August 28, 1991
The Songs of the Singing Horsemen
By Paddy Woodworth
Paddy Woodworth talks to Jimmy MacCarthy, whose long-awaited first album has just been released, about Celtic images, training horses and the joy of getting something finished.
BETWEEN horses and courses, Jimmy MacCarthy’s first album has been a long time coming. Eleven years ago to the month, Mulligan records released his first single, “Miles of Eyes”. The record got good air-play, sold respectably and extended his reputation, even then becoming established in popular music circles as a singer-songwriter with, in both senses of the phrase, a distinctive voice.
‘I can’t deny that I have been difficult, the poor misfortunes who encountered me in those times would lose their brains if I did’
There have been other singles since, and countless sessions, with and without the company of major bands like De Dannan, with whom he most recently played a guest spot at the summer session at College Green. Above all, there has been a constant flow of first-class songs, which stand proud among the best work of several leading Irish artists: “No Frontiers” for Mary Black, “Ride On” for Christy Moore, “Ancient Rain” for Mary Coughlan, to name but three of the best-known.
And all this time, “Jimmy’s first album” was the object of speculation, sometimes motivated by genuine concern to see a significant talent realise his full potential, sometimes driven, as the years rolled past, by a knowing cynicism.
This week “The Song of the Singing Horseman” (also released by Mulligan) stands in the shops, and in the Irish Top Ten, in all its finished glory. It features top-notch musicians ranging from Davy Spillane on uileann pipes to Adele O’Dwyer on cello. Some of the songs have long been familiar to MacCarthy’s fans, others are brand new. The sometimes obscure but always haunting imagery of his lyrics unites them in a single context, MacCarthy says he chose these particular songs, out of the wide pool of his work, “because they define my idea of what the Irish psyche is, incorporating the universal aspects of contemporary popular music, while clinging to the traditional lyrical and melodic flavours of this country.”
Jimmy MacCarthy is the first to admit that bringing this album to birth was far from easy, for himself or anyone else. Even when it seemed to be finished, you see, it still lacked the title track, though MacCarthy himself didn’t know that at the time.
“I thought we had it all recorded, but I knew we hadn’t got a cover design, or an overall title. I was at the Jack B. Yeats exhibition in the National Gallery, and I saw this painting of a white man riding a yellow horse, singing to a blue sky. When I read the title, “The Singing Horseman”, I said to myself ‘that’s it, that’s the cover and the title, because it ties in with all the equestrian images in the songs’. When I got out to the door of the gallery, I realised something else: ‘that’s not only the title,’ I said to myself, ‘that’s also a song’. So I wrote it.”
He also went back into the studio to record it, complete with a 20-piece choir, by far the most ambitious arrangement on the whole album. Yet again, his backers had to hold their breath. So is his reputation for being difficult to deal with justified?
He smiles charmingly and relaxes back in his chair: “As you can see for yourself, it’s a complete myth … No, I can’t deny that I have been difficult, the poor misfortunates who encountered me in those times would lose their brains if I did. But I came to terms with difficult aspects of myself through doing this album. Since it’s been finished, I’ve put on a load of weight and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I’m already all fired up for the next album, composing ideas for it.”
So will he, at last, go on a big national tour and give his career the promotional push that many people believe it both needs and deserves?
“Absolutely. The problem has always been that, unless you had an album out, you were a nobody on the road. I want to let my album breathe for a little while, then I’ll go out on my own to test the water, and if it’s OK we’ll put a little ensemble together. I’ve no reservations about gig gigs. I’ll do as many as possibloe. I love performing.”
That love goes back to his schooldays, when he formed a rock band with his brother, Dan, at the age of 12, and performed in a glorified hamburger joint known as the Shambles. But another love came his way, and nearly seduced him altogether. In his teens he abandoned the Cork city junior rock ‘n’ roll circuit for Vincent O’Brien’s training acres in Tipperary. He rode Sir Ivor (“but only on the day he was taken off to stud”), exercised Nijinsky, and became an apprentice trainer at Newmarket. A shattered femur left him back in the Bons hospital in Cork: “six months in traction during the best summer weather I can remember.”
At the age of 19 the horses were behind him as a career, but they remain a passionate hobby – and a source of the images for some of his best songs:
True you ride the finest horse
I have ever seen
Standing sixteen-one or -two
With eyes wild and green
And you ride the horse so
Well
Hands light to the touch
And I could never go with
You
No matter how I wanted to
[from “Ride On”]
Unlike many songwriters, Jimmy MacCarthy is more than willing to discuss the meaning of his imagery. After his gigs, punters often engage him in lengthy conversations.
“Occasionally the questions are absurd, but it’s quite remarkable how often people are bang on the button. I like the idea that the song isn’t over when I’ve finished singing it, that the mystery created keeps people thinking, it means they have an active part to play in the process. I think of it like painting, there are always new details which emerge in these conversations.”
The imagery of “Ride On” is relatively straightforward. “The Bright Blue Rose” is more typical of the dense lyrics, at once sensual and mystical, which are characteristic of the album:
And she like a ghost beside me
Goes down with the ease of a
dolphin
And awakens unlearned,
Unshamed, unharmed
For she is a perfect creature
Natural in every feature
And I am the geek with the
alchemist’s stone
“Symbolism and imagery are what delight me. I feel that my songs have to do not only with my own spiritual recovery, but that of my generation. I don’t dismiss the positive aspects of the ‘60s, peace and love and so on. But we believed that ‘anything goes’. That’s not true, and we are paying the cost of excess and folly and finding our way back.”
The cohorts of Family Solidarity, nevertheless, would probably take little comfort in MacCarthy’s return journey, because he wants to go back further than the ‘50s: “Leave Catholicism out of this, that’s not what I’m dealing with. I’m interested in the Celtic imagination; Ireland didn’t convert to Christianity, we adapted Christianity to ourselves.”
Until he wrote “The Song of the Singing Horseman”, however, he always felt a need to give himself “a way out” in songs which have an increasingly spiritual feel to them. In the lines quoted above, for example, a geek is a fairground showman who bites the head off live chickens. “I wanted to take a standpoint so low that no-one could feel preached at. By identifying with a geek, I neutralised that song from being preachy. But there’s no way out in “Horseman”: it’s a straightforward ‘Hallelujah’”. Which must make it one of the most unusual popular songs ever written.
MacCarthy’s intense concern with the integrity of his lyrics has, on occasion, led him into conflict with his peers. When Mary Black first recorded ”No Frontiers”, she omitted the final quatrain. MacCarthy tenaciously insisted, ultimately successfully, that she should reinstate it.
“People like myself and Noel Brazil write complete songs. We know when they are finished, and I would be offended by the idea that other people need to change them. Of course they’re absolutely free to do their own arrangements; as long as they leave the lyrics and the melody line intact, they’re playing the game.”
Throughout our interview, MacCarthy repeatedly returns to the pleasure it gave him to work with the instrumentalists and vocalists who support him on the album, and to the support given at crucial junctions in production by Brian Masterson. He agrees that Irish contemporary music is in a remarkably healthy state. For every new album which comes out featuring a soloist like himself, there seems to be a bunch of backing musicians who could – and often do – bring out solo albums in their own right.
He sees his own musical sensibility as unashamedly popular: “hard and all as I try, I can’t get away from it. But I get tremendously stimulated by the idea of incorporating traditional elements, to which I came quite late, into that idiom. There’s no point in us exporting to New York something which New York invented. But we have something unique in this country, which we can send anywhere. The most healthy thing the Irish music business can do is to incorporate outside influences the way” – and he bursts out laughing at the improbability of the parallel – “the same way we incorporated Christianity”.
– The Irish Times
Jimmy MacCarthy 