For National Poetry Day

'For Tess'

by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver

Out on the Strait the water is whitecapping
As they say here. It’s rough and I’m glad
I’m not out. Glad I fished all day
on Morse Creek, casting a red Daredevil back
and forth. I didn’t catch anything. No bites 
even, not one. But it was okay. It was fine!
I carried your dad’s pocketknife and was followed
for awhile by a dog its owner called Dixie.
At times I felt so happy I had to quit
fishing. Once I lay on the bank with my eyes closed,
listening to the sound the water made,
and to the wind in the tops of the trees. The same wind
that blows out on the Strait, but a different wind, too.
For awhile I even let myself imagine that I had died -
and that was all right, at least for a couple 
of minutes, until it really sank in: Dead.
As I was laying there with my eyes closed,
just after I’d imagined what it might be like
if in fact I never got up again, I thought of you.
I opened my eyes then and got right up
and went back to being happy again
I’m grateful to you, you see. I wanted to tell you.

Cheeky face

A journal post from last year: In the coffee shop this morning, a young mother and her friend are complaining to each other about relatives, while her son runs around the café, as kids will do, picking things up and putting them down, his little trainers pounding on the fake wood floor.

  I’ve just come from the doctor, whose confirms my suspicion – this cold has gifted me a perforated eardrum, so I’m sensitive to every noise: her barked orders at the child, the steam from the cappuccino maker, even (God bless him) the youngster’s thin, wet little cough, which sounds in my bad ear like a cheap roller skate being thrown down the stairs.

  ‘Show Tracey your cheeky face,’ she says to her boy, who stands by their table and pulls a face. The women laugh. ‘Show her your cross face… Show her your happy face.’

  The little boy grimaces at them repeatedly. They’re all the same face.

To Kill A Mockingbird - revisited

(On Sunday May 11, Andrea and I went with my daughter Sian and her boyfriend Bob to the Queen's Film Theatre to see 'To Kill A Mockingbird' on the big screen)

Oceans of ink have already been spilled on the subject of To Kill a Mockingbird, so there’s really no reason for me to pour my thimbleful over the side of this boat.

  But I can’t help myself. What is it about this film that peels me open every time?

Atticus Finch and the children are confronted by the lynch mob

  Certainly the central performance by Gregory Peck is a towering example of dignity, courage, integrity and strong, loving parenting. I have to say that Atticus Finch is the yardstick I set myself some time ago as a father.

(I know. It’s an impossible standard to measure up to, but you have to aim for something. There are a number of things that will bring me out in a cold sweat in the small hours of the night. And the thought that I might have been a bad parent is one of them. So I look to Atticus as one of the role models)

  The sense of lost childhood is also stronger every time I see the movie – the narration, the idea that this whole thing is already a memory. That’s highlighted, I think, by the soundtrack, which hints at nursery rhyme structures now and then.

  Also the look of the film – the overhanging trees, the creaking verandahs, the fallen leaves, the warm darkness... It’s a childhood world seen in memory. It has an unreal quality, like the whole street – the trees and yards and houses – was created in a vast film studio lot - indoors - and lit to look like reality, but feels instead like something you dreamed.

  It’s an archetypal southern landscape too, all those heatstruck ladies and the kindly black maids, front porches and screen doors, chirping crickets and tree houses. People sitting outdoors at night on a porch swing, fanning themselves in courthouses, the rattling cars, the pocket watches and waistcoats.

  It has been many years since I saw the film, and Sunday past was my first time to see it on a big screen. It has lost none of its power to move me. Almost from the minute they put Tom Robinson on the stand through to the last line... ‘he would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning’ - I’m in tatters.

  What do I weep for? The first novels that really made an impression on my teenage mind were Southern Gothic classics - Harper Lee's Mockingbird, Truman Capote's A Grass Harp, Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and as a result, it's a world that makes me nostalgic when I go back there to visit, like a sentimental tourist in my own childhood.

  What do so many of us weep for, anyway? Our own lost childhoods, I suppose. In my case, lost opportunities to be a better father, too, I’d guess. As always, the sense that time is slipping through our fingers and important things are being missed.

Sharp as ever - Linley Hamilton's 'In Transition' is out

For many years, as someone who worked in a music venue by day, and played gigs in the evenings, I have considered Linley Hamilton to be someone who played with the same impeccable taste - and with the same attention to detail - as he dressed.

  He always seemed to play with cool people, and he breezed in and out of venues looking sharp. There are few more instruments as cool as the trumpet to start with anyway, right? And a sharp dressed trumpet player is exponentially more sharp than any other sharp-dressed musician.

  And Linley seemed capable of playing ANYTHING. With ANYBODY. He has turned up in the most unlikely combinations - and always delivered something appropriate, unexpected and delightful.

  The first time I saw him play live was with the Dermot Harland Quintet at the Edgewater Hotel in Portstewart in the early 90s, and as the sun went down on the Atlantic beyond the windows, he played an exquisite solo on ‘When Sonny Gets Blue’, and I was hooked.

  He has progressed leaps and bounds even since then, and he remains an arresting talent – he has played beautiful trumpet solos for me on three of my albums, and on each occasion he has been exquisite. It’s a source of huge personal pride for me to share the stage with him occasionally as my guest, or when he augments the Ronnie Greer Blues Band line up.

  The reason for my gush is that Linley has released a delicious second album called ‘In Transition’. It's a beautiful thing, and features performances by Linley backed by a superb band - Johnny Taylor on piano, Damian Evans on bass, Dominic Mullan on drums and Julien Colarossi on guitar. Highlights include a beautiful arrangement of Rufus Wainwright's 'Dinner at 8' and Linley's own composition 'Dusk'. You can find links to the album here:

At Amazon, and at Spotify, and at Lyte records: http://lyterecords.com/

Haunts of ancient peace

Crawfordsburn Country Park, Bank Holiday Monday - picture by Andrea Montgomery

I have always enjoyed forest trails and walks. Some of my fondest childhood scenes are set in the woods.

On blazing summer days at St. Malachy’s Primary School in Coleraine, our headmaster Frank Molloy used to occasionally arrive unannounced in our classrooms and take a couple of dozen of us on a stroll around Mountsandel Forest. He would tell us the names of the trees, talk about the birds and wildlife that lived in the forest, and excite us with fanciful tales of highwaymen riding along the trails to escape capture. For a kid who had caught the bus in from the housing estate that morning, it was an unexpected trip to a leafy world filled with wild noises - with a beautiful high green canopy and a warm, soft floor.

My father and I, Roe Valley Forest Park in the mid-70s. The little pot belly, the steel-framed specs and the binoculars: Just a MAGNET for bullies.

My dad already knew the names of the trees – he had worked for a sawmill as a young man and knew his ash from his chestnut. When I was in my early teens, we got our first car – an Austin 1200, I seem to remember, in a nostalgic royal blue - and as a family we would often head out for Sunday drives to places like the Roe Valley Forest Park, where I would stare through binoculars, looking for anything other than sparrows and jackdaws.

Today Andrea and I went out for a walk around Crawfordsburn Country Park – and had a beautiful stroll along the stream there, with the banks just misted purple by bluebells. It’s a beautiful space – it was lovely to be in under that bright green roof, and then find ourselves skimming stones on the beach ten minutes later.

Both of us felt the oncoming rush of the spring – things starting to come up out of the ground and make themselves seen, the sky seeming to lift a little higher.

I’ve just had a month or two that have felt like a low-level hibernation of the spirit, so it’s good to feel the ground warming up again, the sense of promise renewed. Bring it on.

To begin at the beginning... A suggestion for the Perfect Library

The lovely people at Libraries NI have been running a campaign asking people to nominate their choice for a book to make up The Perfect Library, and they asked me a couple of weeks ago if I would make a selection.

  How do you narrow something like that down to one book? And how do you take into account the vagaries of mood – Monday’s choice would be Harper Lee, Tuesday’s might be Charles Bukowski... And the thing is, you KNOW someone else will have suggested Harper Lee already - she'll be in there within the first half a dozen selections, along with Catcher in the Rye and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and all the other regular residents of the Top Ten lists.

  Anyway, from the frame of mind I was in when I made the choice, here’s my entry for their campaign:

Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

  'Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams...'

  I could have selected dozens of titles for this - ask me tomorrow and I'll probably have a different one in mind. However, right here, right now, my choice is Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. I first read it when I was at Coleraine Inst and it had a profound effect on me. At that time I didn't know you could DO that with words. It was ravishing and heartbreaking and dreamlike. If words were edible, this book would be a never-ending box of expensive chocolates. Of course, off I went and wrote all kinds of imitations of it - that's what dreamy 14-year-olds are supposed to do. It did show me what language was capable of - and there's a direct link from the joy of reading this to the joy of putting words together in the songwriting process. I still read Under Milk Wood every three or four years, and I often listen to the delicious BBC recording with Richard Burton as the narrator. I offer it as a choice for the Perfect Library in the hope that some other head-in-the-clouds 14-year-old will find it and be smitten.

 ( I think the Perfect Library entries are now closed, but if you'd like to suggest an entry, click HERE to be taken to the submission page. )

One for the departed

I wrote this poem in the car driving north one day last year after hearing that an old friend had died - I won't pretend I was deeply saddened, as we hadn't spoken for a long time - but I did mourn the connection we used to have. I don't know what I did - or when I did it - but I found myself suddenly locked out of the house that had been our friendship. I continued to throw a few flowers over that wall for a while, but the phone never rang again. so I let it be. I never showed the poem to anyone. There had been snow on the hills as I left the city that morning, and this is how the sky and the road to the north looked through my windscreen as I wrote it.

I drive north in the snow, and I think about you -

and a party you had at your house.

We drank to Lord of the Rings and John Millington Synge,

Flann O’Brien, Neil Young and Mickey Mouse.

Today the books on my shelf turns their spines to the wall;

all the characters’ hearts have been broken.

And thousand-year-old poems fold their frail, tired arms -

all the words, words, words have been spoken.

When we hugged in your hall we said we’d always be friends -

that’s hard work, but easy to say.

Because handshakes are brief and all parties end

when the taxis come and take us away.

Arrivals - something of a departure

Over the course of the last six days I’ve been given what I wished for – and it turned out to be (as you’d expect) not too pretty.

  Essentially I’ve been off work and holed up in my study, doing nothing but composing music, for the forthcoming drama ‘Arrivals’, which opens at the Crescent Arts Centre this week.

  The show, which explores interesting cross currents in the multi-cultural life of Northern Ireland, consists of five short pieces, written by a group of hugely talented writers from here and follows the fortunes of a cast of characters criss-crossing the globe to land here in search of love, marriage, refuge, work, inspiration - or just a new beginning.

  The plays, written by Shannon Yee, James Meredith, Paul McMahon, Deirdre Cartmill and John Morrison, were conceived and are directed by Andrea. For more information, visit the Terra Nova website at www.terranovaproductions.net.

  Most of the composition process has been huge fun, but some of it has of course been like having my teeth pulled, one molar each day. Walking in the door and seeing the guy there waiting, with the pliers.

  I had thought at the outset that nothing could be sweeter than having a concentrated amount of time to knuckle down and produce some music. But I had forgotten that when I normally make music, I follow a set of rules – there are lyrics, choruses, spaces for guitar solos. A structure that I can bend and twist any way I want.

  But this time I start with a number of canvases with outlines already sketched on them – it has to be something that suggests disquiet, says Andrea, or something that sounds restless and unresolved. With no lyrics to suggest disquiet or restlessness, I have to put my faith in the sound the instruments make.

  So the finished pieces are strange bedfellows – one of them sounds like a powerpop band in a small club. Another sounds like a Zen master playing the piano. Another sounds like Talking Heads. And one sounds like me smacking a variety of glass objects in my kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, and blowing into bottles.

  (This last one was interesting – to create the desired effect, I struck all kinds of glasses and jars alongside a drum loop. And then I blew across the top of a variety of bottles in the kitchen. When the process was over, I was left with a residue across my lower lip that was a mix of vodka, baileys, balsamic vinegar, sloe gin and fish sauce. Nice.) Of course, the pieces are all written to accompany scene change movement, so let’s hope they work.

  I should come clean and say this is not the first time I’ve written instrumental music. A couple of years ago I was commissioned to write pieces for an exhibition of paintings by Maurice Orr. I learned some valuable lessons during that process – every time I brought music to him he would ask for less. Take the harmonica out. Can we take out the percussion? Let’s lose the guitar.

  ‘Sorry... Er, lose the guitar?'

  A couple of the pieces ended up with just the sound of surf and a few broken piano chords here and there. But it worked. It was all about atmospheres.

  This is a similar process – one of the plays is about faiths meeting and clashing and meshing, so I played a piano piece that I hope sounds like two pianos speaking to each other.

  If you visit the ReverbNation player right HERE, you can download a couple of the tracks absolutely free.

  But if you’d like to see them in their proper context – in other words, setting up the atmosphere for the piece of drama to follow, come along to see the show at the following venues.

FEBRUARY 12-15 at 8pm nightly (and matinees Feb 13 at 1.30pm and Feb 15 at 2.30pm), BELFAST: Crescent Arts Centre

Call (028) 9024 2338 or visit www.crescentarts.org 

FEBRUARY 19 at 8pm, NEWTOWNARDS: Ards Arts Centre

Call (028) 9181 0803 or visit www.ards-council.gov.uk 

FEBRUARY 20 at 8pm, COLERAINE: Riverside Theatre

Call (028) 7012 3123 or visit www.riversidetheatre.org.uk 

FEBRUARY 21 at 8pm, ARMAGH: The Marketplace Theatre

Call (028 3752 1821 or visit www.marketplacearmagh.com 

FEBRUARY 22 at 8pm, DOWNPATRICK, Down Arts Centre

Call (028) 4461 0747 or visit www.downartscentre.com

What I want to be when I grow up

It's Careers Insight Day at the girls grammar school, so I have my little name badge and a table in the corner of the gymnasium. And all the teenagers who want to be rock & roll stars will flock to me, right? And gather around my feet to hear my words of wisdom?

Not quite...

As always with these things, for every bright spark, for very shining-eyed little Sylvia Plath angel with a notebook full of terrifying biro sketches and poems, there are thirteen other sleepy-eyed girls who look like they wish they were back in bed watching TV.

What is there to say to kids this age about careers, anyway? It's hard, hard work, girls. I want to make important pronouncements like: there are no easy ways to be rich and comfortable. The trick is not to make compromises with your life. Don't ever say, 'this will do'. But it's hard to make that point to 14-year-olds. They're being asked to make Big Grown Up Decisions about career choices – at 14, I didn’t even know what I wanted for breakfast.

By and large they regard me silently, like a small herd of beautiful, curious young deer that have sneaked in through a hole in the fence. When I finish talking and invite questions, their big eyes swim around the room and they look at the floor, or their nails, or the wooden climbing bars behind my head. And their cheeks redden ever so slightly in soundless embarrassment.

One of them bravely eases her hand up and reads one of the ‘suggested questions’ from the Careers Advice sheet in front of her.

'What would you consider to be the starting salary for a singer songwriter?'

And I think of Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan… and all of them making scratches on the paper, playing their first D Major chord - and having to start somewhere.

'The starting salary...' I say, 'is zero pounds a year.'

Me and Mr. Hemingway

I just finished reading Paul Hendrickson’s biography-that's-not-really-a-biography, Hemingway’s Boat.: Everything in Life He Loved and Lost. And like all good biographies (even those that back away slowly when referred to as biographies), it drove me back to the bookshelves, to read the work of the subject.

And the work is a patchy business, it has to be said, with prizes reserved for a few of the short stories, Fiesta, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms and A Moveable Feast.

Reading Hemingway has been like trying on old clothes from years ago you once thought looked really cool. An enjoyable experience but perhaps not considered fashionable anymore.

Hendrickson’s book hints at conflicted sexuality – not a new subject for Hemingway scholars. Its main point is that the writer’s relationship with his boat Pilar was the strong undercurrent below his best years. And the more landlocked and removed he got from his boat and the Caribbean, the more lost at sea he became.

By the time I was eleven and I got to the big library at Coleraine Inst, I gazed up at the tall shadowy shelves and was already aware that Hemingway was one of the big 20th Century names you were Supposed to Have Read. One of the authors known only by their surnames, like generals in some complicated war overseas – Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Forster.

When pocket money allowed, I had taken to stopping on my way home every now and then at Coleraine Book Shop in Stone Row, a neat oasis of orderly shelves of second hand stock (long since gone). And it was in there that I picked up a copy of Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (it still has the pencilled price in the back – 40p).

All the world’s a stage, and in my early teens I had sketched out a role for myself as someone with aspirations to be a writer, to be an unrequited lover, carrying my broken heart around the world with a tragic nobility that women would find irresistible.

In other words, I was a sitting duck for Fiesta by the time I read it – I was completely swept away by the doomed expatriate romance and the exotic Parisian and Spanish backdrops. I don’t think I ever quite got over it. That’s the mark of a really good book, I suppose. Some part of it enters you and takes up residence and never leaves.

Of course, the myth of Hemingway is irresistible, even as a source of ridicule. Hendrickson’s biography thankfully doesn’t buy any of the macho Hemingway industry bull. To me, though, it was more the image of the writer that I swallowed like a baited hook. The locomotive power of a man working, pressing the words into the page and getting his work done.

And this is what has drawn me back from the bookshelves to the desk with this little passage from the breathless and beautiful epilogue to Death in the Afternoon. I first read it years ago, and now that writing and creativity have become such a girder running through who I am, I re-read it and share it with a re-found sense of dedication and inspiration.

I dedicate it as a blessing to any of you reading this who are involved in your own creative journey. Take heart – and get your work done.

HEMINGWAY ‘The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.’

Down to the river

IT’S true – there are few things better designed to fray your nerves than opening the door on a wild night and finding a policeman standing there. A million thoughts crash through your head at once – but it’s okay: He’s here to remind us of the flood warning. Parts of Sydenham are at risk when the high tide meets high wind and heavy rain at midday tomorrow, he says. A perfect little storm that could see us evacuated if things get really bad.

Evacuated? Let’s be honest - that’s not a word that comes up often in conversation.

I spend the rest of the evening trying to decide whether to actually be worried or not. I reason – probably correctly – that our house is pretty elevated (the street rises quite a bit from the far end to us), and that we have two additional steps up to the front door.

I stomp around the house all evening, looking out the windows and telling myself this is the kind of thing that happens to other people. And yet every now and then I think about throwing some underwear and pyjamas into a rucksack, and moving some precious stuff up a floor. I keep checking Twitter and making sure all my hand-held devices are fully charged - and making sure I have a good book handy, in case I have to spend a night sleeping in a primary school assembly hall or something.

The next morning is windy but dry, and there’s a definite edge to the morning – people are out in their front gardens talking to each other. As midday approaches, emergency vehicles go down Park Avenue in the direction of the Connswater River. I quietly take the car and park it a couple of streets away, on higher ground. Not everyone is willing to take it so seriously. A neighbour texts me to say he's coming home at lunchtime, 'to put down a couple of sheets of kitchen roll just in case'.

Andrea and I decide to take a look, and we’re surprised to find as we arrive at the river that about two hundred people have decided to do the same. There’s a kind of carnival atmosphere down there, as people stand and watch the Connswater – swollen dangerously high and looking kind of cold and evil, tickling the underside of the motorway bridge.

Local politicians are here looking concerned. The police and emergency services are keeping an eye on things and people are taking photographs of each other. It’s like a rock festival. I almost expect someone to start selling hot dogs. All around us are streets and streets of houses with sandbags piled up at the door – their gardens are a good six feet below the level of the sandbags, and if the water level rises another foot, the river will come down the embankment in seconds and head straight for their front doors.

As 12.15 passes, Andrea and I seem to have an impression that the water level is dropping, almost perceptibly as we watch it. In any event, we decide to call it a day and go back home. On the way, we are passed by people going in the opposite direction – mums and dads bringing their kids down to see the flood. It’s remarkable in a way, this appetite for any kind of experience - people rushing to see a disaster even as it potentially heads towards them. There are families walking down Park Avenue with drinks and sweets. The police turn away a couple of massive all-terrain vehicles, with mums and dads and the kids in the back, hoping they could drive down to Victoria Park and maybe watch the sandbags as they give way. It’s like we’ve seen a million apocalypse movies and we want to have our own close shave with a disaster, even a little one.

(When I get back to the house, I find the rucksack that I had thrown on the bed but didn’t get round to packing, and it makes me feel a little foolish. I throw it back on top of the wardrobe, before anybody notices)

Songblog: Broken in Advance

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Another one of those songs I come out with now and then about the anxieties of getting older and how we’re crossing shaky ground. The song almost didn’t get finished – I wrote the first draft while going through a very angry few weeks, and it was full of unpleasant sentiments.

I think I completed the missing verse the night before recording it, so it was close to the wire. Despite all the anxieties of the central character, I like to think he finds a shot at redemption in the last few lines, so it’s not too dark and full of despair. Anyway, during the recent tour dates, some of the lines have actually been attracting a giggle or two from the audience, so it must be OK...

MUSICIANS: Anthony Toner – vocals and guitars; Clive Culbertson – bass; Peter McKinney – drums; John McCullough – piano

Broken in advance::

In the deepest, darkest part of the night,

you lie awake and you worry about things that you can’t put right.

And if sleep is a river of dreams,

you’re headed back upstream,

where the fish come and look at your toes

and they take a bite.

There are joyriders watching you from the dark.

They know your house and your car

and the place that you always park.

They missed the boom but they got the crash,

and they’d love to redistribute your cash -

and you hold your keys so tight

that they leave a mark.

Maybe they were born to it -

maybe they never stood a chance.

Their hearts were broken in advance.

It seems so much harder than it did way back at the start.

And you worry ’bout the toll that it takes on your wounded heart.

You just hope it wins back what it loses,

between the teethmarks and the bruises

And all the big ideas that used to seem so smart.

Everybody’s on the make but me, I must have

missed my lucky chance.

My heart was broken in advance.

Well you wake in the middle of the night with your pulse rate thumping:

This isn’t the dream about falling, this is the one about jumping.

You’re lying there wide awake,

and your heart’s just about to break -

when the sun comes up, and you remember to be glad for something.

Songblog: The Heart Says 'You Never Know Me'

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Pulling the songs together for this album, I wanted to write something for a person I knew who was going through a hard time – a time when the head and the heart were not quite on speaking terms.

There was a sense that the heart kept pulling towards situations the head knew were a mistake. And the idea came to me that the heart would have its own identity, and would know better, could speak aloud, and say simply – ‘you never know me’. The chords and melody had been around for a while – I wrote them in London, and all I had for a lyric was ‘you never know me’.

I didn’t realise until I thought about my friend that in fact it was the voice of his heart. Sometimes moments like that are like a key turning in a lock, or a coin dropping down into a slot – sometimes, when you connect an expressive idea with a specific person, you can almost hear the bolts sliding back and the song walks through the open door. I hope that doesn’t sound too pretentious, but it’s like being in the dark with the lights coming up, like coming up to the surface.

MUSICIANS: Anthony Toner – vocals and guitars; Clive Culbertson – bass; Peter McKinney – drums; John McCullough – piano; John Fitzpatrick - violin

The Heart Says: 'You Never Know Me':​

Trusting in your high wire shoes from grace to grace.

Practising your broken smile from face to face.

Carrying your rotten luck from place to place.

Oh, in the dead of night your heart will tell you:

‘You never know, you never know, you never know me’.

Love will make you leave your home, and change your name;

Make you bend or break the rules of every game.

The people that you leave will never be the same.

Oh, in the dead of night your heart will tell you:

‘You never know, you never know, you never know me’.

Desire is the flame that melts you together

And she says you’re the one, but your heart knows you better.

‘You never know, you never know, you never know me’.

Songblog: All the Empty Pockets of Ireland

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This song came out in about 20 minutes – I have no idea what sparked it off, apart from the ‘empty pockets’ line, which is partly borrowed from the poet Antony Raftery. As so many times before, I was fooling around with an Open G tuning and the little John Prine-ish introduction motif seemed to emerge on its own.

The rest of the lyrics seem to be have been a reaction to the ongoing global recession and in particular the awful state of the economy in Ireland – and what has been lost.

As for the last verse, it’s a rumination on the awful year of bad health my parents had just gone through at the time of writing. My mum and dad were great dancers. As a child, I remember watching them dancing at family parties. When they began to jive, other members of the family would gradually stop dancing and just watch. They had never taken any lessons or anything, they just knew how to do it, and they moved like the expression of pure physical joy that dancers give off like a light when it’s done right.

A circle would form and they would inhabit the space and fill it with an unconscious expression of delight. As my father spun my mother, he would often let his left hand float upwards and flutter it, like a pianist playing a boogie-woogie trill. As a child, I may have believed that at times like this, they actually would leave the floor and rise upwards like Chagall’s lovers.

I remember watching them with huge pride from the edge of childhood, from the side of dancefloors in dusty hotel function rooms, my eyes gritty from lack of sleep and my teeth sticky with Coca Cola. And all I have to do is put on some Chuck Berry and close my eyes, and they’re still there.

MUSICIANS: Anthony Toner – vocals, guitars and banjos; Neil Martin - cello

All the Empty Pockets of Ireland:​

I had a dream that the people came back

to the dancehalls,

and they waltzed and they jived

beneath the mirror balls.

And with the music in their heads,

they went back home to their beds

and they woke up hopeful.

In this dancehall, all the millionaires

stood regretting.

And they leaned against the walls

and started sweating.

And all the sweetest girls in town

consistently turned their advances down,

and they went home lonely.

Baby I’m going to hit the road,

but I won’t be long.

I’ll be home before you even know I’m gone.

And I’ll wash my face and smile

and I’ll sing my song

to all the empty pockets of Ireland.

In this dream I’m ten years old,

and I’m up way too late.

And as my mother and my father dance,

they start to levitate.

And as the people stop and stare,

they catch each other in mid-air

and I don’t want to wake up.

Baby I’m going to hit the road,

but I won’t be long.

I’ll be home before you even know I’m gone.

And I’ll wash my face and smile

and I’ll sing my song

to all the empty pockets of Ireland.

Songblog: Bed and Breakfast

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On October 10, 2011, I was invited to take part in an outside broadcast of the Ralph McLean Radio show for Radio Ulster, down at the Bronte Centre in Rathfriland in County Down.

It was a bitterly cold night, but a lovely experience – Matt McGinn, Ruth Colley, Isobel Anderson, Gareth Dunlop… It was a great show, but I was glad to be heading home to the warmth, and on the way home, the first line just popped into my head as I was driving – ‘headlights on the road, and the moon up above. I drive between the lights to be with the one I love’.

I knew almost immediately that I was in straight-ahead love song territory, so I was determined not to be too clever. The only concession was when I started using the paired words – I love you hot & cold, I love you thick & thin… And without even thinking, the next pairing that came into my head was ‘bed & breakfast’, and then I couldn’t resist ‘going out & staying in’.

The chord pattern over the verses is a I-Vim-IV-V pattern that has been used a million times before. In my head I was thinking ‘Stay (Just a Little Bit Longer) and even Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Oh Diane’.

It was the first track that we recorded for the album, and when I heard Linley Hamilton and Meilana Gillard’s horn parts, I knew I was going to have fun. It was good to put a big slide guitar solo on the record, too...

MUSICIANS: Anthony Toner – vocals and guitars; Clive Culbertson – bass; Peter McKinney – drums; John McCullough – piano and organ; Linley Hamilton – trumpet; Meilana Gillard – saxophone

Bed and Breakfast:​

Headlights on the road, and the moon up above:

I drive between the lights, to be with the one I love.

And if I was a DJ, with my own late show,

I would dedicate to you every love song I know.

CHORUS:

Cause I love you hot and cold,

I love you thick and thin.

I love you bed and breakfast,

going out and staying in.

There’s a checkpoint up ahead – and I tell them with a smile,

if they take away my wheels I’d walk home the sixty miles.

CHORUS

First thing in the morning, and last thing at night

I need to hear my baby’s voice to know it’s going to be all right.

Songblog: The Road to Fivemiletown

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I’m always trying to make people happy.

Somehow I can’t stand the thought that I’ll tell a story with an unhappy ending and not find offer shred of hope in the process somewhere. As a songwriter, I’ve always tried to find the light at the end of the tunnel. I laboured over this song for weeks, without successfully being able to rescue the character from the quicksand of her own life and unhappiness. Onstage I introduce it as a ‘little slice of South Tyrone gothic’.

And people seem to love it.

As a character study it seems to work – maybe everyone knows an aunt or a cousin who made these choices in life and ended up stuck, trapped in a loveless dead end of a life. Anyway, it goes down well in concert, and I’ve had all kinds of kind comments about it online, so it shows how people love a little tale of misery in their lives now and then.

The origin of this one is a mystery to me – the guitar figure right at the start was the first part. I remember sitting on the edge of the bed playing this over and over until it was properly under my fingers. As for inspiration, I think the work of John McGahern may have rubbed off on me more than I thought – there seems to be a touch of the Amongst Women about it, that sense of being stranded alone and unloved in a rural landscape.

MUSICIANS: Anthony Toner – guitars and vocals; Peter McKinney – drums; Clive Culbertson – bass; John McCullough – drums; Neil Martin - cello

The Road to Fivemiletown:​

She was the youngest of four daughters,

and she married way too fast,

in the days when vows were iron -

and you had to make them last.

But her father was a bruiser,

and he bruised them twice a week.

She couldn’t live the life her mother had,

and turn the other cheek.

So when she turned sixteen, she started counting off the days

- til she could find herself a husband, and finally get away.

He was a farmer with big farmer’s hands,

and she met him at a dance.

She set her sights upon him,

and he never stood a chance.

She thought the price of being choosy

was to live upon the shelf,

and she thought he’d do the job

as well as anybody else.

And when they both stood at the altar, he said he’d never let her down -

he had a farm and forty acres, either side of the road to Fivemiletown.

That first year the river burst its banks,

and half the countryside was drowned.

all the food that he had planted

lay and rotted in the ground.

He’d come home at night exhausted,

and lie dead between the sheets,

and she’d lie all night and listen to

the roaring of the beasts,

and it was dark - as dark as being lost and never found.

You wouldn’t even know your eyes were closed or open on the road to Fivemiletown.

Once upon a time she thought the world

would be hers to wrap her arms around.

Now she makes the bed, and lies back down.

She drew a disappearing heart, when there was no-one else around,

on a steamed-up kitchen window - looking out on the road to Fivemiletown.

Songblog: Most People Are a Pain in the Ass

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I had this song knocking around the house for a few days and had convinced myself that I couldn’t do anything with it – the ‘be a good boy’ urge in me said that I couldn’t possibly say something like that in a song.

But of course, since the Sex Pistols issued ‘Anarchy in the UK’ you can say anything you want in a song. Once I had the first line: If life was a party, then you wish you could leave them at home’, I knew I would have to repeat the couplet and get meaner each time, culminating with ‘If life was a journey, you’d slash their tyres in the driveway’.

I’ve sung it a few times at parties where there were people who really do fit the description and I have winced a little and avoided looking at them before singing that particular line.

But most of the time people take it in good humour. I played it at Ards Arts Centre one night, and afterwards, someone in the audience shouted: ‘let me know when that’s available as a ringtone’. John Fitzpatrick is particularly lovely on violin on this one.

MUSICIANS: Anthony Toner – vocals and guitars; Clive Culbertson – bass; Peter McKinney – drums; John McCullough – piano; John Fitzpatrick - violin

LYRICS:​

I need to set some boundaries.

They keep knocking on my door,

and tucking in the tail of my shirt.

And I negotiate my personal space:

They keep walking through walls and

they bug me when I’m trying to work.

Well, the ones that you love and

who love you, you got to keep them around.

But just about everybody else can get lost,

that’s what I’ve found...

Most people are a pain in the ass.

If life was a party then you wish you could leave them at home.

They keep tugging on your sleeve.

Even when they’re dead, they won’t leave you alone.

And we’ve got experts in every subject.

Cooking pasta, and how to save a fortune

on the cost of your heating.

And they boast about the price of their houses,

what they said to the boss and what

they’re going to bring up at the meeting.

Well I try to be cool at the party

while they waste my precious time.

But every time they open their mouths,

I just want to drink a lot more wine.

Most people are a pain in the ass.

If life was a movie, you’d kill them in the opening scene.

They keep tugging at your sleeve,

you try to change the channel

but their face keeps coming up on every screen.

Well I try to be patient and I try to be kind.

But with all the ears in the world tonight,

how come you keep bending mine?

Most people are a pain in the ass.

If life was a journey you’d slash their tyres in the driveway.

They keep tugging on your sleeve,

even when you sleep they won’t leave you alone.

Songblog: Polaroids and Postcards

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I wrote this in Canada one morning in July of last year – the same morning I took this picture, actually.

The little guitar figure had come first, a few days before. I was playing the Tanglewood guitar in dropped D for a few days, and the lick just seemed to fall under my fingers. I played it over and over for about three days solid.

On one of those afternoons, Andrea and her mother decided to open some of the cardboard boxes that had been in storage in the basement of the house for over a decade, and there were deep emotions circulating – old family pictures and letters and artefacts were coming out for the first time in many years. A lot of ghosts moving through the rooms, and quite a bit of conversation about the immigrant experience.

The Montgomery family had come over in the late 19th century from Scotland. So the idea of leaving home and writing back to your family was in my blood at the time.

All that year, my father had been copying old family photographs – and every few days I would call to visit and he would have copied another family picture for me. One of the pictures he showed me was of my Aunt Bridget, who emigrated to Australia in the early 60s. There was a picture of her standing outside a rural Post Office holding a baby. And in the background there was just... endless miles of white desert. Nothing as far as the eye could see.

On the opposite page of the family album was the telegram that she had sent home to her mother in Pates Lane in Coleraine, to mark the fact that she had crossed the Equator. We all have family stories like this, I imagine. And it strikes me that the idea of travelling that distance is kind of commonplace now. Back then it must have seemed almost like a death in the family – to lose your loved ones to the wind.

I love John McCullough’s piano playing on this.

MUSICIANS: Anthony Toner – vocals and guitars; Clive Culbertson – bass; Peter McKinney – drums; John McCullough – piano

LYRICS:​

We were both named for Catholic saints,

but it never does us any good.

We say our prayers each day and we walk out

into the deep, dark woods.

We’re kids of a restless generation,

who prayed that life could be better.

They packed their bags and caught the boats, and got kind of

lost out in the weather.

CHORUS:

And it’s happy and sad,

all these Polaroids and postcards.

Good and bad, all the news they send back home.

And you wonder how these hearts can go the distance,

even though we’ve been down this road many times.

Australia 1962:

Our uncle and his brand new wife.

Behind them the land goes on for miles,

without another sign of life.

From Vancouver, New York and Boston;

Philadelphia, New South Wales:

Black and whites of birthday parties,

and smiling little nephews come Air Mail.

CHORUS

Songblog: Things Fall Apart

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The idea of things falling to bits was one of the key themes of the album. Things getting worn out, blasted by the weather and by time and erosion. This song was trying to express some of that, but I got distracted along the way, talking about New York and Smithfield Market and so on.

There are several true adventures here – the ‘dead hotel’ was the old Fawcetts Royal Hotel in Portrush. I rehearsed in there with one of many bands I tried to start in my teens. It was a wonderful, spooky old place, still partly furnished but abandoned. As I seem to recall, we set up our gear in the dining room under the dusty chandeliers and played ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ by The Beatles for about three hours until our fingers were numb. We never actually made it far enough to have an actual gig, fortunately.

(I remember thinking about all the empty bedrooms upstairs and the creaking doors and dusty windows. The experience had a profound effect on me – I remember writing one short story based on these ‘abandoned hotel’ afternoons, and at least one forlorn little teenage unrequited love song)

And I did see Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes – at BB King’s Bar & Grill on 42nd street in New York City (left). I was in New York with a large party from Northern Ireland and I was the only old person among them who had HEARD of Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes (I thought, where have these people BEEN?). So I bought a ticket and sat there on my own and watched one of the greatest gigs I’ve ever seen.

And I did get stuck in Fermanagh once, during the bad floods of a couple of years back. Coming back from the Ardhowen Theatre after a show, the roads were underwater in so many places, and I was diverted so many times I ended up lost, driving past lakes that used to be fields, trying to get back to the motorway in the middle of the night with the petrol gauge swinging towards zero.

Musically, my dear friends Ronnie Greer (guitar) and John McCullough (piano) excel themselves on this one, I think.

MUSICIANS: Anthony Toner – vocals and guitars; Clive Culbertson – bass; Peter McKinney – drums; John McCullough – piano and keyboard; Ronnie Greer - guitar

LYRICS

I been to New York City,

I walked the boots right off my feet.

I saw Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes

play on 42nd street.

In a car on the New Jersey Turnpike,

I saw America after dark.

I’ve been up and down the road to hell,

trying to find a place to park

I been to Smithfield Market

but that just gave me the blues.

All those old LPs from your teenage years,

and the toys nobody used

I saw a mama look down at her little boy,

and the boy regard his mother.

There’s nothing worse than two generations

disappointed in each other.

Things fall apart, and you try to hold it all together.

You can throw your arms around it sometimes,

but nothing lasts forever.

I got locked in a dead hotel,

I was a ghost on the second floor.

I kicked my way out the fire escape,

I stole the key to a hundred doors.

I got chased by the flood.

I took a dirt road home,

I went looking for higher ground

in Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

Things fall apart, and you try to hold it all together.

You can throw your arms around it sometimes,

but nothing lasts forever.

Don’t read your old love letters,

you’ll feel a thousand years old.

Don’t visualize your broken heart being

left out in the cold:

That was a time of superstition,

people checked under their cars.

They stopped going out to dances,

and they avoided certain bars.​