10 days, 10 songs: Grateful

THE IDEA FOR the chorus of this song came to me, in true songwriter fashion, in the middle of the night in a hotel room in Nashville, on my first ever trip to Tennessee. They had put us up in the very plush surroundings of the Hermitage Hotel. After a 14-hour journey, we still found energy to hit the honky tonks and have some beers. I was convinced it would knock me out, but I remember going to sleep around 1am on the first night and waking up again at 3.30am, wide awake and buzzing with jetlag.

  I seem to remember sitting propped up in a vast bed, facing a giant blank TV screen where I could see my own reflection. I had my little Moleskine notebook and just started scribbling. At one point there was the sound of a train whistle, way off in the distance. That might have been my imagination, though.

  (I also remember that the same writing session – very brief but intense - was the one that generated the line ‘hope the days outnumber the nights’ that became the central line in the song ‘Well Well Well’)

  As usual, I was feeling grateful (it’s my default mode these days, I think) – here I was in this wonderful hotel, propped up on heavy pillows, with performances to look forward to and my creative juices flowing. And my head was filled with images of dark and light, day and night, negative and positive - the idea of the light shining below the door, and being positive in your approach to what might lie on the other side: ‘If there’s a light below the door, you should open it for sure...’

(Incidentally, I just remembered that I came back to the hotel early one night on that trip, and Ryan Adams was standing in the lobby, talking animatedly to a roadie... he looked rather grumpy about something, and I figured it probably wasn't a good time to interrupt)

  The chorus ran around in my head for a couple of years – and the song didn’t make it onto the last album. It was only when the little John Prine-ish guitar figure (the first thing you hear as the track starts) fell under my fingers one morning that I realised the two parts were meant to be together.

  The verses were a kind of warning to an old friend of mine not to listen to the bad advice she’s been taking from so-called friends for a number of years: ‘It’s your heart – and nobody knows it more than you.’ As it turns out, she doesn’t know her heart as well as I thought she did. Despite our confidence, most of us probably don’t.

  Recording it was a joy – with Eilidh adding such grace with her harmonies and John McCullough playing gorgeous piano, it remains one of my favourites on the album.

The musicians on this track are:

Anthony Toner – vocals, guitars

Clive Culbertson – bass

Eilidh Patterson – vocals

John McCullough – piano

Paul Hamilton – drums and percussion

GRATEFUL - lyrics

You don’t mind drinking, but you hate the coming round,

and you don’t mind flying, but you hate the coming down,

you’re glad to land - anywhere that ain’t too hard.

Your broken heart’s a perfect crime, and you go looking for clues.

But you turn up nothing, and it gives you the blues,

you should know - you catch yourself red-handed every time.

CHORUS:

I know the story of love,

and as for eating humble pie, I’ve had a plateful.

If there’s a light below the door,

you should open it for sure...

And if it’s luck that saves your ass,

just be grateful.

Your friends mean well, but there’s always a price,

you get to pay for all this free advice,

it’s your heart, and nobody knows it more than you.

They get a secret little kick from your hard time-

they like reading the cards on the roadside shrines,

and they say, ‘there but for the grace of God...’

- CHORUS

Stand tall and hold your hand in mine

- CHORUS

10 days, 10 songs - All of the Above

BEDFORD STREET IS always busy – it’s the main route down to the city centre from Belfast’s south side and the maze of streets around Lisburn Road and Botanic that are home to so many of the students attending Queen’s University. Maybe that’s why everyone I see on Bedford Street these days seems to be younger than me.

  After the long winter, all of these dark northern cities get a twinkle in their eye when the sun comes out – I imagine the same happens in Newcastle and Glasgow. I emerged from Harlem Cafe (right) one bright afternoon, blinking into the sunshine, and found Belford Street was unexpectedly filled with people in love.

  Couples were strolling down past the BBC and the Ulster Hall, arm in arm, hand in hand, like characters in some 80s romantic comedy set in Central Park. And as they gazed into each other’s eyes and laughed at each other’s jokes, the first line of this song came to me: ‘All the happy couples that you meet, walking up and down Bedford Street...’

  The only piece of music I had to fit the lyric at the time was a slow, terribly quiet little progression based around major sevens with a couple of diminished chords, and for a while I ran over it on a Spanish guitar, whispering the melody.

  It was still unfinished the following March, when I had to suddenly produce it, like a half-baked cake, during a writing session in Nashville. I had three co-writing sessions lined up for the trip, each of them with established songwriters in the city. The first and the third went really well – but I came unstuck in the middle. I had something else half ready that I thought would be ideal for my more experienced friend, but he seemed less than impressed.

  I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that he might not actually like it – but I was taken aback when he kind of sniffed and checked his phone for messages.

  - Hmmm... What else ya got? He drawled at me as the chords rose and disappeared into the high corners of the room like a bad smell. And the only other thing I had was ‘All of the Above’. I was immediately convinced that he wouldn’t be into the whispered sweetness of what I had in mind, so I made a plucky attempt to beef it up, and took it up a few semitones. It came out of my mouth like a complete stranger, like something I had no connection with.

  He didn’t buy that, either, and it remained unfinished. I footered with it for months and then, with the album deadline coming up, I went for broke, pumped it up as much as I could and even wrote an arrangement for horns. With electric piano and tambourine, it has taken on a kind of soul vibe that I hadn’t imagined way back in its ‘Spanish guitar’ phase... Songs can take on lives of their own when you’re not looking.

  The song was inspired by a couple of people that I knew that seemed to have anti-love magnets round their necks. It sounded to me that they regarded love as a power struggle, a dance of domination and submission where the partners often switched roles without warning – hence the idea of being the hand instead of the glove.

The musicians on this one are:

Guitars, vocals, tambourine – Anthony Toner

Drums – Hammy Hamilton

Bass, vocals – Clive Culbertson

Electric piano and Hammond organ – John McCullough

Trumpet – Linley Hamilton

Saxophone – Dave Howell

ALL OF THE ABOVE lyrics

All the happy couples that you meet,

walking up and down Bedford Street,

they can fill you with a sense of defeat

if you don't beware.

It can be a kind of danger zone,

just walking around on your own -

they're blowing kisses into mobile phones,

so you better take care.

CHORUS:

Why are you avoiding love?

What is it you’re so scared of?

Is it the fear that it won’t be enough?

To be the hand instead of the glove –

All of the above?

You used to think that it was easy to take,

being lonely was a piece of cake.

Now you listen to your heart break,

a little every day.

So you say you can’t take any more.

You put a lock upon your every door,

like nobody felt this before -

you’re leading the way.

 - CHORUS

You better take your heart out, baby,

and let it get kicked around.

Before it flies it has to hit the ground.

- CHORUS

The wisdom of E.L. Doctorow

I saw a wonderful quotation last night - on the website of the singer songwriter Sam Baker, a wonder in his own right. It was a quotation from one of my favourite authors, E.L. Doctorow:

'Writing is like driving in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.'

Poses and paws

I just had to share this WEIRD little picture with the world – but I think it deserves an explanation. I was walking up to the corner shop on the morning of the Royal Wedding a week or so back, and on the way past this house, there was the most adorable, human-faced little poodle leaning on the back of the sofa, looking out the window with what appeared to be a smile.

  I remarked to myself about the incredible happy face of this little hound and, as I had my phone with me, I considered taking a snapshot on the way back.

  The dog was still there as I made my way home, so I fished my phone out of my pocket and took aim. And just at that moment, as I squeezed the button, the thought flashed through my head that I shouldn’t be taking pictures of people’s houses, and that perhaps I’d be spotted and could end up with an angry householder on my hands.

  So I decided not to, and turned the phone away and put it back in my pocket. Somehow, though, a picture was taken. And when I looked at it later, it appeared to have snapped just as the phone was moving, and somehow the light was twisted as the lens opened and closed. So I’m left with this strangely bent-out-of-shape portrait of a happy little poodle peeking out between the curtains. The bay window was square, and the railing in the foreground was, I assure you, completely straight.

  And if I stood there for the next six months wiggling my phone back and forth I would never be able to achieve this effect deliberately.

Arrivals

Sunday February 20^th - International Arrivals, Belfast International Airport: A small crowd is gathered, waiting for passengers to appear from the Newark flight. At the front, ahead of everyone, a woman stands in complete stillness, staring fixedly at the door, holding a ‘Welcome Home’ balloon that spins slowly in the air conditioning.

  She holds one end of a small ‘Welcome Home’ banner, the rest of which extends three feet to her right, vanishing under the arm of an older man (her father? an older brother?) who leans against the wall. The rest of us check our watches and shift from foot to foot, watching her from behind as she remains motionless, with her eyes on the door.

  In ones and twos, passengers emerge, bearing their trolleys of luggage or their small, well-packed cases. In turn, they look harried by the long flight, or well rested. Or they appear neutral and expressionless, jet lag already starting to seep into their bones as the time adjustment starts to reveal itself.

  In the middle, here comes a family unit, an ordinary-looking bundle of man, woman, small child in a pram. Our lady goes to pieces. From behind, you can see it as an involuntary gasp, a barely-perceptible lean forward as the knees buckle slightly and she begins to shake and weep. Approaching the pram, she picks up the child, a small exhausted boy, and bundles him tightly in her arms, her face streaming. Then she and the rest of the family group, smiling weakly, move towards us, with the pram and the luggage trolley.

  Released to the floor, the little boy waddles off between the strangers, clutching the ‘Welcome Home’ balloon, which gently bumps against our shoulders as we continue to wait.

  The woman – thin, pale, groomed – continues to weep and shake, wiping tears from her eyes to either side, as they gather up the little boy. They all make their way towards the exit, like an emotional hurricane crackling with energy, the oblivious child at its centre. And in a matter of seconds, they are gone.

Hello Bluebird... and bye bye Nashville

The Bluebird Cafe is one of the most famous venues in the city, the place where some Big Names were discovered. From the outside, it’s a fairly nondescript cafe in the middle of a strip mall out on the Hillsboro Pike. But that adds to the legend, of course. It only seats about 120 people, so there’s an ‘exclusive’ feel to it. The walls are covered with pictures of the great and the good. Monday night is for those at the other end of the ladder, however – those who are willing to queue for the chance to sing a song. I reckon it can’t do any harm to join a queue like that...

  By the time I arrive at 5pm, there’s already a line of about 25 people hanging around outside with guitars. When the doors open, you come in from the car park, write your name on a piece of paper and throw it in one of two baskets – one for ‘first try’ and another for ‘second try’ – people who queued last Monday night and didn’t get the chance to play. So second tries are selected first, and then names from the ‘first try’ basket are selected.

  The venue is now run by the Nashville Songwriters Association, and because I’m a member and I’ve made a long journey, I’m told that I’ll definitely get a spot. So the names are pulled, and the rules are read out – no rambling introductions, no extended guitar solos, be in tune before you get to the stage, etc. And then we start. I’m up seventh.

  After a while it’s clear that the variation in quality is enormous. Some are ready for the studio. Some have material that could definitely work, with a little polishing and shaping – but others are embarrassingly bad. They come with their guitars and their pages of lyrics, and sometimes with their accompanists. And up they go, gulping into the spotlight with their guitars and their high hopes. Many of them are a far cry from ready - can’t sing, can barely play. A few obviously don’t know how to tune their guitars.

  The ones who show a glimmer of potential are the ones that break your heart. They start off with their mouths dry, and as they hit that high note on the third line, their voices crack a little with nerves, and then the throat tightens, that awful cold sweat starts, the fingers start to shake and the performance starts to unravel. I watch as one girl of about 17 makes the journey from hope to panic, to anger, then resignation and despair - in three verses. She’s just dejected, on the verge of tears, when she leaves the stage.

  There are 53 songwriters slotted to perform tonight, in a three hour slot. The room is all steamed up with hope. This is the dream business we’re in, and you have to wonder what an awful steel-toecapped kicking some of the singers give their own dreams - in the three minutes between stepping up into the light and walking back to their tables.

  There’s not a lot more to say... I get up there and deliver ‘Well Well Well’, get my round of applause and go back to the table. And now I can say ‘I played the Bluebird’. Me and 52 others. I wanted to do it, of course, but afterwards, part of me wanted a chance to talk to those dejected young hopefuls and tell them to... slow down. It’s okay to take more time, to get ready, to build up your performance muscles... Being in the spotlight doesn’t mean you’ve arrived at any destination – it’s just a part of the journey, a glimpse from the car window as you roll through. In spite of what X Factor and American Idol tells us, artists aren't made overnight. And if you’re serious about it, it gets easier. And the queues get shorter.

(This is the last of the blogs from the Nashville trip - thanks for visiting & reading...)

Home from home at McNamara's

When you’re an Irishman abroad and someone says they’re going to take you to an Irish Bar, they usually expect your eyes to light up. You’ll love it, they say: ‘It’ll be just like being at home!’ - missing the whole point that being abroad is all about NOT Being At Home.

  Now, don’t get me wrong – if I lived all year round in somewhere like Nashville, I would probably welcome the chance occasionally to visit an Irish Bar and vicariously connect with home through the craic, the Guinness, maybe news from home, the occasional visitor, etc.

  But when you’re on holiday, drinking badly-poured Guinness and listening to The Corrs while glad-handing everyone with an Irish connection is not necessarily your idea of a good time. Sometimes it can feel like you’re at somebody’s wedding in Limerick, being introduced to somebody else’s uncles and cousins. On at least half a dozen occasions on this trip, people told me of their Irish roots as soon as they heard where I was from. I bet that’s something that never happens to the French when they’re overseas.

  Irish bars often look like they’ve come in a ‘build-your-own-pub’ kit – scuffed floorboards, lots of metal Guinness toucan advertisements, bodhrans and whiskey crock jars gathering dust on high shelves.   McNamara’s in Nashville is quite another story, however. Firstly, it’s tastefully done – no bicycles or Sligo road signs hung on the walls. There are a few framed hurling shirts and a Christy Moore poster, but it’s well-judged. In the gents, they’re playing a recording of an old Hal Roach stand-up show. Cute.

  My overall impression is not that it’s an Irish ‘theme’ bar – it just looks like how a well-run bar would look at home. If that makes sense.

  The bar is owned by Sean McNamara and his wife Paula – who hails originally from Newry (I can’t tell you how sweet it was to hear her talking. More than the music and the decor, it was the sound of her voice that brought me close to homesickness). A couple of nights a week, Sean takes to the stage with two other musicians and they belt out some Irish tunes for a couple of hours, including some of Sean’s own well-made songs. And they’re very, very good. Talented players who excel on a range of instruments.

  They’re excited that another Irish musician is in the audience, and they ask me up for a spot – I perform ‘Peggy Gordon’ (a throwback to my childhood memory of Dubliners records), Van Morrison’s ‘Solid Ground’, ‘The Water is Wide’ and of course ‘Sailortown’.

  I’m there with my friend Benita Hill (who filmed this Sailortown clip), her son Robert and their friend Mark Brashears. Afterwards, there is much hugging and handshaking. And in that respect, in the woozy, end-of-the-night promises and the plans and the sincerely-felt desire to sustain and repeat and deepen the craic and the friendship and the joy, it’s EXACTLY like an Irish bar.

The cake of sin... up the road to Tullahoma

Enjoying some down time before the afternoon road trip, I spend Saturday morning up in Hillsboro Village, a Nashville neighbourhood that is Funky with a capital F – lots of cute bistros, retro clothing stores, artisan jewellers and second hand book shops. To get there I walk up from Broadway until it becomes 21^st Avenue, past Vanderbilt University. It’s a cold, crisp morning and it’s good to be out walking. There’s still ice on the pavements but the sun is out and it feels great to be moving around. I enjoy breakfast with Madeleine Slate, a Toronto-born songwriter who’s now based in Nashville. She’s bound for Belfast in February, to take part in the Belfast Nashville Songwriters’ Festival, and will be staying at our place in Belfast for a few days. We dine at Fido, possibly the hippest of the Nashville cafes. It’s finished in dark wood and red brick and has some untouchably cool vibe about it. One of those vibes that comes out of nowhere and is impossible to define. It has more to do with the clientele than any design or culinary decision, I guess. This is my second or third visit, and every time I’ve been here it’s been peopled wall-to-wall with creative types. Lots of laptops and Converse sneakers and herbal tea.

  At three that afternoon, Ben Glover and his fiancée Emilie pick me up in her car and we make the road trip out to Tullahoma, where Ben and I will play a show at the Celtic Cup.

  It’s a two hour drive up country, the highway cutting through rolling hills. Apparently our journey will bring us close to Lynchburg, where they make Jack Daniel’s whisky. We pass signs for towns with pretty names like Bell Buckle and Ruby Falls, and you wonder as you pass through places like Shelbyville how they grew up out of the ground in that spot. The road doesn’t even bend here – it just passes on through and on either side there are furniture stores, gas stations, restaurants, supermarkets and housing.

  We pass through Manchester and a few other towns in Coffee County, and arrive at Tullahoma, which is similarly low-rise. The light is fading, but the town horizon appears to be flat, bristled with TV aerials and lampposts. The coffee house is (to borrow a phrase from Hemingway) a clean, well-lighted place, decorated in warm reds and dark wood. Owners Chris and Denise have put a lot of time, effort and money into the place. Chris has a fascination with Celtic culture, so they decided to follow that as their theme. Outside, there are Scottish, Welsh and Irish flags. Indoors, plasma screens scroll images of rolling Irish and Scottish countryside – castles, burial cairns, rocky coastlines.

  There’s a tiny little PA that sounds surprisingly punchy, and Ben and I settle in, tune up and start playing. The audience – the biggest it gets is around 35, which is pretty packed – are fairly attentive, and we have the chance to try out some of our new songs. It’s fun just to play with Ben, though – I know a lot of his material quite well, and it’s a welcome change to get to play some lead guitar on someone else’s songs. At the break, we have another coffee (believe me, the coffee there is REALLY good), and a slice of the most sinful cake I’ve eaten on this trip. As we pack our gear, we get interviewed on camera by Rachel Vickrey, a reporter who puts out a news programme from Tullahoma three times a week on cable TV.

  And flushed with celebrity, we pack up and head back down the highway towards the lights of Nashville, passing through all the little dark, sleeping towns - until we are back on the still-awake highway.

Friday - Nashville's Big Easy connection

Richard (that’s the guy with his name over the door) comes from New Orleans, and has worked hard to bring a little corner of The Big Easy with him to Tennessee. We’re way out of town here. The cab from the hotel just keeps going and going, way out on Old Hickory Boulevard and then White’s Creek Pike, and the houses start to get sparse, laid back from the road so you can just see the lights in the trees. There’s snow on the side of the highway and even the direction signs start to thin out.

  Eventually we come to a crossroads, and the cafe is on one of the corners, a little well-lit bistro gleaming with warm earthy colours. There’s a cute stage area, and the PA system is pretty good. The staff offer me a warm welcome, and they settle me at a table with coffee and go about their Friday night tasks. They’ve just opened, and there is no-one around. I watch my cab disappear back up the highway. Richard confides that he didn’t even open the cafe last night because no-one was out in the cold weather. I look out at the icy verges and wonder if tonight was a good idea for either of us.

  Out here is like you picture the American countryside from your James M. Cain movie imagination: long, lonely highways and empty crossroads, where the lights burn green and red over deserted intersections. Occasionally, huge trucks barrel on through. There’s a front porch here, and you imagine warm summer nights with good music, good food and beer as the sun sinks low in the trees and Nashville city centre is a distant glow on the horizon.

  But not tonight. It’s cold and I check my watch. I’m supposed to be on in ten minutes and there’s just me and the staff. The waitress offers me a menu and tells me there’s a meal for me – do I want to eat now, or after performing? I look around the empty restaurant and almost say ‘instead of’.

  As it happens, within ten minutes half a dozen people have come in. One of them is Ownie, a friend and fan of mine from Memphis, who has made the detour on her way home from Chattanooga to hear the performance. From Chattanooga through Nashville to Memphis to hear songs from Belfast. That's how small the world is. And by the time I get through my half hour spot, another dozen have come in and the atmosphere is starting to warm up a little. Afterwards, as Ownie and I enjoy a bowl of chilli and conversation, people come over to the table and shake my hand.

  Most of them claim an Irish connection – which is not unusual here. Much of Tennessee was settled by the Scots-Irish, so names like Ward and McNaughton are familiar. Someone else is coming to Dublin later in the year and wants to know if Belfast is worth a day trip. Of course, I say. Here's my e-mail address. Let me know when you're coming and I'll tell you where the good gigs are. All of them tell me that although they were chatting at their table, they were listening, and they really liked the music.

  The next morning I get an e-mail from one of them who tells me he loves the songs, and describes my music as ‘like a warm cup of coffee on a cold day’. Thanks very much - that’ll do for me.

Nashville - Thursday night at the Indigo

It’s a slow night at the Indigo – even though there are plenty of songwriters. The bubonic plague could sweep through this town and within days I guarantee the songwriters would emerge, blinking, from the abandoned buildings and start setting up meetings. Nobody is on the street – but in the city of a million songs, and you can always rustle up someone to sing.

Soul to soul at the Indigo  The Nashvillians have retreated from the snow, and the chilly weather has kept most of the punters indoors tonight. Even Broadway seems half deserted. The usually-crowded pavements outside the honky tonks are empty. The lobby of the Hotel Indigo is similarly empty. It’s an elegant, tall white palace of a place, with maybe two dozen people watching the stage area. Of that crowd, about three quarters are friends of the performers, and will vanish as soon as their set is over. We have an odd gathering of material tonight, everything from well-constructed contemporary songs delivered by well-groomed (and very pretty) women - to an unrecognisable and complex bebop jazz medley of Hank Williams classics (please make it stop).

  Little of it seems to make an impression. The handful of previous performers and friends applaud politely and the songs float up towards the ceiling and disappear like smoke. I’m in a three-man round with one songwriter writing old-time Woody Guthrie-influenced stuff and another writing growling protest songs about Lehmann Brothers and oil tycoons. All of us are kind of irrelevant, really – the audience are talking to each other and no-one is really paying attention. The last round of the night features a young guy with a 70s-style open neck shirt playing Caribbean-influenced Jack Johnson-type material, and a black husband-and-wife team who knock out some excellent blues/soul music.

  In the middle of their set, a rangy man at the bar wearing a cowboy hat starts to shout: ‘TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF!! WHO ARE YOU? WHO WROTE THAT SONG?’ And the young guy quietly and politely introduces himself and says, ‘well... I wrote that song. That’s my song’.

  As they play the next one, the big guy approaches the stage and hands a $20 bill to the young songwriter and asks if the three of them could play ‘anything by Jackie Wilson’. Then he insists that his wife gets up on stage and sings one of HER songs. She doesn’t have a guitar and can’t tell them what the chords are, but she starts to sing anyway and the three of them – now in danger of having their set completely derailed – bravely play along as best they can.

  The woman turns out to have a frankly amazing voice. Husky and assured and startling in its suppleness and clarity. When she finishes and goes back to the bar, the husband of the husband-and-wife team leans into the mic and says ruefully: ‘man... I HATE it when white people have more soul than me.’

Titanic memories - shooting the 'Well Well Well' video

November 18, 2010 – Shooting the video for Well Well Well, in the Drawing Office at Titanic House

Few buildings in Belfast have the sense of drama and history that the old Drawing Office at Harland and Wolff exudes - from every creaking door.

  The building, owned by Titanic Quarter Limited, is now seldom used, and is accessed from a nondescript green door, which creaks open to reveal a gloomy corridor lined with locked doors and blocked stairwells.

  But if you follow the glow, it draws you towards two magnificent rooms, flooded with light from windows set in a high, vaulted ceiling. These are glorious rooms where the naval architects worked at long tables as they designed the ships that sailed from Belfast Lough out into the world.

  To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if the plans for the Titanic were drawn in this room or not. I’m too scared to claim that they were – there are too many experts out there to correct me.

  It doesn’t really matter, though – the building is intoxicating enough. The sense of history, of lives lived and decisions made under these magnificent arched ceilings, is dizzying. Few public buildings have such monumental proportions these days, such grace. I know there are plans to refurbish and restore the rooms, but I’m actually kind of glad I saw it in its ruinous state – the atmosphere is simply wonderful, all the more so with the wind rattling the panes, draughts chilling my ankles and rainwater leaking in from the corners.

  Large parts of the building including the upper floors, are blocked off, but the rooms that are accessible are redolent of industry and bygone style now gone to seed. Glass doors etched with the Harland and Wolff logo gleam from the shadows. Staircases ascend into shafts of light. Plants grow through the cracks in the ceiling, there are puddles of water underfoot from leaks. And here and there, a red carpet glows in the gloom, an empty room boasts a superb parquet floor.

  (At some points, wandering from dark, dingy corridors into ruined old rooms flooded with light, my breath rising in clouds before me, I’m reminded of the old Fawcett’s Royal Hotel in Portrush, where I rehearsed one afternoon with a band that never actually got to play a gig. By that time (it must have been 1982) the hotel was closed, and had started to get cobwebby and draughty. But it still had magnificence – an old dining room, chandeliers, one of the last revolving doors on the north coast. And upstairs, floors and floors of empty bedrooms with grimy windows staring out at the Atlantic)

  Our access is to the Drawing Office is kindly permitted by Titanic Quarter Limited, and I’m there to film a video for ‘Well Well Well’, one of the songs from the Duke of Oklahoma album. Filmmaker Darren Lee from Maverick Renegade productions has agreed to shoot the video, and I managed to get us permission to use the room for a couple of hours. I must have chosen the stormiest and coldest day of the year. After only half an hour of filming, I can feel the circulation starting to leave my fingertips.

  At least I’m the centre of attention, which makes me notice the cold slightly less. My heart goes out to Darren’s girlfriend Lana, who has come along for the shoot only to find herself in a corner waiting for two cold hours, and his sister Suzanne, who applies some make-up for the shoot but then is recruited as the person to press ‘play’ repeatedly on the CD player, as I mime and stare meaningfully into various middle distances.

  Darren is methodical – he films the mime from thirteen different angles, so he has plenty to cut from when the time comes. By the time we’ve used up the two hours, our fingers are numb and it’s obviously cappuccino time. Despite it all, I find it hard to leave – I realize I may never get to see the inside of this building again, and I keep taking film and snapping pictures, as the light starts to fade above us.

  I know I’ll remain smitten with the place. Like a beautiful girl you got to spend an afternoon with once, a long time ago.

Random notes from the Ho-Ho-Ho-Zone... and the sick bed

(a series of notes scribbled here and there over the Christmas and New Year period, between fevers, coughs, back pain and fatigue) 

  London comes back to me as if through the fog this Christmas – we had a miserable two or three days of burst pipes and no heat in our new Belfast home in the run up to the festivities, all of it aided by my back problems – I pulled some muscles in my back carrying around 30-gallon drums of home heating oil and bags of coal, while walking gingerly on the ice.

  (I realised during the big freeze that the biggest effect the whole process had on me was to make me act like an old man. I found myself looking out the window and wondering if it was worth going out at all. When I did, I dressed like a retired dinner lady, I walked slowly, drove slowly, stepped off pavements like they were four feet high and generally was more grumpy and impatient with everything I encountered)

  We had a wonderful Christmas Day with family and friends – our dear friend Stephanie Young was staying with us, and my daughter Sian and my parents all managed to make the journey from Coleraine in the sub-zero temperatures to enjoy Christmas dinner, lots of booze and a crackling wood burning stove.

  Everyone left on Boxing Day, as got ready for our long-awaited Trip to London – a time to meet with old friends, see some exhibitions, sit in cafes and generally wind down after the Christmas activities.

  All was not to be smooth sailing, however - we came in three hours late on the way over, as our flight was delayed to start with. I sat in the City Airport on Boxing Night with a copy of the Independent, whose front page headline was (I kid you not): ‘Spend, spend spend – nine days to save the economy!’

  Then after we finally got permission and climbed aboard, the pilot abandoned the take-off just as the engines were roaring and the plane was gathering speed on the actual runway. This was a little unnerving – to feel the power of the engines literally die underneath you just as the nose of the plane is about to lift off the tarmac.

  We taxied back to the stand and waited for some flashing light to be fixed – and for clearance for another take-off attempt. Second time around, all was well, but by the time we got into Luton, all of the buses into the city centre had stopped and we had to queue outside in the cold to get on a Greenline coach bound for Baker Street. It was a little like the fall of Saigon – jittery people with kids in prams, who had queued without a ticket, their breath rising in the midnight air as the number of available seats on the coach started to dwindle. Tempers were starting to fray. Everyone was tired and cold and anxious.

  In the coach, the driver sits in front of an enormous windscreen as the vehicle barrels down the road towards London (you just know that the windscreen will afford him no protection whatsoever should the coach actually strike anything. He sits there, essentially, like a caterpillar sellotaped to the nose of an anti-tank missile). We sit staring out of the huge windscreen, complete with two wide draw-down blinds, I notice, as we hurtle towards the city. It’s like roaring down the road in someone’s bungalow.

  At Maida Vale tube station there is a fierce wind that blows down from the street, snaking through the turnstiles to meet you stiffly face to face as you come up the escalator. In the summer, it brings with it the heat of the world above, and serves only to agitate the airlessness of the world below. The wind carries the smells of the street – car fumes, hot rubber and dust. Tonight, as the year nears its end, it is a cold blast, tinged with moisture from the dirty wet pavements above. On the platform there is an advertisement, in which Ricky Gervais stands holding a sign which says ‘Lung Cancer is No Laughing Matter’. As I struggle off the tube to be met by the wet blast coming down from the street, I look closer and see that under the slogan, some wag has scrawled: ‘neither is Ricky Gervais’.

  That night I will have restless, strange dreams. A friend who passed away a few weeks ago appears to me in a dream – he looks unnaturally smooth-skinned and tanned, and he’s telling us how wonderful Heaven is. How happy everyone is, and how much everyone gets paid. He’s wearing a shiny pair of Aviator shades, and I remember in the dream being frightened and mistrustful and thinking that I didn’t want him to take them off – I NEVER wanted to see what was behind those shades. When I woke up the next morning, my hands felt like two bunches of bananas, and I was running a raging temperature.

  I realise now that this flu, or chest infection or whatever shape it takes now, has been working on me since before Christmas (I write this in Luton Airport while waiting for the gate to open on my flight. People are piling up at the screens in what looks like one of those ‘air traffic controllers strike’ kind of days. Overhead they’re announcing the departures – Geneva, Frankfurt, Glasgow).

  Back home there are serious water shortages and people are queuing at standpipes with drums and lemonade bottles. I’m an anxious traveller at the best of times, but I must confess I’m more worried about going home than I have been for some time – the frozen pipes and pumps and everything else have left me fearful that some damage will have befallen the house in my absence. That it’s so pretty and beloved that we’ll be... punished in some way by natural disorder, fire, burglary or neglect.

  So I’ll be glad to turn the key in the door and hope to find all well. I travel with hope, and with optimism that our new home will welcome me back, will fold me in its arms for a few days of rest and work and comfort before 2011 breaks open its possibilities and its million tasks.

Gerry Rafferty, RIP  PS – As a deliberately irritating repeated joke during the trip to London, I told Andrea and Stephanie every time Baker Street was mentioned ‘oh, I know a song about Baker Street’. So it was constantly in my head over Christmas. And now the world is without Gerry Rafferty, the man who brought us this little slice of rock’n’roll heaven. It’s been a strange time of spooks and fevers and portents and chills.

The final cut - Robert Sellar, 1920-2010

I lost an old friend this week, as the celebrated artist Robert Sellar (right) passed away at the age of 90. His loss puts out a light that has shone brightly for many years.

I met Robert almost as soon as I joined the staff at Flowerfield Arts Centre in 2004. To celebrate the re-opening of the centre after major refurbishment, Robert had donated a copy of every one of his prints to the centre, to be retained as The Robert Sellar Collection. It was an act of huge kindness.

To be honest, I was having a hard time adjusting to the new job. I’d left newspapers, and a world in which everything had to be done right now, to join a world where things might need to be considered for a week or two before action was needed. I had a real struggle making plans for anything that would happen further ahead than next Wednesday.

One morning, about two weeks in, my line manager Malcolm placed a bulky folder on my desk, and said that Coleraine Borough Arts Committee had agreed to fund the Robert Sellar Collection – to have all of the prints professionally mounted and framed and an exhibition put together, complete with a catalogue. My task was to make it happen – seek quotes from framers, printers and designers and make the decisions. And to interview Robert, write the brochure copy and see the whole thing through to completion.

It proved to be my salvation at that time – a project to get involved in while we waited for the building work to be finished. I remember opening the folder and immediately falling in love with the work. Robert was a master printmaker, working in woodcut and linocut, turning out work of incredible precision and style. The best of the work had a nostalgic feel – I had no background in art history, and it just reminded me more than anything else of book illustrations from my childhood. It all seemed wonderfully contained somehow, beautifully composed and perfectly in its own world.

His religious works interested me less, but I know how important they were to him – stained glass windows and illuminations of Bible verses and such. My favourites were the landscapes, illustrations of flora, street scenes and the like.

Putting the exhibition together involved many long interviews with Robert at his home in Castlerock. That was often a longer-than-usual assignation – hours would go by as he adjusted the copy, line by line. This pushed all kinds of buttons for me – only six months before, I would have proof read and edited the copy in a blur of blue pencil, and started typing. Robert had a relaxed approach to urgency, and the catalogue copy went through draft after draft, with literally thousands of corrections and additions before we agreed it for sending to the designer.

The hanging of the exhibition was similarly painstaking. Robert wanted the pictures to unfold like a journey, so they were separated into sections to match the catalogue copy and reflect the major concerns of his life.

Having said all that, we got it right, and when the exhibition opened as part of our festival that year, it was an unqualified success. It sparked a revival of interest in Robert’s work and I hope he and his wife Roberta made a good income from sales of the prints – I know I bought many copies as gifts for friends and relatives, and Andrea and I have three of Robert’s prints in our own collection.

Over 70 works of all descriptions are now in the ownership of Flowerfield Arts Centre, as part of the centre’s permanent collection, and they’re a major testimony to a life of dedication and skilled work.

This is work that endures – a reminder that good art will always outlive the artist, and that’s as it should be, and exactly as Robert would have wanted it. I can’t help thinking that he had this thought in mind as he worked on every one of these pieces, copies of which are now in collections all over the world.

His work is also preserved in stained glass windows in Castlerock Presbyterian Church, where he worshipped for many years. And that serves as an apt use of his gift – allowing his work to illuminate the subject - and let the light through at the same time.

Autumn in Belfast

Andrea and I went out for a walk today through the Botanic Gardens here in Belfast, and found ourselves in the midst of a riot of colour - the expected mellow ochre and red of the leaves was punctuated here and there by the lavender of autumn crocuses, and  in the rose garden there were some fiery blooms. Under a chestnut tree, a harvest of conkers, gleaming like mahogany doorknobs or the little toes of polished shoes. It's the first time I've picked up conkers since I was ten years old, and inexplicably I filled my pockets with handfuls of them and brought them home. They seemed so beautiful it was a shame to just leave them there in the grass, unappreciated. They shine in a basket on the kitchen table now - I like the idea of bringing something of each season indoors. I'm resisting the urge to hammer a nail through the middle and string them up with a shoelace for a quick game. I value these knuckles too much.

One-sided New York conversation

Overheard in the dining concourse of Grand Central Station at 9.30am. An old guy waiting for his train is trying to complete a crossword as the bag lady next to him assaults his ears:

"...To the day I die I’ll never understand it. All those years, working for the Post Office. The man has a good job. A good income. He’s been making good money all these years. He has a nice apartment. But what does he DOOOO with his time? Nothing. Nothing. THAT’S what he does. He has no friends. Making good money at the Post Office ALL. THOSE. YEARS. and he never goes out. He NEVER. GOES. OUT. What is WRONG with a person like that? I’ll never understand it. The man has a good job with the Post Office. You think at his age he would have FRIENDS. He would TRAVEL a little. What does he DOOOO with his time? NOTHING. That’s what he does. I don’t know. All those years, all that money and the man doesn’t even own a decent COAT."

On the buses in NYC

I made use of the buses in New York on a number of occasions because they were cheaper and I wanted to see as much of the city ‘above ground’ as I could. I found out quickly that the bus fare was $2.25, payable in coins to the driver, whereas I worried that going down into the subway I’d get caught on the wrong side of town on the wrong train, or have the wrong token or something. Mistakes on the subway seemed more difficult to put right, for some reason.

I did make one wrong turn. I made my way down to 12^th street to visit the fabulous Strand Books (their motto is ’18 miles of books’ – now that’s the kind of walk I like to take) and was feeling very smug with myself for having successfully caught a New York City bus and actually made it to my destination in the rain. On the way back, I must have taken a wrong turn, and ended up at a 5^th avenue bus stop with a gaggle of young girls – pretty and excited, chattering like birds. One of them asked me for details on where the next bus would go.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m a tourist here.’

‘Oh,’ she said, when she heard my accent. ‘Are you Canadian?’

‘No,  I’m from Ireland.’

‘Wow... so d’you like, speak Scottish?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We speak English in Ireland.’

‘Riiiight,’ she nodded slowly. ‘Okaaaay.’

And with that the bus came. I took a seat and looked out the window as the street names told me a story I didn’t want to hear. I wanted them to say: 13^th street, 14^th street, 15^th street... But instead it was Christopher Street, Bleecker Street... I approached the driver, an enormous guy with a baseball cap and a bored expression.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Is this bus going up towards 42^nd Street?’

He looked out the window and frowned momentarily. ‘Man,’ he said, like he was disappointed in me for even asking. ‘I’m goin’ the whole OTHER direction.’

Beyond the windscreen, signs started appearing for The Holland Tunnel. Tunnels, on the whole, make me panic. Entrance to something like The Holland Tunnel would mean emergence on the other side of something WIDE – ie something that requires a TUNNEL. In this case, the East River.

‘What should I do?’ I asked, feeling my voice rise a few semitones.

‘Get off at the nex stop, walk over to Hudson Street and pick a bus going back this way.’ He jabbed his thumb rearwards and as we hit the next stop, I skipped out onto the pavement and the now pervasive rain. I realised with dull anger that I was now out of quarters and would have to break a ten dollar bill for change somewhere to get back uptown.

Half an hour later, I’m sitting damp and footsore on a bus headed (this time) in the right direction, when a young girl boards the bus with an older man. He’s so painfully skinny and frail looking that I expect his knees to buckle before he reaches the seat, but he makes it, and sits down with a wheeze and she stands before him for a second as the bus pulls away.

From the seat behind me, a very soft and low voice says: ‘Sit down, child...’

It sounds like a vampire. That smooth, insistent tone. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck rise. Nobody hears it but me... ‘Sit down, children,’ the silky voice says quietly, ‘sit down... In every Jim Crow village and town... sit down children, sit down...’

And then there is silence. I’m scared to look around. At the next stop, the unseen figure behind me rises and leaves the bus. And I see that it is a bald man in his mid-60s, wearing a stained white T-shirt straining over a huge belly and a pair of jogging trousers and dirty tennis shoes. He stands in the pouring rain, hatless and coatless, on 8^th Avenue, with a rucksack over one shoulder, peering out at the street under heavy, fleshy brows. He does not look like a healthy person to be around.

A couple of days later, the sun is blazing down and I’m riding the bus up to Central Park. I just want to see the park, really, to lie down on the grass and doze for an hour - and say that I’ve been there. It’s an extraordinary space, this green jewel surrounded by skyscrapers. I’m struck again by the use of public space for something so green and lush. And like so much of the city, it is exactly as you’ve seen it in the movies. Elegant and peopled with New Yorkers on the stroll, or jogging or cycling through, past the hot dog stands and the ice cream vendors as the buildings tower above and yellow cabs flash in and out of sight through the trees.

On the bus back down, though, I get on behind this portly little woman in her late 40s, dressed in a black trouser suit – a black jacket buttoned closed over a pair of black trousers. She has frizzy blond hair spilling out to either side, and a beaky nose. I take a seat, and she remains standing, just behind the driver. As we take off for the long journey down Lexington Avenue to 42^nd street, she grabs hold of two upright handrails on either side, and looks out the window. I realise after a couple of blocks that she is singing quietly to her own reflection. This can be quite common for people wearing earphones, iPods, etc. But she’s not. She's just... singing to her own reflection, holding onto the handrails and occasionally tossing her hair, pouting and frowning and nodding as she delivers the words. It’s a full-on, silent performance to an audience of one. It feels kind of tragic and every time she tosses her hair she reminds me... of Miss Piggy.

Later on the same journey, another woman gets on and sits in the seat closest to the driver and tells him a series of jokes in a German accent, one after the other, without pause, like someone reading a menu to a blind person. And as soon as she finishes each joke she asks the driver if he gets it: ‘...ze priest says no but I hef a good contect for ze weekend you geddit, ja? You understand zis?’ When the bus stops and her jokes are interrupted by people getting on, she pauses and looks up at each of them in silent fury.

To avoid any more unstable people, I decided on the last day to take a Yellow Cab and the driver told me and my companions that he made $5,000 dollars a day as a cab driver. With the average NYC cab fare being something like $12, that’s 416 separate fares a day. At an average of 20 minutes per ride, that works out at a 138-hour day he’s working. If he really believes that, he should be riding the bus.

Hello from the Hudson...

Taxi and bus drivers in New York manage the remarkable feat of combining inch-perfect accuracy and complete insanity – it’s something to behold the bravado of these guys as they edge in front of enormous trucks and buses, squeezing past each other to get in the best position for the next green light. You can almost feel the wing mirrors kissing.

  When the lights change, it’s like six bullfights happening simultaneously – the instant that you think you’re headed for impact, someone steps aside in a split second decision and the yellow cabs go snorting and charging like bulls down the concrete canyons.

  My friend Bob Welch told me years ago: ‘Walking in the streets of New York is exactly like the movies... It’s not like noticing something that looks like a movie. It’s EXACTLY like a movie.’ I had that impression this morning – stepping out of the Port Authority bus terminal with my guitar case and walking across 8^th Avenue. Right across the street is the New York Times office, and when you step across the crosswalk, you walk past five lanes of waiting yellow cabs, trucks and buses while the buildings tower over your head and the seething mass of the city spreads out to either side, honking, wailing and steaming. The sky above is a narrow jagged band of blue between the buildings.

  I’m here for a week, to play three shows a day on stage at Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Station, as guest of Tourism Ireland. The promotion is aimed at giving commuters and visitors a real feel for Northern Ireland – so there are a variety of very impressive stands around the hall, along with speciality stands covering crafts, accommodation, food and drink and so on. And every now and then, I take to the stage with Ben Glover and we play a half hour set, talking a little about the music scene in Northern Ireland.

  The hall is a massive, golden, marbled space, filled with glorious antique chandeliers and vaulted ceilings. A few steps away is the famous main Grand Central Terminal Building, which is just cinematic in its majesty.  Throughout the day THOUSANDS of people pass through this space, and many of them stop for a look around, speak to exhibitors and take away leaflets and business cards. The hope is that we convince them to book a flight and actually come over.

  Our first couple of performances are a little ropey as we try to settle on sound levels and approach – this is an enormously tall marble room, and the acoustics are drenched in echo. Right in front of the stage, though, there are four rows of chairs, and from close range, the sound is pretty good.

  Away from the shows, we’re staying in a lovely hotel in Weehawken, New Jersey – it’s a 20 minute bus ride through the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan, and its windows look across the Hudson River at the most spectacular skyline in the world – the lights of downtown New York. There are a couple of nice places to eat in the neighbourhood, and even after one day, we’re all pretty assured of our methodology for getting to and from our destination.

  Having made a trip on Friday night out to Larchmont to visit Andrea’s brother and his family, I arrive back in Grand Central and start walking down 42^nd street towards the Port Authority terminal – and I discover Bryant Park.

  Every town planner in the world should be brought to somewhere like Bryant Park, to see what can be achieved with green spaces in city centres. By night, the park (adjacent to the New York Public Library) is illuminated from on high by a bank of powerful spotlights on top of the MetLife building that shine down through the gently swaying canopy of trees. The central green is dotted with tables and chairs, where people sit and drink coffee or chat. In the dim cloisters around the edge, lovers smooch among the leaf shadows. There are a couple of ping pong tables, a beautiful fountain and a poster for Tai Chi classes. All around, the skyscrapers form a surrounding palisade studded with lights, and on the margins, the cabs and the trucks thunder past. It’s a remarkable space, made up of light, shadow, water, space and stillness in the midst of frantic motion. One that radiates tranquillity and civic pleasure.

  And from there to the bus station and onward to Weehawken, where the boats in the Lincoln Harbor Marina tinkle and rock together gently. More in the next few days.

Sand and water

Castlerock beach – We’ve been living in the city for the last six months, and it was – unbelievably – the first chance in all that time that the pair of us got to walk on a beach on the north coast, something we used to do two or three times a week when we lived up there.

  I’d forgotten how big the sky can be, when you’re at the edge of the world like that. The enormity of the space as you look out to the ocean and realise that there is nothing out there between you and... Iceland in that direction, and Newfoundland that way.

  The clouds were piled up enormously high, bruised and backed up all the way to Donegal, where you could see bands of rain and sunshine moving across the terrain, the little white houses on the hillsides picked out as the sun came and went, like sheets flapping on distant washing lines.

  It’s been a weekend of huge contrasts - my daughter and I went to see the mighty Wilco in concert on Friday night, in a densely packed marquee in Custom House Square in the centre of Belfast. It was a balmy evening, a feeling of damp, warm late summer, with hundreds of people milling around outside the bars after the shows making all kinds of wow noises, vendors selling T shirts and thai food and handing out leaflets for the other weekend gigs.

  And the next day Andrea and I are driving on the north coast and we drive into rain that you can actually see up ahead, like a curtain strung across the road, a wall of broken glass falling and hitting the windscreen so hard that you have to slow right down and put on your headlights. You come out the other side like emerging from a tunnel of water, to rainbows and bright sizzling air. Welcome to Ireland.

  And in between there is the beach and the ocean, the width and height and the glitter of it all entering you again, filling a space you hadn’t even realised was empty.

Toronto without an agenda

August 12 - In the early 80s, Sir Peter Ustinov was asked for his impressions of Toronto and came up with a wonderful description – he said it was like New York, run by the Swiss. He was remarkably on the button; the city has all of the glamour and sprawl of the Big Apple, but it’s cleaner and less chaotic, and the people are much more polite. If New York City is a mad cab ride, Toronto runs on rails.

  My introduction to the city comes via a couple of Andrea’s friends who have offered us the use of their apartment while they go up country for a couple of days. Lots of Canadian city families have cottages – usually modest wooden cabins, near water, somewhere in one of the many wildernesses that are still left in Canada. The cottages are always stuffed with all the blankets and sheets and paperbacks that you wear out at your city home. Most of them are filled with 70s or 80s items, and mismatched furniture and crockery. It’s not out of place to open the cupboard and find souvenir mugs from ‘Vancouver Expo 86’, and drawers full of old holiday T shirts, shelves full of Dick Francis and Len Deighton thrillers. It’s all very charming and relaxing – you pull on one of those old T shirts and a pair of Bermuda shorts and your sandals and immediately feel at home.

  Toronto is hot and humid – we’re staying at Davisville, and our seven minute walk to the subway station leaves us both bathed in sweat. Thankfully the subway trains are air conditioned. We climb up above ground at Bloor and Yonge and the morning heat is like having a pre-heated electric blanket draped across your head and shoulders. Yonge – at 1,178 miles, the world’s longest street, is the central spine of the city, running up the middle of the grid. Every street that crosses Yonge goes west to east, so St. George Street East becomes St. George Street West, and so on. People talk about stores being on the south or north side of the street. I find this a little difficult to follow, but most Torontonians seem to instinctively know at any time where they are in relation to Lake Ontario, which forms the  southern limit of the city. I like this – the relationship of the city to a natural body of water.

  (on the train into Toronto, we pull alongside Lake Ontario, which is like staring at the ocean. It’s so vast you can’t see any end to the coastline to the east or west. The horizon is enormously wide and flat – like the Atlantic)

  I have no agenda at all for Toronto. I’m here to follow Andrea around as she reconnects with her past. She was a student here, and we visit the very pretty campus of the University of Toronto, where she and her brother Ian both studied. We also have plans to meet some of her friends for coffee. Some people that she hasn’t seen in fifteen years. Reunited thanks to the glories of Facebook. Strolling under the trees at Trinity college, I’m struck by how English it all looks. You can tell that they wanted to create their own little version of Oxford. And to be fair they have made a wonderful job of it. More interesting, though, is Massey College, a 70s style building that borrows from the zen stillness of oriental forms and works on clean, angular shapes with wide panes of glass overlooking water features and lawns.

  From there we walk on into downtown Toronto, and a familiar vista opens up of skyscrapers, designer label shopping, construction, endless traffic, honking cab drivers and thousands of pedestrians. It’s great to have the smell and racket of the city after two weeks in the woods and we soak up the coffee shops and the bustle.

  To be honest, our time here is brief (one and a half days), and with Andrea lined up for several meetings both informal and formal, we manage to stroll a little and relax. At one point, I instal myself in BMV Books on Bloor Street for an hour and a half while the old friends catch up on 15 years. It’s a heartache – they have some wonderful stuff at wonderful prices, but my suitcase is already so stuffed I know there’s no way I can make room for more.

  They’ll all have to wait for next time – maybe I’ll bring a book suitcase...

Monday night at the Tranzac

August 10 - I’m delighted to have a gig in Toronto, but I don’t think I’m being unfair to the Tranzac Club when I say that it could use a little makeover.

  The Tiki Room at the Tranzac (which stands for ‘Toronto Australia and New Zealand Club’) is painted a dull brown and dotted with incongruously gaily painted tables and chairs. It reminds me of one of those stuffy meeting rooms you see in British Legion clubs and parochial halls all over Ireland.

  Inside, the sweet-natured bundle of talent that is Kyp Harness (left) is tuning up. Kyp is one of the city’s remarkable writers (he’s Ron Sexsmith’s favourite songwriter). He has written some remarkable songs, providing material along the way for Blue Rodeo and picking up all kinds of nice comments from Daniel Lanois, Leonard Cohen and many others.

  Someone has kindly left out a PA system and two speakers for us, but there are no microphones, cables or mic stands. There’s a pull-down screen on the wall behind us which won’t pull back up. And there’s an ancient piano that even smells out of tune.

  We decide to perform completely unplugged. And that’s kind of nerve wracking. Onlookers never have any idea how much songwriters love to hide behind a mic stand.

  We’re strumming at the empty corners to see what the room sounds like and the first of the audience arrive. Billed as an ‘open mic’ night, there seem to be no other takers but me – and I’ve brought my own crowd, which consists of our hosts in the city, Pat Thompson and John Brewin. I realise it’s a little unfair to Kyp – there’s a large number of people in the room with Andrea connections who want to hear if her boyfriend is actually talented or not. I shake hands and assess them all for forgiveness potential.

  My friend Laura Adlers arrives – Laura (left) handles PR for a host of classical events in the city, and has kindly put the word out to a host of her friends. She has one in tow tonight – Phil, who I later find out is part of a punk trio that wear charity shop ‘dead guy suits’ on stage and call themselves The Parkdale Hookers. I like him already. (I checked out their website, and here’s how they describe themselves: ‘We can best be described as AntiGlam… We’re like a trio of accountants who figured out a way to make Marshall stacks tax deductible and went with it’.)

  Also here for the show is Joanne Sleightholm and her husband Blair – their daughter Madeleine is one of my songwriter friends from Nashville, but hails originally from Toronto. Isn’t it a small world? So small that, as we chat, we find out Madeleine needs a place to stay in Belfast in February of next year, so our spare room suddenly becomes her pad for the week.

  Kyp starts proceedings with the excellent ‘God’s Footstool’ and continues with a rash of great material – ‘Little Dog Song’, ‘Old Grey House’, ‘Chemical Valley’ and many more. Behind me, I can sense a lot of school reunion nerves in the room. People are dying to chat and connect after so many years apart.

  I don’t help by going on stage and stealing another forty minutes of their time, in what has now become stifling heat (when I sit down later, I find that I have sweat patches on the knees of my trousers, and that’s just weird).

  But the reaction is great – people seem to appreciate the stories and the extra context that I give with the song introductions, and the hit of the evening is undoubtedly the new song ‘East of Louise’, which also garnered a cheer at the Black Sheep. It’s great when songs from the NEXT album make an early connection like that.

  An unusual thing happens – a late arrival to the show brings a guitar with him. It’s Jowi Taylor, a friend of Pat and John’s, and in his case is the most amazing guitar I’ve ever seen. I could spend pages talking about this instrument, but here’s the short version: The guitar (called ‘Le Voyageur’) has been made from 64 individual pieces of Canadian history.

  From the beautiful book that documents the creation and celebration of the instrument: ‘Pierre Trudeau’s canoe paddle is in the tone bar, Paul Henderson’s hockey stick is part of the pickguard, and the sacred golden spruce of Haida Gwaii forms the soundboard. Even Maurice ‘Rocket’ Richard’s first Stanley Cup ring is in the Voyageur – a small piece of it adorns the 9^th fret.’ Jowi has taken the guitar all over Canada to bring it to the nation – his website and book Six String Nation give more details on the story at www.sixstringnation.com.

  Both Kyp and I take turns playing the instrument, which has also been played by everyone from Feist and Gordon Lightfoot to Ron Sexsmith, Justin Rutledge and The Wailin’ Jennys. And then everyone in the room wants a try, wants to get their picture taken with the guitar. And why not? It has everything built in there – even a piece of the floor from Jack London’s cabin, for crying out loud.

  As everyone lines up for pictures and a quick strum (see right, Jowi and I), I realise that friendship and a shared sense of pride and history have transformed this airless brown little room into a real space where hearts and minds meet. Thanks Jowi.

  After the show, we retire (Andrea, her friends and I) to the Futures Bakery on the corner, where she and they re-connect until the owners throw us out.