MICHAEL McDONAGH TALKS to Paul Brady in the release of his album The Archive, and the eve of two exclusive London dates in April
Paul Brady (Eamonn Farrell for RollingNews.ie)PAUL BRADY is to release a 4 CD set called The Archive, full of songs culled from his prolific and varied career.
This musical gold mine contains demos, acoustic rarities, collaborations with other artists and rare live recordings that complete any omissions from Paul’s published material to date. The bonus news is that Paul will be performing songs from this collection at a series of gigs.
I asked him if it was the notion of impending mortality that had prompted this epic collection. He laughed: “Yeah, I'm not exactly in the spring of my career. So the suggestion was made to me by my record company that it was about time to look back and see what got missed. There's a lot of stuff on this that's never been heard before—maybe only once, on somebody else's album, when I did a collaboration with someone—and there's a lot of home demos and stuff which are the original versions of songs that might be well known by people.
“So it’s a look into how things started off, some live stuff and some rare collaborations. I've been delving into it all, and it's been a real joy.
“There's a lot of stuff too, that say 30 years ago, I wouldn't have let out to the world at all. But when I listened to it, as I was compiling all this, I kind of went, you know, there's nothing like this. Back then I was such a perfectionist, you know, that nothing got by me—and thankfully I grew out of that.”
I reminded Paul that it was actually 55 years since we had our first encounter and worked together on an album photo session for the Johnstons, when I worked for Transatlantic.
We got talking about the Johnstons — I’ve always thought that they were very much overlooked in the great history of Irish music.
“Well, you realise of course for most of the life of The Johnstons, I took a back seat,” Paul said. “Mick Moloney and Adrienne Johnston were, if you like, the main characters. I didn't really come into my own in that band. It was really only after that band imploded that I began to get stirrings of who I might be.
“The Johnstons were very big in Ireland at the beginning of their career. They had a number one hit with Ewan MacColl’s The Travelling People but we moved to England in January ’69 and lived in England up until 1972, and we took all that time to build our reputation in the UK. So to some extent, we squandered our reputation in Ireland by leaving at our peak popularity there.
“We went to America and to be honest, we were aimed towards America at a time of the first big vinyl crisis in the record business—because of the first big oil crisis globally in the early 70s. Record companies in the States were not only not signing new acts, but they were dropping a lot of the acts they actually did have. So what chance did we stand? As it happened, I was right—we kind of ended up in a cul-de-sac in America, which ultimately led to the split up of the band.
Continental Trailways Bus was my first entry into songwriting and I was happy with it as a song. It's a shame that it coincided with the last album the Johnstons did. As I was putting The Archive together, it stuck out as a song. I wanted to give it another chance.”
When Paul joined Planxty in 1974 I promoted that first ever proper concert tour. I said to Paul: “I’ve told you this before—that my wife and I still to this day say that of all the countless concerts I've ever been involved with in over 50 years in the music business, standing in the wings at the New London Theatre watching that line-up of Planxty was just the very best. It was quintessential, seminal, perfection. It was just so good hearing that supergroup of top folk virtuosity.”
Paul reminisced about his time with Planxty: “Well, I always loved playing with Andy Irvine. Back in the early days of The Johnstons before we left to go and live in England—just before I joined The Johnstons—I had been a solo act opening for bands in the folk clubs in Ireland. I was asked to join The Johnstons, and a week after I said yes, I was asked by Andy Irvine to join Sweeney's Men. I regret, in a way, joining The Johnstons, because I would have preferred to have been in Sweeney's Men."
1975 saw the consolidation of Planxty’s reputation in the UK and Europe with that great line-up of Liam O’Flynn, Andy Irvine, Johnny Moynihan and myself playing really decent venues.
Later in the 1970s — Paul recorded Nothing But The Same Old Story?
“In early 1978 I started to record my own solo album Welcome, Kind Stranger, and that's when Andy and I stopped touring together, because he just wanted to tour all the time, and I’d just got married and we had our first kid.
"The song’s subject matter was harking back to those days when it was difficult to be Irish in England, you know. The version I put on the Archive, I always thought was very special. It was with Dónal Lunny and I was singing it live, just the two of us, for Philip King's documentary film Bringing It All Back Home.”
I asked Paul if it was the success of Gerry Rafferty—who was also a folkie on Transatlantic getting a huge pop hit—that influenced him to move on from folk to rock.
“The first time I heard Baker Street on the radio I had to stop the car and pull over to the side of the road, and in an instant I knew that I didn't want to make another folk album. I wanted to start to see if there were any songs inside me, and that's when I started to take songwriting seriously. Eventually, after hearing Baker Street, I said, ‘Look Paul, you have no time to lose. If you're gonna write any songs, now is the time to start.’”
It was that album that saw Paul’s career forge forwards: Tina Turner, Santana, Bonnie Raitt, Carole King, Art Garfunkel, Cher, Cliff Richard, Phil Collins, Joe Cocker and Eric Clapton and others discovered and recorded
Paul Brady appears at Bush Hall
310 Uxbridge Rd,
Shepherd’s Bush
London W12 7LJ
Thursday, April 3
Friday, April 4
See More: Bush Hall, Gigs, Music, Paul Brady
