Despite a career that has seen the former Eurovision entrant doing a fair bit of globe-trotting, Mickey Harte hasn’t really strayed very far on the domestic front, his current abode in Strabane in County Tyrone lying not too far away on the other side of the border from his beloved Donegal. “I grew up in Lifford, which is literally just across the bridge over the River Foyle from where I live now,” he explains.
It being a modest semi-detached affair in a small housing estate, Harte Towers may have become too small for the expanding Harte clan and an outbreak of upping sticks might soon be on the cards. As the affable performer confided to me, “We now have four children as of five weeks ago, so we’re spending a bit of time looking around to find some place a bit bigger than here. But I wouldn’t want to move very far from where we are now. We’ve been in this house for about ten years, since about a year after we were married. It’s only three and a bit hours from Dublin, so I can get wherever I need to go for gigs and stuff and I feel very comfortable in the area. But this house we’re in was the best we could afford at the time and it was a great buy. Judging by the prices of new houses this one has probably doubled in price since we got it.”
Nor will you find a massed hoard of entertainment celebs cluttering up the area where he lives. “There’s nobody really. There used to be a radio DJ living close by, but then he moved away. Maybe he didn’t like the records I was making!”
Unlike some of his colleagues and rivals, Mickey doesn’t use the house as a place in which to write new material or make demo recordings. In fact, when it comes to penning new songs, Harte prefers to go to his little cottage in Downing, County Donegal on the coast overlooking the Atlantic, to write. But although he sees his current residence partly as a place of refuge from the demands of the music industry, music is rarely far away. “We have a piano in the living room. My wife kind of regards it as a bit of an eyesore, but I find it relaxing to sit down and tinkle away. I also like to sit down and watch a bit of telly every now and then or read a book to unwind. We used to have an old chair I used to really find comfortable, but eventually we had to get rid of it and replace it with a brand new leather suite which I don’t find half as comfortable. I should’ve held on to that comfy chair.”
It will come as little surprise that he has a large CD collection. “When I was doing the You’re A Star television series people used to give me loads of records, and if I’m away, especially when I’m overseas, I’ll often pop into record shops to see what I can pick up,” he tells me.
Harte’s record collection is liberally sprinkled, as you might expect, with artefacts found in the singer-songwriter sections, but you’ll also find albums by bands like Kaiser Chiefs, The Killers and Embrace, of whom he’s a long-standing fan, in there too. In fact the growth of his collection has resulted in a current burst of DIY to build new shelves to store them on.
Although his wife regards him as a hoarder, Mickey disputes this, but on reflection he admits that there’s a lot of stuff in the attic that he’ll have to go through one day, but not just yet. “I have a lot of photos that are very special to me. For instance, there’s one of me and my brother in Moscow for a European Cup football match against Russia, and there are some of me Da that I’d always want to keep.” There are others he might prefer if I didn’t come across, such as the ones of the band Kryptix with whom he played when he was around 16/17. “The guitar player’s dad took the photos, and one of the other guys’ fathers gave us our name. We were awful, and the shots are really embarrassing now.” Which is true.
And then there are his guitars, of which he has several. “My favourite is this Avalon I got from Lowden guitars. I’ve had it for three years or more and it took me about a year to really get the feel of it properly. Now it’s become the one I prefer to use as much as I can. It’s a real beauty.” He also has a computer. “But,” he explains, “I use it just for basic stuff, like sending e-mails and that sort of thing. I’m not one to spend hours surfing the internet or downloading music tracks. I’m usually too busy for that.”
There’s also the ever-present and highly contentious issue of his domestic tidiness (or otherwise). “Even when I was growing up my mom always reckoned I was an untidy sort of person, but I never agreed with her at all. But my wife thinks I’m very untidy and she reckons our daughter is picking the bad habit up from me. Maybe there’s no hope for her!”