I would like to give my younger self a good talking to!
Flo McSweeney was once a staple on Irish television but she believes that distracted her from her real love of singing, which is why she now says...
S‘You have an awful lot more to say when you have lived a life’
OMETIMES Flo McSweeney looks in the mirror and thinks she hasn’t aged well. Other days, she reckons she’s not done too badly. The singer, voiceover artist and sometime actress and TV presenter still has the same bright blue eyes and sense of fun that she always had but she feels women do get a raw deal as they get older. While men are deemed silver foxes, there’s no female equivalent.
‘I hate being coy about my age,’ she admits. ‘But I’m aware that people are thinking, oh my god she’s 62! There is a terrible thing for women. I have bumped into people who don’t recognise me because I don’t look anything like what I looked like in my 20s or 30s.’
She points to the American actresses and singers who do everything they can to hold back time.
‘Women who manage to keep their beauty and just don’t age get celebrated,’ she says. ‘Look at Michelle Pfeiffer — she is 65 and she looks amazing. There was a video of her recently and they were practically giving her the Nobel Prize for Non-agement,’ Flo says, laughing.
‘We are vilified for ageing and it is a horrible thing, but ageing happens to us all.’
However, she realises that the likes of the Hollywood stars have the money to keep themselves looking good with tweaks and tucks and regimes.
‘Their raison d’etre is to look good — they have money to pay for chefs to cook them healthy food, they probably have home gyms and personal trainers,’ she says.
‘I live an ordinary life and I don’t have a personal trainer or a gym — unless you count the skipping rope that’s currently keeping the cover on my barbecue.
‘But they will all have to age at the end of the day — it’s just a natural thing.’
Flo says there are also benefits to getting older and, let’s face it, we’d all rather that than the alternative.
‘I think you have an awful lot more to say when you have lived a life,’ she insists. ‘As a singer, my voice is better than when I was younger.’
Ah yes, that stunning voice which is still in demand today. It’s hard to believe Flo’s debut solo album was only released in 2019, given her canon from pop to punk to rock and trad with Moving Hearts, as well as jazz.
Today she is preparing for a concert at the Bord Gais Energy Theatre on April 28.
Hosted by Stephen Triffitt, the world’s top Frank Sinatra impersonator, she will be a special guest of the Nelson Riddle Orchestra, featuring the great man’s classic arrangements from hit albums by Sinatra, Linda Ronstadt and Nat King Cole.
‘Anyone who sings the kind of music I love to sing would be absolutely bonkers to turn down an opportunity to sing the original arrangements of Nelson Riddle and conducted by his son with an orchestra,’ she says.
‘What’s not to love about a gig like that? I’m thrilled to be doing it.’
Flo will be performing the Linda Ronstadt tunes, songs that perfectly suit her voice.
As a young child she would spend hours singing in her bedroom at home in Cabinteely, while her teenage years and 20s saw her trying to find her place.
‘People always like to pigeonhole you and say you’re a rock singer, you’re a trad signer, you’re whatever,’ she says. ‘I think I am a very versatile singer and I always have been. I worked a lot as a session singer.
‘When I was about 27, my friend Gerald Davis had the most magnificent collection of albums,’ she says. ‘He had an art gallery just over the Ha’penny Bridge and above it he had this apartment, which was like a New York apartment, and he had the most incredible selection of music. He said to me: “Come up and play whatever songs, and take whatever albums you want,” just to build up my repertoire. I came across Julie London’s Black Coffee and when I heard that song I said, this is my music. This is what I should be singing.’
Flo though enjoys listening to all kinds of music to see if it resonates.
‘It’s one thing I would say to anyone who wants to get into music or who loves to listen: don’t be dismissive of a certain genre of music, just because you don’t like it,’ she says. ‘I’d like to think that at the age I am at now, I still have my ears open to everything. I don’t necessarily like it all but I listen and I wouldn’t dismiss any genre of music.’
Music has always been what has driven Flo, who spent her teens in different kinds of bands in Dublin’s
1980s heyday. ‘I hung around the Pink Elephant and the Bailey Pub — they were the places to go,’ she says. ‘You had lots of bands like Spandau Ballet and so on who were in Ireland back then. I used to say any money I earned should go directly to the Pink Elephant because it is where I spent most of my wages.’
It was by accident that she fell into TV presenting. Billy McGrath, who used to promote bands she was in, did an RTÉ producer course and needed guinea pigs for a mock magazine-style programme. Someone saw it and asked her to do a screen test. She was then offered TV Gaga.
‘That was how simple it was then,’ Flo admits, laughing. ‘I would be brought in to do whatever TV show, and I would get paid for the rehearsal period and the duration of the contract. If I was able to buy nice clothes out of it, and go for nights out and pay my rent, that was kind of it. But I certainly wasn’t buying houses in Spain, that’s for sure.’
Those gigs continued right up until 2002 when, with her second
‘I got a Dear John letter telling me I was being replaced’
baby on her hip, Flo found out just how ruthless TV could be when she was replaced on travel show No Frontiers by Kathryn Thomas.
‘I think I had done four seasons and I had just had my second child, she was three weeks old,’ she recalls. ‘I knew that we would be getting into pre-production and I hadn’t heard anything from the company that made the programme.
‘I actually went to their offices with my baby to show her off and there was a very weird atmosphere and the doors to the inner sanctum were kept closed. I left thinking, that was all a bit odd.
‘The next day, a Dear John letter landed in my letterbox telling me I was being let go and replaced. I remember thinking it was a terrible and cowardly way to deal with somebody you have worked with for four years. But I remember looking at my baby and thinking, I don’t care, so I let it go.
‘It was nothing to do with Kathryn Thomas. I met her a few times, she seems like an absolutely gorgeous, lovely, charming, open human being. I would imagine she was completely unaware of what was going on.
‘She was very young at the time, and they’re always looking for the next bright, young thing, and when you are that young, bright thing you think you’re irreplaceable but everybody is replaceable — everyone. You learn that with age and you learn not to be so hard on yourself.
‘You just realise as you get older that none of it matters.’
What does matter to Flo is family. She is married to comedian Barry Murphy and they have two children, Luke, 27, and 22-yearold Mia. They were introduced in the Dockers Bar almost 32 years ago by Barry’s fellow Apres Match comedian Risteard Cooper.
As you ‘pixie-headed’ Apres Match fans can imagine, there’s a lot of laughter in Flo’s home and she says her love for Barry was immediate. When Apres Match took off, Flo stayed at home to mind the children. Luke is currently in Australia, while Mia is a talented pianist who has just finished her music degree.
‘My family is the only important thing,’ she says. ‘If I get the opportunity to create and be creative, that’s great. That used to mean doing a big gig or being in a big show but now I sing once a month in the Left Bank in Kilkenny with a wonderful jazz quartet. That’s important to me, because it is one of the loves of my life and I am still lucky to get to do it.’
When gigs disappeared during the pandemic, a chance conversation led to Flo working in a jewellers — her first regular job since the age of 21. It wasn’t for the money — though that came in handy — but more for the human interaction, the chats and craic with those who crossed her path.
But when gigs returned, she returned to the stage too. Her first solo album, Picture In A Frame, was something Flo had always wanted to do.
‘It was so important for me because I felt, I am going to die and my greatest hits are going to be Guinness commercials,’ she laughs. ‘In the 1980s and 1990s, I was pretty much on every single jingle going. But I desperately wanted to do [an album] of my own so I started working with Fiachra Trench, who was a string arranger, and his wife, Carmel McCreagh. We put together a show called The Divas and the Piano. We did a lot of gigs in these lovely kind of black box theatres that hold about 300.’
It did really well and as the couple had a studio at their home, the album was finally recorded.
‘We started recording it two weeks after my mother died,’ Flo says. ‘It was a wonderful and healing
‘Recording an album was a healing experience’
experience for me. When you do a great vocal, and you sign off on it, you think that’s there now forever. Nobody can mess with it, nobody can take it away.’
So if Flo now could talk to her younger self, what would she tell the girl from the 1980s?
‘I would really like to take my younger self aside and give her a good talking to. I would tell her not to be led by other people and to listen to your voice and listen to your instincts,’ Flo says, admitting that TV sidetracked her from her real passion of singing.
‘I think it would be to listen to yourself and trust your instincts, don’t follow the crowd. Find a sense of yourself — I think if you have a sense of self, you have everything, because when you have that you don’t need other people’s approval. You can be quite confident in what you are doing.’