Mind you, you learn a lot about yourself and your art in this country. Freed of, deserted by all the musical and lyrical frames of reference that cloud the issue in the English speaking countries, Ireland in particular, you’re left with nothing but the sound you make and the way you look. There is no shared cultural memory which has made so many of my songs resonate with the Irish diaspora and those other cultures it has intermingled with. No musical commonality that I can see beyond, I suppose, a shared love of the best in American music of the past century which has also left its mark on me. A response therefore is visceral, fundamentally human, instinctive. When it comes.. and come it does in spades, I come face to face with myself in a way I never do elsewhere. I end up feeling more human, a basic individual giving voice to a spirit as old as time. But in truth I’m as far from fully understanding what it is as ever…and end up forced to accept that whatever the signal is, it’s bigger and more complex, yet primitive and universal than my take on it.

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We’re pleased to announce the April 23rd 2012 Proper Records release of the new 22 track double CD ’Dancer In The Fire – A Paul Brady Anthology’.

Now available to pre-order from our secure Paul Brady website, Proper Records or Amazon , it’s a collection of Paul’s own favourite recordings from over the years including new remixes, alternative versions, demos and singles. For more info see here

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1994 The Most Reverend Dr. Edward Daly
1995 John Hume, Nobel Laureate, former M.P., M.E.P.
1996 Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate, poet
1997 Brian Friel, playwright
1998 Professor Sean Mullan, Neurosurgeon
1999 Monsignor Brendan Devlin, cleric
2000 Sir James Doherty
2001 Professor Raymond Flannery, physicist
2002 Martin O’Neill, football player and manager
2003 Phil Coulter, composer
2004 Honouring all alumni (as part of the school’s 125th anniversary celebrations)
2005 James Sharkey, diplomat
2006 Sir Liam McCollum PC, Lord Justice of Appeal in Northern Ireland
2007 Peter McCullagh/John Toland, mathematicians
2008 Professor Patrick Johnston, Director of the Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology (CCRCB) and Dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen’s University Belfast
2009 Professor Seamus Deane – Poet and novelist
2010 Sir Declan Morgan – Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland

Below is my formal acceptance speech.

‘Mr President, My Lord Patron, My Lord Bishop,
Allumni Illustrissimi, Right Reverend Monsigniori, Reverend Fathers, Ladies & Gentlemen.

I am pleased, honoured and to be honest, a little surprised, to be here tonight to receive the College Union’s 2011 Alumnus Illustrissimus award. I suppose, given my recent recorded comments about my experience as a student in the film ‘The Boys of St Columb’s’, I wouldn’t have been surprised to be considered persona non grata at any of the College functions! It speaks highly of the the Union that the achievements of even a truculent dissenter like myself can be acknowledged and appreciated in this way. For that I am grateful and applaud you.

I came to St Columb’s as a boarder in Bishop Street, Derry in September 1958 a few months after my 11th birthday. My only experience of schooling prior to that was at a mixed sex, mixed religion primary school in Sion Mills, Co Tyrone where my mother was a teacher. I probably wouldn’t have gone there if she hadn’t been teaching there as it was three miles outside Strabane where I lived and there were closer schools in the town.

It wasn’t a private school. Anyone could go to it. The mixed sex and religion aspect was enshrined in the school’s unusually progressive charter, founded as it was by a Quaker family, the Herdmans in the late 1800’s to educate the children of the workers at their linen mill which of course gave it’s name to the village. By the time I went there it had been subsumed under the control of the Northern Ireland Education Authority and was just another state Primary School. But the original mixed sex and religion ethos still remained.

Naturally, as children do, I took this reality for granted and…while on some level I knew it was unusual in Northern Ireland.. I didn’t think it was particularly special. I now know differently and realise that it was an ideal way to begin my education and that we were extremely privileged in Sion Mills school. This formative experience stuck fast and fostered the desire in me to later escape the confines of the tribalism that has caused so much separation in Northern Ireland. I personally believe that the way to real reconciliation in the North is through integrated education. After all, wouldn’t it be a good thing if the other community had an opportunity to know some more about our culture and history? But that’s another story for another day. As it was, my Sion Mills school experience unfortunately lulled me into a false sense of what schooling in Northern Ireland was mostly like.

To say that I went into shock on entering St Columb’s as a boarder would be an understatement. Nothing I experienced before remotely prepared me for the contrast. All male, all catholic, avowedly Nationalist, the only games on offer, handball and Gaelic football, neither of which I had any previous experience of. The gradual realisation that to the majority of the inmates (and here I talk about boarders) this culture was a continuation of a familiar and normal pattern made me feel a total outsider.

Also to be on my own for the first time in my life as I tried to deal with this was traumatic and terrifying as it must have been for many boarders. My previous enlightened education now seemed somewhat of a liability.

St Columb’s of the late 50s was a hard place. Boys were expected to be tough physically and to leave childhood behind as soon as they entered the gates. I had never been in a physical fight with anyone in my life previously but within a week of being there I was goaded into at least two bruising and bloody nosed encounters with boys I didn’t even know. Boarding school was not for cissies. The culture of beating up the ‘yaps’ as first years were called, was tacitly accepted. ‘To make a man of one’ I believe is the term. The sight of priests walking the grounds piously reading their breviaries, studiously ignoring the ritualised terror around them on the night of the ‘ducking’ remains one of my more bizarre and surreal memories. Strange times, indeed.

While fairly well co-ordinated physically, I was not really a sporty individual though I did enjoy handball and became reasonably adept at it. Gaelic football less so, my glasses being somewhat of a problem. Swimming was something I really enjoyed and still do. I was grateful for the weekly trip to the William Street baths.

The thing I was really interested in was music and, at that time, music to me was pop music and rock’n roll. 1958 was undoubtedly the high point of Rock ‘n’ Roll and before I entered the college I was totally wrapped up in it. It was a global cultural sea change which might as well have never happened as far as St Columb’s was concerned.

I had.. just the previous Christmas.. got my first guitar and was making some good progress over the summer of ‘58. A short selection of what was on radio then included:
Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B Goode’ and ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’.
The Everly Brothers ‘All I Have to Do Is Dream’,
Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’ and ‘C’mon Everybody’,
Buddy Holly’s ‘Rave On’,
Elvis’ ‘One Night’ and Hard Headed Woman’, Little Richard’s ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’,
Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘High School Confidential’.
Revolutionary and glorious music that has stood the test of time.

As part of the college pre-entry consultations my parents asked if I could bring my guitar with me. The edict came from on high that guitars were not permitted in the College. This was a huge disappointment. I can only imagine that there was some irrational fear of the guitar, it being the prime tool of the new and subversive rock ‘n’ roIl. I will say now that that was a petty and ignorant attitude and one which undoubtedly slowed my progress towards what would later become my profession. The fact was that Music…and then only Classical music…strangely not even music from the Irish tradition… came a very poor last after language, literature, Science and Maths in the curriculum priorities. More so, Pop was not even considered to be music.

My visit early today to the college music department has shown me that all that has changed. I was amazed.
I was treated to a performance of some beautiful music both traditional and modern by the students who now have at their disposal recording, performing and rehearsal facilities I would have died for. The encouraging atmosphere towards creativity was palpable. Great to see!
In fairness, I suppose, a full time career in music was not considered a possibility or even desirable in 1958 and increasingly only became a viable option in the 60s with the advent of the Beatles. Still, I feel that the refusal to allow me to bring a guitar was motivated by some other atavistic impulse not connected with my future career prospects and it’s something that still mystifies me.

Of course, I studied piano at the College and did Classical Music at junior and O level. In my final two years I even was co-opted into playing the church organ at Benediction and sometimes Mass which I really enjoyed. I also performed in the college opera ‘The Yeomen Of The Guard ‘ in 1960 sharing the role of Dame Carruthers with Patrick Caffrey…possibly the first example of wife swapping in Gilbert and Sullivan! But I wasn’t interested in Classical music and spent most of my piano practice periods learning how to play the hits of the day or figure out how Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis made the sound they made. Again in fairness I would say that I wasn’t prevented or discouraged from this and was pretty much left to my own devices. But still no guitar!

In general, I kept my head down and plied a fairly solitary path throughout my time in St Columb’s. My grades were above average, even good, but not outstanding. I was not, as I said, a gifted sportsman or ever in the running to be a prefect which I wouldn’t have wanted anyway. I was not a favourite of the teachers nor was I considered a trouble maker. For several of my six years I was bullied by one particular individual, with all the stress, fear and anxiety attaching to that situation. The one occasion I tried to escape from under that involved my parents approaching the then president Fr Farren. They were told more or less that ‘students tend to exaggerate these things’ and… nothing was done. I was not exaggerating. Hopefully today there is a more enlightened approach to this pathetic and destructive practice.

To be honest, I would have to say that the St Columb’s of the late 50s, early 60s really did not know how to deal with someone like me or prepare me for the eventual career I made for myself. At that time it was a College mainly concerned with the conventional and obvious life choices and really was not geared towards the creative, the artistic, the inventive…. more towards the orthodox job market, teaching, the civil service, medicine, the law, accountancy, the Church…the exciting stuff!

The lack of this imaginative support meant that by the time I was in my first year at UCD in 1964, I still had no clue as to why I was there or what it was leading to. The extent of my expectations when I arrived was to perhaps be a teacher and play music for fun in the long summer holidays. In my first couple of years in Dublin I somehow found in me the confidence and imagination to entirely invent myself as a musician and singer and essentially… and not without a lot of guilt and uncertainty… finally waved farewell to the world of the orthodox job market as ‘not being for me’.

What St Columb’s did do for me was give me a love of language and words, in English, Latin, French and Irish which has remained with me. That has definitely led into my work as a songwriter. To be fair, that fledgling talent was recognised during my stay there as I had a couple of poems printed in the Columban annual college magazine in my final years.

By accident too, as we boarders were on our own and cut off from the day to day support of our families, I developed a sense of emotional and mental self-reliance and a kind of ‘lone wolf’ mentality that was an ideal state from which to develop into the artist and writer I eventually became.

Many of you will have had differing experiences to mine and to each others. I accept that, for those of an artistic bent, there is no real rule book or set of guidelines to prepare for the future. Part of being an artist means annoying people, bucking the trend, ignoring accepted wisdom, rebelling against the norm, inventing what isn’t there. So while I can lament the lack of early support I know deep down that the artist is destined to be on his own and needs most of all to find the inner strength to fight his corner in a society that is getting on with the business of the real world. I seem to have somehow managed to do that. I’m still here! In some ways the college has helped make a man out of me. An odd one, but a man nonetheless.

In spite of all I’ve said, I recall, recognise and respect that with a couple of unpleasant exceptions, the teachers in my time were gifted, considerate and conscientious men, who skillfully prepared the majority of the students towards success in their adult lives. The reputation of the college as having high academic standards was well founded. Today it goes from strength to strength and I wish it every success in the future. Everywhere I go I am asked how so many gifted and celebrated people came out of the same school. I am always surprised to be considered one of them.

All that remains now is to thank the still Excellent James Sharkey for his fulsome introduction and to once again say how touched and honoured I am that the College Union has chosen to acknowledge my achievements in this way. It’s a long road with no turning and I am very grateful.

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But Paul is not a man without his own darkness. Now, for the first time, he reflects on his childhood, and in particular his fraught relationship with his mother, Mollie, who has since died. He says she ‘probably felt’ she should have married someone other than his father, and that he never really came to know her at all during her life. It is a remarkable insight into a man renowned for being guarded. But these days, Paul maintains he has come to be ‘comfortable’ with who he is.

And it certainly seems to be the case when I meet the legendary singer-songwriter who wrote seminal classics such as Crazy Dreams, Nothing But The Same Old Story and Nobody Knows – just three of the hit singles featured on the exclusive CD that will be given away free tomorrow inside our sister paper, the Irish Mail on Sunday.

As we sit down in his plush recording studio, built at the side of his home in Sandyford, he immediately strikes me as affable, humble and, more importantly, someone with a great sense of humour. And, as I quickly learn, he’s also refreshingly candid.

‘I regret the fact that I have a reputation in the media for being withdrawn and difficult,’ he says. ‘I think that comes out of a time when anybody who takes their work seriously in the pop world is considered to be a bit odd.

‘You know, you can’t take that seriously!’ I take my work seriously, but that doesn’t mean I’m a grumpy old f***. I am very comfortable with what I am now.’

But, by his own admission, becoming comfortable within himself was a long and difficult journey.

He admits: ‘I see my early twenties as being in an emotional fog. The only thing I was bothered about was music. Like everybody else you wanted to go out and get off with girls and stuff like that, but I wasn’t really interested in anything except music. I would describe myself as closed, even for myself, in my twenties and it was only when I got to the age of 30 that I started to open up. And when I finally did get married and things became real, you settle down, get a mortgage, kids come along – it’s a whole other world you have to deal with. And that experience started making me actually trying to decide who I was and what I was and how I felt about this and how I was going to handle that.’

The 63-year-old, who grew up in Strabane, Co. Tyrone, reveals that he initially withdrew into himself as a defence mechanism after he became the target of a brutal bully in boarding school.

‘I think I developed strategies of concealment and keeping myself to myself,’ he explains, ‘and to some extent withdrew into myself as self-protection when I was a boarder. That may have kept on in my life after I left boarding school. I was scared a lot of the time because for quite a few years I was bullied by a certain person. It was mental torture, I suppose. It eroded a lot of my confidence as a human being. There was an implied physical threat all the time, which was never actually carried out because I never provoked it enough. I developed strategies to deflect it. But it was weird because the guy who bullied me was slightly fascinated by me, particularly musically. And he was into music and wanted me to perform for him all the time. it was like, “I love you but I think I’m going to kill you!” sort of thing. it was very stressful.’

It was playing music that helped him eventually rebuild his self-confidence.

He says: ‘Before I went to boarding school, music was always my best friend. I wasn’t even allowed to bring my guitar to college. From the age of 11 until I was about 16, I was only able to play my guitar on the school holidays. Music for me was like an alternative world that never told any lies.’

Although Paul set out to follow in the footsteps of his parents and become a teacher, he very rarely attended his lectures at UCD. instead, he either gambled away his grant ‘on poker’ or played with local bands. Unsurprisingly, he failed his final exams and never graduated.

‘I would not have been a good a teacher,’ he insists. ‘I would have had no patience. My father didn’t really like teaching. In another generation, he might have had the courage to go and be a professional artist. Teaching was the steady job. My father had an extremely good, innate talent. he was a very lovable man. he was very easygoing, probably too easygoing for my mother’s liking. My mother probably felt she should have married somebody else or something. I think my mother had quite an unhappy life. Not because things happened to her, but because, I think, real life and her expectations of what it should have been were miles apart. What you expect from life and what you have, there’s always a wide gap, but most people learn how to deal with it and get on with it.’

Paul has spent the past 20 years working on-and-off on an autobiographical song entitled Mother and Son, which he finally managed to finish after Mollie’s recent death. The song was finally released on his latest album, Hooba Dooba, which critics have described as one of his best.

Until now, the songwriter has always refused to discuss their difficult relationship, a subject he has in previous interviews described as ‘private’.

Paul says: ‘I would never have talked about my mother when she was alive. I’m a very loyal person and I don’t want to talk about people in a way that’ll offend them if they hear it themselves. My mother and I didn’t have an easy relationship. In a way, I suppose we were both very similar. We were always rubbing each other up the wrong way. I didn’t know what I felt about my mother really until she passed on. Poor Mollie, I think she was locked in herself in many ways. It was very hard to get to her. I found her quite remote as a person. And that used to annoy me all the time as a child and as a teenager and I kept wanting to puncture the balloon. And I kept being really angry because she was who she was. But it wasn’t until about a year or two after she died that I began to, in a way, feel sympathetic.’

Sadly, the pair never managed to reconcile their issues before Mollie passed away.

Paul adds: ‘My mother withdrew for the last few years of her life. And that’s what I talk about in the song. She was in a nursing home for a while and when you’d go to see her you’d be looking at her and you’d sort of go, “Did I ever really know who you were?”

‘A stranger in her eyes – looking into her eyes and realizing that I actually never really knew who she was.’

And although proud of her son’s success, Paul’s mother would often compare him to his contemporaries.

He says: ‘She was [proud] yes, but she would equally come up to you and say, “Paul, is Elton John really a better piano player than you?” Or, “is Chris de Burgh really a better song-writer than you, Paul?”’

He pauses to laugh.

‘She would look at the situation and she’d see Elton John as this huge global superstar and her son wouldn’t be a global superstar, so she would be thinking in her own head, “Why is that, now? Maybe Elton John is a better piano player than Paul”. But she wouldn’t have the wit not to say that to me!’

After effectively dropping out of college, Paul spent several years playing with different bands before joining The Johnstons. But it wasn’t until 1974 that he started to make a real name for himself when he was the surprise replacement for the legendary Christy Moore in one of the country’s then most influential and successful trad bands, Planxty.

‘I never knew why Christy wanted to leave the band, but it was a great boost for me,’ Paul continues. ‘I came back from the U.S. where things weren’t going great for me and suddenly I was drafted in to one of the leading bands in the country. And the spotlight was on me.’

It wasn’t all sweetness and light, however, after he stepped in to fill Christy Moore’s shoes.

‘The year-and-a-half I was with Planxty I found extremely frustrating, not so much from the musical point of view, but from just the administrative and business point of view,’ he says.

‘It was just a mess. An absolute mess. Management was non-existent and every time we seemed to do anything it just seemed to be so hard to do and ended up physically disastrous. There were a few reasons why we broke up, but the band never paid any tax in all the earlier years. So, I ended up coming into a band whose tax affairs were totally out of order and the next minute the Revenue come down on us. I ended up working my ass off to pay off taxes for a band I wasn’t even in. I found myself having to clean up an awful lot of messes that were nothing to do with me and i just said, “F*** this!” It was something that had to be done. I walked.’

And when Planxty reunited in 2003, he was not asked to participate: ‘I didn’t even know it was happening until I read about it in the papers. I wasn’t disappointed that I wasn’t in the reunion, but I just thought it was a bit rude. Somebody could have said, “We’re getting together, you’re not going to be involved”. I could have just been forewarned, that’s all.’ After the band’s first of several break ups in 1975, Paul recorded an album with ex-Planxty member Andy Irvine before going on to release his own critically-acclaimed debut folk album – Welcome here Kind Stranger – which was recently reissued on CD.

His next move was controversial – he decided to leave the folk music scene and branch out into rock and pop. And similar to the audience reaction Bob Dylan received when he abandoned acoustic for an electronic sound, Paul was dubbed as a Judas-type figure for leaving his folk roots. he says: ‘The media characterized it as that, yeah. And there were undoubted similarities with Bob Dylan.’

Bizarrely, Van Morrison once even launched an attack on Paul by accusing him – alongside Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seeger – of plagiarising his work, describing the trio as ‘monkeys’. While completely unfounded, it did not stop the Belfast musician from writing a song about certain ‘copycats  ripping off his music’.

Paul explains: ‘I think that’s paranoia. If there’s any sort of remote similarity between me and Van Morrison, it’s that we both happen to like rhythm and blues. And we both had a go singing in that style. I will never criticise Van Morrison. Van is a wonderful artist. I just sometimes wish he was a bit happier, you know? I mean, since that, Van has made overtures to me. There was a time that we tried to write together a few times, but it never actually worked out. But he respected me enough to make overtures to me.’

Did Van ever apologise?

‘No. he probably doesn’t even remember saying it! i don’t really know him that well to be honest. People tell me he reads every single word that’s ever printed about him. ‘Van didn’t invent white rhythm and blues. Sorry! That’s all I have to say about that,’ he laughs.

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In a career that has spanned more than 40 years, the brilliant singer- songwriter has released more than a dozen solo albums. Many of his classic hit singles can be found on the exclusive Paul Brady CD being given away free with tomorrow’s Irish Mail on Sunday.

PAUL BRADY’s first big pop hit, Crazy Dreams, which touches on emigration, still clearly resonates with his fans today during these bleak recessionary times – as the Irish are being forced, once again, to go abroad for work.

‘A lot of people relate to that song,’ he says. ‘With everybody emigrating again, probably a lot of people more will relate to it; you know, coming back home and stuff, you know? In concert it’s still very popular. The minute the intro for that song starts up – everybody just goes ape.’

In another moving song about emigration, Nothing But the Same Old story – also featured on the free CD – Paul poignantly describes the story of Irish expatriates struggling to deal with living in a politically-hostile environment in London during the height of the Troubles in the seventies.

He reveals: ‘When I was living in England with The Johnstons from ‘69 to ‘73, that’s when there was a real lot of trouble with the IRA. Irish people were looked on with suspicion all the time, and Irish accents – if you spoke with an Irish accent immediately people would start to get uptight.

‘It was a real tough time to be Irish in London. There was a lot of racism. It wasn’t quite as bad as it was in the “no dogs and no Irish apply” for apartments and stuff like that in the Fifties, but still, the Irish were an underclass in London. I felt very much uncomfortable in London in the early seventies, late sixties. People weren’t sure if you were either some mad artistic genius or a terrorist!’

The Long Goodbye, which Paul co-wrote with Ronan Keating, is another track on the album. The pair recently worked together again – interestingly enough, the song, The Price of Fame, appears on his latest album, Hooba Dooba.

Speaking about the Boyzone singer’s much publicised affair with dancer Francine Cornell, he says: ‘I do feel sorry for him, but if that’s the kind of world you aspire to inhabit, well, it’s going to rebound on you! so, accept it. I see Ronan as famous – and I don’t consider myself famous at all. So, I consider this type of fame that he has is, you know, it’s the paparazzi fame.’

Nobody Knows, is a song that explores the dark side of fame, and refers to Elvis’s tragic death.

Paul explains: ‘The music business is a very seductive business. It’s very easy to get sucked into the way it operates. And you can get sucked into the success/fame game. Elvis Presley was like God – he was beautiful, he was sexy, he had talent, he had global success. He had anything you could possibly aspire towards. His pick of any woman he wanted. And what does he do? He dies sitting on a toilet.’

Delighted that he can have both a successful music career and enjoy a normal and sane private life, Paul says he would not wish the fame Elvis had on his worst enemy.

The CD in tomorrow’s Irish Mail on Sunday also includes the positively upbeat ‘The World Is What You Make It’,’ Oh, What A World’ and ‘I Believe In Magic”.

‘With The World Is What you Make It, I’m really just saying that you can invent yourself and the world is what you make it. It really is,’ adds Paul.

With such a positive mentality, It is hard to imagine how Paul ever had a reputation for being grumpy..

Irish Daily Mail, Saturday, January 8, 2011

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The Lefsetz Letter (http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/) is an influential music industry blog from LA based Bob Lefsetz that goes out to around 250,000 people. This is a recent issue which I don’t think he’ll mind me sharing with you. Also my reply to him which he re-blogged.

From: “Bob Lefsetz” <bob@lefsetz.com>

Date: 12 November 2010 04:49:04 GMT

Subject: The Long Goodbye

This is a number one record.

“I know they say if you love somebody

You should set them free (so they say)”

So they say.  Don’t you wish it weren’t true?  Don’t you wish every cliche was wrong, that you could reinvent the wheel, that things could be different for you?

But they’re not.

Sting sang that song about setting someone you’re in love with free, but the tonality of that number gave the impression that he was the one being set loose, or he was giving the advice.  And we all know love advice is given to make you feel good.  But it doesn’t.  The more your friends talk, the more they try to cheer you up, the more isolated you feel, you believe they just don’t understand, just don’t get you.

Funny thing about love.  Even though it happens to everybody, yours is unique.  And there are some people who marry the first person who makes their heart flutter, but that’s unusual.  The rest of us, we experience heartbreak worse than the scariest thrill ride.  It’s a roller coaster that never ends, you try to hold on at first, then you just let yourself be battered, banging against the seat, trying to hold on to the end.

I had my iPod on shuffle last night in the mountains.  I wanted to be surprised, because nothing I could think of would make me feel good.  And not long into my slog I heard Paul Brady’s “Can’t Stop Wanting You”:

“Hot words on a summer night

You ‘n’ me having a fight

One drink and it all come out

Before I knew what we were fightin’ about”

Eventually they get to the makeup sex.  Where Paul claims that he can’t stop wanting her.  But back before I put down the sauce, I used to be in this situation far too often.  What started out as a good time twisted into an argument.  Something just a bit too sarcastic was said by one person, the other took offense and every slight in the relationship came to the surface and we pushed each other apart.

“Can’t Stop Wanting You” is off Paul Brady’s breakthrough album, “Trick Or Treat”.  Only it didn’t break through.  It was his one shot at stardom, produced by Gary Katz, but it flopped, despite featuring a Bonnie Raitt duet on the title track.

And that’s where I first discovered Paul Brady, hearing his covers on Bonnie’s albums, especially the title track of “Luck Of The Draw”.  A better song about Hollywood struggle has never been written.  The things we do to keep ourselves alive while we’re trying to make it.  And most people never make it.

Elated by hearing “Can’t Stop Wanting You”, I turned off shuffle and went on to play every Paul Brady track on my iPod and that’s when I discovered “The Long Goodbye”.

“And I know they say if they don’t come back again

Then it’s meant to be (so they say)

But those words don’t pull me through

Cause I’m still in love with you”

The breakup is never mutual.  Depending which side of the equation you’re on this professed mutuality is either a guilt-avoiding declaration or a face-saving statement.  Somebody always wants it more.  You might have discussed breaking up, but when someone pulls the ripcord it’s clear the other person was willing to hang in.  And embraces that position.  To no avail.

We all hear stories of people who get back together after separations.  But those are the exceptions.  People dream of a better life, they envision a superior partner and jettison their old love.  But usually they don’t tell their old partner until they’re ready to exit, after they’ve lined up a new place to live, have created a new life that only needs their presence to be three-dimensional.  Meanwhile, the one left in the dust is shocked, completely surprised, alternately pissed and yearning for what once was.

Very few people can write a hit song.  Sure, there are tracks that run up the chart, sometimes sit atop the hit parade, but even though they evidence the number one statistic, they’re not really hits.  Hits make you turn your head and take notice, you have to buy them, and continue to play them ad infinitum.

After discovering “The Long Goodbye” last night, I couldn’t turn it off, all day long it was in my brain.  I was going through the motions of life, but really I was in my own private universe with this song.

I’d like to tell you a movie can soothe you when you’re down in the dumps, when you’re in heartbreak hotel.  But only a song will do in these circumstances.  And that will never change.  And these songs will not be about kicking ho’s to the curb, they’ll have a feel of isolation and loneliness, like you’re listening to them alone in your spacesuit.  And it’s these songs that resonate, that we never forget.  Like “The Long Goodbye”.

“Come on, baby, it’s over…  Let’s face it

All that’s happening here is a long goodbye”

That’s the killer, that’s the truth you can hear in a song that you won’t tolerate from a friend.

Paul Brady “The Long Goodbye”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8_hVPI8DLM

P.S. In the mountains I envisioned a diva singing “The Long Goodbye”, someone like Mariah Carey, who insists on writing her own half-baked material but had arguably her biggest hit with her cover of Badfinger’s “Without You”, which was also a hit when sung by Nilsson decades before.  A great song is evergreen, it can be a hit for every generation.  All you’ve got to do is lift Paul Brady’s arrangement, the hypnotic piano notes in the intro, the strings…it’s a perfect blueprint.  Which it turns out Brooks & Dunn employed in 2001 to have a number one country hit.  See, I told you this was a number one record!  But even I wasn’t aware of this cover until I started researching…  Top Forty wouldn’t play “The Long Goodbye” but it could live on the Hot AC chart for half a year, that’s how powerful a number it is.  You see heartbreak is something Justin Bieber and Willow Smith might not comprehend, but the rest of us know it too well, and nothing helps you get through like a great song, and that’s Paul Brady’s “The Long Goodbye”.

Brooks & Dunn “The Long Goodbye”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvPK9kEnjjM

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AND MY REPLY:

Hi Bob,
Thanks for the Long Goodbye rave. Strange its passage through the record/ radio biz. It was the fourth or fifth single off the Brooks ‘n’  Dunn record as I recall. The record company just didn’t want to release it. But it kept getting played from the album and when they finally released it, it took around 19 weeks to get to No 1. Equally with the Ronan Keating version (Ronan was co-writer) in the UK. They didn’t want to even put it on the record at first. Then they didn’t want to send it to radio. Again it was the fourth single off his album… but still eventually went top five there and charted well throughout Europe. My own version came out first (in 2000) and was 5 weeks on the BBC Radio 2 A-list. So, a song that the public developed a relationship with and wanted to hear in spite of the various A&R depts inability to deal with it.

I was amazed at the various reactions from fans ..apart from the obvious ‘it’s a break-up’ read. While my version was on the radio a woman wrote to me from UK to say that she and her husband’s new-born baby had a terminal illness and that over the three or four weeks till the little child passed they kept hearing it and it meant so much to them and gave them such comfort. Another man thought it was about someone drifting away with Alzheimer’s. That’s what I love about songs. You write it and think you know what it means…but it’s only passing through you.

Re my record Trick or Treat… a flop?! Ouch!! ………More like a non-runner, I’d say. I remember producer Gary Katz and myself going for dinner after what I thought was a pretty good showcase gig I did in a club in Soho, NYC in the presence of Alain Levy and various other Polygram grandees the week of its release in US. I wittered on at dinner for a while fantasizing through the adrenalin till Gary raised his hand and, in his world weary Brooklyn way said..”Let me tell you something, Paulie. Right now those people are wondering whether or not to even put you in for the race.” Ho, ho! How right he was. A week or two later my supporter Mercury boss Mike Bone was ‘let go’ and as every artist knows, that’s the kiss of death for a record.

But that was a long time ago. Life is real good now. As I write I’m in San Remo, Italy to be presented tomorrow with the Premio Tenco award for songwriting at the 36th annual ‘Rassegna della canzone d’autore’ , the Italian Grammy for songwriters. Aren’t songs amazing? Nearly 11 years after It was written, you discover it and fall under its spell. I feel blessed to have been gifted with it in the first place.

Best wishes,

Paul Brady

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Just recently it’s been taken up by the Fransiscan Sisters of Charity as one of their ‘Streaming Songs Of Peace’,
Give it a listen!

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