Mary Pat Kelly talks to Phil Coulter, one of Derry’s most famous sons.
Often during the years of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, when the”end of the day” brought political conversation, someone would sing PhilCoulter’s “The Town I Loved So Well.” And if the singer was from Derry they knew, too, “the gas yard wall” where soldiers had replaced school boys playing ball. Though very specific to Derry, Coulter’s words and melody somehow give voice to the contradiction of pain and resilience, fatalism, and hope and the kind of rueful defiance that marks the people of the North.
Now in these days when the peace wished for in the song is holding, it seems only right that the two men who have risked so much in its service, John Hume and Gerry Adams, would sing it together at the White House on St.Patrick’s Day.
Phil Coulter since writing the song has achieved international fame as singer/songwriter and entertainer, his Tranquility albums have sold millions, and his latest: American Tranquility, is currently topping the Billboard charts.
Irish America: How did you come to write the song?
Phil Coulter: The song came out of comparing the Derry that I grew up in and the Derry that was then emerging. I was on a number of civil rights marches. I saw baton charges by the police. I saw people getting hosed down with water cannons. I saw old women cowering in shopfronts. I saw the riot squad beating people mercilessly over the head just because they happened to be in the street, and I thought: “Jesus Christ, these are the streets I grew up in, what’s going on here?” Writing “The Town I Loved So Well” helped me to come to terms with the trauma all around me.
I was producing the Dubliners at the time, and it wasn’t by accident that I chose Luke Kelly, the lead singer, to record the song. Not only did he have fire in the belly and a great voice, but he had great integrity as well. So as I was formulating the song in my mind I could hear Kelly’s voice. ButKelly was a real hard-nose. It took a lot to move him.
We were in England in a very tacky hotel room on a wet Monday. He sat on one twin bed, and I sat on the other with the guitar, and I played “TheTown I Loved So Well” with my eyes closed. I was afraid to see his reaction. When I finished, I looked and there were tears in his eyes, and I thought: “Oh well, this song is right.”
IA: What’s it like for you when you sing?
PC: Sometimes I find it a bit draining. For example two nights before the Carnegie Hall concert I played in Long Island. There was a big contingent from Derry. As I was making my exit after “Steal Away” I could hear them shouting “Up Derry,” “Up the Lackey Road.” Shouting the specific places, where they came from. So when I came to sing “The Town I Loved So Well” I was actually choking up. Those streets were all coming up in front of me. I really thought I wasn’t going to get through the song. I’ve sung it now forCrown Princesses of Japan, and I’ve sung it for Presidents of the U.S., butthat night was just something. And of course singing it in Derry is another thing. It’s always hard to get through it in Derry. Ghosts just come out of the wood-work. It’s harder for me to give a concert in Derry than to playCarnegie Hall. People’s expectations are so high, that I am always afraid to let them down.
IA: What part exactly of Derry did you grow up in?
PC: When you come over the bridge from the waterside to the cityside, turn left up Abercorn Road. The big building at the end of the bridge was the Henderson Shirt Factory. That’s where the shirt factory horn came from in “The Town I Loved So Well.” A horn went off at ten to eight to let the girls working there know they should be getting in. Another horn would sound at eight o’clock when they were supposed to start work. I would see all the girls scurrying down to the shirt factories to work because the ten-to-eight hooter was the one that would wake us at home. My mother didn’t work therebut most guys’ mums would have worked in the shirt factory or their sisters or aunts. Most of my classmates at St. Columb’s College had someone who worked there.
IA: Could you talk a little about St. Columb’s and the people who graduated from there?
PC: People often ask how the likes of John Hume, Brian Friel, SeamusHeaney, and Seamus Deane all emerged from that one place over a 10-year period. Those who don’t know Derry think that it was some kind of elite school. It was the only school. St. Columb’s was our awakening. We passed exams and went on to university, that was a first.
IA: Would you talk a little about this attachment Derry people have to their city?
PC: Derry people have a great sense of the Derryness, a great sense of pride in their town. We never really had that naked sectarian hatred that Belfast had. It was softer. Though we had some pretty dark hours, I’m not saying we had it easy, but the kind of mindless savagery found in other places was always missing in Derry.
I lived in an area where there were only three Catholic families. The kids I played with in the street would have been Protestant. So on the 12th of July, I was gathering up the wood for their bonfire. And then on the 15th of August would be the big Catholic ritual, and we’d be gathering in another part of the neighborhood, for that bonfire. My parents never instilled any feelings of bitterness.
The people of Northern Ireland are very special. They have a great resilience that has allowed them to live through some very dark hours. Even in my own crew, I always have a Northern Protestant because they’re great people, great workers, very diligent, and very reliable. You can’t exclude them from any scenario. They are very much a part of what makes Northern Ireland.
I can fully understand the fears of decent, ordinary, God-fearing Protestants in the North. They feel the ground is shifting so fast. You cannot disregard those people. These are good people, they are the people who make Northern Ireland what it is. I do a reading called “The Man From God Knows Where” in my set. The story comes from the 1798 Rebellion. The whole monologue is about one of the United Irishmen, a group formed largely byNorthern Presbyterians.
IA: You seem to want to move beyond stereotypes in your choice of music, also. Classic Tranquility made me hear songs that had become almost too familiar, differently.
PC: There are songs that maybe people don’t have enough respect for because they have been around for so long. And they have been sung by drunken men at weddings. I thought: “We’ll strip all that away and treat these songs with a bit of dignity.” Give the melody a space to breathe. Let the songs come through, and these beautiful airs emerged. Simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve in any art form.
I’m doing the same thing in my American Tranquility album. “Carry Me Back to Old Virginie,” “Shenandoah,” these are big tunes — big melodies, but people don’t have enough regard for them, because they’ve known them for so long.
When I announce “Shenandoah,” I say, “Just close your eyes, and imagine back to a time when this country opened its arms and opened its hearts to immigrants. Many of them from Ireland fleeing from deprivation, disease and death.” And I say, “Just listen to this music, and imagine those days, and imagine those covered wagons heading westward.” It’s one of those big songs, it has that wide open expanse.
IA: And yet your roots remain.
PC: In the Town Museum in Derry there are quotes that refer to different periods of Derry history. The first is a quote from St. Columba, which was the founding of the town. And then there is a quote from William of Orange about taking Derry the Maiden City. And then there is a quote from Karl Marx about the shirt factories in Derry. And then there is “The Town I Loved So Well.” [Laughing]. When I saw that I thought, my mother would turn in her grave if she saw this. She’d be all for me to be in company with St. Columba, but as for William of Orange and Karl Marx?! But that is Derry — The Town I Love So Well!
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the May/June 1995 issue of Irish America. ♦
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