Aubrey Malone profiles a life less ordinary
Back in the day, or rather night, I used to spend a fair bit of time in that legendary music pub on Dorset Street, The Meeting Place. All the greats played there – Christy Moore, Mary Black and her opposite moniker Freddy White, Paul Brady, Donal Lunny, Declan Sinnott, Red Peters (a man who looked like he just came down from the mountains but who actually worked in the tax office) and that incredibly gifted jazz guitarist Jimmy Faulkner, Ireland’s answer to Django Reinhardt. Jimmy’s partner told me that he kept the strings of his guitar tuned so tightly, sometimes one would snap in the middle of the night (he kept it under the bed) and give them an awful jolt.
I later heard that Jimmy punched a hole in a door once after Christy told him he couldn’t bring him on a European tour with him. That’s how much music mattered to him.
I was so excited listening to Jimmy in the Meeting Place one night, I started calling up my approval to him. Christy Moore, who’d just finished his set, was sitting a few chairs away from me. With a face that looked as if it was about to explode he said, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll pick you up and drop you onto the street’. In those days he was on the bottle.
I saw him in the Downhill Hotel in Ballina some months later. It was on a Sunday morning. He was sitting as cool as you like reading the paper. He smiled cordially at me and I thought: Could this be the same person who turned on me in The Meeting Place?
That’s the thing about Christy. You get both extremes with him. Moore, or less. He’s either pumping out his songs bathed in sweat as he serenades some nationalistic hero, or gently wondering where is the ring he gave to Nancy Spain.
He’ll be eighty this year. He’s just finished a run of shows at Vicar Street. How does a man of 79 manage to captivate audiences from every corner of Ireland?
Keeping good company. Christy Moore with President Michael O’Higgins at a recent benefit concert
Newbridge
The eldest of six children, he was born in Newbridge. His father ran a grocery shop and was also a Fine Gael councillor. He died when Christy was just 11. It was a freakish death; he’d gone to hospital to have an ingrown toenail removed and never came out of the anaesthetic. He was only 41. Christy’s mother was only 37 at the time. . When she got over her grief she put on a housecoat and took over the running of the shop.
The Taoiseach of the day, John A. Costello, attended the funeral. Christy’s mother took over her husband’s County Council role. She was narrowly defeated for a Dáil seat in 1968.
She had a tough time making ends meet as a widow with six children. Some of them, Christy says, were ‘doled out’ to different neighbours. Christy has forgotten most of the details of the funeral. All he remembers is his mother putting his father’s watch on his wrist. ‘I wore it until 1968,’ he says, ‘when I lost it in the washroom of Victoria Station in Manchester.’
The neighbours told him he was now the man of the house and would have to look after his mother and siblings. The idea was too daunting for him. ‘I started running,’ he said, ‘and didn’t stop until 1989.’
Bank clerk
He became a bank clerk in 1963 but the work bored him. He was getting just £8 a week. Half of that went on his digs. When the banks went on strike in 1966 he jumped ship. ‘I was fed up counting other people’s money,’ he said, ‘and getting spurned by the local cailíní at dances.’
He decided to go ‘across the pond’ to see if he could make it in the music world. All he had with him was his guitar and a sleeping bag.
He took some labouring jobs at first. Then he became involved in the folk scene over there, meeting people like Seamus Ennis and Margaret Barry in the Irish pubs. His early musical influences were American – singers like Elvis and Buddy Holly – but once he heard the Clancy Brothers he became immersed in our own rich lore, swapping his blue suede shoes for a pair of sandals. He wrote in the song Encore ‘When first I heard the Clancys, my future i was sealed/I was bitten by the music bug and the wound has never healed.’
He hadn’t forged a career yet. When he was in London he met Ewan McColl at the Singer’s Club. He also met other singers at this time – Hamish Imlach and Luke Kelly. They confirmed him in his desire to devote himself full time to music.
Christy got into some scrapes in England because of his volatile personality. He was in a nightclub in Manchester one night when he was playing the ‘hard man.’ He fell into an argument with a fellow over a woman and they decided to ‘go outside’ to sort it out. When they did, the man pulled a gun on him and put it to his head. He was an armed detective. That was the end of the argument. Christy was happy to let the woman go. Then the detective brought him back to the nightclub. He sat him down and bought him a large Bacardi.
Christy released his first album in 1969, Paddy on the Road. Having an album out meant he could increase his performing fee from £8 a night to £20 or even £25.’ Albums couldn’t be over-estimated in advancing one’s profile. I would have sung Liverpool Lou in Norwegian to get an album out,’ he said. People were saying ‘’e must be good – he’s on record.’
The following year he made his first television appearance in Ireland. It was on a show called Capital Folk. Two years later he released the album Prosperous. ‘The arse was out of my trousers,’ he said, ‘and I was living hand to mouth, but I was meeting all the right people.’
Planxty: Dónal Lunny, Andy Irvine, Christy Moore and Liam O’Flynn
In the same year he formed Planxty with Donal Lunny, Andy Irvine and Liam O’Flynn. Lunny was his best man when he married Valerie Isaacson the following year. He said she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Two years later he left the band to pursue a solo career. ‘We played for fun,’ he said, ‘and fame followed.’
Many of his songs have messages, as most people know. He says his politicisation began one day in 1976 when he heard Sean McBride denouncing a plan Dessie O’Malley had to build a nuclear power station at Carnsore. The following year he visited the H-Blocks in Long Kesh. The ‘blankets protest’ inspired his song Ninety Miles to Dublin.
It was banned. He produced an album called H-Block in 1979. The launch party was raided by secret police.
In 1980 he formed Moving Hearts with Lunny. It was one of the greatest (and most under-rated) bands this country ever produced. I can never listen to No Time For Love enough.
They went all over the country on tours. ‘When we were working in full flight,’ he said, ‘it was quite awesome. We slept head to toe on the bus in freezing conditions, cooked our own scran and Davy Spillane was the laundry office until we court-martialled (sic) him in Galway.’ When Christy was replaced by Mick Hanly – without any disrespect to Mick – ‘The Hearts’ were never the same for me.
Stardust
The Stardust Ballroom in Artane burned down on St. Valentine’s night in 1981. 48 people died. Christy was outraged. He wrote a song about the tragedy, They Never Came Home.
In 1984 he performed three sell-out shows in the National Concert Hall. He also released his much-acclaimed Ride On album that year, and perhaps his most famous single, Lisdoonvarna which he usually sang with his eyes closed. (When asked the reason for this he replied, ‘Because the words are written on the inside of my eyelashes!’)
1985 saw They Never Came Home released as a single. One of the lines, ‘Hundreds of children are injured and maimed, and all just because the fire exits were chained’ caused the album to be withdrawn from circulation by a High Court judge. Other songs of Christy’s that were banned include Section 31, Back Home in Derry and McIlhatton – the last two because they were written by Bobby Sands and thereby deemed subversive.
Christy is no stranger to controversy. He’s also had his problems with drink over the years. ‘It usually began with a glass of wine before a meal,’ he said, ‘and ended with the horrors.’ He wrote about some of those horrors with black humour in songs like Delirium Tremens, which is probably the funniest song ever written about the morning after the night before. Every line is a gem. Everyone has their favourites. Mine are, ‘Suddenly it dawned on me I was getting the DTs/When the Child of Prague and Flatley danced around the mantelpiece.’
Christy has written over 500 songs. A spontaneous composer, he once wrote a song five minutes before going on stage, and then performed it.
Mary Black, another regular with Christy Moore at The Meeting Place in the early days
He’s a workaholic who finds it hard to say no to an offer to sing. He once played gigs for 89 nights in a row. The resultant adulation gave him illusions about himself. ‘There was a period in my life,’ he said, ‘when I believed I was God.’ In a humbler mood he said, “I know a little bit about many things and very little about most.’ He’s also humble about his guitar playing , ‘There’s a rumour out there that I only know three chords,’ he says. ‘It’s untrue. I actually know four.”
He had a heart attack that made him have to swear off the drink. He knew he’d been hitting it too hard for too long. ‘For ten years of my life,’ he said once, “every time I went on stage I was drunk.” He needed it ‘to exist, to work, to talk.’ After he went on the dry he wrote a song called Arthur’s Da’ which dealt with the manner in which young people are being exploited by the people running the drinks industry.
His mother died in 1992. She’d been a huge influence on him all his life. She gave him his first love of music, singing everything from Moore’s melodies to John McCormack songs to Gilbert & Sullivan medleys when he was young. She also sang in the Dominican church choir. He said of her, ‘She taught me to walk, talk, sing, swim and always to look for the good in people. She hit me once for drinking and then loved to drink with me.’
She developed a problem with drink when she became lonely in her widowhood. As Christy remembers it, ‘She drank too much for maybe ten years.’ That was from 1972 to 1982. Christy didn’t talk to her for a year between Christmas 1981 and 1982 but when they reconciled they remained close until she died.
Christy Moore’s latest album A Terrible Beauty is already a best seller
Christy was playing sell-out shows in Ireland and around the world at this point. Eventually it all became too much for him and he burned out. He had a nervous breakdown in 1997 which led to him cancelling all concerts for the forseeable future.
He’d just returned from New York when it happened. ‘My mind went into a strange spin,’ he said,’“and my emotions were completely awry.’ He went into hospital to try and put the pieces back together again. At this time he discovered the great power of prayer.
Today he’s a mellow man who realises how blessed he is to have lived five lifetimes in one and still be able to strum his guitar, excite the masses, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
A philosopher of the common man, Christy believes there are only three questions that really matter in life. The first is, ‘Who made the world?’ The second is, ‘Would you have the price of a drink?’ The third is perhaps the most important of all: ‘Can I stay at your gaff tonight?’
Anytime, Christy.
