 You're listening to Around the Northwest. Now, Paul Brady has had a remarkable career to date, a career that has spanned six decades and started out at the forefront of the folk scene here in Ireland from the Johnsons on to Plankstay and then recording and touring with Andy Irvine and then a very, very successful solo career where he's collaborated along the way with the likes of Bob Dillonary, Clapton, Carol King and Tina Turner. Born in Belfast, but of course raised up the road in Straban and he's got a new book out and all of that is in there and a lot more besides. The book is called Crazy Dreams and Leather Paul joins us now on the show. Good afternoon, sir. How are you, John? Yes, good, good. Just while I set my Zimmer frame aside, just hold on a minute. Zimmer frame, well, when you're described as one of Ireland's greatest living songwriters, does that give you the heavy GPs? No, no, I mean, you know, I'm pretty fit and healthy. I still lap around. Anybody who saw me and done Louie recently would see that. Swimming, you do a lot of swimming. So exit the planet just yet, huh? You do a lot of swimming, do you? I do. I do try and swim two or three times a week in a 25-meter pool, 30 lengths and on a weekend I'll go snorkeling in the sea, in the wetsuit. And I'm on the next month I'm going off to the Red Sea for a week to scuba dive with some bits. So I'm still tuttering about the place. Have you scuba dived in the Red Sea before it's supposed to be fantastic? I have, yeah, I've been going there since the early 90s, you know. I learned to scuba dive in 1988 and so I've pretty much been everywhere around the world that's famous for scuba diving, apart from the Maldives and Thailand. I've never been to them. Right. Plenty of fine scuba diving around Donegal. It might not be as warm as the Maldives or the Red Sea, but that's a great scuba diving around the coast here. Well, I've dived off Donegal, I've dived off St. John's Point down there and off Valkyrie up the North, Horn Head. I remember a lovely dive up there and beautiful underwater cathedral. Fantastic. Brilliant, brilliant. Are you a scuba diver yourself? No, no, I do a wee bit of swimming, but not near as much as you and I don't do any scuba diving. Some bad swimming just. Let's talk a wee bit about the book because well, you would have a long association with Donegal down through the years from holidays in Bondorn to your dad was a teacher in Murlough and then all the tours and concerts, you very rarely miss Donegal. True. You were playing in Donegal earlier this year. Yeah, that's true. Donegal is one of my favorite spots in the world. You know, anywhere from the Southwest up to the tip of the shown, you know? I've been all over the county, loads of friends there and I love it, you know? So no tour is complete without a visit to Donegal. Good, good, absolutely. And everybody I talked to, it was a weekend we were away and everybody we talked to, we were in Dublin and we seemed to be talking to people, oh yeah, I'm going to Paul Brady tomorrow night and then another group, oh yeah, I'm going to see Paul Brady tomorrow night. So you had a couple of good nights in Donegal. Yeah, it was great. I mean, I'm enjoying myself so much on stage now. I mean, particularly when I play solo and you know, the audiences are just wonderful and I mean, I've never been happier on stage than I am right now. In the book you go right back to growing up in Straban, your dad taught in Murlough and your mom was a teacher as well over in St. Mills and would it be fair to say that your parents and particularly your dad were big influences on you? Oh yes, I could be very fair to say. Yes, absolutely. And not just in music, in a sense, my father was a singer, you know, he liked to sing but his main talent outside his teaching job was, I'd say as an actor and you know, when in his younger years in the early 50s when we just had moved to Straban, he was involved in lots of reviews and he produced plays in St. Pat's Hall and you know, acted out plays himself and later on was well known for his one-man shows like his monologues and all, he was always been asked up in Gondorn wherever establishment he found himself in was long before Sean Brady was asked up and when I was a kid, like 10 years old, like at nine or 10, 11, you know, my parents would bring me out in the evenings with them and I'd sit there with my club orange and sooner or later in my father would get up and do his bit and I just took my breath away like his talent for investing his monologues with a spirit and I mean, a lot of people would kind of, you know, it would learn off monologues like, you know, but they'd drone them out like, you know, bad, bad, bad, but he made the whole thing come alive and that stuck with me when I started to perform myself, you know, I became interested in wanting to do story songs that and become the character in the song and almost act the song out as much as sing it and yes, my father was a huge influence only as a performer. Did you inherit the acting genes? Because there's a picture in the book here if you're looking very dapper in a film. What is it? Cromaster 3. Cromaster 3, that was one of the weirdest movies you'll ever see. I can't claim to have seen it before. It was a sort of an art film by an artist of the time, Matthew Barney and the loose story was dealt with some of the Irish workers who were involved in the building of the Chrysler building in New York back in the whenever it was built in the 20s or something, you know, so the outfit I'm seen in is as the metrity of the Cloud Club, which was the private club at the top of the Chrysler building. Yeah, yeah. From the sort of architectural background and I can almost guess that it was something like that. Anyhow, in the book you go right through your career from the early days in the folk scene with the Johnson since as far back as the 60s and back when folk music wouldn't really be in vogue. It was in the 70s and again you were at the forefront with Plankstee and played alongside some other great musicians. And you know, the stories are two numerous to go through, but they're all outlined and well documented here in the various chapters. But you survived it all. They were tough times in many ways. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, I'm a lucky boy because at crucial times in my career I got blessed by an accidental association with someone. But at the same time, there were a lot of downsides in the career and lots of low points and I had to struggle many, many times to feel that I would get through and things would work out. You know, people asked me that I never feel like giving up. I never felt like giving up, but I knew I had a fight on my hands many, many times. So, yes, there were struggles, but there were lots of highs too. Ironically, those struggles were at perhaps the most successful stage of your career because it was in the 80s that you and through to the mid-90s that you embraced rock and maybe even a bit of pop or whatever and moved away from folk. And behind the scenes, it was a hard time. Was it to do with record labels? Was it to do with, you know, their art play or what? Well, you know, I mean, I was with major record labels for a long time in the 80s and 90s. And, you know, major record labels, they want top 10 hits. They want you on top of the pop. You know, that's all, you know, they want you on daytime radio. And that's all. They kept pushing me in that direction all the time. And I never felt comfortable, particularly, you know? I mean, I never felt like a pop star, never wanted to be a pop star. And, you know, so I felt myself, you know, like a square peg in a hole for a lot of the 80s and 90s and so far as my record career was concerned. So I was very, you know, in the mid-90s, when I was kind of set free from all that, was when I began to realize that, you know, I was all right the way I was, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's when you sort of have, you know, it's when you had artistic freedom when you were to control again that you, that you sort of came out of that phase and were happier. Yeah. But looking back on it, looking back on it, how do you feel now all those collaborations and record companies and them telling you what to do rather than what you did to yourself? Well, you know, I'm a great believer that your mistakes are as important in your life as your success is, you know? And I know, you know, I don't regret much. I don't look back much apart from when I was writing the book, but I don't look back with regret. You know, I mean, I made some, I made some bad choices, you know, I made some big mistakes, but, you know, they threw me in a direction that I had to find a strength in and that, you know, I lived through them and came out stronger the other way and that's made me the person they are now. I mean, not just personally or spiritually, but musically, you know? I mean, I'm very content with who I am musically and I'm quite happy to do a concert where I sing The Homes of Donegal after, you know, the long goodbye. You know, although there's chalk and cheese in terms of the types of music they are, I think that's what I always would meant to be a person who had a broad variety of music and the pop world couldn't deal with that, you know? But you took audiences with you along the way and you won new audiences along the way and today I'm sure when you're playing to an audience it's one that's there to hear whatever you decide to play. Yeah, you know, yeah, exactly. And I mean, I don't go on stage trying to sort of bamboozle people or challenge them utterly, you know? I like to pepper a few new things and interesting things that interest me, new things maybe, into a program but mostly I'll do songs that people want to hear, you know? Because I like the songs too, you know? I enjoy singing them, you know? And it's wonderful that, I mean, it's a wonderful feeling to know that something that you made up out of nothing has been very important to hold bunch of people for years and I mean, that's a big give back, you know? Along the way there's been a lot of associations and collaborations as well and you've written songs for other artists and I'm thinking about, you know, as in here in the book about the time you met Bob Dylan and working with Tina Turner and touring with Dire Straits and all great memories and all sort of stop gaps along the way. Yeah, yeah, great, you know? I mean, I was very fortunate. I mean, there's no way I could have ever, when I was listening to John Mayle and the Bluesbreakers featuring Eric Clapton on my little dance set, record player back in 1962 or 1963, would I have ever thought that Eric Clapton would ask me to tour with him or end up singing a song of mine on a record? Equally, I mean, I could never have dreamt that one day I'd be sitting moving Bob Dylan's fingers around the fretboard of a guitar saying, no, Bob, not like that, it's like this, you know? So, I mean, all these magical things happened, you know? I mean, they're not what I think about when I wake up every morning, but at the same time, they happened and I was a lucky boy, you know? I still am lucky. Most people would know some, maybe many of your songs. A lot of songs, you often describe as a songwriter's songwriter, but a lot of people, a lot of songwriters would look up to you and hold you obviously in very high regard. And in the book, it's all covered, songwriting and performing and the people that you've met along the way. But what, you know, if you were to pick out, if you were to pick out a couple of years or a phase of your career, I suppose, where I think you were happiest, but just where there's, you know, particularly fond memories, whether that's people or whether that's tours or... What would they be? Well, I always enjoyed my work with Bonnie Rates. I mean, I was a fan of Bonnie Rates from early 1970s when the Johnson's moved to America, first on our big Let's Break America fantasy. I was a fan of Bonnie Rates and I remember buying her album, her vinyl album, Give It Up in a Shop Down in the Village in New York. I was a huge fan of Bonnie Rates and I listened to it all throughout the 70s. You know, her star went up and the star went down. And then I met her actually out in LA when I was out making the Trick or Treat album back in 1989 it was blown away to discover that she'd been listening to my records for years too. So we ended up doing a duet on the title song of the Trick or Treat album and then she asked me did I have any songs and at the time she was planning to record a song of mine called Not the Only One that I had on her record back, it must have been seven or eight years before that, back in 1983 it was. She recorded that and had a big hit with it and in America it went to number two in the top 100. And you know, so I got all well with her I sang on her records and she recorded some more of my songs and we actually co-wrote songs and so that's definitely, and I love her singing still so that's definitely a high point for me in the career. Yeah. Whatever we're writing songs, what about writing the book? Has that been as it's not an easy process writing a song I'm sure but writing the book? No. Does that mean trickier? Well it's been trickier, yeah. I mean, I'll go through it, you know, and I'll go, anyway, why did I say that, you know, or sometimes I'll go through it, go through it and go, why didn't I say this, you know. So it's a book, you know, writing a book is, a biography is, you know, at the best you're only you're only sort of writing about maybe 5% of your life, you know, but that you can remember. So the, it's trying to decide what to leave in and what to leave out is a hard thing and I mean, you know, the book, as far as I know now, after we edited it is about 95,000 words. I think originally it was about 120,000 words so there's a fair few bits and pieces lying on cutting room floor. Volume 2, volume 2. Volume 2, no, no, no, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I have to tell you a story about a young DJ many years ago in Donegal Town who was starting out in the business and his first interview was with Paul Brady over in the Abbey Hotel and he made an absolute hams about it. I think I told you you were a songwriter rather than a performer and messed up the intro but you couldn't have been nicer. You won't remember it, but... Was that you? That was my very first interview. I think it was about 1990 and I got a few minutes with you over in the Abbey Hotel ahead of a concert. I block out the painful ones. That's why it's disappeared from your memory. Anyway, listen, the book is out now. Paul Brady, Crazy Dreams and it's a great read. Paul, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, John. Thank you. It was a good pleasure talking to you. And we'll chat to you down the road again. It's the right price tiles on wood flooring. Half price sale. Get up to 50% off everything in store.