Night And Day

If I'd been from The Face and asked him the question people from The Face always ask - “What would you find in Room 101?” - he would probably have replied, “You and your damn tape-recorder.”

You get the feeling that Paul Brady doesn't like interviews. In fact, you get the feeling that compared to journalists and their tape-recorders Paul Brady would consider O'Brien with his rats a bit of a picnic.

When I ring the doorbell of his house, only seconds after the appointed time of eleven am, Paula Brady opens the door almost instantly, a mixture of apprehension and panic on his face.

“Yes?” he enquires impatiently, as though he is expecting someone else.

“Hello Paul.”

“Yes?” he says again, exasperation creeping into his voice.

“I'm from Hot Press.”

“Oh... “The panic returns. He examines me for a moment. “You don't look a bit like your photograph.”

I follow him into the inner room, wondering what the hell photograph he's on about. On the floor beside an armchair is a small pile of back issues of Hot Press, open at interviews done by this particular reporter. The latest issue is open at the letters page with the photo of Kevin Turvey Investigative Reporter, masquerading as me. Oh Christ, I think, if Paul Brady's been up all morning expecting a visit from Kevin Turvey, it's no wonder he's in a blind panic!

“Have I met you someplace before?” Paul Brady enquired as we face each other across the carpet.

“No,” I answered.

This was a lie. Paul Brady and I had one previous, drunken, encounter, about two years ago, at the Punchestown Festival.

I was standing in the midst of a veritable galaxy of Rock Stars - including Brady, Rory Gallagher and Philip Lynott - swallying pints and chewing the fat. The subject under discussion was the 157th “mix” of Paul Brady's Nothing But The Same Old Story which had just been completed.

This reporter, knowing sweet FA about “mixes” was anxious to get the conversation onto a more general footing.

“Ah yes,” said this reporter, “I heard that mix on the radio. It sounded much the same as the first one.” This good-natured remark had the approximate effect of a fart at a funeral. Rory Gallagher looked at me as though he had suddenly forgotten who I was. Philip Lynott looked at me as though I was the one wearing the ridiculously tight trousers. Paul Brady's expression said “Go!!!”

I went.

John Waters: You used to have a reputation for being a bit of a perfectionist, a bit of a stickler...

Paul Brady: “I've largely changed my attitude in relation to perfectionism. I would see perfectionism as a fairly negative force at the moment. Perfectionism, as it used to be part of me, would have been an unnecessary interference in the creative process for me. I tend to let things come in and go out now, with a minimum of distortion from myself.”

JW: Does that require an intellectual effort on your part?

PB: “Oh yes. You have to grab hold of traits of yourself that are exaggerated - you have to grab hold of them intellectually, figure out what they are and recognise them when they appear and do your best to control them. It is very much for me an intellectual process.”

JW: Did that aspect of your personality make you difficult to work with?

PB: “Oh yeah. Undoubtedly. That's been a very negative side to my character. I wouldn't say that by any means it's still under control. I have to watch it like a hawk, all the time, because it's a very strong force. I think it's something to do with Ego, or something.

“I'm trying to make the whole thing I do less of a big deal to me. I still want to treat it seriously, because it's my work and I love it; but I don't want it to become a kind of prison in which I find myself. I like to think that I'm other things besides a songwriter and a performer. I like to think of myself as a father, for instance!”

JW: How many children have you got?

PB: “Two. A boy and a girl. The girl will be seven on the 2nd of November. Her name is Sara. And the boy is five-and-a-half. His name is Colm.”

JW: Do you find that your work and the way you respond to it creates a lot of tension between you and your family? Or can you switch it off fairly easily?

PB: “Oh, I can switch it off. Yeah. But not without a lot of training. And it does create tension - of course it does. But then there are very few relationships that don't experience some degree of tension. The fact that I go away a lot causes problems; but the fact that I go away a lot also forces the other people in the relationship to become independent of me. I think that's a positive aspect.”

JW: Do you find it hard to relax?

PB: “Yes. There's lots of things I'd love to do, that I don't really have time for. This is ne of the things I feel resentful about, in relation to the driving force I have to be whatever it is I am - a writer or a musician - because it's almost all-consuming. It's very dangerous. It's something I worry about a lot. You have to fight very strongly to make time for the other important things in your life. So, I mean, the thought of me being able to do things like, say, go fishing for a day - which I'd actually very much like to do - Like, when I was young, I used to fish a lot. I like fishing. But it just doesn't enter my scenario at all.”

JW: Do you feel that a day spent fishing would be a day wasted forever, type of thing?

PB: “Yes. I'm finding this all the time. I'm trying to achieve some kind of equilibrium. I don't even understand whatever drive it is that makes me want to keep going on. I know that I'm going to keep going on and that nothing's gong to stop me. I'm aware that there's a very strong driving force, but I don't understand what it is. I'm almost afraid to start thinking about it. I realise that it's a very destructive force as well, and that I have to try to keep it under control.”

JW: Do you worry a lot?

PB: “Yeah. I have to fight not to take things too seriously. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it's just a bunch of songs. It's a few bob in the bank. At the end of the day it's not that important.”

JW: What do you think is your motivation?

PB: “I feel that I've been given a talent, and I feel an obligation to justify that talent. I feel it would be wrong for me to underuse it or misuse it. This is a very strong, unconscious driving-force.”

JW: Do you worry about security?

PB: “The last nine months or so, I've begun to relax about that. For the previous two years, I suppose I was in a blind panic about things like that. Undoubtedly things like the Tina Turner and the Santana covers of my songs have now created a climate whereby I can sit down and say, 'Right! Phew!! I don't have to panic anymore.' That exercises a very strong effect on the work you do, as well. The songs I wrote in '82, I don't know to what extent they were overshadowed by all those wolves outside the door! I would like to think not, but I could never be sure. Who knows what influences the songs people write.”

JW: Of course, it needn't necessarily be a negative effect...

PB: “No. But I tend to think that any worry about finances is pretty negative. At the same time, when I sit down and coldly look at the future in front of me, I honestly feel that I'm always going to be able to make a living. Even if I didn't ever get to make another album - which is not the case - I would find plenty of things to do. I have lots of arrows to my bow. I'm lucky in that respect. Musically, I can turn my hand in lots of different directions.”

JW: What did you think about the versions of your songs by Santana and Tina Turner?

PB: “Ah... (Long pause) It's still a new enough thing for me not to know what I think about it. If I had twenty covers, I'd probably start to get used to it. But it still sounds a bit odd to me to hear someone else singing a song and delivering a line in a way that I wouldn't have delivered it. But I don't consider that my feelings on that are very valid or important, because I don't think, once I write a song, that it belongs to me anymore.”

JW: Have you met any of the people since they recorded your songs?

PB: “I met Carlos Santana once.”

JW: What did you say to him?

PB: “Not an awful lot, to be quite honest. I'm not sure if he even remembered the song! (laughs) I don't think he's very song-oriented, somehow. It seems to me he probably sees himself primarily as a guitar-player, and I imagine he feels that, well, you can't put out an album of guitar solos, so you have to have some songs on it!”

JW: Songwriting and performing are almost opposites, in a way, in that they call on the one hand for someone to be quite introverted in order to draw out the best of himself and into the songs, but for live work you have at least to appear to be quite extroverted. How do you reconcile the two?

PB: “The two things are coming closer for me. Performing live is an exaggeration of your personality. It requires that you indulge in certain aspects of your personality before you go onstage; you stoke them up and let them be the dominant part of what you are for an hour-and-a-half. There's a large side of my character which is extremely extrovert, and that's the side I would tend to develop onstage.”

JW: Is there also a very introverted side to you?

PB: “Yes. I would say that I'm unusually self-absorbed. It's part of my make-up. And it's something that I try to keep at a tolerable level.”

JW: It's good from the point of view of writing songs...

PB: “Oh it is, yeah. But songwriting isn't the only thing n the world. Getting on with people would be also very important.”

JW: Are you getting better at that?

PB: “Yeah. I feel I'm getting better. I feel the last couple of years has been a period of great change, development and growth for me. I've been faced with a set of obstacles that have been pretty high. And I've had to adapt attitudes and parts of myself in order to cope with those obstacles. I've had to stop getting overwrought to the extent that I used to. I've had to grow up a heluva lot in the past two years and I feel a lot stronger now. And I feel a lot more - maybe not this morning, but generally speaking - relaxed than I used to.”

JW: I was just going to say that you seem a bit tensed-up. Do interviews bother you?

PB: “Well, I suppose, most public confrontations I find fairly stressful. I'm aware that when you're talking to someone, there's always a certain amount of expectations and I'm always nervous as to how to handle things, or to know what to say. I mean, like, I don't feel particularly connected this morning. There's other mornings I feel very much in control of my thought-processes and I'm able to talk much more lucidly. Right now, I'm quite confused about what I'm thinking. For quite large periods of time, in fact, I'm quite confused about what I think.”

JW: Tell me about your background?

PB: “Well, I was born in Strabane. My father was from Sligo and my mother from Fermanagh. They were both teachers - he was trained in the South and she in the North - so they wanted to settle someplace where they could both teach. So they settled in Strabane.”

JW: Were you aware, growing up of the tensions in the North?

PB: “Oh yeah. The thing I most remember when I was growing up was the 1956 Campaign. I remember as a child seeing the armoured cars which had just come in from Cyprus, and were all painted sand-coloured which was ludicrous for country lanes in the North of Ireland!”

JW: Were you very aware of the politico/religious divide?

PB: “Well, not as much as perhaps I might have been. I went to one of the few mixed religion schools in Northern Ireland, which had been set up by a family of Quakers. It was mixed religion and mixed-sex. So I grew up all the time in a class with Protestants and Catholics all together. I honestly feel that that formed a lot of my attitudes to things. I feel that people going to school with just their own religion for the first ten or eleven years of their life is very damaging.”

JW: Are you a practising Catholic?

PB: “No. I'm not. I feel that, for me anyway, organised religion as it is in Ireland is largely out of date and is not suited to the needs of humans in 1984.

JW: Do you consider yourself Northern Irish, or what?

PB: “No, not really. Because of the fact that my mother was from Fermanagh and my father from Sligo, I didn't have any particularly strong relationship roots in Strabane. It was an accident really. I wouldn't consider myself (adopts Paisley accent) An Ulsterman or anything like that. I've always felt fairly rootless - in terms of geography, anyway.”

JW: What's your attitude to the Northern conflict now?

PB: “I feel that's all looking backwards. It's looking to establish things the way they were. It's wasted energy. I feel people should be concerned about the way we're going, and not about the way it was.”

JW: Are you at all political? Do you take an active interest in current-affairs, for instance?

PB: “I do, yeah. I wouldn't say I align myself to any political structure. I suppose I tend to plough a fairly solitary path in terms of how I respond to most situations. I'm totally disillusioned with politicians in this country. There's so much energy and no outlets for that energy, and I think it's terrible that political structures are unable to deal with that.”

<>b>Are there no politicians at all that you admire?

PB: “Ahm... I suppose you have to be a certain animal to go into politics. It's not suited to every person... I like Jim Kemmy a lot...”

JW: Are you in any sense a socialist?

PB: “No. I wouldn't consider myself a socialist. It would be Jim Kemmy's humanitarianism that would appeal to me, rather than the particular way he might choose to frame that in an ideology. I'm deeply suspicious of movements; I've always been. I feel there are so many forces that drive people into politics, above and beyond a valid reason for being there: forces of self-aggrandisement, the Ego, power - all these things which have as many negative sides as they have positive sides. I feel people to a large extent use political movements as extensions of their own personality.”

JW: As a father do you ever worry about the fact that the future in this country looks so bleak? Would you ever consider getting out of Ireland?

PB: “Well, the future does look bleak, but if I was to get out of Ireland, it wouldn't be for reasons of Ireland going down the drain, or anything like that. It would be because it seemed the right thing for me to do in terms of what I work at. Because I do feel very committed to Ireland - not as a national entity, either 32, 6 or 26 counties, but because of the people of Ireland, whom I have great belief in. And things do look very bad at the moment, but I don't feel deeply pessimistic about the future. I feel that things are probably going to get a lot worse before they get better, but I have great faith in the young people of this country. It could go any way here in the next couple of years. The shit could really hit the fans in this country. And I don't think people in politics are quite in touch with that.”

JW: Do you think rock'n'roll has a role to play?

PB: “Yes. Rock music is, like, the language of young - and not-so-young people. It's been around for 30 years. It's very much a valid cultural medium. It has a huge impact on people's consciousness.”

JW: Do you ever worry that rock'n'roll itself may be beginning to grow old? That it was born in the fifties, took the sixties by storm, got very conservative in the seventies, flared up again in '77 - a sort of menopause revival thing - and is now on the way out?

PB: “Well, I've got out of the habit of trying to view it in that way - I suppose because I find it too depressing. Rather than taking a broad media vision of What Is The Current Trend? I tend to look at it in smaller fragments, like: What effect is so'n'so's music having? What effect is what I'm doing having? I'm not really interested in the blanket trend, because I think that's too facile a description of what's happening. I feel there's a lot of very good things happening in music at the moment... Don't ask me what!!”

JW: But people do grow out of pop music - younger and younger, as it happens...

PB: “Yeah. Well, I feel that's because rock music hasn't kept up with the needs of people as they grow older. It disappoints me that there aren't more people of my generation writing songs at the moment. I feel that it's a very vibrant time for people - in their thirties: you're facing up to so many things in your life. I don't necessarily see rock'n'roll as being the domain of the Angry Young Man. The teenage rebellion is always a rebellion against something from the outside, but when you reach your thirties you start rebelling against things inside yourself, trying to sort out things that are positive or negative about yourself. And that's what I like to write about. I'm not really interested in what's happening to teenagers. I mean, I'm not a teenager.”

JW: But the whole industry is geared to the teenage market, isn't it?

PB: “Yes. The main problem is that you're fighting against the industry. The industry in Britain has decided that people over twenty-five don't buy records. I don't know if they have reached a corporate decision and included it in the minutes, but that's the way they act. It's harder to sell records to over-25s than it is to sell records to teenagers, and they always take the easy way out. It's a vicious circle: there isn't a lot of potent music around to appeal to people in their thirties, but maybe there isn't because there's no encouragement for it. I dunno. I've found that's one of the major things that I've had to face in the last couple of years: that stereotyped view.”

JW: What's your attitude towards drugs?

PB: “Well, I think it's horrifying that so many people's lives are being blighted by drugs, particularly heroin. Ah... it's very difficult to talk about drugs in this country at all, it's such an emotive subject. I mean, personally I do feel that alcohol is much more dangerous than marijuana: but the minute you say that, you enter the statistics war. There's nothing I can say when people say to me, 'but the majority of people who smoke marijuana go on to use heroin!' That to me is a statistic, but it doesn't mean anything about marijuana.

“I mean, to me, alcohol has totally ravaged this country. It's not funny anymore. It used to be funny, y'know: 'Let's have a drink, we're Irish', but I don't think it's funny at all. I think it's ridiculous the amount of time and money that people spend in pubs in this country, and the amount of alcohol they drink.”

JW: Do you read much?

PB: “I wouldn't consider myself a reader. My wife is a huge reader, so I always tend to call myself a non-reader in her presence. But I suppose I actually read a fair bit... I hate talking about what I read - it's as if you're talking about an extension of yourself or something. I have been trying to evolve, recently, a sense of spirituality for myself - in other words, trying to work out what I think about things... y'know... Life. I tend to... ahm... read some philosophy.”

JW: Do you find this helpful?

PB: “Oh yeah! I go through long periods of feeling fairly certain that 'this is what I am, this is what I feel about this and this is how I relate'. And, quite increasingly over the past couple of years, I've been able to find a thread that most things I experience seem to hang on - a certain thread of thought from which I can make sense of most things. But then, some day, I trip up again and the whole association will become meaningless. I think everybody's the same.”

JW: Do you think that, from the point of view of discovering yourself, the time you spent in folk-music was wasted?

PB: “Oh, not at all! I don't regret at all the whole period I spent with folk-music. There's a whole intangible spirit that runs through folk-music, which you cannot define too easily. But it's a very strong spirit that became very much a part of what I am. I think it's very strongly influenced what I've written. I know that in five years time I will know why I spent ten years doing folk music; it will make sense then, y'know?”

JW: Are you a different person now to what you were when you were doing folk-music?

PB: “Oh yeah! Completely! I'd say a large part of my mind, when I was involved in folk music, was looking back at the way things were, and now I think I'm much less interested in the way things were - although I believe that's very much still there, subconsciously, with me. So, I think that has been a fundamental change in me and it's affected the way I think about everything - from politics to relationships to music. No, I don't regret anything.”

JW: One last thing: Have you got a fishing rod?

PB: “No. I'm afraid I don't have a fishing rod.” (laughs)