I struggled with this. Granted, these men..and they were always men… were extraordinarily talented and the music they produced was beautiful, complex and impressive in its structure and arrangement. But to me, music is basically simple. No matter what the composition is or whether it’s played by a sixty piece orchestra or four or five people round a campfire it’s still just made up of three constituents….rhythm, melody and harmony…and of course.. if it’s a song, words,. The combination of these ingredients is what makes music magical …or not.  Music is only ever magical to me if it excites me emotionally. This only happens when I hear something entirely spontaneous, abandoned and fresh, something new that seems to jump straight from the collective human store of ecstasy and pain and in an instant explains why we humans feel the way we do. In every form of music I’ve been exposed to from Jazz, Blues, Pop, Rock, Country, Folk or traditional music of the world in all its myriad ethnic forms, at one time or another I found this magic. I never found it in Classical music.

As a child I found myself listening to Mozart and, while impressed by his total grasp of the fundamentals of rhythm melody and harmony, I remained emotionally untouched. There was a pristine logic to the piano concertos but still I was unmoved. It felt closer to mathematics or architecture than to what I wanted from music. Wolfgang was tuneful, no doubt, but his tunes seemed twee, clever, polite, lacking in what I’d later call ‘soul’ or even ‘balls’ and… somewhat obvious. He sounded like a smart-ass, a know-it-all and frankly a kid I didn’t feel I wanted to bother to get to know.

Equally with Bach, Haydn at al. Their powers of construction, arrangement, and counterpoint were total and complete but I always struggled to find a melody that told me anything about myself or made me want to squeal with delight or even cry. In general..and I know it’s wrong to say ‘in general’ about music…baroque music seemed to be about things being in their proper place …and when I say things I mean thoughts and feelings and, above all, the higher and lower orders. It sounded like music for another time and  society and worst of all it had to be played exactly as it was written…every time. You weren’t allowed to mess with it or throw it around the place. So once you’d heard it and figured it out… why bother with it? What I couldn’t understand was why people wanted to hear it again and again and again and furthermore…  tell me it was the only music worth listening to or that had any value.

This might have held water when the alternative was “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window’ by Patti Page, ‘The Shrimp Boat’s is a’Comin’ by Jo Stafford or ‘Mares eat oats and does eat oats but little lambs eat ivy’  but when the first strains of Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Cumberland Gap’ or Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’ came out of the radio in 1955 I knew for certain that there was something else going on out there that I needed to know and soon….

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What is at stake in this ‘competition’? National pride? Hardly. No one really cares any longer about Eurovision songs except the participants, the tabloid media and a rash of Eastern Europeans who obviously want to tell the world that they’re as hip as everybody else and spend most of their lives clubbing. Anyway most of the songs have no characteristic that links them culturally to the country they ‘represent’. Old Europe, as the Americans say, is profoundly bored with it all.

Whatever it was.. and there were many glorious moments… increasingly it seems it’s in the grip of a media/Eurovision clique in each country that browbeats the nation into following them like lemmings every year and providing them with their annual champagne junket to an orgy of mediocrity in whatever country has the misfortune to win it the year before. It’s not good enough to say this is just a bit of fun and not meant to be taken all that seriously. It costs the earth. it’s a colossal waste of money much needed elsewhere and in these recessionary times it’s frankly obscene. ‘Fun’ that costs this much is just not funny.

Musically it’s become the equivalent of painting by numbers but as a socio-political document of the current state of ‘Europe’ it’s fascinating and worthy of a PhD or two. To anyone who watched the final the other night it must be clear that Europe hasn’t a hope of unity of any sort in the long term. It’s simply too culturally diverse. Anyone who thinks culture is not relevant in this age of international money is fooling themselves. But that’s another story. Comments welcome on this aspect.

The changes to the voting rules recently (a percentage of the vote via public individual texting) have favored the younger voter which to me explains why the German entry won this time. Stylistically it was the closest to what young people in the developed world are listening to these days. It was about the only song that didn’t sound like it was written by committee and it had quite a bit of creative flair. The Irish entrant this year was at least an attempt at a conventional song as opposed to a circus act but, although Niamh Kavanagh sang well, the song is stylistically outmoded and it disappeared without a trace. People at home went over the top about it but really, it’s an average, predictable tune and you know exactly what’s coming next as you’ve heard something kinda similar a hundred times before.Young people switch off when they hear this kind of song. It’s what their parents are into and their parents don’t vote anyway. The old days are gone forever. It’s not even primarily about music anymore.

Please, please Ireland. Be the first country to say ‘the Emperor has no clothes’. Pull out now and hopefully this ghastly, expensive and pointless affair will soon come to an end. I’d be fascinated to see how many other countries might pull the plug if Ireland was the front runner.

Except that, those who still think that any of this means anything will be saying…..’sure if we pulled out now the rest would see it as sour grapes because we came nowhere this year’.

Hey. Stop!! Stop it! Nobody gives a shit! It’s just your silly egos. Pull the plug and give us all peace! No one will miss Eurovision when its gone except those who want to make money from it.

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Later, when I started to play traditional music and worked mainly within the UK ‘folk scene’ as it was known, I found these tendencies to be even more exaggerated. More often than not politics (left wing) became the central context in which music was experienced and an artist’s music was often judged by the political stance he or she adopted. Worst of all was not to have any. How often, too, did ‘musical artists’ come to the fore who really were political agitators in disguise, artists whose musical ‘arsenal’ was basic, unimaginative and wholly derivative but whose agility with the ‘bon mot’, instinct for exploiting and capitalizing on the mood of the moment was finely honed. Pre internet and mobile phones, the need for social cohesion that, in my view, gave the folk scene one of its main raisons d’être gave a platform to a host of ‘entertainers’, comedians and commentators whose communication skills often enabled them to present themselves as leading lights in folk music. Nothing wrong with them tasting success. It was often great entertainment. But did it have much to do with music? Not a lot, really.

In the Irish context, traditional music and song has always nestled in an overall political context, that of rebellion, rejection of the old enemy Britain and, to an extent, of modernity in general, a regret for things past and gone forever. Particularly in the 80s, when the political tension was ratcheted up to a degree between Ireland and Britain to the extent that some were regrettably convinced, on their own or by others, that hunger strike was the only option, it was so often assumed within the traditional music camp that a love of ‘The Music’ went hand in hand with support for violence. Again, failure to toe the party line was frowned upon. The lone wolf in me got tired of all that appropriation of music for ulterior motives and I have plowed a terminally non aligned furrow ever since I broke away in the 80s.

I find that people too, depending on whether they feel liberated or threatened by the prospect of the future, tend to mirror those traits in the music they embrace. Folk music old, substantial, good…pop music young, lightweight, bad, for instance. Me, I feel there’s some really bad pop music but equally some ghastly folk music. Personally I feel that new music, pop or otherwise, is the future and while I fiercely love the best in my native music and hugely enjoy playing it, it no longer interests me as a vehicle for progress. more one of comfort, security and nostalgia…and, yes, joy.

But perhaps this appropriation of music for ulterior motives is just a factor of youth, that period where we will grab at anything to bolster up our sense of ourselves as belonging, having validity, being relevant…a time when we delude ourselves till the cows come home that this or that music is the only one worth admitting to our imaginary inner circle, based on whatever contextual baggage is flavour of the month.

As my own audience ages with me I find that more and more they simply relate and respond to what is in the music I make rather than claim it as a badge of identity. I set off on this tour slightly concerned that the variety on my new record Hooba Dooba would be more than they could deal with. How wrong I was. A woman I met after the Edinburgh gig who had first seen me 20 odd years ago and who had brought along her 19 yr old metal head son, now a fan, asked me was the song ‘The Winners Ball’ influenced by watching the tv series ‘The Wire’. Hooba Dooba! She’d got it in one. There’s a lot to be said for maturity. You tend to finally really hear stuff…

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We drove from Dublin last night and our first gig is tonight in the Millennium Theatre. Rehearsals went well. We’re all vaguely excited and rarin’ to go. Resting in my room in the bus and reading ‘The Song Before It Is Sung’ by Justin Cartwright, I stop at the juxta-position of Art and the real world at the end of the first chapter and consider.

I often wonder about the artist’s vocation and whether it is mere ‘folly and self-indulgence’ in the face of the ‘real world’ of  the surgeon and his caesareans, his chemotherapy, the farmer and her 4am lambing, the VAT inspector, the teacher of children. The periods of ‘enlightenment’ where I feel that making ‘Art’ is the only honourable thing a human should be about, the only reason we evolved at all….and that the rest is just sticking plasters on a chaotic existence and stuffing that chaos into separate cupboards…come less and less frequently and when they do, disappear sooner.  An artist all my adult life, I have a healthy disregard for us artists and these little ‘torrents of banality’ we get so excited about. I less and less feel justified in expecting anyone to take a blind bit of notice.

Yet tonight I’m told this hall will be full of fellow humans who, in these scary times, have handed over money they worked hard to get…for what? They’re not fools. They’re getting something out of the experience that justifies the loss. Standing on this side of the artistic divide it’s hard to understand the dynamic. Increasingly I feel that my performance, my ‘art’ is just a medium, a catalyst to allow people to access their own imagination, creative impluse, romantic urgency, latent lunacy and that the specifics of what I do, the songs, the voice, the sound are beside the point.

Fair enough! I can live with that. It makes it easier to do what I do, to believe that people aren’t there to take me seriously, to seek out my weak points, to pounce on the jugular, to even listen all that committedly to my particular outpourings…more to join in a collective celebration of our own glorious existential dillema. I feel lucky to be, for a short while, chosen as the focal point for this instinctive human response.

Tonight when things go ‘wrong’ on stage as they will, I’ll hopefully care that little bit less and quietly attend the gentle tug of the opening parachute.

Looking out my porthole I see Man of Aran has attracted a few fudge fanciers, rain or not. Why worry?

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On another level I’m intimidated by these guys in that it’s all miles over my head…all this ‘front loading’, hedge funding, futures, speculating on some other guys collapse, the picking up of pennies a trillion times and then gambling it all in some other direction. The addictive thrill of fucking someone over. it’s a skill that’s gone on from the dawn of time in one form or another and…I’m not even at the races. I just don’t get it. Am I missing something?

The thing that bothers me is that, when I’m around these people, and from time to time we do cross paths… hey, they need to be entertained every so often…I kinda feel like I’m from another species, one that’s on the way out. Last time I was in NYC I found myself looking up at the Lipstick building and feeling like a dinosaur….a very small one. It’s not a good feeling.

Once in a while a money guy will go..hey Paul, I’d love nothing more than to be able to sing, write a song, play the guitar like you. How come i don’t believe him, think he’s humoring me?

Mind you, Bernie’s in the clink now and I’m heading out on tour to play for you guys.
But one question won’t go away. How do you value a song…and is there any way I can maybe bet on it being a failure?

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If I didn’t have a strong ego and a need for approbation, I mightn’t ever have bothered to strive for acceptance as an artist. As it is, in spite of what many people see as a successful career in the public arena, I often struggle to see the point in selling what it is that I do and can find it hard to believe that anybody could be interested in what I have to express or how I express it.  On the other hand I feel the gift, the talent I’ve been given is significant and, while I mostly feel undeserving of it, I’ve arrived at a point where I’m really afraid of no one and feel the equal of anyone at my game, anywhere in the world.…especially when I’m performing. Then it all comes together. Bit of  a conflict here, you might say. You’d be right.

I seem to have lived my life so far in permanent incertitude and I don’t presently see that changing a lot. Everything around me seems continually moving, developing, changing. I feel these currents very strongly and have an instinctive comprehension of them on an immediate level which governs the way I behave on the surface. ..like I can somehow grab hold of thoughts and feelings for long enough to capture them in a song. But to deal with the world in a more obvious and direct way…which is what I feel blogging is…is a hard leap for me to make. Everyone who puts ‘pen to paper’ seems so certain to me, so opinionated and eager to use their intellectual athleticism to defend and promote what they think. I won’t say believe. It all seems mercurial. So often I feel they don’t really believe what they say…but are just psychically jousting with their peer group in a kind of knee-jerk power game. Then I figure that maybe the energy expended in that kind of social intercourse is the only fuel that gets anything done in this world and that I am, as Jimmy McCarthy said,  just ‘the geek with the alchemist’s stone’ wherever I got it from.

Anyway, here I am. More of this stuff as I get my head round the concept. Welcome aboard!  PB

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