Paul Brady What You See is What You Get by Tom Nelligan

Paul Brady is arguably Ireland's foremost contemporary songwriter. Certainly he's among the country's most widely covered. Praised by fellow musicians who include Bob Dylan and U2's Bono, covered by artists as stylistically diverse as Mary Black, Santana, Tina Turner, and Phil Collins, Brady has, in his career of more than 30 years, moved from early days in rhythm and blues cover bands, through a decade of landmark work in Irish traditional music, to a large and highly respected catalog of original music that pulls together all of his diverse influences.

In North America, some of his widely traveled songs are probably better known than he is, including melodic and thoughtful compositions like "Crazy Dreams" and "Helpless Heart," as recorded by Maura O'Connell; "The Island," as recorded by Dolores Keane; and "Luck of the Draw," the title song of a 1991 Bonnie Raitt album. In Ireland, where he's been performing since the 1960s and has had numerous radio hits, he's widely recognized as a fierce singer with an edgy tenor voice and considerable skill on guitar and keyboards. These days he writes songs that often look at the changes and challenges that middle age brings, much of it good foot-tapping pop/rock music for adults, some of it quieter and more pensive. An opinionated and talkative man, he is anything but reluctant to comment on his work, as anyone who has seen his CD booklets or his website knows.

Brady was born in Strabane, Northern Ireland, in 1947. In his earliest days he seemed headed for a career as an American-style rocker. His parents listened to swing, jazz, and Irish dance hall show bands, while among Brady's first interests were early American rock 'n' roll, Motown soul, and R&B. "In the 50s what turned me on was stuff like Little Richard, and people like Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Buddy Holly, and all that kind of thing," he recalled in a phone conversation. "That's what got me into American music in the first place. I knew that rock 'n' roll had been very much influenced by black music; then, when the British blues boom started with people like John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, I, like everyone else, started listening to a lot of the American black blues singers of the past. It was really just an organic thing. I wasn't that wildly unusual; a lot of my contemporaries went down that road." Van Morrison, for example, is a singer from the same Northern Irish background whose career has been heavily influenced by the African-American pop music of the 60s. "But I wasn't as single-minded as Van was!" Brady added with a laugh.

Even before he was a teenager, Brady taught himself to play the piano so that he could play the songs of musical heroes like Lewis and Fats Domino. Soon after that, surf bands like the Ventures and rockers like Chuck Berry inspired him to take up guitar,''as well. In the early 1960s, he spent school vacations playing piano at seaside resorts, and as a university student in Dublin a couple of years later he played in bands that covered American soul and blues artists like Ray Charles, James Brown, Muddy Waters, and Howlin' Wolf. It was while in college that he also became seriously interested in traditional music, in part because the room below his apartment was used as a rehearsal space by a group that included two fellow students who would be among the catalysts of the Irish folk revival, Mick Moloney and Dónal Lunny.

"Irish people in a way were sort of on the back end of the U.S. folk boom — Peter, Paul & Mary and Dylan and all that in the early 60s. We were the college audience at the time, and it made us look back on our own culture. I think it is fair to say that the energy that was created by the folk boom in America was quite instrumental in our generation going back and putting all our energy into rediscovering, rearranging, and re-presenting Irish folk music. Because before that, like in the 1950s, Irish folk music was fairly dormant, and really until the Clancy Brothers became big in America, folk music was something that was played at dances in the country or in people's houses. It wasn't a commercial entity. You didn't have lots of concerts going on and people paying money to hear it."

This is an excerpt from issue #96.