Colin Randall writes: we were both young men when we first met, Christy Moore the hard-working, hard-drinking star of the folk club circuit, me the hardish-drinking fan and folk club organiser. Today, Salut! Live toasts the 80th birthday of a magnificent ambassador for Irish music … see also our playlist of 12 favourite Christy Moore songs as chosen by the Salut! Live editorial team:
The 80 Club, an informal but well populated association of singers and musicians, gains a new member today as Christy Moore celebrates this milestone birthday. It is one he is unlikely, on his own admission, to have reached without the radical change of lifestyle he made around 40 years ago.
Christy Moore has not enjoyed the same level of fame and fortune that came the way of such other 80 Club members as Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon and Mick Jagger. But like Martin Carthy and Ralph McTell in Britain, his contributions to music are deserving of the utmost affection and admiration.
Photo: Ellius Grace
In case you are not quite fed up with hearing about this modest claim to fame of a sort, I slept with Christy on the first night we met.
Calm down! It was a simple sleeping arrangement at the home of the my great Darlington-Irish friends Mike Sheehan, his four sisters and parents, after he had performed at their once-a-fortnight Liffey club. My habit was to linger long enough to be invited to stay the night and Christy selflessly offered to share the bed he was guaranteed as the guest artist.
Years later, when I told him I dined out on the story, his instant retort was: "You must be hungry."
We have met again on numerous occasions since that first encounter in Darlington – 58 years on my rough calculation though Christy would know precisely when it was, thanks to the meticulous diaries he kept of all his appearances.
It has been a warm, mutually respectful but also occasionally edgy relationship. During that Liffey club evening, he fell out quite loudly – from the stage – with the Cork-born patriarch of the Sheehans, a disagreement (over Irish politics) that continued, unknown to me, back at the house.
In naive ignorance of the full details, I made a derogatory comment in my mercifully little-read folk column in the Darlington Evening Despatch. Little read but seen by Christy; when we next bumped into each other in Durham, he said: "I don't know whether to punch you on the nose or buy you a pint."
Classic Christy, turning potential conflict into friendly banter. There was no punched nose. There were certainly pints.
This was not too long after the start of Christy's period of slogging around the folk clubs, building a formidable reputation on his way to the greater glories of Planxty, Moving Hearts and an extraordinary solo career. He lived in London, Halifax, Manchester and possibly elsewhere, taking any opportunity to see football and forming what would be an enduring fondness for Leeds United, whose promotion back to the Premier League must please him no end.
One night, after the only professional performance of my life (a dismal night in Guisborough; my pal Phil Steele and I got ourselves paid off at the interval), we stopped on the way home in Trimdon to catch the second half of Christy's gig at the village's folk club in a pub just three minutes' drive from the old colliery where – as documented in the Pitman Poet Tommy Armstrong's glorious song – at least 69 men and boys died in the 1882 disaster. He was brilliant, lifting our spirits after a miserable experience in a hostile pub in Guisborough.
Later still, Christy would call me from Darlington bus station one Sunday afternoon to ask me to pick him up for his guest slot at my club in Bishop Auckland. "But you were due here last week and never turned up!" I exclaimed. "We've got Tony Capstick tonight."
Christy's response was robust. It was me who had the dates mixed up, he said. Eventually, we would agree drink must have been taken when we put the booking into our respective diaries at the end of an evening somewhere else.
A compromise was struck. I would put up the admission price for a joint bill and pay Christy whatever was left after meeting Tony's fee. What transpired was one of the best live experiences I have ever known. Two fabulous, crowd-pleasing artists enthralled a big audience, collected their full fees and then drank my dad's drinks cabinet dry when we finally got home after stoppy-back drinks as we did the usual tidying up the Aclet pub in Bishop Auckland.
Photo: Ellius Grace
Three times when I worked for The Daily Telegraph and wrote about folk as a sideline to my news reporting duties, we met up in London for interviews, once in Dublin. It was always a pleasure. We’d reminisce and banter as much as we'd get the formal interviewing done. I had been critical in print of what I saw as a pro-IRA flavour to his songs, but Christy always treated me more as friend than mere professional acquaintance.
. Recently, on the message board of his own website, he said he'd always liked my journalistic work even when we disagreed. To my surprise, I earned a brief mention in his autobiography One Voice.
Once, I urged him to show a measure of balance by writing a song about the utterly appalling IRA murder of Tom Oliver, a border country farmer wrongly accused of being an RUC informant. "Write it with me," he replied in a shot.
As I wrote in a chapter for the second volume of Reporting the Troubles, I am no songwriter and no such song was written. But Christy did cite the killing when explaining to Hot Press magazine how he had become disenchanted with republican violence.
'Thinking of how Tom Oliver was killed andhow a kitchen porter was used in a proxy bombing, I find I’ve reached a point in my life where I can’t fucking take it any more. After Enniskillen, and now, I find I no longer can support the armed struggle … it’s an armed struggle in which too many little people are blown away.’
Disagreement does not have to mean disrespect and I have always considered Christy a man of principle whose values determine the words he sings whether or not he has written them.
Bill Taylor, a Salut! Live writer who also happened to be MC for that night of the shared Capstick-Moore bill back in Bishop Auckland, once said it was hard to think of a good song Christy had not covered, invariably applying his own unmistakable stamp. For Bill, Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamondbecame "heart-stoppingly beautiful" in Christy's stripped-down version,
In Christy Moore's voluminous body of work, we find love, social observation and humour galore but also compelling coverage of major issues, not just questions of Irish nationhood but also dealing, for example, with immigration and racism, Palestine, Ukraine, the Spanish Civil War, domestic abuse and climate change.
And a little of that balance I had sought appeared in one of his finest self-composed songs, Smoke and Strong Whiskey, first released in 1991, the Good Friday Agreement still seven years off.
Dia le hEireann, suckle the empire Dia le hEireann, suffer the loss Of the green to the blue while the media feeds On the blood and the pain and the hatred Father walks home on the colourless night And the organisation has blinded his sight His wife and his kids are sleeping tonight In the arms of sweet Jesus and Mary
There would be more: North and South (Of the River), a noble, hopeful song co-written with Bono and The Edge about moving towards peace.
Some high ground is not worth taking
Some connections are not worth making
There's an old church bell no longer ringing
And some old songs not worth singing
And much more recently, from his 2024 album A Terrible Beauty, there was his haunting interpretation of James Cramer's agonising remembrance of Lyra McKee, the young journalist shot dead while covering a dissident republican riot in Derry.
In the 80s, Christy suffered a heart attack. He gave up drink without losing a scrap of the energy, passion and sense of fun that had made him such a sensational performer even in hellraising days fuelled by alcohol and drugs.
I salute the artistry, showmanship and towering musical genius he has shown over the six decades I have known him. And I have saved a favourite memory for last. Also from the sober years, it evokes his inherent decency and thoughtfulness.
One of my wife’s colleagues, Aisling, a Devonian of Irish stock, was about to be married. She loved Christy’s music and especially his version of Johnny Duhan’s The Voyage, love and marriage depicted in nautical terms. It has been played at a million or more weddings on Christy's estimation; Aisling wanted it at hers.
I sent off a request not knowing if he would even see it. A few days later, I took a call on the Telegraph newsdesk. "What's the news, what's the news?" he bellowed down the line with the opening words of Kelly the Boy from Killane. "Of course I’ll do it."
And he did, sitting in his kitchen and recording the song and a touching personal message on a cassette. Aisling was thrilled, so much so that only with some reluctance do I add that the marriage did not survive.
Happy 80th to a colossal figure of Irish culture and a good, kind man.
* Scroll to the end for a clip of Christy describing and singing The Voyage with its composer, Johnny Duhan, who died in tragic circumstances last November
A giant of a man who, as you say, deserves far wider recognition. That night at the Aclet with him and Tony Capstick is more than half a century ago but lives on quite vividly in my memory. The stage may have been made from beer crates but it was privilege to share it, if only for the momentary introductions, with the two of them.
And you were by far the best MC we ever had, Bill.
I have to say the journey from the Aclet to my home in Shildon – three miles – with Tony at the wheel of his old Jag, was also memorable. The car seemed to bump along rather than drive and I’m still surprised we made it without mishap or being stopped.
Photo: Ellius Grace
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