Andrew Curry writes: Paul Brady is on a short tour of London, Dublin, and Donegal to promote his Archive, a collection of songs from his six-decade career that includes “demos, rare acoustic versions of his work, collaborations and live recordings”—as Salut! Live editor Colin Randall explained in the extended interview that we ran in March. I saw Brady playing in London’s Bush Hall.
(Paul Brady. Photo: Aiken Promotions.)
Bush Hall was packed and expectant, and there were, of course, a lot of Irish voices to be heard. It’s just Paul Brady on stage, sometimes with guitar, sometimes on electric piano, and, for one song, on mandolin. As we left I realised that he’d played—with a break—for all but two hours.
This was his second night, and he hadn’t played live for five months before last night. He’d been nervous about it, although he used a more direct Irish phrase.
But he wasn’t showing nerves.
The set was constructed so as to mix up songs from The Archive with his more famous songs, with a run in the second half which was more or less a “best of.” (There’s a setlist here.)
Some notes from the first half: he opened with Money to Burn, a song written about the global financial crisis:
All I hear is one white male with money to burn
And a whole lot to learn.
Smile, a couple of tracks later, was written in 2004, “when I thought the world couldn’t get any worse. How naive we were.” It has a familiar Brady song-writing turn in it—the world is terrible, but there’s something in our personal worlds that will help us through it.
There was some elegant sequencing in here too. There’s a pair of songs that had been covered by other artists who wanted to change the words. The first of these was The Long Goodbye, covered by the country duo Brooks & Dunn. The chorus of the original runs:
No matter how hard I try/ You’re gonna make me cry.
But, of course, men don’t cry in Nashville, so they changed it to “I always make you cry”. Brady implies he agreed reluctantly, but the Brooks & Dunn version went to #1 in the American country charts.
Tina Turner wanted to change a line in Steel Claw, written about some Dublin people that Brady knew, because no-one in the USA knew where Benidorm was.
It became a scansion-free “San Francisco”, but Turner certainly makes the song her own.
Brady told us quite early on that he used to live in this part of London in the 1970s, when he was based in Britain as part of The Johnstons, making a living by playing the several hundred folk clubs in the country at the time. The band had travelled from Ireland in a Volkswagen Beetle with a roofrack, carrying two guitars and a mandolin.
He closed out the first half with a couple of songs in the Irish tradition—from the record he made with Andy Irvine—that he has made his own. In The Jolly Soldier, the soldier who has married a rich woman sees off the men her father has sent to take her home, and in Arthur McBride a couple of men get the better of a British army recruiting seargent (“one of the most hated persons in Ireland”, say the sleeve notes to Andy Irvine Paul Brady.)
One of the intentions of The Archive was to gather up some of the uncollected orphans from Brady’s career, and he opened the second half with one of these. Let’s Get Together is a bit of hippy whimsy first recorded by Quicksilver Messenger Service in the 1960s. Brady recorded it for Bleecker Street, a tribute record to ‘Greenwich Village in the 60s’ which also featured Chrissie Hynde, the Roches, and Loudon Wainwright, among others. Until this tour, he’d never played it live.
Nothing But The Same Old Story, also early in the second half, was written from his experiences of living in London in the 1970s, and the exiles he met in the Irish pubs where he went to listen to traditional music.
They had come to Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, intending to make some money and then go home again, but never had. It wasn’t easy being Irish in the 1970s, often the butt of ‘Paddy’ jokes and, as the song says, “living under suspicion”.
As Brady shifted into the second half, he changed up a gear. Nobody Knows, the title song of his ‘Best of’ compilation in the 1990s, gave way to Follow On. Despite being quite a dark song, this was given a lease of life in the 1990s when it was used for a Kerrygold butter ad, to Brady’s bemusement.
A pause for a less well-known song, Mother and Son, which has been covered by Cher and Tina Turner (“written from my feminine side”, said Brady), and then a run that took in The Island, The World Is What You Make It, and Crazy Dreams. As a sequence this is an impressive list, and each one was greeted with a ripple of applause as he played the first few chords.
The encore—after a standing ovation—was the Lakes of Ponchartrain, another traditional song that Brady has long been associated with.
The critic in me would say that he sometimes struggled, playing on his own, to fill out the songs that had been recorded with a larger band, although the electric piano helped. And at 77, there were a couple of top notes he couldn’t quite hit. But this is detail.
Although no-one said it, the gig did feel like an ending. Early on, Brady had acknowledged that he was at “the silver screen stage” of his career. And as with Ralph McTell’s 80th birthday concert in January, the standing ovation seemed as much an acknowledgement of the career as the concert. Brady himself seemed to be soaking in the moments.
Brady’s best songs have a knack for connecting the political to the personal. Perhaps this is never more true than on The Island, where we remember the sensuous chorus, which is set up by the grimly topical burning “skies over Lebanon”. Similarly, it’s easy to write an angry song about the banking classes (see Ry Cooder’s No Banker Left Behind). But on Money to Burn, he’s talking personally to that billionaire who has “a whole lot to learn”). The songs that are more directly about relationships and their discontents always have a layer of reflective depth.
Kevin, who happened to be sitting in the next seat to me, asked me at the end, “Do you think he’ll be remembered as an artist or a songwriter?”. He’d come from Manchester with his wife to see the gig. It was a good question, and in truth, although Colin mentioned it in his interview, I forgotten that Brady’s songs had been covered by the likes of Cher and Tina Turner, and many more. I suspect his legacy might be as a songwriter.
—
https://cdnjs.buymeacoffee.com/1.0.0/button.prod.min.js
Feel free to ignore the donation figures suggested by Buy me a Coffee. If you'd like to support our work, just type in your own sum
—
More on this in Colin’s interview:
The Big Interview [1]: ‘Second class citizen, first class artist’
The Big Interview [2]: Paul Brady on being inspired by Gerry Raffery to become a songwriter.
The Big Interview [3]: Paul Brady on celebrity, culture, and The Troubles.
—
Leave a Reply