Stories old and new
“That was a young man’s song,” Paul Brady said as the applause began to fade at the Bush Hall last night. He’d just sung “Nothing But the Same Old Story”, written at the start of the 1980s to inhabit the world of a narrator who’d arrived in London from Ireland as a teenager looking for work and confronted by hostility in the time of the Troubles: “Living under suspicion / Putting up with the hatred and fear in their eyes…” It’s a song of resistance, one to drink and dance and cry to, and although only a few weeks from turning 78, Brady invested it with all its original innocence and rage.
This was the second of his two nights in Shepherd’s Bush, and he talked a little about how, arriving from Ireland as a member of a folk quartet called the Johnstons in 1969, they’d settled into a flat close by. He spoke fondly of how he’d learned from traditional musicians at pub sessions in west and north London.
I hadn’t seen him live since a gig at the Half Moon in Putney in 1981, when I was blown away by the material from his second solo album, Hard Station. Since then he’s had great success as a songwriter, his work recorded by Bonnie Raitt, Tina Turner and others. But today you can put him on stage alone with a guitar, a mandolin and a keyboard, and it’s the same old storyteller, now with a bit more of a growl but with wit and warmth and enough edge to lift you from your seat.
Sometimes, as in the gorgeous “Wheel of Heartbreak” and “The Long Goodbye”, he seemed like the most accomplished of adult rockers. During “Mother and Son” and “Follow On” (“a dark song that ended up in a butter commercial”) I started thinking that maybe what he was was a modern chansonnier, in the mould of Léo Ferré or Julien Clerc. And then there were the traditional songs that harked back to his time with the Johnstons and Planxty: the brilliant mandolin work on “The Jolly Soldier”, the sheer historical weight beneath the lilt of “Arthur McBride”.
The shows were arranged to greet the release of Paul Brady: The Archive, a four-CD, 63-track set of demos, one-off collaborations (with Dolores O’Riordan, Cara Dillon and Carole King, for example), interesting alternative versions of most of his best-known songs, and other fascinating bits and pieces, copiously illustrated with tickets, posters, photos and newspaper cuttings.
Curiously, the first two CDs begin with two songs that he didn’t write, both from the 1960s, which express polar opposites of the spirit of the time. One is the lovely hippie anthem “Get Together”, written by the American musician best known as Dino Valenti and containing a line I’ve never wanted to get out of my head: “We are but a moment’s sunlight / Fading in the grass.” Brady recorded it in 1999 for a set of songs associated with Greenwich Village in the ’60s, and his is a beautiful version, which he reprised last night. The other is “Gimme Shelter”, a song of a very different complexion: his treatment, recorded in 2009 with Bob Thiele Jr’s Forest Rangers for a TV series, Sons of Anarchy, loses nothing by comparison with the Stones’ original.
Those are among the many treasures in the box set. I’m still absorbing it, but I can say that the version of “Paddy’s Lamentation” for voice, piano, tin whistle and military drums, recorded in Dublin in 1980 for a long-vanished compilation album, might alone be worth the 50 quid.
Brady came back for an encore last night and of course it was “The Lakes of Pontchartrain”, the song he recorded in 1978 on his first solo album, Welcome Here Kind Stranger, and which he later taught to Bob Dylan. It’s a traditional song, but it’s his really, and The Archive has a fine version in Gaelic, translated by Prionnsias O’Maonaigh: “Bruach Loch Pontchartrain”.
Last night he sang it in English and gestured to us to sing the last two lines of the final verse with him, acappella: “So fare thee well my bonny o’ girl l’ll never see no more / But I’ll ne’er forget your kindness and the cottage by the shore…” Every heart melted, all over again.
* Paul Brady: The Archive is released by The Last Music Company: http://www.lastmusic.co.uk
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