Mary Black
MARY Black sits back in the cream sofa and takes a sip from her sparkling water. The light bounces from her Celtic necklace and onto the tasteful red and gold Christmas decorations in the hotel lobby.
It has been a while since the celebrated singer has been out on the promotion circuit. A couple of years ago she decided to take a step back from global touring to spend time with her family.
She has found the joy she once got from singing to crowds on either end of the globe to be less satisfying to playing and minding her grandchildren.
‘I’m not giving up singing’, she says wistfully. ‘I always said I’d continue to do one tour of Ireland a year over the next while anyway. It’s just the travelling and you’re doing it for 35 years and I’ve got two grand-daughters and I said to myself, do I really want to be going off for three weeks here and then coming back? I just miss them if I’m away even for four days, so I said, “I think the time is right, I’ll call it.”
‘It was kind of around my 60th when I called it. I’m 62 now and I’ve been doing the Last Call tour around Australia, Japan, Europe, all over England and America, so the only place we haven’t gone is Canada, so we might still do it at some stage.
‘I suppose I’m savouring it more now [singing] because it’s going that way. I don’t like to say it’s coming to an end, but it will peter out eventually. To be honest, part of the reason why I stopped a lot of it is, I feel I’m still young enough to enjoy other things in my life.
‘I don’t want to keep on till I’m too old to do anything else. I like to travel and spend time with my grandkids. I’ve got two granddaughters now from my eldest boy Conor, who never gets a mention. ’Cos he’s not a famous musician!
‘He’s the guy with the job in our house and he lives five minutes around the corner. And the kids are gorgeous and I’m like how my mother was to my kids.’
Mary has been touring relentlessly since her own children were small. She recognises that she made many sacrifices and feels now that the guilt she felt then was probably a little unwarranted.
‘I want to be a huge part of my grandchildren’s lives and I have another 20 to 25 years if I’m lucky.’
SHE says: ‘Not just a visiting grandma that comes every Sunday. I want to have them on sleepovers and take them on holidays and they’re fabulous and they give me great joy.
‘So I want time for that. I’m not ready to leave them after I left all my own kids, which was the toughest part of my own career, without a doubt. Waking up and saying, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I’m somewhere in America and I should be at home minding the kids and missing them. They managed better than I did because they always had Joe there.
‘Frances [her sister] was great and I had a great woman who came every day. As a woman you feel very guilty leaving your kids, but they were fine. I always say, they’re not too damaged by it. Danny used to slag me about his abandonment issues! “You were never around for my birthday,” because I always used to tour in March and that was his birthday, March 24. So I try and make it up to him on his birthday these days.’
Mary is probably the matriarch to one of the most successful musical dynasties in Ireland. First there was Mary and her talented siblings, notably her sister Frances, who sang together as the Black Family.
And now the second generation are making their mark, Danny O’Reilly as the charismatic frontman of the Coronas and Róisín Ó, who is a talented singer-songwriter.
She says that the modern world of celebrity that her children now must navigate was not there in her day. And she watched as her son Danny landed on the front pages of the national newspapers when his relationship with Laura Whitmore ended a number of years ago. Celebrity, she says, is not all it’s cracked up to be.
‘Danny? He’s had a few rough times and it’s not easy when you’ve a well-known face and maybe a well-known girlfriend.
PEOPLE are watching all the time, but he’s in a great place now, he’s really happy. I think it’s part of life, isn’t it? Everyone has relationships that work or don’t work. But it’s part of growing up, it’s part of living.
‘Sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t. But he’s in a great place. He’s a great guy, he’s lovely. He’s got great time for people and he’s down to earth.’
But the music business can be an extremely tough place to make a living. So did Mary have any wise words for her children when they were starting off?
‘I’ve said it to them from day one. I said, “Look it, you have to be willing to work hard and there’s no guarantees.” And there still aren’t. It’s hard to make a living from music unless you have international success.
‘I mean, you can make a living from Ireland, but it’s such a small country. There’s only certain people who’d make a living out of Ireland. So I said to them, it’s about luck, it’s not just about talent, all that. They were warned!
‘But I wouldn’t warn them off. I said, “Look if that’s what you want to do, I’m behind you.” But to be aware of the pitfalls and in a way, they know the music scene so well and they did support me over the years, when they were starting out particularly, Danny who used to get up with his guitar and he was “Danny O’Reilly”.
‘Nobody knew who he was in the early days, before The Coronas. So he was in his teens and he’d get up and sing a song and people loved it. But it was great experience.
‘You can’t buy that, you’ll never learn that anyway else except up on the stage doing it with the light on you. And same as Róisín. She would have done the same thing. But she’s stopped now; she’s into her own thing of course and has been for a while now.’
With a new CD in the shops, Mary says she still adores the physical aspect of buying music. She struggles to see how her children will make money at a time when digital downloads are the mainstream method of accessing music.
‘It was so easy in our day. You go in, you record an album. If you get a bit of airplay on it, people buy it, they like it, they come to your concerts. That was the way it went,