Travelling back from the brink

Liam Collins meets Christy Moore, who has broken his musical and spiritual silence after three long years 'It is a matter of frustration to me that the first man I talk to doesn't know any of the songs on the album - it frustrates to me, in fact I'm f**kin' ragin' about it" growls Christy Moore.

We're coming at this from two different perspectives. He wants to talk about his music and is deeply disturbed that I haven't spent enough time listening to the songs that make up his new album Traveller. What I want to talk about is Christy Moore, to find out where he's been these last three years, when the dream went wrong, why he retreated from the world and why he is now back performing live.

As for the music, I've listened to it, marvelled at it over the years, seen the Grand Canyon listening to Ride On, stood enthralled in the Dome in Tralee as he held several thousand rollicking fans in the palm of his hand.

Later when I listen to the tape I can hear the clinking of glasses, the sounds of children playing, background lounge-music with a piper lamenting Carrickfergus. But as we sat facing each other I was so gripped by the intensity of those softly spoken words and the unflinching eyes that all of these distractions were wiped away and I heard nothing but the voice and the passion and sometimes the anger.

Christy Moore believes that all we ever want to talk about is the drink, his political views, the same old stuff. But in reality the drink didn't come up and politics was peripheral, we talked about a wide range of things.

And mostly we got on well. "Anyway," he said after that 'raging' exchange, "apart from that little outburst I am really enjoying this." Here is a man who -appears to have it all. Yet teenage suicide, the way we denigrate refugees and the perversion of progress all gouge deeply into his head.

What comes out afterwards are songs about Ann Lovett, The Stardust, or the pained Lovely Young One on Traveller, which he wrote after receiving a letter from a mother detailing the anguish of her daughter's suicide.

"I am 54 now and I can understand why suicide is rising. I can. Because the world is becoming a terrible, terrible place," he says. The dark vision, the depths to which he takes these themes and the seriousness with which he approaches his work have taken their toll, leading to a complete mental breakdown three years ago. Even as he describes it in a hotel lounge on a Sunday morning, he gets what he calls "jittery".

But it would be wrong to portray Christy Moore as all serious and driven. He can also be humourous - and very perceptive.

At one stage when the tape was turned off I was telling him about seeing Planxty all those years ago. "Where"? he asked. The County Hall, Mullingar in the mid 1970's I reply. "Sunday night, small crowd", he shot back immediately.

Later he noticed as I wrote in shorthand in my notebook "remembers County Hall Mullingar 30 years ago". He looked at it and said: "You missed the story - Sunday night, small crowd." He was right.

It was a year ago that he began edging towards what was to become his latest album and a series of concerts in Vicar Street in Dublin.

"It started off with this guy (Leo Pearson, a friend of his son). We decided to try a song together. I went down to his house and sang Tell It To Me, then we decided to try a few more, I had fun with it. I would say it's the most enjoyable album I have done since 1986.

He becomes slightly defensive when we talk about promoting the album and the abrupt end to his earlier involvement in Vicar Street. It was to be a joint venture between business-man Harry Crosbie and the singer, but Moore still refuses to give his side of the story when asked how their partnership ended.

Did the difficulty contribute to the breakdown and the three years' silence that has only now ended? "Ah, no, it was a different thing altogether," he answers. "I had a complete breakdown. When I actually put out that statement (cancelling his major Irish tour in 1997), the way I was feeling at that time - I actually felt that I would never play again, because I couldn't play at that time. I had a complete breakdown and couldn't do anything for quite a long time. It happened very quickly, it happened as if I was talking to you now and I had a breakdown it hit me like that. I can remember the day, I can remember the time, I can remember the place. That year, 1997, was a mad year and when it was all over I arrived home, and I was home about four days and everything fell asunder.

"I don't know what it was. I haven't drawn any conclusions. I knew when I got home I was tired and I hit the ground running and was straight into various things; there was another big tour looming, I was supposed to be home for Christmas and then start a 60-day Irish tour which was all sold out."

The actual experience is something that still haunts him, because he remembers it with such clarity.

We get back to the subject of his new album, dedicated to his late father Andy. It opens with Urgency Culture, more a poem than a song, setting out Moore's bleak vision of Irish life. No sooner had he done that than he moves back in time to the old Planxty standard Raggle Taggle Gypsy, but without losing the modern feel of the music.

"My son had a group of friends. One of them was a guy called Leo Pearson and I went to hear him. I liked his stuff and he had never heard what I did before. He was interested so we decided to try and do one of them together and what he delivered was really beautiful.

"It was his feeling for the songs, for the spirit of the songs, for the lyrics of the songs. I don't know ... to me it was just - he had as much empathy with the songs that Planxty had 25 years ago." They did three of the songs, and then when it began to turn into an album they went over to Christy's house. "It was brilliant to be working with Leo because he had no baggage from the music world I was in; he didn't know anything about it or didn't care anything about it; he just loved the lyrics.

"I've a room just down the garden and he came down and he set up all his boxes there and so the whole thing basically was recorded in the garden. You see, it's all different now; you don't have to go to recording studios anymore."

Quoting the album's first powerful track Urgency Culture, he speaks of "the holocaust of silence" and Irish society's condition as a "hot bed of nothing." Is that not a very depressing vision of a country where we have never had had it so good, I ask.

HE explains: "It is reality, absolute reality, it is my reality. There is an emptiness in all this. The way I feel about it is expressed in the few lines of that song. 'The violence of apathy' - those were words that were spoken to me; 'the holocaust of silence' was spoken to me by a man who works with deprived families and children in Limerick and 'the violence of apathy' was a man who works with homeless children in Brazil and the images of that song have come from different people I have been talking to.

"In this society that you are talking about, where we seem to have more and more and more, there are other people, voiceless people, who have less. This frenzy, this building frenzy we are in at the moment, you know - it is more important to get the building up than to take care. I feel the whole country is like that. Traveller is about that, the loss of spirituality in Irish life." Moore harks back to an era when we had less but seem to enjoy ourselves more.

So we have three songs from an illiterate travelling man, John Reilly, who he met in Boyle in 1961. And he sings Rocky Road for the first time. It is granted, because its always been around.

Christy Moore is a bit like that himself. He has always been around, singing about the way we were, but more importantly defining the way we are today. So when he sings, "Mile failte my arse" - his summing up of a lot of the attitudes of prosperous modern Ireland - then perhaps it is time for us to take notice.

Copyright 1999
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