The life of Brian

The world would be a lot less lively without young bands declaring war on other, better known young bands. We should not, therefore, judge Dan Gillespie from The Feeling too harshly for his recent declaration of hostilities against the Arctic Monkeys.
“If indie has to be this incredibly edgy cool trendy thing without melodies and pop influences then I think indie will die,” raged Gillespie, before adding, somewhat sniffily, “(there’s) this idea that indie is credible and anything else isn’t, when most indie bands are put together by record labels and as dreamed up as any pop act. I very much doubt Arctic Monkeys play on their records.”
Like, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Still, Gillespie has a point. In many ways, it’s tougher to take the Supertramp road than the rock solid indie route. The bizarre reverse snobbery expressed against People Who Can Play Their Instruments or Those Who Can Actually Sing dictates the canon.
Applying the same mondo logic, there is an interesting case to be made for Brian Kennedy – old-world songsmith and possessor of an extravagantly sweet voice – as a strange rebellious figure in Irish music. Mammy Rock, for all its unit shifting power, rarely endears one to the critics. But plenty of people out there love him.
When he shows me around his impeccably neat home on Dublin’s South Circular Road, he takes particular pleasure in gifts from adoring fans. One has sent a glass case filled with Joni Mitchell badges. Another has lovingly bound his two novels in classical volumes.
“I’m always really touched by stuff like that,” he beams. “It really means something that someone has sent something to me.”
A singular sort of talent by any measure, Mr. Kennedy is long used to standing apart from the crowd. The fourth of six children raised on Belfast’s Falls Road, he credits the omnipresent wail of sirens with defining his extraordinary vocal.
“It was difficult,” he says. “Everyday we were glad that everyone had come home safely and that no one had died today. There were shootings outside the house. We were evacuated a number of times and soldiers broke in to search the house from top to bottom. It created a need for escape. For me, I saw what I saw, and all that I had to get away from that was singing. I think that saved me.
On a deeper psychological level, it would be fair to say most children cope with it in the best way they can. There is a brilliant book called The Lost Language Of Cranes, about a boy left on his own in a council flat. When they found him he moved strangely and robotically, because all he saw were the cranes outside his window. I think the high pitch in my voice may come from me trying to make my surroundings less scary.”
Despite the very specific geographical location and the turmoil outside, Brian – and the Kennedy clan generally – remained curiously apolitical.
“It was often hinted that it would be a good idea to join certain organisations," he recalls. "One of our neighbours had a son shot dead. I saw another neighbour whose son was dragged off by the army. Like any mother, she tried to stop them and this young guy basically smashed her face in with the butt of his gun, not once or twice, but half a dozen times until her face collapsed. I will never forget that. Had it been my mother, I would have been tempted to sign up. But my parents were never political. My da was a sports person, and my mother, like all of her contemporaries, was so fucking busy looking after all of us. They only had time to worry about keeping us alive and wondering: how the fuck are we going to feed all these kids? But it is one of those situations where you’re almost branded with a political identity anyway. I could speak Irish. I went to choir. It’s unavoidable that you are interpreted in a certain way.”
When he discovered that he could hit any note the singing teacher required – uncomfortably, before a class of 25 – Brian Kennedy had found a means of escape. It wouldn’t exactly make him the most popular boy in school, but, by then, a propensity for angelic singing was the least of his troubles.
“I was always aware that I was gay I think,” he tells me. “But because of human nature, you very quickly cop that most people don’t think that is a good idea. By all accounts I was a very effeminate fellow. I really reacted well to girls. I thought they were fantastic. They told great stories and they always had chewing gum. They had the most intricate, mad games. They were funny and emotional. You could be upset and it would be alright. So I just really hit it off with local girls and my sisters’ friends. It was a strange contradictory situation. I grew up around powerful, yet powerless women. So I loved women. I got on really well with my granny and my aunties. They were hilarious, and yet, in the next breath something awful would happen. A friend would get blown to pieces or they'd find a dead body at the top of the street. That was all part of the fabric.”
Did that cloud the issue of his sexuality?
“Oh certainly,” he says. “The female part of my life was so extraordinary and the girls were like little wives full of stories and knowledge. I obviously related heavily to that. Then the subject of boys would come up and I would go, ‘Yeah,’ but I knew I couldn’t really be joining in with that. But it was funny. I remember being really young and some girls saying, ‘You are a bit of a fruit.’ I was around seven probably. Girls are just that smart. They really get it. Boys at the same age were so distracted by football you were invisible.”
It can’t have been an easy environment to come out in then?
“Well, everyone has their own journey,” he smiles. “It was something you learned to bury very deeply so I did not think about it much. It just wasn’t accessible. Then, when I was 18, I had a brief love affair in Belfast for about four months. That was my first taste of what it could be like to have a fella. But then, I still loved girls. I had a few different girlfriends, on and off, in my 20s. It made things easier and I loved women so much, so I was comfortable with what I had with them. I had a very intense relationship with a woman once, and if we had been from a different generation we would have been married and had children. It might have been lovely, if not absolutely honest.
"But the great thing about the generation I come from is that we can be honest about who we are, if we are brave enough. There are a lot of men of my generation who are 100 percent gay but you will never hear about it until it is too late. That’s their decision and it is not my place to out them. You have to respect their privacy. It took me a very, very long time to feel comfortable in my skin, and it is a daily job.
"Some mornings you wake up thinking you don’t fit your body and other mornings you feel great. Also, one of the things you have to cope with is negative association. The only examples of same-sex behaviour I knew of were always in an abusive context. It was always awful, terrible abuse involving children being raped by priests. I came to think of homosexuality as something involving the Hooded Claw.”
A glimpse of a lifestyle that didn’t involve bogeymen came when an adaptation of Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant was beamed into Brian’s home.
“I remember it on the TV so clearly,” he recalls. “I was around 14 and I was sitting in the living room. Like any household at that time, the TV was on longer than the fire. My mother was doing a million different things and my da was reading the paper and I was transfixed. I sat there thinking, ‘Hang on, he's wearing make up and he’s trying to meet up with men'. I got it – and I didn’t get it – before my mother switched it off in no uncertain terms. I remember a little fire in my head. I was wondering: what was that and why was that so interesting? I remember thinking, very acutely, that I had something in common with this. Weirdly enough, I got to meet Quentin Crisp in New York years later and was able to ask him in detail.
"It’s funny though, because in those days it was all about lip-gloss. These days it's almost turned on its head. It’s all about hysterical masculinity. But the good news is I am very happy in myself now. I came out to my family in my middle 20s because I thought I should. And like any of their other children, they want to know if you are okay. They don’t want to know about your sex life any more than they want to know about the sex lives of their straight children. So it is not an issue with them. I’m a very lucky man.”
Not long after he viewed The Naked Civil Servant, Brian was invited to join his older brother’s five-piece band Ten Past Seven. Jacking in his A-levels in favour of a North London squat, he once again became the odd one out. When the others suggested that he might like to sing in the style of Billy Idol, enough was enough.
“My brother’s band was enormously influential on me," he affirms. “Certainly, I was always exhibiting signs of being a singer, but he was old enough to be caught up in the wave of punk where you didn’t have to play. That would have been his scene, but he was one of the first people I encountered who became a musician. His band Ten Past Seven got on The Tube when they did a show on music in Northern Ireland. They were the only band on the show not to get signed. But that didn’t matter. The first thing I thought was, ‘Wow, you can go on the TV and it could be a job’. My teachers used to say if you could fucking do your homework as well as you can sing then you might get somewhere, but by then I had to started singing in school and in a folk group most Sundays, plus I’d do the odd wedding for 20 quid.”
Creative differences led Brian to a solo career and to Simon Fuller, later the manager of S Club 7, The Spice Girls – and – most familiarly – a caustic talking head on Pop Idol. Fuller’s tutelage helped shape The Great War Of Words, Brian’s debut album. Sadly, in 1990, there was no place for the gifts of a Belfast singer-songwriter with a mesmerisingly different voice. With virtually no airplay, the record sank without trace. Brian’s sophomore effort, recorded with former Fairground Attraction writer Mark Nevin, met a similar fate.
“I did two records very quickly for RCA in 1990 and 1991 and then suddenly, everything fell apart for the record company,” explains Brian. “They fired their first female managing director and a lot of bad things were going down in the industry. All of my A&R team were fired. The new people didn’t want anything to do with what went on before, so I was in limbo. I didn’t know what the fuck to do. I cut off all my hair and I got a pay-off from the record company, paid off my tax bill, put the money in the bank and basically just walked out of my flat in London. I bought a rail ticket around America. I started in New Orleans and just crawled anonymously around America.
"Eventually, after a month and a half, I made it to New York. I had no guitar. I was pretty down about it all. I had two records that were well reviewed and I thought, ‘Oh fuck, that was my moment. My career is over'. At the time, the REM song ‘Everybody Hurts’ was playing everywhere I went and it became my theme song.”
In New York, he spent time with Jeff Buckley, who asked him to appear on his then forthcoming debut album, but without the means, Brian was forced to return to London. In the awaiting stack of mail, he discovered the letter from Kate Bush that inspired him to keep on trucking.
“It was the most amazing thing,” he recalls. “There was a card from Kate Bush inviting me around for tea. I had sent her my record before I left because she was such a powerful influence for me, and she loved it and wrote back. She told me I was on the right path. I went off and recorded a song for the Peace Together project with my brother’s band. Then Van Morrison heard it and when he put together a blues and soul revue he gave me a job.”
Brian would work with the notoriously prickly Mr. Morrison for six years.
“He’s not all that prickly,” laughs Brian. “He just operates at such a high speed that he’s going along like a locomotive and has no time to stop with the press. He’s a master at what he does but he’s a private person. He’s shy and really funny when you get to know him. He comes from a time when you got to be famous because you were just that good. I only know him as a generous person, especially to me. He plucked me from relative obscurity and put me in front of his global audience. I am a singer from Belfast, so that helped, but the band came from all over, so it was sink or swim with that band. Luckily I managed to swim.”
Since then, Brian has been beavering away on novels, short stories, poetry, successful solo projects and, for all we know, a cure for cancer. Two events, however, have earned him a central place in the collective consciousness – his Eurovision adventure and his performance at George Best’s funeral.
“I never watched the footage,” he admits, “because it was like I was watching myself when I was doing it. I grew up on the Falls Road and here I am at Stormont surrounded by a sea of people including football legends and politicians. I had a dead genius in front of me. I literally could touch the coffin. There was a choreographed moment when I sang ‘You Raise Me Up’ and the coffin came up on their shoulders. It was floated down towards the procession and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life. I was so emotional I didn’t think I could get the notes out. His dad was there in front of me and the grandson and the sister. I thought about George losing his terrible battle with alcohol. I knew him a bit because he would come to my gigs in Manchester and we had a few funny nights with him. I felt very proud of it and it was bittersweet. I was the first person to record that song but one of the last to have a hit with it. But again, there is George Best being generous even in death. It’s a good way to remember him. Even though I was terrified as I stood there singing in my own accent, hearing it reverberating around the four walls.”
I wonder if, like Damien Dempsey, his accent is integral to his art?
“Definitely,” he nods. “It never occurred to me over the years that various producers have said, ‘Oh, would you put a ‘g’ on the end when you sing the word walking’. I would if it helps the emotion, but it would not occur to me. It just shows how marginalised our culture has become. Everybody is walking around with a fake tan and showing off their midriff. But I honestly don’t understand why an adult would want to be like everyone else. I think it’s much worse for female artists. I can go on stage and be a bit overweight. But if Madonna put on a stone it would be world news. And those women you see on reality pop shows are basically pole dancers without the pole. Where is the originality in that? That’s why I love Pink so much. There is nobody else like her and she’s not taking that shit.”
And finally, a word about the Eurovision controversy. Was it all just a vast conspiracy? Will Oliver Stone be making the movie someday?
He sighs just a little.
“I think everybody is allowed to get passionate about what they want and it was good that a lot of people cared about the process. But we honestly did the best we could. We opened it up to everybody. We got over 1,000 songs and we hired the best people in the industry to consider those songs. Obviously, every single person who sent in a song absolutely should feel like their song is the best. Otherwise, they wouldn’t fucking bother sending it in. But the cold hard reality was that the quality of songs was surprisingly low. I think pretty much everyone imagines they are a songwriter now.
"But there are also high expectations attached to the Eurovision. We had Brendan Graham, Shay Healy, Juliet Turner and Paul Brady. That was the filter you had to get through. That was the filter my song had to get through. I didn’t have to listen to all the songs but they played what they thought was the best of the bunch and frankly, it was not great. There where some awful ones, and I was representing my country so I did not want to go in with a half-baked song.”
He doesn’t mind losing out to Lordi on the night, though, as he rightly observes, nobody can remember how the chorus goes. The contest has, however, made him even more of a gay icon.
“I was stopped by a group of kids yesterday on the street,” he tells me. “Most were under 11 and they were shouting, ‘Mister, were you on the Eurovision?’ Then one of them turns to the friend I was with and says, ‘Is he your boyfriend?’ I said, ‘No, my fellah isn’t here’, but I was impressed. First of all, how did those 11-year-olds know I was gay? But more importantly, it struck me that they weren’t bothered by it at all. They just got out their camera phones and asked for autographs and were not remotely offensive. It was a lovely moment.”
And not at all like the Hooded Claw.