Phil still has a lust for life

SEVENTY one years old now, Phil Coulter’s energy levels are still high and he is starting a national tour that will come to Limerick’s Lime Tree Theatre on February 28 and Glór on March 15.
Coulter’s lament on the state of Derry in the early ’70s, The Town I Loved So Well, is iconic and he says it is a song he’s particularly proud of.
Another song, Free the People, was written a little earlier about internment, but he says it was a less considered work.
“I was in Derry on the weekend that interment was introduced, I was based in London at the time and working on and off in the United States. I happened to be home visiting family and in common with everyone else in Derry I was shocked, horrified and enraged because internment was, as history has proven, a very blunt instrument.
“The British intelligence was very scattered, very sparse, so they threw the net as wide as they could and they were dragging in people who spoke Irish or played GAA or they went to Irish dancers, they were perceived to be nationalists with a small ‘n’.
“There were guys that I knew, guys who were in class with me who were pulled out of bed at four o’clock in the morning, unaware of what the hell was going on.
“That happened repeatedly across Derry, with wives and kids at the doorsteps crying and wondering why the hell the British army has pulled their husband or father out of bed and thrown him into the back of a jeep.
“I wrote a song then called Free the People. It was an immediate song, a song that I wrote as a reaction to internment, it was truthful because it was immediate. On the back of that we held an anti-internment rally in the National Stadium in Dublin, John Hume and Austin Currie, I was producing Richard Harris at the time and I brought him across.
“The song served the limited purpose that it was meant for but I knew that if I was going to write a song about the deteriorating situation up there it needed to be a more measured song.”
Decades later The Town I Loved So Well is still a favourite of many people and he says he spent months crafting it.
“It was probably a few years later before I unveiled The Town I Loved So Well, because as the situation got worse in Derry, I could see the effect it was having on the people of Derry as much as on the landscape there.
“The music I probably wrote in a couple of weeks but the music probably took me the most of a year. I kept going back to it, I was so aware that the wrong phrase, the wrong image, the wrong choice of words could have just tipped it over the edge.
“The situation was volatile enough and I didn’t want to add any fuel to the flames, I didn’t want it to be that kind of song and that’s why the song has endured. That’s why you hear The Town I Loved So Well now and you never hear Free The People.”
Another much-loved song he penned is Scorn Not His Simplicity, written after his son was born with Down’s Syndrome.
“There are legions of families who have had the experience of having a physically challenged or mentally challenged child, who have all now adopted that song. You don’t get that response to Puppet on a String or Shang-a-Lang.”
While he has huge success as a commercial songwriter, his two favourites are ones that weren’t designed with the charts in mind.
“If you were to ask me of all the songs I’ve written which ones mean most to me, it would be those two songs. That’s the curious thing, I’m a commercial song writer, have been for 45 years but the songs that mean most to me are ones that weren’t commercial hits.”
This Sunday thousands of people will sing his Ireland’s Call in Murrayfield. Writing a song for a 32 county team was a political minefield in the mid-’90s, when there was no guarantee that the fledgling peace process would be a success.
“It had to be musically stirring to get the crowd up but against that I had to be careful because the whole point of it was to be all-inclusive. Amhrán na bhFiann wasn’t the national anthem of everyone and whether you agreed with them or not you had to respect them. It was a tricky one and maybe it was no accident that a Northerner was approached.”
He enjoyed a very symbiotic relationship with the late Luke Kelly, and says the Dubliner challenged him to produce his best work.
“I have no problem in going on record and saying that I owe a great debt to Luke Kelly. He nagged me continually and when I took over the Dubliners in the studios he’d be talking about the songs to be recorded for the next album etc and Kelly had a neverending supply of songs.
“His familiarity with folk songs and folk music, be it Irish, English or American, was huge. I learned a lot and he put me on to sources like Ewan McCall and people like that. On the other hand he’d say to me that was the kind of songs you should be writing, you’re capable enough, you’re smart enough, you could write those kind of songs, never mind Puppet on a String.”
He is still writing high profile songs and wrote a new tune about his hometown not so long ago.
“Just about three weeks ago I was up in Derry which has been voted the UK City of Culture and there was a spectacular launch concert in January with everyone from Snow Patrol to the Undertones to Paul Brady to Nadine Coyle to Neil Hannon to the Priests to Dana. there’s a huge list of people from Derry who’ve gone into the music business. I’d been commissioned by the City of Culture people to write a new anthem for the city for 2013, that’s my most recent composition.”
He is just back from a series of shows in New York and says he’ll keep playing live as long as he is motivated by it.
“I made myself a promise a few years ago that when I stopped enjoying it, I’d stop doing it.”