Phil Coulter and Geraldine Branagan
Phil was barking that the piano was dirty, there were fingerprints on it. What a stickler
SITTING in his studio in Bray, Co. Wicklow, with its grand piano in the corner and walls bedecked with platinum, gold and silver discs, composer Phil Coulter sighs when his wife, singer Geraldine Branagan, says something he has clearly heard before.
‘He didn’t write me enough. That’s one complaint,’ she says, when I mention how romantic it is that Coulter penned his hit Steal Away about the early days of their relationship.
Oh dear, what is the 75-year-old from Derry who has sold ‘millions’ of records - both his own and as a writer and producer for acts as diverse as Boyzone and Van Morrison - going to do to rectify this?
‘I’ve nothing to do for the next number of months,’ he replies, with benign sarcasm.
‘I think he’s kind of busy,’ his wife concedes.
Most pressingly, there’s next Saturday’s A Party Celebration of James Last at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, with a full 35piece big band, Coulter and his special guests, including Geraldine, 63.
The couple who met through Eurovision in the early 1970s have come full circle and are back performing together, Geraldine having abandoned her pop career in the Eighties to raise their six children, 25 hens, 28 ducks and 18 chipmunks.
Before she hung up her hairspray and backin-fashion tapered trousers to become a mother hen, Geraldine was a bona fide pop star. She had number one hits and a huge fanbase in South Africa where private Lear jets would take her between concerts, after which her dressing room would be besieged.
‘My stuff would be nearly nicked because it was mine. Clothes, you name it,’ she says.
Of course, Coulter would become the star in the partnership, though he does not interrupt his wife’s recollections or compete with stories of his own.
Photographs hanging in the stairwell show him hobnobbing with fans including former American President Bill Clinton, actor Liam Neeson and Manchester United legend Alex Ferguson.
Wasn’t Geraldine resentful, stuck at home changing nappies while Phil went out and conquered the world?
‘We wouldn’t be here if I was,’ she replies. ‘There was a price to pay, but it was worth it. I always wanted babies.’ But, six? ‘I would have had seven,’ she counters.
‘Eight, nine, ten,’ suggests Phil.
Theirs is an enduring love with obstacles to overcome from the start - not least the fact that he was already married.
The first time Geraldine clapped eyes on him was during a rehearsal at the National Song Contest in RTÉ.
‘You came in just in time to hear me barking at the orchestra, didn’t you?’ he says.
‘You were barking that the piano was dirty, there were fingerprints on it. Talk about a stickler,’ she smiles.
They didn’t meet until Luxembourg asked Coulter to compose their 1975 Eurovision entry and pick the singer.
A flattering request given it was the most successful country at Eurovision those days and the contest was basking in the afterglow of ABBA’s win with Waterloo the previous year.
Coulter had Eurovision form too; Sandie Shaw won in 1967 with his song Puppet on a String, Cliff Richard came second the following year with his song Congratulations and while Coulter didn’t write Dana’s winning All Kinds of Everything in 1970, he arranged, produced and published it.
For the Luxembourg entry he held auditions ‘up and down the UK without any great success’. Back in Dublin on different business he was in his hotel room, watching TV when ‘on comes an ad for Guinness. And the ad is set in a club, there’s a stage and a five-piece band and singer.
‘I clocked this girl and said, “Oh wow. She definitely has a look that could work on Eurovision. She looks great on camera, good singer.” I made it my business to find out who was the singer.’
It was Geraldine and he showed up at her house in Castleknock, Dublin the very next morning, just after the milkman.
‘I rang the doorbell and this girl answered the door and I’m standing there with two pints of milk saying, “These must be yours.”’
He chose her to sing his composition Toi, written by a French songwriter. Geraldine had to learn the lyrics phonetically and placed a not-too-shabby fourth in the contest.
‘I was only singing in little pubs at this stage. I was only three years out of school.’
A Eurovision nerd recently told Phil that he and Geraldine are the only husband and wife team to have been an entry’s conductor and singer, respectively.
‘Well, we weren’t married at the time,’ points out Geraldine. She says they had ‘a lot of hurdles’ to overcome before they finally tied the knot in 1998, 24 years after first meeting, and when their youngest was five and lisped to the gathered Press: ‘I asked my Daddy when is he going to marry my Mummy’.
They brought the kids on honeymoon to Italy.
Both agree there had been an immediate spark but Phil was older than the guys Geraldine usually went for and he was already someone’s husband. It was during his first marriage that he welcomed his Down Syndrome son, Paul, who inspired the beautiful song, sung by Luke Kelly, Scorn Not His Simplicity. Sadly, Paul died aged four.
When Phil met Geraldine, divorce was illegal and having children outside of wedlock was frowned upon. Or as he puts it, ‘Those things back in those days were a lot tougher going than today’.
Geraldine mentions another song he wrote for her back then called Stay With Me.
‘The lyrics are all about us,’ she says, before describing their cosy nights in and her longing for her beau when he would have to go.
In the end, they moved together to London. Their tricky personal circumstances ‘didn’t stop me going ahead and having the six kids because the hurdles could have gone on forever’, says Geraldine, practically.
Their first daughter Danielle was born, followed 22 months later by Dominique – who is now married to the tenor Paul Byrom. The twins came a year after that.
‘I had four under four. When the twins were born, they were born three weeks and Phil had to go away for three months.’ Three months? ‘That was tough,’ she nods. ‘But that’s the reality of things. You just sucked it up. All my energy went into the kids. And we had two more babies after that.’
Though she relished her role as a mother, Geraldine felt the pull of her old life as a performer.
‘It was hard. I’d go to concerts and say, “I could be up there”. I