Leo salutes you from the great beyond

My father Leo passed away in July of 2020 – but last week it felt like he gave me an unexpected wave. My old bandmate and friend Robert sent me a picture on WhatsApp, with the simple message – ‘just came across this great picture of Leo’.

 The picture showed a crowd of people drinking in a marquee. Most of them looked pretty serious, actually. It looked familiar, but it took me a while to realise where it was: the marquee at the back of Frank Owens’ terrific pub in Limavady. Obviously during the town’s Jazz and Blues Festival, at which Robert and I would have played on many occasions during the late 90s, the glory days of Big Ankles, the band we were both in at the time.

 It took me a moment to work out where my dad was, in among this parade of faces.

 Then it hit me like a little electric shock. Down at the back – seated, against the back wall – my father peeks through the middle of the crowd. He’s wearing a green sweater, his head tilted back so the light bounces off his glasses, to look across the width of the marquee, right into the lens. He’s grinning and his right hand is aloft, high, with a jaunty thumb raised.

 It’s wonderful, and heartbreaking at the same time. A salute from beyond.

 It is also ENTIRELY Leo – everything about it is just… HIM, his comfortable presence among the drinkers in one of his favourite bars, near to the music, near to the liveliness and the craic of the whole affair, seeing someone he’s fond of (Robert, obviously) across the room - and throwing his arm up in unstoppable joy.

 Although she’s unseen in the picture, I imagine my late mother Eileen is also there, obscured by other figures in this shot, but also enjoying the afternoon. Thinking about it, I would certainly have offered to drive the pair of them home after the gig, so there would have been happy, relaxed drinking all afternoon, maybe a stop for chips at McNulty’s before heading home, over the mountain to Coleraine. Some talk about who they had seen, who had been asking after me, who had come over to say hello.

 The easy, happy, love-filled sociability of my parents was stolen from them too young, by disease and ill health and bad luck. The happy business of their lives was cruelly unfinished.

 But I haven’t felt as suddenly orphaned as I have seeing this little picture on my phone (even though I’m over the moon to have received it). It was a wave from the other side, for sure: Just when I thought I’d seen all the pictures of him, this new one arrives. A joyous thing, my God yes, but a reminder too, of what’s been lost.

 And yet… it so perfectly encapsulates who my father was that I will have it framed. And when people wonder why I have a picture of a marquee seemingly filled with mirthless drinkers on my wall, I will take delight in pointing out the happy man - almost lost in the frame at the back of the crowd - waving with unconcealed delight to us. A signal sent out, without knowing it would arrive years in the future.

Once in a Loaftime

Thanks to everyone who has commented and asked questions about the crusty white loaves I occasionally share on social media… I’ve been trying to make simple white bread for the last few years – I don’t have the time or the energy to start into the sourdough starter world, so I’ve been looking for something very simple, and this recipe seems to work a treat for me. I borrowed it from someone else on Instagram, and simplified that recipe even slightly more. It takes a little bit of attention over a few hours, but I think it’s worth it.

The finished loaf is about the size of a rugby ball, so it’s pretty substantial. Of course that depends how many of you there are waiting at the breadboard. There’s just the two of us, but we seem to go through it in a matter of two or three days. It’s a crusty, country kind of bread, so I’ve never used it for sandwiches, but it’s great for toast, for spreading with things, for serving with cheese, a bowl of soup etc.

You’ll need a large metal cooking pot with a lid, something that’s big enough to contain the dough and act as a ‘Dutch oven’ (essentially an oven within your oven). This should be a pot that can go into the oven with the dough inside - and the lid on. I usually throw one of those cake tin liners in the bottom of the pot, so the dough doesn’t stick to the bottom.

  For forming the dough, I would also recommend a large plastic bowl with a lid, so you can put the dough in there, put the lid on and leave it to rise.

Ingredients:

650g of strong white bread flour

7g quick acting yeast (the little tear-open sachets are perfect)

Half a tablespoon of salt

450ml of lukewarm water

Mix the dry ingredients together in your bowl and slowly pour in the water. Mix the whole thing together to form a dough – it’s very sticky and heavy, so use a wooden spoon. It can sometimes look like a bundle of rags, so add a little more water at a time as needed, until it forms a sticky, messy ball. It doesn’t have to be perfect, as long as it kind of… hangs together.

  Cover it with the lid, and leave it alone for half an hour. From then on, at half hourly intervals, or whenever you get time, take the lid off (wet your hands, so the dough won’t stick to you so much), pick the dough up and fold it on itself a couple of times - and put the lid back on and leave it for half an hour to an hour.

  Repeat this several times through the day (maybe three or four times) – it doesn’t have to be at regular intervals, just lift the lid off and fold the dough on itself a few times. It will gently get bigger the longer you leave it.

  After a few hours, set the oven to 250 degrees with the pot and lid inside and the cake liner in the bottom. While that’s heating up, take the dough out onto a floured surface and knead it thoroughly – literally fold it in on itself, east over west, north over south, about 20 times, Add more flour to your work surface if the dough starts to stick. Form it finally into a ball and let it sit for 15 or 20 minutes. In my experience, it spreads and flattens out quite a bit.

  Take the hot pot out of the oven and remove the lid. Pick up the ball of dough, form it back into a ball shape as much as you can and drop it into the hot pot (be careful) in to the cake liner if you can. Use a knife to gently score some lines across the top of the dough and sprinkle it with a little flour. Put the lid back on and put the pot into the oven.

  Bake it in the oven for 30 minutes with the lid on, then open the oven, quickly take the lid off the pot, close it up again and let it continue to bake for another 15 minutes. After that, take the pot out and turn the loaf out (tap the bottom and make sure it has that hollow sound) and let it cool on a wire rack.

Revisited: The Kiss of Light (2018) - words and music

The Kiss of Light collection is the most unusual thing I’ve ever released – a collection of Frank Ormsby poems read by the author, each selection followed by a guitar instrumental inspired by the poem that preceded it.

  The instrumentals were mine, and I arranged them for solo guitar, with counterpoint from cello (Neil Martin) and flugelhorn (Linley Hamilton).

  I had been a fan of Frank Ormsby for a number of years before I became his friend. His collection A Northern Spring has always been one of my favourites – at its best, those poems seemed to somehow leave the page and take on lives of their own – they were accessible without ever being ordinary, they moved me fiercely, and they didn’t hang around. They were like songs, in other words - when songs really work.

Having seen Andrea’s photograph (see above), I was reminded of the opening titles of Milos Forman’s film ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, and asked the designer to follow that look.

  On March 6, 2015, I had a show at No Alibis bookstore on Botanic Avenue in the city, one of a number of gigs I had that year, promoting the album Miles & Weather. I arrived in the bookstore to set up, and was thrilled to find a table displaying Goat’s Milk: New and Selected Poems by Frank Ormsby. Not only only NEW poems, but Greatest Hits, too. This is fantastic, I told No Alibis owner David Torrans – I’ll read some of these between the songs tonight and maybe you’ll sell a few copies.

  After soundchecking, I went across the street for a coffee and when I came back, David told me that he’d called Frank Ormsby to tell him I was going to read the poems, and lo and behold, he was coming down to the show himself. Which was wonderful – I introduced the book and asked Frank to come up a couple of times and read a selection of his work. I hadn’t seen him in many years - he was in the early stages of Parkinsons in 2015, but still really sparky, and he read with great wit and charm.

  He returned the favour and asked me to sing a couple of songs at his book launch at the McMordie Hall a couple of weeks later, and the seeds of this album were sown. By this stage, I was deep into his work again, re-reading A Northern Spring and soaking up the new poems – Goat’s Milk is a tremendous collection. If you don’t have a copy, I urge you to seek it out.

  We were already starting that ‘we should do some more things together’ conversation, so the doors were half open already. The first thing I wanted to do was get Frank recorded. I think the Parkinsons condition was part of that sense of urgency, but also I thought he deserved it. There’s an audio archive of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, I thought – why not one for Frank?

  I made an arrangement that at some stage I would bring him to Clive Culbertson’s studio, we’d put him in front of a beautiful microphone, and we would record a selection of his poems.

  Back at home, I was going through one of my occasional sulks with my instrument. Periodically, the acoustic guitar bores me to tears (coincidentally it’s happening right now as I write this – I have barely touched the guitar since the start of 2023, one of my longest ‘unacoustic’ periods yet). I usually have to ‘doctor’ the instrument in some way to make it interesting again – use a capo absurdly high up the neck, or employ a different tuning.

  I know, I said to myself – I’ll LEARN something. I’ll set myself an actual challenge. I had sheet music for the haunting main theme to ‘Paris Texas’ by Ry Cooder, and I resolved to learn it. First challenge – it’s in Open D tuning. So you have to tune the whole instrument to an Open D chord – across the strings it’s D-A-D-F#-A-D. So the guitar lay around the house for a couple of weeks in Open D, and I found myself suddenly interested again. Not only interested, but I found myself composing little tunes – a couple of them ended up on the album that became Ink – ‘All the Winds’, ‘Train I’m On’ and ‘The Shepherd’s Daughter’ are all in Open D. At the same time I was reading the Frank collections, and the pieces seemed to… respond to the poems. I remember getting ‘Under the Stairs’ first, and then ‘Winter Offerings’. I began to wonder if there was an actual project in this – could we record the instrumentals with the poems…? I wasn’t sure.

  A year intervened, when I worked on and released a collection called Ink, I had begun touring the UK as special guest of Barbara Dickson – our first show together had been at the Lyric Theatre in November 2014, but by now, I was part of her UK touring circuit. So looking back at the calendar, the wheels moved more slowly than I remember.

September 12, 2017 - Frank Ormsby (left) and producer Clive Culbertson at Clive’s studio in Coleraine, after Frank had recorded a collection of his poems - many of which were the basis for The Kiss of Light.

  I did finally get Frank into the studio on September 12, 2017, and he recorded about 25 poems (all of those recordings are with his publisher Bloodaxe now), and with the poems now ‘in the bag’, I felt the time had come to step up and finish the instrumentals. In the process, I sensed there was some room for other instruments. I thought of the poems as mostly coming from a rural perspective, so I wrote a series of parts for cello and trumpet and invited Neil Martin and Linley Hamilton to become involved.

  Most of the ‘foundation’ guitar parts were recorded at home, and Clive recorded the cello and trumpet – or flugelhorn, as it was mostly – at his studio. We then mixed them, ran the poems and instrumentals back to back and mastered them up. The whole thing was ready for release by spring of 2018. I’d secured some funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to help with the recording process, and they very generously also offered to send us – Frank and myself with Neil and Linley – to Paris to launch the CD at the Irish Cultural Centre in the city (there’s a slideshow of our visit below).

  The album had a mixed reaction, to be honest – a lot of people didn’t know what it was, didn’t really know who Frank was, and why I wasn’t singing anything. So it didn’t really get reviewed – or even played on radio! And yet there were others who thought it was a ground-breaking, unusual thing. Looking back, I was wish I’d made it a bit MORE unusual, actually – possibly worked with some found sounds, drones, other instruments, special effects. But even as it was, it still felt like a leap in the dark.

Wonderful - Linley warms up in Paris…

  In memory, I’m awfully proud of it – it was the first time I’d written for other soloists, and for the most part the instrumentals hold up pretty well. Some are stronger than others, of course. And I think it honoured Frank and his work. We did a series of live performances of the works, and it certainly put us both out in front of audiences we hadn’t encountered before – we played at the Aspects Literary Festival in Bangor, the Out to Lunch festival, we played at the Northern Ireland Office headquarters in Brussels, in Paris of course, at the Atlantic Sessions in Portstewart, quite a few times in Enniskillen and many other places. And as I told him, he’s one of the only Northern Ireland poets who’s on Spotify now!

  We still meet occasionally for a bite of lunch and a quiet pint, but to be honest, those reunions got away from us in the pandemic, and we’re long overdue a rendezvous. Since Goat’s Milk, Frank carried on with a couple of amazing collections – The Darkness of Snow and The Rain Barrel, and was made Irish Professor of Poetry in 2019 for three years. Click HERE to order Frank’s books directly from his publisher Bloodaxe.

  Click HERE if you’d like to stream or download the album on Bandcamp.

  And click HERE if you’d like to order the CD from my own website – I still have some copies of the physical object. And physical versions of many of the earlier albums, too…

Revisited: Ink (2017) - true confessions

(a blog post to celebrate the issue of the Ink album from 2017 as a digital download - or stream - on Anthony’s Bandcamp page. Click HERE to be directed the relevant page)

Ink came out in 2017, and at that stage was my seventh album, and remains, up until The Book of Absolution in 2022, the most personal collection of songs I have ever written.

  My mother had died at the end of 2014 (and the album Miles and Weather the following year had been dedicated to her), and my father had gone into care in a dementia facility in Coleraine, his condition deteriorating really rapidly. Looking back from this distance, I can see that the destruction of the family unit has been the central trauma of the middle period of my life. It has been a time dominated by anxiety, stress and deep sorrow.

  I had skirted around the subject of their decline and loss in some earlier songs, but this was the first time I really took the plunge and wrote about it in such a direct way.

  (to elaborate: there are things on this album that I could not have comfortably said while my mother was alive. In tracks like ‘Sleep Like a Soldier’, I described my anxiety and stress during her last illness: ‘I soaked myself in nightmares, and I waited for the flame’. And of course I couldn’t have been so candid about my dad’s condition: ‘When I hug my father we hold on tight. If he forgets who I am, well that’s all right – A is for Alzheimer’s’)

  Many people assume that songwriters are writing about themselves all the time. Lots of people, on hearing the song ‘Sailortown’, are curious about what ever happened to Elaine – a completely fictional character. I suppose the self-regarding songwriter has become such a ‘type’ that many listeners imagine all songs are confessions.

  In this case, it happened to be true. And writing songs about your own life can be a tricky business – if you make it really personal and intimate, there’s a chance that the listener will be excluded and – of course – have no connection with the story you’re telling. But sometimes, if you get it right, the song will jump across the gap between performer and listener, and illuminate something in the audience.

  So it was with this collection – I had never received such heartfelt reactions from fans and followers before this. And afterwards, I told myself I would never be able to write a collection like that again, and it’s no surprise that this one followed the death of my mother, and the recent collection, The Book of Absolution, which has attracted similar reactions, followed the death of my father.

  Thinking back on some of the key songs, and where they came from:

Home studio - recording the basic guitar tracks for Ink, autumn 2016

  ‘An Alphabet’ was conceived backstage – actually in the wings – of the Dunamaise Theatre in Portlaoise, during a tour of Ireland with Barbara Dickson. The little descending guitar part had been under my hands for days, and I remember singing the opening line in its entirety: ‘When I hug my father, we hold on tight. If he forgets who I am, well that’s all right, A is for Alzheimer’s’. It’s surprising when a line as long as that falls from the sky, and I remember thinking – that’s good, I can work with that. My mind immediately wanted to fill in all the other letters of the Alphabet, and that happened over the next few days.

  ‘Night Prayer’ is almost word for word true – my mother had been given morphine while recovering from surgery in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast and was convinced that the dreams she’d been having as a result were absolutely real. I teased her about becoming an addict, and challenged her to prove she was ‘straight’ - and out came the recitation of the names of all the books of the Bible, obviously something she’d been taught as a child, and which was still there in memory. She retained a few of these nuggets right up to the end. As an ardent Elvis fan, she could still have told you what his GI number was in the US Army. The little rolling guitar figure at the heart of the song I always associate with the tithe barn at Bishops Cleeve – backstage at another show with Barbara.

  ‘The Shepherd’s Daughter’: I periodically get incredibly bored with the acoustic guitar, always playing the same James Taylor chords and runs. In an attempt to reinvent the instrument a little, I have often experimented with open tunings – specifically in this case Open D (I was attempting to learn Ry Cooder’s ‘Paris, Texas’ at the time). And out of that tuning came this instrumental, and also – now that I think of it – ‘All the Winds’ is also in that tuning. I would later use that tuning almost exclusively for the guitar instrumentals on the album that followed, ‘The Kiss of Light’.

the late, great Alan Hunter - always to be fondly remembered

  ‘Light from the Stars’ was for Bap Kennedy, who had died the year before. I’d lost a few good friends around that time – Alan Hunter, the wonderful bass player who was a dear friend and fellow member of the Ronnie Greer Blues Band – had died in 2016, as had Henry McCullough, the legendary Portstewart guitarist and songwriter who had encouraged me a great deal when I started to play my own songs in public for the first time.

  The opening line of ‘Let the River’ also came from touring – in Morecambe I spotted a second hand bookshop on the Promenade, and as I approached it, I had the impression that the owner had arranged a huge array of books of the same colour for display. As I got closer, I realised that they had all originally been different colours, but had over the years faded to the same dusty blue: ‘If you heart’s been abandoned, in the window of a store, faded blue by the sun, and no-one goes there any more, let the river wash you clean’.

  I remember writing ‘Exit Wounds’ – which is almost an entirely true story – in the car while driving from Portstewart to Belfast. Right from the start I had thought of it as a recitation, a spoken piece, and it came really quickly, I had the entire thing in about an hour and 15 minutes, by the time I got home. I remember coming into the living room, picking up a pen and paper and writing it all down before it vanished. The guitar part came a few days later.

  There were some other elements in the creation of the collection – for the first time in my life, I had a home recording set-up. I had an enormous Acer laptop, a copy of ProTools and a microphone, and I set about recording the basic tracks for the album at home. This allowed me to experiment and work long hours on arrangements and guitar parts at my own pace, and try out different approaches. Most of the guitar parts were played on a Tanglewood TW40SD guitar, their version of the Gibson J45, that just sounded great as a recording instrument.

  I took all of these recordings to Clive Culbertson’s studio outside Coleraine (I made a short video of some of the behind-the scenes work - see right) and we recorded piano and Hammond by John McCullough, drums by Peter McKinney and bass from Clive, and Clive mixed it with his usual flair. The resulting album still sounds very warm and human to me, six years later.

  I knew that I wanted something personal and family-related for the artwork, so there are a variety of images throughout the lyric booklet that come from my family (see the reel of images at the bottom of the post). On clearing out my parents’ house, I had discovered a stash of paper collectibles - film and music annuals and postcards of movie stars that my mother had collected as a girl, including some romance comics, Hank Snow fan club material, a souvenir book on the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and much more. There were also some family treasures – I discovered a very fancy document that revealed that my mother had taken the ‘pledge’, as a 12 year old, to refrain from alcohol. I’m delighted to say that didn’t last more than six or seven years, although the paper promise remains.

  Inside the front cover, I put one of my old school reports from 1979, which was hilarious in its averageness: ‘Satisfactory…’ ‘he continues to work steadily…’. At first I thought it would be cute because of the lovely fountain pen handwriting, but when I read it I thought the faint praise was perfect for how I felt about my musical career at that point: ‘Never seemed to strike top form this year, but a fine result’. And what was I DOING, studying Greek? Not travellers’ Greek, you understand, ANCIENT Greek…

  The front cover image turned out well – it’s a close-up of the back cover of an old Elvis Monthly magazine (that’s the King, in his GI-issue forage cap). Someone had obviously set a fountain pen full of green ink against the magazine at some point, and created this glorious dark green blot across the edge of the paper. For some reason, someone has also written a number across the top of the page in red ballpoint. I was nervous about using the whole back cover – apparently the Elvis estate is jumpy about use of unauthorised images of the King… so I blew it up in size and concentrated on that one corner, and it actually became slightly surreal and more intriguing as a result. I added a typewritten title (battered out on an Olivetti Lettera 22), and there it was.

  In a digital world, it felt interesting to include so many things that were handwritten, printed, tangible. I hadn’t realised until later that by accident the album cover contains four different types of ink – the fountain pen, the red ballpoint, the print on the magazine and the typewriter ribbon.

  Even over half a decade later I still think the album’s a high water mark for me in writing terms. I still get asked to play ‘An Alphabet’ and ‘The Night Prayer’, and I often include ‘Let the River’ in live performance. And between this collection and The Book of Absolution, it feels like I might have said everything I need to say about family, childhood, memory, loss and love.

Click HERE to be directed to the Bandcamp re-issue, where you can also order the CD if you like.

Revisited: Miles & Weather (2015) - emotions in motion

The road image on the front of the Miles & Weather album is a photograph by Andrea - taken through the windscreen – as we rolled up Highway 5 in Quebec (note that I’m driving on the right) one evening on the way to her family’s place near the Gatineau River in the summer of 2014. Early evening, storm front moving in overhead.

But strangely, as I think of the Miles & Weather time, I have another stretch of road in mind – going through Ballybogey in County Antrim and later turning left onto the Cloyfin Road towards Coleraine, at about 8.20am most weekday mornings. At which point I would often call Andrea from the car. She would have been asleep when I left around 7.15am, and I often wanted to hear her voice as I braced myself for the day to come. One morning she didn’t answer and I left a message, saying ‘call me when you get this’.

I often come up with song ideas in the car. As I drove on, I extended the line: ‘Call me when you get this… and tell me everything will be okay. I just won’t believe it from anyone else but you today.’

And I think… that was the start of the album. It seemed to capture everything that was happening to me at that time – all the weariness and anxiety, the endless driving.

Forgive the gloom, but this was one of the lowest points of my life, I think – my father had gone into an Alzheimer’s care facility in July and my mother was gravely ill (she died in November of that year, 2014). I was living in Belfast, working in Portstewart, staying at my parents’ bungalow for half the week, and playing shows all over the place, as well as ferrying my mother back and forth to various appointments, making hospital visits and so on.

So it felt like I was just living in my car. I would be thinking about where I would be sleeping for the next two nights, and what equipment I would need for the following few days, so at any point there were guitars on the back seat, overnight bags, amplifiers, laundry, medicine.

There are ten songs on this collection – the first and the tenth are love songs to Andrea, who pulled me down off the ledge on so many occasions. ‘Conversation with a Hurricane’ and ‘Walked Upon the Water’ are about my Dad’s condition. ‘Dear Amelia’ is about the loss of an old family friend. ‘Come On, Angel’ and ‘Great Big World’ are memory songs – childhood and later. Two of the songs sound like exercises in genre – ‘Train I’m On’ and ‘Cadillac Graveyard’ are fun, but they don’t really… sound like me.

By the time I got these songs ready for the studio, I was exhausted and had no idea how to record them – I just knew I wanted the whole thing to be stripped back, almost to zero. So there are no keyboards, horns, strings, special guests… there are real drums on one song – Chris Bradley was playing for someone else at the studio and Clive tried him out on ‘Conversation’ and we decided to keep it. Otherwise, it’s a series of drum and percussion loops, generated by Amie McClay who was assistant engineering the album.

I have virtually no memories of the recording process – apart from Clive putting some exquisite harmonies on ‘Bless the Road’ Every note of ‘Andrea’s Runway Song’ was recorded on a Korg digital recording desk by me, layer by layer, here in the same room where I’m typing this now. We recorded the whispered vocal for it at Clive’s, on one of his lovely old Neumann microphones (that song is still one of my favourite things I’ve done).

I asked Ken Haddock to take some bleak-looking head-on portraits of me, and he set up a backdrop and some lights, in a hired room at the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast. I wanted it to look like Bill Evans on the front of Sunday at the Village Vanguard, but we extended that idea a bit. As we were leaving, I stood in the doorway of the lift and he liked that background, and shot a few of me in that location, too, with one shoulder holding the door open, preventing anyone downstairs from accessing the classrooms for ten minutes...

The photograph for the front was perfect – I had another image I had taken (I think from a plane window) of the runway at Aldergrove, and I used that on the booklet. Andrea did some lovely hand lettering, and it has since become one of my favourite of my album covers.

I toured the album with live solo shows through the spring of 2015, and reactions were pretty positive, although interestingly it didn’t really sell – of the various albums from that period, it’s one I still have a couple of boxes left of.

Striking a chord: Where my head was at the time - one of my journal entries from the period - an excerpt from James Salter’s novel All That Is

‘From start to finish, Anthony Toner‘s new album does serious mileage and covers some ground,’ said Julie Williams-Nash in her review on the Folk & Tumble website, ‘and as you’d expect nothing less from the bard of Coleraine, it’s poetry in motion… Betraying the worldly weariness of a life on the road and its tiresome journeys… [it] is a mature and finely crafted collection’.

It would take a couple of years before I was to process what had happened – and those were the songs that went to make up Ink in 2017 – more on that collection next time.

(A small quantity of physical copies of the Miles & Weather CD are still available from the SHOP page on this website. It’s also available to stream and download on Bandcamp, and on all the various main streaming services)

Revisited: Sing Under the Bridges (2013) - things falling apart

A blog post to accompany the ‘Revisited’ series of re-issues of Anthony’s back catalogue on Bandcamp

‘In this dream I’m five years old, and I’m up way too late.

And as my mother and my father dance, they start to levitate.

As the people stop and stare, they catch each other in mid-air -

and I don’t want to wake up.’

- from ‘All the Empty Pockets of Ireland’

Album number five… My memories of this collection are like fast, fleeting images rushing by: sitting in the kitchen of the little house at Hillfoot Street trying to finish new songs… playing the lovely old upright Yamaha piano in the bitter cold of New Year’s Day in the storeroom at Flowerfield Arts Centre… driving my mother to countless hospital appointments.

This collection was the first time I really WROTE about the ongoing deterioration of my parents. Things had been sliding for a couple of years, but this was the first time I confronted it and was willing to perform it – songs like ‘Things Fall Apart’, ‘The Only Only Child in the World’ and ‘All the Empty Pockets of Ireland’ were inspired in one way or another, by my mother’s ongoing decline.

  And by a new ghost hovering at the side of the stage: I remember sitting in a Starbucks in Coleraine one afternoon in late 2011 when my cousin rang me – after the initial pleasantries, she just said it out loud: ‘Have you noticed recently that your father is becoming very forgetful…?’ And as Martin Amis once so memorably described it, the world just… changed colour slightly. Of course I’d noticed it – he’d been repeating himself quite a lot, and he was struggling sometimes to remember words for everyday objects. I’d kept the fear of his Alzheimer’s to myself, but really I was just pretending it wasn’t happening.

  It was to become a recurring subject for writing – right through the Ink album and up to this day. Even for an only child, I was very close to my parents - and the decade or so of struggle through their slow, sad loss will remain the trauma of the middle part of my life.

The original Moleskine notebook entry for some of the lyrics of ‘The Road to Fivemiletown’. (the lack of crossing-out suggests that I had ‘written’ this section in my head, possibly while driving, and transcribed it as soon as I could grab a pen. That’s something that happens quite often in the writing process)

  Not to say there weren’t light moments in the mix – ‘Most People Are a Pain in the Ass’ became a favourite of BBC afternoon presenter Alan Simpson, who played it a lot. And ‘The Road to Fivemiletown’ ( original lyrics, left) emerged from that album to become, despite its gloominess, one of my most popular songs (I did try to rescue the central character of the song, by the way – there was a later verse where her sister came down and took her away from that isolated, desolate relationship – but the song had become seven minutes long, so I dropped it). I wrote ‘Bed & Breakfast’ driving home from a show hosted by Ralph McLean at the Bronte Centre outside Rathfriland – hence the line ‘if I was a DJ, with my own late show…’

  ‘St. Paul’s 8th Floor Farewell Blues’ was one of those coalitions of various characters from my past, all blended into one fictitious person… ‘All the Empty Pockets of Ireland’ was pure childhood, the title inspired by the lovely old poem by Anthony Raftery the 18th century blind poet: ‘Look at me now, my back to the wall, playing music to empty pockets’.

  To be honest, I remember very little of the actual recording process – it seemed to be something I fitted in somehow, between all kinds of driving, at the time. The sheer amount of distance I was covering was to become the touchstone of the album that followed this one, Miles & Weather. I do remember one moment that stood out - recording a demo version  of ‘The Only Only Child in the World’, on the old upright piano in the storeroom at Flowerfield Arts Centre (on New Year’s Day, 2013, actually). In my head I thought it would later become a full-on soul ballad, with full-band arrangement, horns and Hammond organ and the like. And we actually recorded it that way – but when I heard the mix, I realised that I was still in love with the old rough recording that had started it.

  In the end, we used that New Year’s Day recording as the finished recording. I’m such a clumsy pianist – the piano track you hear on the album was actually double tracked – the right hand recorded first, the left hand overdubbed on a separate track. I couldn’t get through the song even once playing with two hands.

  It was also the first time we had recorded an album on ProTools – allowing for easier digital edits and production. Producer Clive Culbertson was still finding his feet with the technology, and Simon McBride was on hand to help with the mixing and editing. The musicians and special guests on this one included myself on guitars (and piano on ‘Only Only Child’), Clive on bass and harmonies, John McCullough on piano and Hammond, Peter McKinney on drums, Ronnie Greer (lead guitar on ‘Things Fall Apart’), Neil Martin (cello on ‘The Road to Fivemiletown’), John Fitzpatrick on violin, Linley Hamilton (trumpet) and Meilana Gillard (saxophone).

  The album came out in the spring of 2013, and was shortlisted for the album of the year award at the inaugural Northern Ireland Music Prize that year. The award went to Foy Vance for his Joy of Nothing album. Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol was asked to comment on each of the shortlisted albums and talked about: ‘A poise and elegance that is quite rare… and songs full of compassion and kindness.’

  I had a stroke of luck with the cover image. I had asked Ken Haddock to take some pictures, and my thinking was to be photographed in Bennett’s restaurant on the Belmont Road in Belfast, which had become one of my favourite places. He arrived at Bennetts and immediately hated the idea, and suggested instead that we go down to Victoria Park. It was one of the coldest days of the year, and I posed here and there, like a male model with my scarf on and my collar turned up. There was a lovely image of me on the bridge at the park, and at one other point a plane came over from the City Airport, Ken said something funny and I looked up – he caught me with my head back, and the plane directly overhead, and that image has been in constant use since.

  Looking back on the album now, it feels like part of a ‘middle’ period: there are things about it I love and other things I could easily never think about again. Like a lot of my stuff, some of it was overdone, for sure in arrangement terms. I think I also began to be aware at this point that albums had an ‘arc’, a period of interest – they would come out, get some attention, sell their allotted number of copies… and then slowly vanish, to be replaced by the next one. And the one after that.

(Incidentally, I always hated the physical packaging for this CD – the design of the thing had been to allow the disc and the lyric book to slide in from the outside edges, but when it arrived (in some really unexpected, tiny format I hadn’t asked for), the CD and booklet had to be pulled out from the middle, so it was prone to rip and put a strain on the glued binding – I hated it on sight, and opening the boxes I found that about half of the stock had been packed too quickly to meet the deadline, and the glued edges had come unstuck on many of the albums. Over the eight or nine years since, I’ve been regluing some of them to make them presentable for sale… I have about half a dozen of them left, and they’re all in poor shape, so I’ve withdrawn the physical object from sale. Apologies to any of you who own copies that are by now also in poor shape)

Revisited: A Light Below the Door (2011)... city to city

An extended blog post to mark the addition of Anthony’s fourth album A Light Below the Door to his Bandcamp catalogue.

Looking back at A Light Below the Door now from a decade away, it feels like a collection with its inspiration in three places – my roots on the north coast of Northern Ireland, Belfast - and Nashville.

Songs like ‘Way Too Dark’, ‘The Great Escape’ and ‘Still Unsigned’ are all inspired by my younger days growing up in Coleraine and going to gigs in Portstewart and Portrush.

During the time I was writing these songs and recording them, Andrea and I had just moved to Belfast, and we were living in a sweet little three-up-two-down in Hillfoot Street in Sydenham (about two hundred yards from where I sit typing this now), and we were just in love with the idea that we could jump on our bikes and go to St. George’s Market on a Saturday morning. So Belfast is also a major factor in the writing - songs like ‘All of the Above’, ‘East of Louise’ and ‘You’re the One’ are reflections on the excitement and the newness of that adventure.

Elsewhere, it was a year of being in and out of love with the Nashville dream… I think I was still in thrall to the idea that I could actually make a dent in the music business through some fancy footwork in Tennessee. The album actually starts at one end of that dream, and comes out the other – I distinctly remember going with enthusiasm to Nashville for meetings and co-writes in January that year, with copies of the early mix of ‘Grateful’ in my bag, thinking it would be a perfect song for Music City.

And yet, the last track on the album, ‘Nashville Snowflake’, is the work of a man already disillusioned by the city - and ready to come home (I’ve written about this before). I had an awful trip to Nashville that January, where my appointments got cancelled at the last minute, my guitar got lost in transit (it thankfully showed up), I got the chance to play the famous Bluebird (but on the night when almost anyone with a pulse could get a one-song slot). And it snowed in Tennessee, so nobody came out to any of the open mic slots I had managed to secure. And it cost a LOT of money. I got on the plane back to Belfast, just determined to go home - and make music THERE.

(I recorded some film on the Nashville trip, including the snow coming down outside the hotel, some of the empty places I was supposed to play, and some TV evangelism I discovered on the TV while channel-hopping one night, and put together this video for ‘Nashville Snowflake’…)

The physical album of A Light Below the Door is now sold out as a physical entity, but I have about five copies left for my own personal collection. Looking at the packaging, it feels like I was attempting to show again that I wanted to be taken seriously – I spent a lot of money on the design, and then I got out on the road, in what is a now-familiar pattern, and played everywhere I could get a gig, and sold as many copies as I could.

(speaking of the design, I had a sequence of pictures from Ken Haddock, studio portraits, and I supplied a selection of those to the designer at Frank, who came up with a selection of suggestions for the cover art – the beautiful fractured lettering and the ‘broken mirror’ design were both their idea – I’ve put a little slide show of them up here (below). Including a close-up of me that could have put potential buyers off at a distance of twenty yards)

In the studio, this was the first album to feature the mighty John McCullough on piano, who has since become such a friend and collaborator over the years. His approach just seemed to suit the material, and there are moments on this collection that still stand out as favourites. This was also the first time that Ronnie Greer played on any of my material – I remember he came up to Clive’s studio with a Telecaster and a Fender Champ, plugged in, listened to ‘Way Too Dark’ a couple of times and played the solo that would end up being the final take. He was back on the road home in about 40 minutes.

Eilidh Patterson provided some glorious harmonies on ‘Grateful’, ‘Finally’ and ‘Walking Down the Line’, and Linley Hamilton and Dave Howell played trumpet and saxophone on three of the songs. Linley played a wonderful solo on the end of ‘Finally’. The idea was that the track would fade with the solo, and he played right to the end of the performance, and stopped. Clive stopped the recording and turned to me: ‘That’s SO good, you know there’s no way you can fade ANY of that, right…?’ And I agreed whole-heartedly – which is why that song remains five and a half minutes long. Apart from Ronnie’s solo, I played all the guitars (the first time there was no other guitarist on the project), Clive played bass, Paul ‘Hammy’ Hamilton was on drums and percussion.

Early draft of ‘East of Louise’, with a rough melody line above the lyrics

I wrote a series of blog posts – one for each of the songs on the album. If you’d like to read even more details about the stories behind the songs, click HERE to be taken to song number one, and scroll forward.

Looking back on it now, I have a real affection for this handful of songs. The album production sounds bright and snappy, and there are moments that still give me chills – Eilidh’s harmonies… John’s piano on ‘Grateful’, Ronnie’s slinky playing on ‘Way Too Dark’, and Linley’s trumpet solo.

But it also feels like this collection hovers between early optimism – getting established as a working artist in my own right, moving to the city, travelling back and forth to Nashville, making new connections – and the emotional juggernaut that was to come as my parents started to decline. The albums after this, Sing Under the Bridges and Miles & Weather, were to contain the first songs that examined that impending sense of loss. But that’s a whole other story.

Revisited: The Duke of Oklahoma & Other Stories (2009), including visits to Tennessee and Barry's Amusements

(A special extended blog post to accompany the ‘reissue’ of the 2009 album The Duke of Oklahoma & Other Stories on Bandcamp - you can play through the album on the Bandcamp player below, and download high-quality music files)

Looking back on The Duke of Oklahoma & Other Stories – the writing of the songs, the recordings, the arrangements, the design – I see HOURS and WEEKS and MONTHS of effort, most of it worthwhile, some of it in vain, some of it… uncalled for.

  The success of ‘Sailortown’, from the Sky for Every Day album early the year before had put me in a strong position – I was now starting to perform more and more as a solo artist, I had been invited to go to Nashville in 2009 with the Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival.

  As an only child, I have a complicated relationship with the gaining of attention. It felt like a huge amount of faith had been placed in me, and I got started on that album with a sense that I should deliver. Not pressure, as such, but a sense of… obligation. And looking back on this period, I think I might have tried a little too hard as a result. Not that much, just… a little. Like I always do in those circumstances. I wanted to show the world that the ‘Sailortown’ guy had more up his sleeve, that he was here to stay, that this was no flash in the pan.

  So there are 13 songs here (and one live version of ‘Sailortown’ – why is that on there? I was still so in thrall to the success of that song that I didn’t want to let it go yet, I guess). It was still that time when people put out albums with fifteen or sixteen songs on them. As Dylan said, ‘too much information about nothing’.

  Looking back, there are a few songs here that feel undercooked, that could have waited for the next bus. But we’re never the best judges of these things in the moment. Even with fourteen tracks, there are a couple of whole OTHER songs still knocking around that didn’t make it. I’ll work on a collection of outtakes and rarities one of these days.

  Following on from the Sky for Every Day project, Clive Culbertson and I were joined again by Rod McVey on piano and Hammond. But there was a different drummer on the project – the great Martin Hughes, a wonderful, soulful and sympathetic player and a veteran of sessions with Robert Wyatt, Elvis Costello, Clive Gregson, Any Trouble and many more. He was already booked to come over for a few days and play on the ‘No Borders’ album that Errol Walsh was recording at Clive’s studio at the same time, and we managed to get him for the day.

  Joe McNamee is also on here, too. This is the only album of mine to feature pedal steel guitar – I must put that right one of these days. I grew up surrounded by albums soaked in that supremely melancholic sound, and I don’t know why I don’t use it more often as part of the arrangement. Clive recommended Joe, and he was great. I remember we ran the first song for him a couple of times, and after the first take I asked if he could play something slower, with a bit more of a slow burn to it. We ran it again. No, I said, even less licks, more… open. And Joe said – ‘oh, you want, like 70s country pedal steel?’ Yes, exactly, I said. So he gave me some wonderful Charley Pride-style pedal steel. Perfect for the material, I thought.

  There are some inspirations worth mentioning – I had been on my third or fourth visit to Quebec, remembering a particularly wonderful warm summer, and ‘The Water Letter’ came from that. The title came from Andrea, who had e-mailed home from Canada a couple of summers before, describing the beauty of swimming in the Gatineau River. She called the e-mail ‘The Water Letter’ and I always loved that title. John Fitzpatrick played the most sublime, gorgeous viola lines on that song. I had written something for him, thinking ‘yeah, this should work’, but he gave it something completely new in performance. It still haunts me.

  ‘Boy Struck by Lightning’ was a news item overheard driving back into Coleraine from a gig somewhere. A kid had been felled by a bolt of lightning on the outskirts of Tallaght, north Dublin (he went on to make a full recovery). By the time I got home, I had imagined him as a figure forever empowered and made legendary by the incident.

  ‘Well Well Well’: A word on the songwriting benefit of paying attention - on that trip to Nashville, I lay awake in bed one night and heard the most American of sounds – a freight train in the distance. I was still wired by the experience of being in Tennessee, and lay there in the middle of the night with the thought in my head that… at the point of death, there must be an imbalance between the number of days you’ve lived, and the number of nights. It CAN’T come out even, can it…? So I had the phrase ‘hope the days outnumber the nights’. A few weeks later, I had fashioned the song into a meditation on an old unrequited love, and was almost finished, but couldn’t get a line to rhyme with ‘the memory won’t let me be…’ and on a bus one day, I looked out the window and saw a plastic bag caught in a tree. Out came the notebook and the song was finished.

  The decision to record it completely alone – voice and guitar – was a brave one for me at the time, I didn’t yet have the confidence to let the songs breathe. If asked, I still reckon it might be my favourite of all the things I’ve written.

  The title track came from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slapstick. The plot centres around a virus called The Green Death that wipes out huge chunks of the world’s population, and leaves isolated tribes living wild, under the command of self-appointed leaders with strange names – The Prince of Candlesticks, the King of Michigan... In the middle of all this, here was The Duke of Oklahoma. I just loved the name and created a character for him that was a composite of various people that I knew.

  My mother always loved ‘Merci Beaucoup’, but to her every French phrase sounded the same, and she occasionally would called it ‘Bon Appetit’.

  When the recording and mixing was done, I put a LOT of effort and money into the detail and feel of this album – the physical look of the CD was a big deal for me, and I spent a small fortune on design. I told the designer (at Frank in Belfast) that I wanted a ‘second hand book’ look for the thing, and he went round the corner to a used bookstore, bought four or five devastated old books and scanned them to give the effect you see on the cover and the booklet.

  Around this time, Andrea had doodled a little cartoon of a group of figures, like a large extended family, all standing in a line holding hands. I loved the image, and asked if I could borrow it. It became the ‘logo’ for our imaginary record label and production company, Dozens of Cousins, and I’ve been using it ever since.

  I asked Ken Haddock to do a location photo shoot for the album, at Barry’s Amusements in Portrush, during the off season. They very generously opened the door and left us to it. I’d been a regular at Barry’s as a child – it was always a ‘big day out’ treat, and the place is rich with memories. It was a haunting experience to wander around there with the lights all turned off, the rides all stationary and the whole place completely silent. I must have taken it seriously – I’m wearing two different shirts in the pictures, including a lovely Wrangler Western-style shirt (on the cover) that I bought the during the Nashville trip. I went through some of the pictures recently and put together this short film with the instrumental version of ‘The Water Letter’.

Postcards, launch invitation and flier for the Trio tour in 2009, to support the album.

  I toured in late 2009 to promote the album – it was the first time I got myself organised for what was to become my methodology: book some dates in advance, put the album out, and then go out and play the dates and promote it. I toured throughout Northern Ireland with Clive on bass and John McCullough on piano, and the ‘circuit’ of theatres and arts centres that we visited has, with some exceptions, remained my circuit since then. I was learning, learning, learning all the time in those days, building relationships, trying and failing, trying again.

  Looking back on it, there are songs on this collection that I still play regularly. There’s a lot about it I would change of course, from arrangements to design touches, even to basic song choices. But overall, I think it achieved what I wanted – to show that I wasn’t just the ‘Sailortown’ guy. There was going to be more to come.

  NEXT MONTH: “All the happy couples that you meet, walking up and down Bedford Street” – the making of A Light Below the Door. 

Revisited: A Sky for Every Day (2008) - The Rotterdam Bar, Robert Frost and Castlerock Beach

(This post has been written to accompany the ‘reissue’ of the 2008 album on Bandcamp, where it’s available to stream - or download for £6. I’m intending a monthly series of Bandcamp reissues of all of the albums, over the course of the next year)

 I had kind of torn apart my life and was starting to remake it by the time I gathered my lyric sheets and chord parts and went back in to Clive’s studio to record the songs that made up A Sky for Every Day. Six years had passed since the Eventually album, and in that time I had changed jobs – leaving journalism after seventeen years and moving into arts management – had completed a Masters Degree in Irish Literature.

  I was a single man again by this stage - a decision that was mine, nothing more to be said about it. By day I worked at Flowerfield Arts Centre, and in the evenings I just walked until the sun went down, and then I went back to a house loaned to me by a dear friend and was mostly only used during the summer, and went to sleep – that autumn was wonderful, and I tramped the streets of Portstewart - the Cliff Walk, the Promenade, Harbour Hill - my head whirling with guilt, shame, anxiety (years later, when my father’s Alzheimer’s put him out on the road walking and walking, I could understand some of what was going on there – the act of putting one foot in front of the other sometimes feels like the only reliable response to the terrible uncertainty and instability between your ears). I went a deep brown from the sun and lost about two stone. Looking back I think I was living mainly on coffee and bananas.

  In the process, I changed from being a songwriter throwing the shapes of an experienced life, and became a person experiencing the life. I set my plastic bag of clothes down in the living room of my friend’s home and looked at a cluster of Russian literature left behind from the summer visit – Turgenev, Chekhov, Gogol. ‘All the books on your shelf,’ I sang to myself, ‘tell you nothing’.

Some of the key texts of the time! Vonnegut, John Campbell and The Artist’s Way. And the Robert Frost Penguin collection with the pattern used for the artwork.

  So the songs from the couple of years that led up to that album are more rooted in my own experience than the first collection – the lyrics feel like a kind of… making sense of what was going on, where I had come from.

  Within a couple of years of this upheaval, I had regained some equilibrium. My relationship with Andrea had begun, and I had moved into her house in Millburn, Coleraine. Lots of long conversations at the dinner table, lots of beach walks. Lots of thinking about the process of making art, of what it means to be an artist. Of taking this process seriously, giving it time and space. I remember reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, finding ways out of writer’s block, all kinds of new processes.

  And I remember revisiting the work of Kurt Vonnegut - his memoir of life in George W Bush’s America, Man Without a Country, had just come out, and I started to re-read him, also discovering his earlier nonfiction. It was a voice that became extremely important to me: a wise uncle, full of mercy and gentleness and humour. It was just what I needed, I think.

  And the songs began to come – ‘Electricity’ was inspired by a line in one of the Vonnegut novels, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. ‘Cathy’ was inspired by another relationship break-up among my friends. ‘The Stars Wish on You’ and ‘Marion, That’s All Right’ were written for my daughter, who had been a solid rock during my wandering months, me suddenly discovering her filled with wisdom and restraint and compassion… All of which had, of course, been there the whole time.

  ‘Wake Up Holding Hands’ was the first song for Andrea. ‘Last Go Round’ was a song inspired by the old uncles on my mother’s side of the family, many of them members of the Orange Lodges around Coleraine’s rural outskirts. I remember having a flash, an image of an old Orangeman on his deathbed, thinking back on his life in Coleraine. It was so strong I could point to the little house on Brook Street where I imagined him lying.

  When there were twelve songs, I booked some time in the studio with Clive, autumn through winter 2007, we assembled the musicians and got started. This time round we were working with Rod McVey on piano and Hammond organ, a wonderfully empathetic and huge hearted player. Clive had discovered a young drummer from Coleraine called Roger Patterson who was incredibly gifted – sensitive and powerful and deeply soulful in his approach, and his drums and cymbals sounded amazing. We also had Tony Philips (who died recently) on drums on a couple of songs. Johnny Scott played guitar, too, but I was becoming more confident as a player at this stage, so a lot of the electric guitar on this one is me. Linley Hamilton played some stately, elegant trumpet on ‘All the Books on Your Shelf’.

  By this stage, Clive had made improvements to the studio – the first album had been caught on old-fashioned reel-to-reel, but this one was recorded on Fostex hard drive, so everything was digitally sampled, and sounded more crisp and detailed as a result.

  I don’t remember many memorable incidents through the recording process, it feels in memory like a fun, exciting, painless process… apart from the process of recording ‘Wake Up Holding Hands’. As the recording developed, I began to think it had real potential as a single – it had a Beatles feel to it, enhanced by a twin slide guitar solo that sounded very George Harrison… or Todd Rundgren, maybe. The drums were amazing, it had three part harmonies, it had percussion, Rod had put a Wurlitzer piano part on there, Johnny Scott had played electric rhythm in a deliberately Traveling Wilburys approach… there were two acoustic guitars on it - the track just kept getting bigger. I remember Clive and I listening to it over and over and wondering – something’s missing. What does this NEED?

  I had a brainwave – I was friendly with Dick Glasgow, who ran the Black Nun Folk Club and was known to be a keeper of old instruments. I asked if he had an autoharp – I could imagine the zing of a big autoharp chord on this thing. I drove out to Ballintoy and picked it up, brought it back to the studio – the noise that it made was amazing, but it was out of tune and I hadn’t asked for the tuning wrench. So I tuned it with a pair of pliers and we recorded it. It was ready to mix.

  Hang on, I said – wouldn’t it be great if we had a sound effect at the end? There was a lyric: ‘all the little birds remember the words and they start to twist and shout’. I had some recordings of bird song at home, so I went and got that, and we put it over the last cymbal crash and the fade. Cute.

  By the end we had used up almost every channel on Clive’s desk – it was a GIANT thing to mix, but by God he did it. When we were mastering, I said to him – what if we took that last crash and the sound of the birds, and REVERSED it, and put it on the front of the song? So we did that, as well. We listened to the finished thing - and were both CONVINCED it was a hit record in the making. This would be a hit in fourteen countries, we were sure of it. I was looking at the walls and wondering where the Gold Disc would go. I took it out and played it to some friends for their opinion. ‘That’s nice,’ they said. ‘Yeah, lovely. Is that you on the slide guitar? Nice.’

  So I don’t know why it wasn’t a hit – maybe it’s not that good a song, after all… the only thing I can say is it sound better when you play it loud.

Diary entry for September 14, 2007 - the gig at the Rotterdam with the Ronnie Greer Band that inspired the song Sailortown. (the previous Friday, Yap Yap Yap, the covers band I was in with Clive and Adrian Culbertson, Paul Coates and Robert Wilson, were booked for the Harbour Bar in Portrush)

  There was a late addition to the list. By this point I had started playing guitar with the Ronnie Greer Blues Band, and had been gigging with them for about six months. On September 14, we played a gig at The Rotterdam Bar in Pilot Street, in the Sailortown district of Belfast. I arrived early and set my amp up on the stage, and I remember it was a sunny, warm evening and there were kids outside in the sunshine, drinking wine and playing guitars in the beer garden. The whole image and the feel of that part of the city surrounded me. In the mix was also the collection of Sailortown poems by John Campbell, Saturday Night in York Street.

  Andrea and I were staying that night with our friend Nuala at her home in the south of the city, and the next morning I got up early, went downstairs and lifted her old Eko acoustic guitar and the first chords of what became the song ‘Sailortown’ came to me. ‘Me and Elaine, we’ve been hanging around,’ I sang, ‘in what was once Sailortown’.

  So that song was actually knocking around during the late days of the recording of A Sky for Every Day. I didn’t trust the song at all – I thought the lines were too long, that the whole thing needed a trim. So I sat on it, thinking, it’ll be ready for the next album (it’s interesting that it felt like I was already committed to this life, thinking that this was the start of a series of albums).

  In mid-December I was invited by radio presenter Alan Simpson to come on his afternoon Radio Ulster show to sing two songs - a Christmas song and something of my own, and I thought, why not give ‘Sailortown’ a go, and see what the reaction is…?

  I told him I didn’t have a title, and just launched into the thing, live on air. And I remember that when I came to the line about the UVF and the IRA, Alan looked to the producer’s window with alarm. But no-one complained about that. The reaction was really strong – REALLY strong. Wow, I thought, maybe this IS ready. I called Clive and said I had another song, could I come back in January…?

  There was no budget to bring everyone back in to play, so we just did it ourselves, on January 8 (see diary entry, right) – myself on guitars, Clive on bass and piano. There was a little drum machine thing on there, but I went to Robert McSeveney’s drum shop and bought a pair of brushes, and played the brushed snare drum part myself, on an old snare that Clive had in the recording room.

  In keeping with my new life as an artist, I had the idea of designing the album myself by photocopier, and I spent hours making collages out of ripped up pieces of handwriting (image gallery below), using Pritt Stick to fix them to a design from an old Penguin collection of Robert Frost poems. It didn’t really work out, and I fell back on Damian Smith from Digital Page again to tidy it up – some elements of the original design stayed, though, and Andrea’s pictures from Castlerock beach are still there. It’s interesting to see the original front and back cover ideas – and a list of songs that didn’t have ‘Sailortown’ even named.

  The sensible direction seemed to be releasing ‘Sailortown’ as the single, and in February, the publicist James Rollins gave a copy of the song to Gerry Anderson, and he started to play it on his morning show on Radio Ulster. People started to request it and he was playing it on an almost daily basis, with Ralph McLean and Cherrie McIlwaine also playing it, and other songs from the album – I was invited to play as part of the line-up for the Belfast Nashville Songwriters Festival at the end of that month, and with my fingers crossed and my little nervous heart hammering in my chest, it felt like I was on my way.

To listen to the album and download, visit my page at Bandcamp HERE.

Revisited: Eventually (2002) - welcome to my world

(This blog post accompanies the re-issue of my debut album Eventually, on Bandcamp – click HERE to visit. I’m planning to make all of my albums available on the platform over the course of the next year, one every month. I’m offering them as an alternative to the streaming services (which offer such meagre returns to artists), making the songs downloadable at high quality. Some of the albums, this one included, are now long sold out as physical CDs. Along the way, I’m offering some background information on the albums, sharing some artwork, publicity material and pictures from the time – if you have any comments or questions, drop me a line at anthonytonermusic[at]gmail.com)…

So… who WAS the guy who went into the studio – God, almost 20 YEARS ago, to record these dozen songs - with no plan WHATSOEVER for what would happen after that?

 I guess it must have been… me.

 Or some version of me, anyway. One with much shorter hair and a completely different wardrobe. Creatively, still a little wet behind the ears for sure.

 I called the album Eventually, because that was the answer I would give when people asked me – when are you going to record some of your OWN songs and put them out? A couple of the songs on this collection (‘Longing for Your Love’ and ‘So Good to See You Again’) actually dated right back to the late 70s, early 80s.

  I had written songs in my early and mid-teens, and recorded them onto an old Hitachi tape/radio thing, so the business of writing songs was not a completely new thing (I still have those tapes – I shudder to think what might be on there). But I had more important things to be getting on with - in my late teens, I became a Dad and got married and settled down and got a job, and the ‘writing songs and recording them’ thing got put to one side.

  I managed to get a job playing guitar in a country band – with Trevor Dixon and the Dixie Band – and before I knew it I was out once or twice a week playing clubs and weddings all over the country (I wore out my first two cars with the mileage I was clocking up, living in Portstewart and doing gigs in Banbridge, Newry, Enniskillen…). Somewhere in there I became a journalist on a local weekly paper, but held on to the weekend work with the band. This went on for a few years, but after falling asleep at the wheel a few times, I realised it was killing me, so I gave up the country band and all the travelling and starting playing closer to home, playing in acoustic duos for a while, and then forming the band Big Ankles (me on guitar, Robert Wilson on sax, Doc Doherty on guitar, Don McAleese on bass, Paul Coates on drums - Michael McGuinness played piano with us for a few months at the start), the band who went on to have a long-running Saturday night residency at Snappers in Portrush.

  I bought a second hand Amstrad four-track recorder, and started messing around, recording in the spare room at home. A handful of new songs were coming through, but I wasn’t playing ANY of this material live. I have some of THOSE tapes too... I do remember when I wrote ‘Cousins at Funerals’, thinking – you really should put that song out, somehow. And as I edged closer to my 40s, the idea of a ‘proper’ recording started to nag at me, like a… midlife crisis or something. I had this ongoing terror that I would wake up in my late 70s some morning and be horrified that I had written all these songs and never released any of them.

  So I started saving, and I applied for some money from the local Arts Committee, with the aim of putting together a four-song EP. Tom Spence from Snappers kindly donated some cash, too. And when I presented myself at Clive Culbertson’s studio for the first time in late 2001, he quite rightly urged me that if I had enough songs, I should make it a full album.

  And before I knew it, I was in the same room as the talent – Johnny Scott on guitars, Liam Bradley on drums, Cloudy Henry on piano, Clive on bass and Robert Wilson (my bandmate from Big Ankles) on saxes. I learned an enormous amount from those sessions – how to write chord parts properly, how to communicate ideas to musicians. When the album was done, Robert was invaluable in helping me get the thing designed through his company Digital Page. I got a couple of newspaper colleagues to help with pictures – Peter Nash took the portrait on the front cover, and Clement Dealey took the image of me in my kitchen for the back, and some of the interior shots, which were just pictures taken around the house in Portstewart. I’ve included a few other shots here (down below) that were taken that night but not used – I loved that red kitchen. The idea of the cover shot was the passing of time, to present me as someone sitting waiting under the big clock for something to happen, with my wristwatch prominently on show.

  Before I knew it, I had boxes of CDs piled up in the spare room. We took over Snappers in Portrush for a launch gig (and got a full page write up in the Coleraine Times, left, the week after) and had special guests – Big Ankles, New Moon, acoustic trio Blonde Sandwich and the late great Henry McCullough, and we raised the rafters and sold a few boxes of albums.

  And then I went home and kind of… reverted to what had been my life before. I sent the CD to a couple of radio stations, got a really nice review from Desi Fisher, who was guest reviewer at that time on Ralph McLean’s Radio Ulster show, and a lovely comment from Geoff Harden in the News Letter. But I really didn’t know what I was doing with it - I didn’t do any solo gigs. And ‘in those days’ there was no social media – there were websites but they were an expensive proposition. Not even MySpace yet…

  Looking at these songs now, it strikes me that it’s not a bad effort for a debut – there are a couple of these songs that I still perform in public, like ‘Cousins…’ and ‘The Way Love Goes’. And an interesting character song, ‘Getting Used to Gravity Again’. ‘Me and Lord O’Neill’ might still work, with a fresh coat of paint. ‘Her Side of the Mattress’ is a low point, but who cares? Sound-wise, I was in thrall to the studio sound of my teens, after years of listening to Steely Dan and James Taylor and the like, so the album wears its influences on its sleeve. But despite the American accent and an occasional lack of confidence, I think the performances are good – I even sneaked in a couple of my own guitar solos (‘You Must Love Me Loads’ and ‘I Blame the Parents’). And it was the beginning of my working relationship with Clive.

  But what had I actually done…?

  I had made the classic error of mistaking the output for the outcome. I thought the end result was that I had a CD out. The end result, actually, is that I was now a songwriter. And the CD? Well, that’s just one of the things you create. I had no plan for promoting the thing, recording another one, writing another song, any of that. And I was 37 years of age – already ANCIENT in the music business year that featured people like Sugababes and Gareth Gates.

  And the business itself was starting to change. About three months after the album came out, I met an old school friend of mine on Church Street in Coleraine – a guy who’d had some experience in the music business.

  ‘So… how’s the album going?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, okay…’ I said. ‘You know, the usual… I’m trying to get it out there.’

  ‘Out there… to who?’ he said.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘labels and managers and publishers.’

  (I had bought the Hot Press Yearbook with its dense, teeming lists of labels, publishers and managers, and was working my way through the alphabet, putting the CDs in jiffy bags with a polite covering letter, reviews etc. After a couple of months I’d got as far as the Gs)

  He gave a bitter little chuckle. ‘Do yourself a favour,’ he said, ‘and save yourself the postage – they’re not even opening the envelopes anymore.’

  So I never got any further through that alphabet.

But despite all of that, the album did well enough. It took some time, but it earned back its costs. But I was too green to stash that money to one side to invest in a second project. And anyway, within five years, that midlife crisis would have arrived in earnest. I would go to University as a mature student to get a Master of Arts degree, change jobs after seventeen years in local newspapers, and walk out of a long term relationship. I really pulled the ceiling down on myself.

  And six years later, my hair was longer and the songs for the second album started coming thick and fast. But that’s another story…

(Below are some pictures by Peter and Paul Nash from the launch night, 15 December 2002)

All Ears - the (informal) listening habits survey

This is quite a long post, so I hope you can stick with it… For those of you coming in late, this was written in response to an online question asking my friends and followers how they consumed music: did they still buy CDs, or did they stream from sites like Spotify, etc. I got literally dozens of replies on Facebook and in response to the newsletter.

  The first thing to be said is, as always, thank you – to so many of you for taking the time to reply, and share your thoughts and experiences. It really means a lot and it has been HUGELY useful. This blog post is an attempt to make sense of what I’m hearing, and let you know how the replies stood up.

  (and just so I don’t exhibit any hypocrisy, I have ended the article with a postscript, explaining my OWN listening and purchasing habits)

  The most encouraging and sincerely moving thing about the experience is the overwhelming sense that as well as consuming music - people wanted to SUPPORT THE ARTIST. And I mean, all the artists… not just me. People who don’t own CD players are buying CDs at the gigs - because they know it helps the artist. People are making choices based on their desire to be most supportive. And that’s a wonderful thing to hear.

  Here are the basics - these are the percentages (I’ll discuss each of these in a bit more detail below):

Still buying CDs – 48%

Streaming – 44%

Downloads – 4%

Vinyl – 4%

There’s some cross-pollination here - a lot of people do BOTH, of course. I’ve awarded marks out of ten, so if someone said ‘I use Spotify and YouTube but still buy the odd CD’, I’ve awarded 4 each to Spotify and YouTube and 2 to CDs, for example.

  About a fifth of those who responded said that they used Bandcamp for streaming and/or downloads, or were willing to use it, and about a tenth of you said you would be interested in merchandise, with some suggestions for items.

  Bear in mind before I go into detail – these are the thoughts of people on the Anthony Toner mailing list, and who are friends of mine on social media. The numbers will be different for other artists. But in any case, here’s a condensed version of the replies, and further below some of my thoughts on the way forward for me, as an artist.

COMPACT DISCS:

Some of the comments on that subject were fascinating. The numbers buying CDs are dropping, and it’s quite often for reasons other than personal choice. A large number of people have said they like to listen to CDs in the car, but increasingly, new cars are being made without CD players. So people who don’t really WANT to ‘stream’ music via Bluetooth or memory sticks are being forced to learn how, or are getting help with it.

  Lots of people are buying CDs just to rip the tracks - I was amazed at the number of people who buy CDs at gigs, then rip the music to their phone and put the physical CD away somewhere, often not to be played again. Quite a few people said they had ripped their entire CD collection to a hard drive and got rid of the lot. There was a sense from some respondents that we’re already drowning in physical STUFF – our lives are already full of books, CDs, DVDs, clothes, shoes…

  By contrast, a lot of people say they appreciate the physical object, they like getting the lyrics, the artwork, the information, etc. Many people said they bought CDs at gigs ‘to support the artist’, even though it was a format they don’t naturally use. That says a lot about relationships.

STREAMING:

Interestingly, a lot of people said they had bought my CDs, but actually listened to my music on streaming sites. The CD is becoming a souvenir, a gesture of support, an object to be looked at once or twice and then shelved. Again, that’s interesting.

  A significant number of people said they used streaming sites to discover and explore artists, but would then often buy the physical CD, or download direct from the artist’s website.

  Spotify accounts for 20% of the total response, with streaming sites like Amazon (8%), Apple (7%) Deezer and Tidal (1% each) coming in behind. A lot more people are also listening to music on YouTube (7%), in this case either new material, live performances, or archives of old tracks.

DOWNLOADS:

Not that many people (4%) are actually downloading music – a lot of people have said they have ripped and collected music for memory sticks and SD cards to play in their (non CD player) cars. But a lot of that seems to be ripped from existing collection CDs. But if they’re listening online and streaming is available, most are going for that option rather than downloading.

VINYL:

At 5%, it would appear that not many people - in my network - are buying vinyl. A few people said they had begun to play old vinyl from their own collections. There were a few comments that people loved vinyl and were keen to explore it, but were put off by how expensive it was - and because they were already running out of storage space.

BANDCAMP:

About a fifth of those who replied said that they either made use of Bandcamp regularly to download or stream tracks. There was a significant feeling that they used the site because they knew that more of the revenue was going directly to artists.

MERCHANDISE:

This was quite interesting - about a tenth of those who replied said they would be interested in merchandise, or had purchased merchandise at live concerts. Again, I had the impression that the primary urge was to support the artists. Someone (not to be named) said they had once bought at APRON at a Keane concert. An apron is a pretty cool product, I think. Some of the responses were interesting – a couple of people said they would only be interested in merchandise if it was ‘done right’ and was of high quality. Things like T-shirts and tote bags were mentioned, and somebody told me that some artists were offering handwritten lyrics, suitable for framing. Another person said they would rather pay for experiences, like workshops or lessons.

So – where do I go next…?

I will continue to make CDs – but I think I’ll duplicate less of them. The usual print run is 1,000, which is ten pretty hefty cardboard boxes coming into the house in release week. And (let me be honest with you) even with gigs and mail order, it takes a long time to sell a thousand CDs. I’ve put out a dozen albums over the years – a few of them are sold out, but that’s still a lot of boxes in the attic. Some nights I get a bit nervous, sleeping underneath that amount of stock…

  (For those of you who want the physical object, but intend to rip the tracks, I might in future offer a downloadable Zip file of MP3s or WAVs if you ask, to save time… would that be useful?)

I will continue to stream – it makes no sense for me to take my stuff down from Spotify, Google Play etc. If fans are listening to it there, why would I shut it down? However, I will make more options available, though, if I can – which brings me to:

I will be making more use of Bandcamp – and I will be inviting you to use it, too. For those of you who don’t know about it, it’s a streaming and download site, where the lion’s share of what you pay goes to the artist. I’m a bit late to it, to be honest – I’ve had a Bandcamp site for ages, but have not really populated it with material (there’s a song from the 2020 US election week up there: ‘Whoever Wins in Ohio’). And I had considered making a series of archive releases available up there – unreleased tracks, live recordings, old demos, stage music etc. However, I think I might now start re-issuing the whole back catalogue, chronologically an album at a time, accompanied with some text, images and so on. This would offer a chance to download the MP3s or FLACs, read a bit of background, etc. So… watch this space.

I don’t have any plans to release on vinyl, or at least not yet – I love the format (it was how music EXISTED when I first started devouring it – the little Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin full of 45s), but I don’t think I have enough fans yet buying vinyl in quantities to make it financially viable (it’s quite an expensive way to put out music, which is why new vinyl albums cost twice what CDs cost). But if listening trends continue to change, or the costs come down - or I find I can afford it, it would be nice to think about it.

I might consider some merchandise, actually - I usually send out free badges with the CDs, and also offer them free at the gigs. I did have Sailortown T-shirts made, about ten years ago, and that was an interesting experience… The physical BUSINESS of lugging the boxes of shirts around, along with the CDs and the equipment, was a bit taxing. But the worst part was standing at the merchandise table after the show, while people held the T-shirts up against each other and looked at them: ‘I don’t know… do you have any other colours? Let me see the Extra Large…’ Some people turned them inside out and looked at the STITCHING and the labels, while I stood there. It all became a bit… Nutts Corner Market. But I might consider it, as a website-only thing, or at times when I have a bit more support. Tote bags? Maybe. Handwritten lyrics? Definitely. Workshops or lessons? Maybe.

  Aprons? Definitely.

Postscript - my listening habits…

Just so I don’t become a conversation vampire, let me share my music habits with YOU:

  I still buy CDs, but nowhere near as many as I used to. And… maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but more and more I’m often… disappointed by what I’ve bought (two good tracks, lot of boring filler). So I often stream first to make sure.

 And let me clear about one thing first – I’m with Guy Garvey on this: I’m a BIG fan of streaming… I have a Spotify account, I listen on YouTube, and it has become a wonderful way of discovering and exploring new music. It just doesn’t pay the artists a lot, or at least not yet. But it means anyone in the world can hear my songs.

  (My mother in law was in a dentist’s office in Ottawa, and during conversation about family, she mentioned me and my music. Five seconds later, I was coming through the overhead speakers on a streaming site called RDio. Whether I get PAID much for that or not doesn’t matter as much as the fact that it’s a new relationship with a listener, one that could not have happened without streaming. Music to get your teeth cleaned to? It’s a niche I’m willing to explore… (and despite being one of the first of the streaming sites, RDio is now gone, actually. It was swallowed up by Pandora)

  Occasionally – not all the time – I will order the physical CD, mainly because I want to support the artist, but also because I want to play the music in the car or the living room, read the lyrics, etc. I recently bought an album by an international artist that was a skinny black and white cardboard digipak with little or no information or lyrics or even artwork - and I remember thinking: this is such a flimsy and worthless physical product, I should have just streamed it. But do I put it in the car and play it? Yes I do.

  I still enjoy a stroll through a music shop like HMV, and I love finding a bargain, or something I’ve been chasing for years.

  I’m using Bandcamp more and more often – often to lend a hand to local artists that I know and love, but more recently I have paid and downloaded material from new artists (recently instrumentalists Ryan Dugre and Zoe Keating).

  I don’t buy new vinyl – at £22, it’s just too big a risk (listen to that voice: that’s me at the age of 13, saving my pocket money for the new Pink Floyd album, talking). But I do like an old ‘crate dig’ at the record fairs, often coming home with obscure 70s singer songwriter stuff and soul/blues. Last gems before the lockdown? The Amazing Rhythm Aces albums Stacked Deck and Too Stuffed to Jump - and Martin Stephenson’s Boat to Bolivia for £3 apiece.

  I do buy merchandise – I quite like a tour T-shirt. Don’t know if I would pay for handwritten lyrics - maybe. The cupboard under the stairs is already full of tote bags, so I don’t think so.

If you’ve read right to the end, once again many thanks for the interest in this subject, and your contributions - it has been a huge help in considering ways forward. And it’s always great to hear from you. Don’t forget that my songs are available on all of the streaming and download platforms, as well as being available for mail order as CDs from the STORE page on this very website. If you have anything to add, feel free to drop me an e-mail at anthonytonermusic[at]gmail.com.

Ten Days, Ten Albums

We’ve been beset on all sides by chain-mail style challenges on social media recently – show yourself at 20, pick ten albums that influenced you, share a poem, nominate someone else. And usually I would shrug these things off, but at the minute, with time to spare, it’s been oddly comforting - to revisit the record collection, and think about the times you were living through when you first heard particular artists and songs. And it’s been human and sociable, to see other people’s choices too, to realise you have undiscovered common ground.

Anyway, I assembled ten albums for the challenge recently, records that had been important or influential to me – it’s a tough task (thanks cousin Paula), because of the limitations and what you have to jettison. So I realised I had ended up with ten singer-songwriter choices, and all (I think) from the seventies. No classical, no jazz… And even for a songwriter collection, no Springsteen. No Kristofferson. No Prine. No Jackson Browne. Only one Dylan. No Leonard Cohen, Costello, Hiatt, Guy Clark, Terry Allen, Beatles, Stones, NRBQ…

Still, even if it’s a small suitcase, you still have to pack it. For better or worse, and with my truncated social media comments, here they are, all in one place:

Day One of Ten: The delicious and groovy Bop Til You Drop by Ry Cooder... Guitar was never the same for me after this.

Day Two of Ten: Highway 61 Revisited - my first doorway into the world of Bob Dylan.

Day Three of Ten: The record that made me get serious about acoustic guitar, and which remains a constant soundtrack: Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon by James Taylor.

Day Four of Ten: Thanks to Keith Watterson for introducing me to this wonderful album, which never ceases to move, uplift and comfort me - Bill Withers Live at Carnegie Hall.

Day Five of Ten: I listened to 'Kentucky Avenue' for the first time and realised songs have the power to tear you open - the wonderful Blue Valentine by Tom Waits.

Day Six of Ten: Discovering that you can't always trust the storyteller - sometimes he's an entirely invented and nasty character: Good Old Boys by Randy Newman.

Day Seven of Ten: I always thought that hearing really good music for the first time should make the world change colour slightly - so it was with this, the first time I encountered the LA-meets-New Orleans groove of... Dixie Chicken by Little Feat.

Day Eight of Ten: I've adored many of her beautifully-written albums over the years, but with some reservation (Hejira...? Court and Spark...?) I settled on this one: The Hissing of Summer Lawns by Joni Mitchell.

Day Nine of Ten: A songwriter album that blew all my fuses with its mix of anger, whimsy and heartbreak. Any album that contains 'Southern Man', 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' and 'Don't Let it Bring You Down' has to be a winner: Neil Young: After the Gold Rush.

Day Ten of Ten: As half of Simon & Garfunkel, he was part of my childhood soundtrack - when I grew older, I came to realise what a magnificent songwriter he was. Paul Simon has it all - as a musician, a lyricist, a master of melody. So many great albums, but I keep going back to this, because it has 'American Tune' and 'Something so Right' on it. And 'Loves Me Like a Rock'. And 'Take Me to the Mardi Gras'. And 'Tenderness': There Goes Rhymin' Simon.

From the Journal: Canada/New York State, summer 2019

Ottawa, August 6: We’re almost last in the queue, far back in the traffic in the rain on King Edward Street, watching homeless people from the hostel across the way, panhandling the cars as they line up waiting for green lights on their way out of the city. The panhandlers are various – some of them are heartbreaking in their complete abjection. Some are more defeated, heads down, holding a Coke paper cup between their hands, out in the pouring rain in their thin sweaters. Some are crazy, high fiving the drivers, one guy with flapping pantslegs offering every driver a peace sign, not even asking for change at all. And some are crazy going the other way, where they’re furious, actually speaking through the foggy windows to the drivers, gesturing angrily when they get the brush-off. And of course, every now and then the lights change and a whole new set of characters gets to take to the stage.

(on the highways in upstate New York, the road surfaces on the bridges is finished with a different kind of material – it’s paler and finer grade. So that when you drive across the rivers, the sound that your wheels make changes, becomes higher and keener, as if some creature suddenly howls at you from the shadowy space below the bridge. And then as you drive off, the howling stops as quickly as slamming a door)

Leaving Ithaca, August 8: At the intersection, a guy stood on the side of the road – bearded and ragged with an old baseball cap to protect him from the sun, which was mid-day beating down. An old pair of shorts, and beat-up trainers. He looked scrawny and leathery, like someone who had been in trouble and out of it many times. In his hand he held a cardboard sign with clumsy hand lettering: ‘Looking for work – willing to lift, do digging or mowing, need to make some money urgent – can you help’. Every now and then as the lights changed, he would switch position away from the moving traffic, holding the sign out to the cars that had just pulled up at the line, so he walked away from us just as we got close. And then the traffic got moving, and we were back on the highway and lost sight of him. So many people waiting for the lights to change.

Travelling (slide)show - some images from the recent tour

CLICK on the images to scroll through: A slideshow of images from the recent shows and tour with Barbara Dickson and Nick Holland - including the gorgeous National Museum of Scotland, the courtyard at Gryll Hall (where we stayed overnight) outside Horsham, the Capitol Theatre in Horsham, the historic Victoria Hall in Settle in Yorkshire, the Tythe Barn at Bishops Cleeve, performing on the altar at St. Mary’s Catholic Cathedral in Edinburgh and the Medina Theatre in Newport on the Isle of Wight. There’s also a shot of the beautiful long pier at Ryde on the Isle of Wight - and the obligatory visit to a second hand book shop, this time Edinburgh Books on West Port in the city.

Journal: Being near the pain

(A short entry from the journal - for the last week, I’ve been helping a relative who is going through serious pain with a sciatica flare-up… And like so many people who faced similar situations I have felt useless in the face of it)

It’s the feeling of complete powerlessness - the TOTAL inability to be of any help with the central Fact of The Pain. All you can do is provide help AROUND the pain - by making tea, tidying up, putting on some music, going to the shops. All of this while the agony goes on at the centre of everything. And after a while you can’t help wondering if it appears that you’re just… getting on with your own life, standing there drinking the tea, while your loved ones gasps and struggles to hold on to their sanity. No matter how often you’re told how great it is that you’re there, and how helpful you’re being, it still feels sometimes like you’re a spectator, a tourist - over on a sightseeing trip from the Land of The Painless.

Gordon Banks - my part in his victory

At primary school I was a pudgy little kid – National Health glasses and a little pot belly (not much has changed…) and when it came time to pick the teams for football during the lunch break I would inevitably be left as the last, unchosen player… Until one of the ‘captains’ would say the words that echo in my mind to this day… ‘youse can have Toner for nets’.

Not even ‘WE’LL take Toner for nets’…

No – ‘YOUSE can have Toner for nets’.

Let’s not forget that being picked for nets was a source of shame – there was no victory to be savoured in nets. Whenever the team chased the ball into the enemy penalty box and nailed it to the back of the net, I would be at the other end, picking paint off a goalpost. Or in this case, folding and refolding the jumpers you were using to delineate the goalmouth. Maybe bringing them a little closer together when no-one was looking...? Watching your teammates being jubilant a hundred and fifty yards away.

Determined to make the best of it, my father would tell me what an important role I was playing, and encouraged me to think of the great goalkeepers I could use as role models – there was Pat Jennings, for instance. Or Peter Bonetti.

Or Gordon Banks.

So Gordon Banks (pictured right, who passed away on Monday at the age of 81, taking a chunk of my boyhood with him) became my hero. And even though I knew nothing about football (and cared less, let’s be honest here), I would profess to be a Stoke City fan, because that was his team.

When they came round the classrooms with a special discount offer for football jerseys, my mother encouraged me by giving me money to buy the Stoke City jersey – all because of my love for Gordon Banks – and here I am, aged about nine I think, outside our house in Hawthorn Place in Coleraine, wearing the Stoke City top (with my cousin Hazel).

Nobody seems to have warned me that VERTICAL red and white STRIPES are not a good luck for my physique.

Not to mention that Stoke City were seldom a cool team to support. Not even – it must be said - at the time this picture was taken. And actually (when I think about it) as a goalkeeper, Banks would never have worn the Stoke City colours anyway. Because goalkeepers always wear green or yellow jerseys.

Anyway, welcome back, 1974. This was my misguided little tip of the hat to a great goalkeeper. RIP Gordon Banks.

Alphabet Blog: M is for Mothers

'When you think you can't face another day,/ they pick you up and carry you all the way.../ M is for Mothers' - An Alphabet

There’s not much I can write about my mother Eileen (1941-2014) that I haven’t already said. Her absence from my life has left a hole that regularly floods with complicated memory and gratitude.

 Sarah Eileen Dickson was born on the high ground between Coleraine and Limavady, on the Windyhill Road – or, as it was more colourfully known in my youth, the Murder Hole Road. Her father Robert was a shepherd up there in the hills, living in a cottage at the end of the Bolea Road, tending a flock of sheep for a landowner, and he and his wife Margaret had a flock of eleven children – with my mother the youngest girl.

 Her memories of that childhood, as related to me, were basically an Irish version of Little House on the Prairie. Tight, loving family connections, long walks to school in all weathers, milking cows, fetching water, fresh eggs, home baked bread… It was a source of fun in our house that my parents’ backgrounds were so far removed from each other – their only shared characteristics were, essentially, poverty and love.

 (my dad grew up a ‘townie’, in Pates Lane in Coleraine, fatherless from the age of eleven. The hardscrabble mid to late 40s. He recalled being sent out at night by his mother with a bag, to cross the bridge to the entrance to Kelly’s coal yard, and gather up any bits of coal that might have fallen from the wagons. He used to tease my mother about being from the country, still having straw behind her ears)

 As they grew to maturity and got married, my parents could never quite believe their luck, coming of age in the Never Had It So Good generation - the late 50s and early 60s, when jobs were plentiful, and the future looked bright. And by the time I was a teenager in the 70s, my parents were living in their own house, with central heating, a washing machine and electric cooker, a colour TV and a car.

 The pace of change must have been bewildering. A lot of kids born in my time, in their middle ages now, have rolled their eyes at their parents’ mystified response to technology – like their parents are… country bumpkins or something, tutting and marvelling at mobile phones and iPads. But when I think of the DISTANCE that my parents’ generation had come in lifestyle terms - of improvements in living conditions, availability of medicine, home appliances, entertainment, transport, food… it’s really no wonder. It was a standing joke that my mother would be amazed by… pesto. By the existence of something like a mango. Online banking, satellite navigation and mp3s.

 She and my father also shared a well-developed talent for having fun. They met in the late 50s, in the dancehall days, and as a child our house remained full of the old time rock & roll records that they had loved and danced to as kids – Chuck Berry, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. Music was a constant thread – neither of them played an instrument or sang that much, but they loved their music. And they were willing to give everything a go. They loved a lot of the stuff I listened as a youngster, especially Dire Straits and Bruce Springsteen and James Taylor. But also, let the record show, Pink Floyd and AC/DC. When I was working at Flowerfield Arts Centre in Portstewart and running concerts there, my folks would come down and sit through just about anything - string quartets, modern jazz and contemporary folk. Often with puzzled expressions. ‘Something a bit different,’ my mother would say to me in the car on the way home, after an evening of screaming saxophone bebop.

 Their lives were intertwined from the moment they got together, and it would remain that way to the end. And I was their little golden boy, of course, through it all. From the moment I could play a D major chord on the guitar, I was the Jimi Hendrix of our street as far as they were concerned. When I was playing in pubs, they would get a taxi there, and I would drive them home in high spirits afterwards, the car filled with an aroma of rum & coke and cigarette smoke. At ‘proper’ concerts later, I would introduce them as the ‘Secretary and Chairman of The Anthony Toner Fan Club’. After my mother died, I found a plastic folder, packed fat as a rugby ball, with clippings about me from the local papers. Every concert, every article, every photograph.

 She was pretty strict, though – she’d had a Presbyterian upbringing and a lean childhood. So, I didn’t get away with much. Good manners were expected, and under no circumstances was any success ever allowed to go to my head. And I was overly protected – I was never allowed to climb trees, swim in the deep end, ride my bike beyond the streets where I lived. And that conditioning has been slow to leave – to this day, I’m incredibly cautious in new physical situations.

 She remained deeply proud of me and we were in daily contact, sometimes even more often, when her last ailments began to affect her.

 When my mother died at the end of 2014, it brought to a close a sad and painful half a decade. She had been a diabetic from the age of seven, so as she entered her late 60s, she had begun to suffer circulation and vascular problems, kidney problems, heart problems. And like so many people her age, one set of health challenges would be affected by another - this medication for that condition would react with that medication for this condition, and thus her body became a battlefield, on which differing ailments and cures warred with each other.

My mother and I, on the boardwalk at Castlerock, spring 2014

 She was greatly affected by my father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. They had come so far together, and she stubbornly refused to let him go – for almost a year and a half, she was wheelchair-bound and dealing with all kinds of health problems, and yet also trying to manage with him and his declining memory and his increasingly strange behaviour. And when he finally went into care in the summer of 2014 and she was alone in the little bungalow, she remained defiant - determined to stay, to be independent. In both of them, I think, there was a long-held belief that once you went into a care home or a residential home, you were somehow finished.

 It ended that November, in the Causeway Hospital, after gruelling weeks of hospitalisation, coming home and suffering, and resisting going back in. Exhaustion and anger and pain and despair. Dropping pills on the floor and not being able to see them or pick them up. Not getting to the phone in time. In the days that followed her funeral, I faced an overwhelming sense that she had been unfairly defeated – not that she had ‘slipped away’ or ‘gone to her rest’, or any of those euphemisms we use when loved ones die. But instead I felt that she had punched back hard, all the way - and had been brought down. She had gone fifteen rounds, toe to toe, with the Grim Reaper, only to be beaten on points, disappointed and worn down.

 So what were my mother’s favourite things? Country music and rock & roll, especially Elvis, Glen Campbell, Charley Pride, Kris Kristofferson’s Border Lord album. The Friday lunches that she would lay on for my daughter and I – a kitchen table laid with teacups, scones, wheaten, sandwiches, sliced cheese, jam… Donegal. Old family pictures. Vodka and slimline tonic. Clean sheets and ironed pillow cases. Foster & Allen. The Point Bar and Magilligan. Coronation Street and Emmerdale. Riesling wine. Handel’s Water Music. Hot tea. The Lakes of Killarney. Drives in the car. Portstewart Promenade and the gardens at Bishop’s Gate near Castlerock. Most of all, family – being around the family, her own brothers and sisters, the nephews and nieces (many of whom had given huge amounts of their precious time and bottomless love to help in those last years), and with me and my family.

 It’s been difficult to separate my memory of my mother from the most recent experiences, the pain and the struggle of the last few years. A lot of people told me it would be like this. In a way I’ve been relieved that she’s gone, that she’s free from the struggle now. We really weren’t having a lot of fun together near the end. And that sometimes feels like I don’t miss her. In time, friends have told me, you will start to remember the earlier sweetness instead. I think that’s starting to happen.

An Alphabet Blog - L is for Love

It’s an investment you just won’t believe:

The more you put in, the more you receive -

L is for love.

Writing about love is - almost - a pointless exercise. From Shakespeare to Aretha Franklin, it feels like everybody else already said it better, years ago. But it doesn’t stop us – the urge is always there to find some new way to express it. I recently read Amy Liptrot’s beautiful book The Outrun, in which she described a relationship that had gone wrong because she had held on too tightly: ‘I’d caught around him, like tights in the laundry’.

I’ve been lucky and grateful to be surrounded by love all of my life – wrapped in warm blankets of love as a child and in loving relationships ever since. I’m an only child that always craved attention and approval - so to this day, I go running towards the applause as if it’s love. Like an eight year old being told what a good boy he is.

I recently found my first ever school report from St. Malachy’s Primary School in Coleraine – from Miss Devenney, Christmas 1969: ‘Anthony is a grand little boy…’ she begins. And across the canyons of the years I feel the glow of love and approval. I can see the pattern being set, even then.

An Alphabet Blog - K is for Kindness

K could also have been for Kurt - Kurt Vonnegut… every time I finish one of his books, it’s like a kindly old uncle has been to stay for a week or two and now they have to go, and it’s always a heartbreaker. His lifelong philosophy that kindness was always the best choice is one that seems to resonate with me.

  He once received a letter from a student who asked him only to say that ‘everything will be all right’. His response: ‘Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind.’

An Alphabet Blog: J is for Jazz

'If I picture myself at the start of a movie, walking down a sunny street on a Saturday morning with the whole day laid open and money in my pocket - this is the soundtrack I'm hearing as I walk...'

I was a latecomer to jazz. As a youngster, I used to think jazz was the stuff you saw Dixieland guys performing, in striped blazers and straw boaters, on Saturday night television specials. Kenny Ball and Louis Armstrong and all that. Then I bought this Blue Note compilation album called ‘A Sample of Blue Notes’ in a bargain bin at a record shop, with Cannonball Adderley, Lou Donaldson, Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk and Herbie Hancock on it… and the world changed colour slightly.

Here’s a selection of five jazz albums I wouldn’t be without (as always with these things, ask me in a few weeks and it will be a different list:

Miles Davis Quintet – Workin’

Miles has so many incarnations, not all of them easy to listen to. But my favourite period is this Quintet, with Coltrane on sax and Red Garland on piano, Philly Joe Jones on bass and Paul Chambers on bass. And I love this one for the inclusion of the ravishing ‘It Never Entered My Mind’.

Cannonball Adderley – Them Dirty Blues

Pick any Adderley album and you’ll hear the soul and the liquid joy in his playing. I also love Mercy Mercy Mercy and Love for Sale, but this one swings beautifully.

Bill Evans – You Must Believe in Spring

One of the last album the genius recorded, and it has that melancholia and sweetness of Evans at his best, all of it delivered with such gorgeous technique… it’s a must-have.

Hank Mobley – Soul Station

My single favourite jazz track of all time is on this collection – This I Dig of You. If I picture myself at the start of a movie, walking down a sunny street on a Saturday morning with the whole day laid open and money in my pocket - this is the soundtrack I'm hearing as I walk. The rest of it is glorious. Mobley was regarded as one of the middleweights of jazz saxophone, but he had such a supple and soulful approach, he was irresistible at this best. And this, I believe, is his best. Wynton Kelly on piano and Art Blakey on drums... what's not to like?

Ella & Louis on Verve

A wonderful pairing that lasted two or three albums and is a perfect mellow Sunday morning thing – those voices and the lovely band that backs them – The Oscar Peterson Quartet. What’s not to like?