest to me. You’ll see in a publishing contract where it says that certain incomes where individual titles are not identifiable is not distributed. So you have all these internet providers using music to bring in advertising. Deals are being done with them for lump sums. Technically, those lump sums become black box money that’s not distributed because the individual titles of all the songs can’t be identified. Now I don’t buy into that, but the argument can be made. Because of the pressure that record companies are under, among other factors, less and less money is going to find its way back to the very people who have created the music out of which the income is being made. Songwriters are at the bottom of the food chain, and our interests are quite different from music publishers. They should be able to find some way to allocate this black box money to the rightful songwriters and we have to put pressure on them to make that happen. I’d be very surprised if they can’t identify the music that’s being used online.
Do you believe the internet has made matters seriously worse for songwriters?
I do. You have whole generations growing up thinking that all music should be free, like the air. There’s almost a sense that one’s human rights are being infringed if one can’t get music for free!
But is the genie out of the bottle and it can’t be put back in?
There’s a need for an educational process. I want to get rid of the word ‘content’ and go back to the notion that songs and music are created by somebody. I would not be surprised to see the Googles of the world buying up music publishing companies because music draws users and advertisers in. You get this argument that if music was free there would be more jobs. I don’t believe that.
What would you like to see the government doing regarding copyright issues?
The legislation, which the Government are preparing, needs to be founded on more than economic factors. It needs to go far deeper than that. The whole current debate seems to me to fall short in that it’s purely focused on the economic aspects of intellectual copyright. I am hearing more about the rights and entitlements of groupings and individuals to take from, and make use of, the creative soul of others, for their own benefit. Music is not fresh air. Somebody created it – and it belongs to its creator. Remember the old Irish legal phrase, “To every
cow its calf, to every book its copy”. That principle still stands.
There are people out there who think: ‘too bad’...
Why do we hear so little in the current debate about the rights of the creator of the work to decide who should use his or her created work – and under what circumstance it should be used? What is being sought is the right to steal the creative person’s labour. It’s a violation of that most sacred of things – an individual’s creativity. We here in Ireland have such a tradition of nourishing creative work – work that has added greatly to our collective identity, to an ongoing definition of who we are as a people, over and above that of how our GDP and GNP and other economic data define us. To lose that concept, that sense of ourselves as something more than economic units or ‘content’ providers – that is a national bankruptcy that can never be bailed out.
Has President Higgins a role to play?
I know that in his new position he can’t speak on political matters. But he can speak about artistic and cultural matters. I hope that when he speaks at the forthcoming Music Show at the RDS he addresses some of these issues. Michael D. totally understands these fundamental matters that go beyond the economic issues and was hugely instrumental in IMRO becoming independent of the PRS.
How did that come about?
At the time he was Minister for Arts and Culture and I’d heard him speak about the importance of music to our society. At the time we were having great trouble with the PRS accepting that Ireland was a sovereign state. I got him to meet with Jean Loup Tournier, who was the head of SACEM in France and was really respected in the world of copyright and a powerful man in Europe. The French place a greater emphasis on the rights of the author of the work, whereas the Anglo-American tendency is to place the emphasis on the owner’s of those rights. I’d like to see us favour the French model. So Michael D. and Tournier met in Dublin and I could see they were speaking the same language. That got the government on side here, and that changed the ball game. Michael D. was crucial to that.

Brendan Graham appears at the Music Show in the RDS, Dublin, on Sunday, February 26.