HE DID IT NORWAY!

MASSACHUSETTS. Pacheco. Unspellable and unpronounceable - or so it seemed, though they both slid painlessly past the ears once airborne on their own whimsical flight path. Mr. Pacheco's been playing 'round these here parts for quite a while now. And lately he's managed to do what 25 years of Eurovisions haven't managed. He's pushed (the normally frigid) Norwegian musical endeavours to the vertiginous heights of douze points - and beyond.
He's selling records over there by the toboggan-load, and causing long-repressed and demoralised tunesmiths (who had almost resigned themselves to a state of permanent melancholia) to venture a glimmer of a smile. If a Yank from New England can flap the usually unflappable Oslovians, why, things must surely be looking up for the innumerable Svens and Ingas sweating away (wo)manfully at their keyboards.
An explanation seems apt: Thomas Pacheco is the proud daddy of a No.1 album, Big Storm Comin' - in Norway. Born of a musical tête à tête with national treasure, Steiner Albrigtsen, that took off after a chance meeting at the airport, it's a tetchy, few-holds-barred long hard stare at that fatally double-edged sword called TheWorldAsHeSeesIt - and it's a sharp knee in the groin to anyone who subscribes to the self-delusion of the Bill 'n' Hill era.
The stick's still all around us. The toilet's still manky. And the cockroaches are still crawling up the walls. So much for the new wallpaper - it barely covers over the cracks . . .
For a man who writes and sings so fluently Tom Pacheco's speech is littered with an unexpectedly copious supply of halting revisions and restarts. Though enviably surefooted amid the scattered complexities and crotchets and quavers, he approaches, retreats and deliberates throughout the conversation as though he were picking his way through an active minefield on the Glen of Imaal. The considered response is his forte, the studied approach his modus operandi. Tom Pacheco has me hanging on to his every word.
The one thing he is sure about, though, is his slavery to his pen and guitar. Divine providence might work for Grant McLennan or T-Bone Burnett but Pacheco's carved of the same mould as Edison where the 99% perspiration is (usually) well worth the 1% inspiration.
"I've written 4 songs this week," he says, and not a bead of sweat in sight. "I've been writing an average of 50 songs a year, sometimes 70, sometimes 40 - and I've found that, with writing the more you do it, it's like pulling a piece of string that drags other strings out with it. I've had other songwriters ask me: 'Where do you get the inspiration?'. It's everywhere and if you stop for inspiration, you might be waiting a long while. You've got to make it happen."
And right now Tom Pacheco is the happening thing up North. Shooting straight in to the Top 10 at no.12 on the release date of Big Storm Comin' earlier this year, he and Steiner Albrigtsen captured the imagination of the Norwegian record-buying public and have held on to it ever since. Doesn't it surprise him that an American rock 'n' roller of mixed Native American (Cherokee)/Portuguese lineage should find so receptive an audience amid the glaciated fjords of Scandinavia?
"Well," he admits, "it was Steiner's idea really. He had used four of my songs on his own solo album and he was interested in doing an album almost exclusively of my political songs, sort of like the feel of Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are A-changing' for the '90s, with that bleak, spare feel to it.
"It was the easiest album I've ever done too!", he says. "Neither of us thought it was going to be successful because although Steiner is huge in Norway, his audience was really in the MOR/Country area - but he's better than that. He's a great blues artist. Anyway we put the single out first, 'The Beaches In Rio' and it became a huge hit in the pop charts!"
Pacheco isn't easily fazed by anything - this belated recognition merely the most recent pitstop in his long and winding career. A bohemian childhood with a father who had played with Django Reinhart in Paris and a mother with a distinct appreciation for all things animate may go some way towards explaining this nonchalance.
"When I was young my mother taught me to have a great reverence for the land and for nature, for rocks and for trees. And I would go a lot with my father, who is also a painter, and watch him do these beautiful scenes out in the country, very passionate pictures, so I guess my background would have had to influence my writing and my perspective on the world now."
Then again when you find yourself (at the timely age of 16) hovering in the general vicinity of all the great musical innovators of the '60s in Greenwich Village, it's hardly surprising that all your awe and wonder gets used up very quickly.
"I was in an acid/rock band then called The Ragamuffins and we were the opening act for Jimi James and The Blue Flames - Jimi Hendrix, before he went to England - so I got to know all those people. We opened up for The Doors, Janis Joplin, B.B. King, I met them all and watched them all very closely. I can recall talking to B.B. King when I was working as a janitor at a club called The Generation (which later became a recording studio called Electric Ladyland - Hendrix's spot), and I asked him: 'B.B., where do you live?" and he goes: 'I'm on the road all the time. I got me an office in Memphis but I got no home. I'm just like the wind' and I remember how struck I was by that."
With a reputation for assiduously recording piercing insights on things both political and personal both at home, Tales From The Red Lake (1992) and away, Eagle In The Rain (1989) and Sunflowers and Scarecrows (1991), Pacheco found himself in 1993 agreeing to Albrigtsen's suggestion that the two record an album of his most recent political songs, with their musical offspring materialising as a Creole of South American/Indian/Irish/Norwegian blood.
"I suppose I have always been to the left of things. I lived in Greenwich Village in the '60s, which was a very vibrant, very exciting place to be and I don't think I'll ever lose sight of that. I know it's fashionable now to say that the '60s were dreadful, that it's old-fashioned and so on - but so many things started in the '60s: the Women's Movement, ecological awareness, the anti-war movement, all of which are part of our whole culture now. My formative years involved all of that, so I think that political awareness will stay inside of me."
Even the most naïve soul could hardly have been ignorant of the pet Irish fixations on religion and sex. Assuming that it was hardly our healthy attitudes to these that attracted him to our fatal shore, is it safe to assume that Pacheco arrived full-versed in the finer points of our conservatism, religious, political and social? Was Pacheco looking for a sustained dose of Irish Catholic guilt - or does he do this sort of thing for kicks?
"I'd like to say that I'd always wanted to come to Ireland but the truth is that I've always had friends in New York city who were from Ireland, loads of friends who were illegal there. After having lived in New York for many years I moved to Nashville which I really hated, so one day a friend rang from Oldcastle in Meath and asked me over here. And at that point I was ready to do anything to get out of Nashville - it was so dull and boring and conservative!"
The conventions of small town life preoccupied Pacheco happily for a while.
"Something that struck me about small town Ireland, which reminded me of the America of the '50s was the fact that all the people in the town had very distinct personalities. There was the wild one, the eccentric one, the crazy one; in America because everyone watches the same television, all 39 or 59 channels, there's been an homogenisation process going on. Lots of Americans have taken so much out of film and television that they almost relate to each other using lines that they've heard in films. Their lives seem so similar in so many ways. So I liked what I saw here."
And he's glad he stayed? A wry smile creeps across his face.
"If there's one thing that I've learned in life it's not to fight anything. I've had terrible times when I've been so broke and so alone but there was something inside of me that kept telling me to wait, sit it out, it's going to get better. Those songs are going to get recorded. I've written close to 2,000 songs at this point, and as recently as five years ago I was looking at that and saying: Jesus, this is my whole life. I'm not married. I've got no children. All I have are these stacks of songs. I wondered had my life been a waste?
"Then all of a sudden, things started to work out. My songs are getting recorded all over the place! I've just found out that a duet I recorded with another artist in Norway, Trond Grundland, called 'Nobody Ever Killed Billy The Kid' is a huge hit there right now."
A veritable advert for self-sufficiency, Pacheco has roamed from Massachusetts to New York to Nashville and onto Europe with an enviable ease. Far from viewing this nomadic spirit as an inheritance from his Native American and/or Portuguese forebears, he sees the road as a natural and amenable companion.
"I keep my own company very well," he observes quietly, gesturing towards his coffee cup and newspaper (the racing page) as evidence of his basic needs. "Some people need a lot of people around them. Me? I'm happy to sit here, sometimes for hours, with just a cup of coffee for company. And that applies to whatever country I happen to be in. I wrote a song about that called 'Home Is A Place Inside Me'".
Prolific songwriter that he is, does Pacheco subscribe to Guy Clark's view that a writer can only write of his/her own direct experience? That vicarious experiences can't usefully be considered as raw material for songs?
"No, though I do think that you've got to be very empathetic," he says, "to be able to filter someone else's story through you, but there's so much that you can tune in to that it needn't just be your own experiences. If you're only going to mine your own life, you'll dry up."
Does he ever get despondent in the face of relentless opposition to the basic human rights he espouses in his songs? 'Beaches In Rio' (a sharp attack on the dual realities of abject poverty amid the vulgar decadence of Rio's upper east side) may be a hit single, but is it enough to sing about the incongruity? Does he ever become frustrated by the nebulous achievements of his artistry? How long must we sing this song?
"Sometimes it bothers me," he concedes, "but there is always a core of people who never lose that social conscience. There's a great book called Cycles Of History - I think it was written by Arthur Schlesinger - and he talks about 30 year cycles whereby periods of liberalism are followed by periods of conservatism. and he feels we are now entering a cycle of liberalism, like the '60s, like the '30s, like 1900 - and I do sense a change to liberalism now. Unfortunately too I've noticed that when people are poorer and they live life closer to the bone, they feel more things, whereas when people are very rich, they can't feel what other people are feeling because they're cocooned in their own lives."
Does this cocoon extend to the music stage? What does Pacheco make of the resurgence of country music? Is it mutton dressed as lamb, a corporate nod in the direction of downhome, from the lofty heights of the penthouse?
"Most of it I don't like," he says, for the first time categorical in his response, with not a glimmer of doubt detectable. "I find some of it really boring. If more songs by people like Guy Clark were hits, then that would be wonderful but unfortunately you've got people like Billy Ray Cyrus singing songs that are written in Nashville at 9 o'clock in the morning in these publishers' offices - by three or four songwriters sometimes.
"It's popular now because the average white family in America can't get into rap music because it's too ghettoised, racist in some ways - some of it; they're too old for heavy metal and they're sick of golden oldie stations, so country is the only thing that's giving them new songs.
"But if it doesn't become more sophisticated lyrically and musically it will die. For country music to survive beyond its 12% core audience, the same thing that happened with folk music in the '60s will have to happen all over again. First you had The Kingston Trio and The Journeymen and then there was Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs but it took Bob Dylan plugging in to take folk music into a brand new sphere. Right now country music is at the hootenanny stage and for it to go and touch us, it has to be transformed and it has to become more adventurous. Otherwise it'll just die."
Despite the malediction, Tom Pacheco sees some hopeful signs emerging from the female camp where there are more than a few artists who are stretching and bending the rules to suit themselves.
"k.d. lang and Michelle Shocked are both very adventurous. And Buffy Saint Marie. Beside them, some of the men sound like drugstore cowboys. And to be honest, although I really love some country music from people like Guy Clark, Patsy Cline and Hank Williams, I listen to a whole lot of other stuff. Bob Dylan is probably my No.1 and I honestly think that anyone who hasn't been influenced by him is in trouble! Anyone who doesn't have that influence in him is going to end up sounding like John Denver!"
Another singer/songwriter who shares Pacheco's perspective is Bill Miller, Native American (Cherokee) whose ancestors were involved in sending over much needed support to Ireland during the height of the famine, when few others cared a whit for the nutritional intake of this remote little island out east.
The irony of the shared lineage doesn't bypass his sensibilities: "I'm just back here collecting on the debt!", he ventures - tentatively.

TOM PACHECO'S TOP TEN ALBUMS
1. Chuck Berry - Greatest Hits
2. Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tracks
3. Lucinda Williams -
4. Neil Young - After The Goldrush
5. Robert Johnson - Collection
6. John Lennon - Imagine
7. Leonard Cohen - Anything
8. Hank Williams - Greatest Hits
9. Joni Mitchell - Hejira
10. Michelle Shocked - Short, Sharp, Shocked