Songs from the heart and soul of a Nenagh man
Some of the finest singers the world over have performed the songs of the renowned Nenagh born songwriter Brendan Graham, yet the man himself seldom gets in front of a mic to perform publicly.
But now all that is about to change as the composer of the lyrics of You Raise Me Up, a worldwide hit for Westlife and Josh Groban, and one of the most successful and frequently sung songs of the 21st century, is set to take to the stage himself.
Graham, the creator of songs performed by artistes all over the globe, disparagingly brands himself as a mere “talk singer”. He says it was “a relief” to him to discover many years ago that he was just the writer. He left the hardest job of facing audiences to deliver his work to “real singers”.
Yet the truth is that Graham can sing - beautifully and movingly. While he might not be a Josh Groban, a Sean Keane or a Caruso, his delivery comes from the heart and it all sounds soulful and lovely.
We’re sitting in the studio of his magnificent natural stone-built home chiselled into a hillside above Lough Mask near the village of Finny in County Mayo. He opens his laptop and presses a button to play Sleepsong, the hit for the Norwegian band, Secret Garden, for which he wrote the lyrics. But now it’s the lilting of Brendan voice that comes from the speakers of the computer, and his rendition gives the lie to his claim that he can’t sing.
Of the man who wrote two Eurovision Song Contest winners, Rock n’ Roll Kids (1994) and The Voice (1996), the points of the Nenagh Guardian jury for his singing are high ones.
At 78, maybe it’s about time that this Nenagh native revealed to the world his own fine voice. And, as if by coincidence, the gods are calling time. Because this coming January, Brendan is going to sing one of his own compositions for the very first time with full backing from the Irish Symphony Orchestra during two nights of performances of his songs hosted by the National Concert Hall in Dublin.
“It’s my big fear of failure moment,” he confesses. “I hope the audience will be forgiving.”
“What are you going to sing?” I enquire. And then he’s back on his laptop calling up yet another of his creations. Everything about this second song is perfect. The melody, the lyrics and his own understated yet emotional delivery almost has me in tears. It’s a love song called ‘I Want to Go to Venice’ and audiences who get to hear him perform it during the National Concert Hall events being staged on January 20-21 are in for a real treat.
Joining Graham will be an amazing lineup of some of the country’s finest performers who will sing numbers composed by the Nenagh native, including Eurovision winners Eimear Quinn, along with Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan as well as Sean Keane, Cathy Jordan, Camille O’ Sullivan and many more. The performances will be streamed live worldwide.
CHALLENGE
To be brave enough, eventually, to perform in front of a crowd while at the same time declaring “I’m not a singer” is a big personal challenge. But for the last number of years, and as he gets older, the challenge to put himself in the same shoes as those who performed his songs has nagged. “I just wanted to put myself [out there],” he says eventually. “I thought I would just put myself on the line.”
Indeed, not only will he brave the spotlight of the critics in the post-Christmas concerts, but he reveals that his 80th birthday present to himself in 2025 will be a completed album on which he will perform a series of his own songs. “They will be different types of songs, more reflective on life, which is something we do as we get older,” he says. “I have already done rough demos on a number of them, and I will decide whether I will inflict them on the public, or not.”
He’s a harsh critic of his own singing, but based on what this interviewer heard it’s ripe time he switched off such negative and unjustified inner dialogue.
NENAGH ROOTS
Graham was born in a nursing home in Summerhill, Nenagh, in February 1945. His father, a Dubliner who came to town to take up his first job as a banker in the National Bank, was a highly talented rugby player who captained Nenagh Ormond to a Munster Junior Cup win in 1935 and played a major role in the club’s Mansergh Cup win in 1938.
Bank staff back then had to move every four years, and though the family subsequently lived in towns such as Portarlington, Castleisland and Ballinsaloe, Graham always returned to Nenagh over the years to visit his aunts, the Whelan sisters, who were older siblings of his mother, Gertie.
Gertie was the youngest daughter of former Nenagh Guardian staff member, Jimmy Whelan, who spent over six decades working as a reporter with this newspaper and lived right into his 90s.
The family had a provisions and sweet shop at Bank Place, managed by three aunts who were all single.
When as an infant his mother was struck down with a prolonged illness, Graham was sent back from Portarlington to Nenagh to be in the care of his aunts, a period from which he still holds fond memories.
NANCY
Brendan recalls: “My aunt Nancy was my godmother and she stood in the role of my mother for quite some time. Nancy was extraordinarily good and kind to me and if any of my other aunts were giving out she would always stand up for me. She taught me how to waltz on the big flagstones in the kitchen at the back of the shop.”
The aunts had a brother, Darius, who was working in Dublin, and his trips back home were always a highlight for Brendan. “He had a bike with a little saddle in the front on the crossbar and he used to bring me off to Dromineer.”
Brendan recalls how Whelan’s shop used to enjoy great business from the Rialto Cinema situated just 50 yards away. “There was no shop in the cinema and when there was an interval in the film all the crowd would make a mad rush down to the shop. They’d be fellas looking to buy three Woodbines and others wanting sweets. My aunts sold Bon Bons which they wrapped in the Nenagh Guardian, so those who bought them could read the death notices while sucking their sweets.”
MUSIC
The music and song talent seemed to come from his father’s side of the family. His paternal grandfather, a judge of several athletics events at the London Olympics in 1908, was a member of a barbershop quartet. Brendan also had an aunt, Ethna Barror, who was a founder and director of the renowned Lindsay Singers who performed on BBC and were all-conquering in choir competitions.
Each Christmas Ethna organised a Christmas concert in her home in Dublin for her extended family, where it was mandatory for young and old to perform regardless of talent. This rubbed off on Brendan and he purchased his first guitar at the age of 16. “I had long dark hair. I thought I was Elvis reincarnated,” he laughs.
He eventually qualified as an engineer and worked in private industry here and in England and Australia where he juggled full time jobs with performing in small bands in the 1960s. His songwriting career kicked off in 1968 when a number, Fr Dickens, which he had written on a red serviette over the course of a lunch in a restaurant in London, ended up as one of the most highly praised songs on an album released by Johnny McEvoy. “That was the spur to keep writing,” he says. And as they say, folks, the rest is history.
Fifty-five years on, Graham seems as enthusiastic and as prolific as ever. He has just finished collaborating with singer Cathy Jordan on a soon to be released new album featuring his songs titled, Story Book – The songs of Brendan Graham. The songs featured on the album include the aforementioned Sleepsong - a lullaby composed for his youngest daughter written the night before she left for Australia - and Curcán na bPáiste, a heart-wrenching song inspired by an unconsecrated burial ground for unbaptised children situated near the songwriter’s home in the Maamtrasna mountains.
BRENDAN AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS
“The truly special songs write us, we don’t write them. We don’t find them, they find us.”
The words of the famous songwriter Brendan Graham who is attempting to explain to The Guardian the creative “space” he has had to find over many decades to create his greatest songs.
“I have learned to keep out of the way, let the song write itself, he says. “I am grateful to be merely the conduit, an accident of time and place, through which something - I don’t fully understand - is given voice and is heard.”
In his home with the half-door on a mountainside overlooking Lough Mask, Graham says he most times only manages to tap into his creativity when “it’s really quiet”.
“I could start at 10 in the night, and, if it’s going well, I’ll go through to five or six in the morning.
“I find the atmosphere in the dark and the mood and the lake more conducive to the way I work. Landscape influences me.
“I often leave the half door open at night when I’m working to let in the spirits of the night that are going by.
So, I suppose, I’m getting myself into a space…I need solitude, silence and stillness. Then stuff happens, but I don’t analyse it too much.
“I don’t know how I get into the space, but I know it when I’m there in it.
“Then the next day you’d look at the thing and ask, ‘where did that come from - it doesn’t sound like me’.
“I don’t know what the answer to that is, except that you’re open to thoughts, feelings, energies.
“And I know when I’ve been in that space while writing that the song is going to connect with someone else. Because we’re all connected in some sort of Super Soul, or whatever one wants to call it.
“So, when I see posts about my songs on Youtube from someone in China or the Far East saying ‘this song means so much to me’. . . I kind of know in advance that that’s going to happen with particular types of songs.”
BEST COMPLIMENT
Graham says the best compliment he ever received as a songwriter was from woman he had never met before who came up to him in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin many years ago to talk about one of his songs. “She said to me, ‘you must have known what was in my head when you wrote that song.’ And I knew exactly what she meant, that this connection was made with her through something I had written on my own somewhere.
“I’m amazed to see how my songs crop up all over the world. It's weird, and that’s the buzz side of it. I appreciate that it’s a gift I’ve been given and that I don’t own it.”
OTHER ASPECT
All of the above is the creative side of songwriting that Graham loves very much, but he says there’s also a clinical aspect. “When I finish the creative end I’ll put that all out of my head and become the listener and I’ll go back through every line, every word, every chord, every note and say ‘is this right for this song’ – that process can be a right pain in the butt. But I used to send songs out very quickly in the old days and I’d regret it later.”
He says that as a songwriter one can never forget that one is in “the music business”. So, for example, if some individual or organisation phones up out of the blue and orders a song for an imminent special occasion you just have to deliver, prono. “I have written Christmas songs in Tenerife, which is hard when you’re in sandals and shorts,” he laughs.
A sign over the door of Graham’s publishers in London keeps him grounded in terms of the business side of songwriting. ‘Don’t bore us - get to the chorus’, it states.
“There’s a great deep truth in that, because people listen backwards when they first hear a song. They hear the chorus first - the hook - and if they like that they’ll ask, ‘what’s this song about?’”