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)