Burning Again with Granny’s Intentions

By John Rainsford

Johnny Duhan has made a long journey that sees him back on the road once again this autumn with his old band, Granny’s Intentions.
The front man with Granny’s Intentions, the most popular beat group in Ireland in the 1960s, Johnny Duhan has experienced all the highs and lows that comes with stardom.
He accompanied the band to London to sign a recording contract with the prestigious Deram label only to witness the band’s demise, in 1970, aged just 21.
Even today, we almost naturally associate one life with the other, the man and the group, but his singular contribution to the development of music in this country is beyond comparison. Christy Moore called him “one of our greatest songwriters” and his back catalogue has been covered by the likes of Mary Black, Dolores Keane, Mary Coughlan, Eleanor Shanley, Tommy Fleming, The Dubliners and Freddie White. Even Thin Lizzy legend, Gary Moore once played at the great man’s side.
Now he and his old band are back with a new single, Burning Again and they are due to perform Johnny’s song cycle To The Light, which was inspired by his Granny’s Intentions’ career in the 1960s.
“We started out as The Intentions, a soul band, playing covers by The Temptations, The Impressions and The Miracles. The name The Intentions had a similar ring. By the time we moved to London our style was beginning to change, just as all the 1960s’ bands were beginning to change musically as well. Band names were also becoming more colourful and expansive. The Mammas and the Papas, The Mothers of Invention, The Loving Spoonful. We got in on the act, permed our hair and ended up looking like a group of ‘grannies’.
“It was great for a while but it is no fun travelling up and down the M1 in a small van night after night with a group of pals that you love but wish at times you could get a rest from. Six years of that was more than enough, thanks. If we started out as ‘grannies’ in the 1960s, most of us are now granddads in 2011 but we still have a lot of energy and a bit of the wisdom of age, hopefully.”
For the autumn tour, the original Limerick band members, Cha Haran, Johnny Hockedy, Jack Costelloe and Guido DiVito will join Johnny on stage to perform some of his most popular songs, all taken from his collection To The Light.
“There seem to be lots of talented bands and solo singers around now,” he says. “Some of them have a freshness that I envy. But that freshness, which seems to be a gift of the gods to youth, doesn’t last. It fades very fast if you don’t nurture it. At this stage of my life I’m still hungry to discover pure melody and poetry. I hunt for it every day.
“For the last month I have been listening over and over to a single piece of music from Bach’s Mass in B-Minor called Agnus Dei. I don’t want to copy that melody but I do want to extract some of the musical juices that went into its creation and to do that you have to totally immerse yourself in it. I have also been dipping into a cover version of an old Scottish folk song, Katie Cruel, recorded by Agnes Obel.”
It should come as no surprise that he has written lots of love songs. He could be called a ‘new age romantic’ long before there were such things.
“I am more interested in songs than in the artists who perform them. I am not that interested in big names. Many big names live on their reputations and produce inferior work that still gets praised by lazy critics who do not listen carefully and just go along with the prevailing trends. As TS Eliot noted, most critics just ape other critics. I see it happen all the time.
“I love poetry and try my best to make my song lyrics as poetic and meaningful and colourful as I can. Occasionally a lyric will stand on its own as a poem, but that only happens now and then. Songs, unlike poems, are made up of two elements, melody and lyrics. Songsters are at a disadvantage to poets, in that they have to divide their time between two separate art forms.
“Half of my day I spend like a bird chasing melody; the other half I spend studying great poets like George Herbert and Dante, trying to figure out how much of life’s experience I can condense into a lyric of three or four stanzas. But I wouldn’t have it any other way; I love singing, especially songs that reach the peak of true poetry.”
He has bad memories of his education with the Christian Brothers but looked to church choirs as his first start in singing. Luckily, it may be said in hindsight, he was rejected by the Redemptorists in Limerick for having ‘no voice’.
“Both my parents sang. My father was a fine baritone singer, with the emphasis on the ‘bar’. He used to sing spirited songs like Keep Right On Till The End of the Road and romantic dirges like Ramona anytime he was called on for a song while he was having his customary few pints in neighbourhood bars at weekends.
“It all started for me when a good friend, Ger Tuohy, invited me to come along to a rehearsal of a rhythm‘n’blues group he had just started.
“While I was there, he and the band called me up to sing a blues song while Ger vamped on harmonica. I have been up on stage ever since. Ger Tuohy and I used to spend hours listening to old blues singers who moaned and groaned about the trials of life.
“What attracted us to that, I guess, was the pain and suffering we became aware of as adolescents. We were also attracted to the fact that black music had great rhythm. It helped us rise above the teenage angst that besets lots of young people growing up.”
Despite an undying commitment to his art he is a firm believer in horses for courses.
“I tried to encourage a few of my own musical kids to write songs over the years, but it did not rub off on any of them. I think it is best when people are naturally drawn to it, as I was myself. But any time I hear young people with songwriting ability I go out of my way to praise them. There are many promising songwriters around now and I fully understand why.
“For me there is no pleasure on earth greater than the feeling you get when you pin down a real song. I am often walking on air for weeks after that achievement.
“I do not think commercial success can come anywhere near the experience of writing a real song, which is why I try my level best to stay true to my calling. But if a true song can give you a heavenly feeling then the frustration of the song doldrums can land you in hell. Patience is the key. But as Wordsworth pointed out, it is the stuff you do between the moments of inspiration that really counts.
“I have developed a fairly strict routine over the years of reading poetry, listening to music, keeping a song journal, singing for hours every day, hunting for melody, reflecting, contemplating, praying, longing, and so on.
“I was once asked how many hours I put in at the job. Well for me it is a calling, so it is literally a 24-hour affair. I often find myself waking at all hours of the night with a verse in my head.”
His new show is not some vain exercise in nostalgia inspired by a need to walk down memory lane. He is anxious to point out that most of the songs are new, made popular by other artists. This is Johnny Duhan version 2.0, definitely a man with a past but very much living in the present.
“I loved singing from a very early age,” he says finally. “Our neighbors on Wolfe Tone Street used to invite me into their homes to sing Bill Haley and Buddy Holly songs when I was only knee high. I took to songwriting like a duck to water when I was 17. I was motivated originally by a failed romantic relationship and started writing to work out the confusion of a broken heart.
“One of the first songs I wrote had a fairly prophetic line: ‘My songs are my guide’, which has turned out to be true.”