‘I’m inclined to be quite a grumpy man’
Johnny McEvoy tells Barry Egan about how he met his new girlfriend for the first time 51 years ago in Cork and how a romance started years after their respective partners died
THEY say that the life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living. So it is with Johnny McEvoy. His wife Odette died four years ago at Christmas. It makes the Yuletide a little more difficult, a little more emotional for the singer-songwriter who was touted in the 1960s as Ireland’s Bob Dylan...
“I used to go down with her for her chemo treatment every week. It was so, so dreadful,” he says. “It was tough because she was ill for three years,” Johnny says of Odette who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2010 and, he adds, “it was a long, drawn out three years.”
“There was no way out of it,” he says of Odette’s illness, “it is one of the worst forms of cancer for a woman.”
I say to Johnny that it must have been a terrible time for him, too.
“It was dreadful,” he answers. “I stopped working, to look after her as best I could.”
Can he remember the last conversation he had with his wife?
“Not really, no, because she was very ill in hospital the last time,” he replies, haltingly. “No, I can’t remember. It is a blur. I remember when she died. I remember where she said, ‘That’s enough’. And she decided that’s as far as she was going to go. I remember that. And I remember being called at three o’clock in the morning. She went into a coma. That was bad. She was in the Beacon.”
Asked how long after Odette uttering the heartbreaking words “That’s enough”, did his beloved wife pass on, Johnny sighs and says: “About five days. She lingered on for five days. But she was in a coma, so there was no communication.” I ask him how did he cope. “Funny enough,” he says, “I coped. In a situation like that, you kind of put everything else on the back-burner. You are totally single-minded about what is going on. I just didn’t think of depression. I got upset. But I didn’t get depression. I haven’t had a bout of depression since about four years ago. So I am getting a good run of that. I’m four years free of it.
“I have moved on. You have to.” The moving on is Mary, who hails from Cork city. His girlfriend of two years, she is with him when I arrive at the Westbury hotel off Grafton Street. She goes off Christmas shopping to Dunnes Stores and leaves him to chat. “She is a great support, professionally and privately, for me. She has a great sense of humour, which I find very important because, although I don’t get depression, I’m inclined to be quite a grumpy man,” he laughs. “She sees all the good things in life. Like this morning, when I wasn’t in good humour because I was up early, she was describing to me what a beautiful day it was.”
They met for the first time over 50 years ago. Johnny was playing a concert at the Savoy in Cork and Mary turned up. He recalls leaving after the show and seeing Mary at the exit, “and we started to talk...” It must have been a good conversation because Mary missed her last bus home. From that point on, any time Johnny was playing in Cork, Mary would be there and they’d meet up afterwards.
“Then Mary got married and I got married and we sort of drifted apart. We used to exchange Christmas cards every year. My wife included. We both became friends with her. I knew her husband. Then she went off to America with her kids and lived over there with her husband, who was from Carrickfergus, worked over there, and then they came back,” he remembers.
Years went by. Johnny was playing in the Village Art Centre in Kilworth in Cork when Mary arrived alone one night. They were talking afterwards. Mary’s husband had died. “We talked about that. It was a good bit before my wife got ill. We still weren’t in touch that much...” Johnny explains.
“Then I met her in Macroom. Then I met her in the Everyman theatre in Cork and Odette was ill at this stage. Odette was dying at that time. I didn’t tell Mary. And then she turned up at...”
He stops himself and bursts into laughter. “It sounds like she was following me around! Stalking me!”
“Anyway, I was playing in Killarney and she arrived. I told her about Odette and she was very shocked about that. We lost contact again for a few months. Then after Odette died, Mary rang me one day. She said she was going to a concert in Dun Laoghaire and would I come along. Odette was two years dead at this stage.”
Johnny said he wasn’t that interested in the concert and declined her offer initially. It was only when he put down the phone in the house in Greystones where he had been living on his own since Odette died that he thought to himself: “I’ve been offered a date here.” So he rang her back and arranged to go with her to the concert. “That was the beginning of the romance. And we have been together since then.”
I say that I’m sure Odette would have wanted him to be happy after she died. “I’m sure she would. There’s no doubt about it,” he replied. “And without actually saying that during the illness, she did hint at it. Be happy. I suppose that’s the last thing I can remember Odette saying to me: ‘Whatever happens, move on. Get on
‘I had two years alone. Two years staring at the walls, trying to cope’
with your life’.”
Johnny has two grown-up kids, Jonathan and Alice, both in their forties now. “They’ve got their own lives to live,” he says philosophically, as ever. “They supported me as well. Like, I had two years living alone. Maybe more than two years.” Staring at the walls? “Staring at the walls, yeah,” he says. “Trying to cook. Trying to cope. I did get little bouts of depression during that time.”
He says he wrote some songs during that bleak period but “they were actually dreadful. They will never see the light of day. They were a bit maudlin, as regards what happened. It was a release”, he explains. “I was trying to write some songs afterwards — because of the grief, you know — and they were really bad. But they did help to get something out of my system. They helped me cope better than I was doing at the time.”
Johnny had been thinking of writing an autobiography but decided he “wouldn’t be bothered”. It was only when Odette said, ‘Look — I’m tired of you bringing pitta bread and tea to me every hour, go away and do something constructive’, that Johnny started the book that became the marvellous My Songs, My Stories, My Life In Music. It took him over four years to write it. “Odette was a great help on the book,” he says.
Born on April 24, 1945 in Banagher, Johnny McEvoy and his family moved to Dublin in 1951. He was a “very quiet, quite a lonesome child”, somewhat “introverted” growing up. The boy from Banagher who set the charts alight is, if anything, even more introverted now. He vanishes on occasion into his brain before returning with a wonderful memory of his youth. He has an older brother, Tom, in America and had an older sister, Marie, who also lived in the States but who died five years ago. Tom has been in the US since 1962; Marie was there from 1951.
“My sister went out there as a nun. She went out to a convent in San Antonio in Texas. She came home to Ireland in 1960 on her first holiday. None of us had seen her in 10 years. I barely knew her,” he says. “She had a great holiday. She was drinking beer. This was not heard of by my father. My father gave her a lock for the bedroom, so she could have her privacy.
She went back to America again and decided she was unhappy. So she left. She had the strength to leave.” Johnny can recall a letter Marie wrote home to her parents, Emily and John senior, saying, effectively, I will understand if you don’t want to talk to me again; or if you don’t want me as your daughter again.
“Which was very sad,” Johnny says. When she left the convent in 1963, Marie had to learn how to walk in high heels and how to dress. “My brother and his wife helped her with that. It was a very difficult period for her. They brought her to a dance one night and she met this man and got married [in 1965],” Johnny smiles. “They had two kids, a son and a daughter. Her husband only died last week. Marie passed away five years ago.”
Did Johnny talk to her during the period when Odette was dying? As a former nun she must have been great spiritual comfort? “She was a great support to me. My younger sister,” Johnny says referring to Emily, who lives down the road from him in Greystones, “was also a great support to me. She rang me every day; dropped over to see I was OK. If I didn’t answer the phone she’d panic... she’d get in a flap.”
People still get in a flap emotionally over the music of Johnny McEvoy. The Irish music legend with number ones like Mursheen Durkin (1966), The Boston Burglar (1967), Nora (1968) and Long Before Your Time (1976), to say nothing of playing with the Rolling Stones in the Adelphi Cinema in Dublin once upon a time, says he loved music from childhood.
“I used to listen to Burl Ives, Pete Seeger and Hank Williams from a very young age. I discovered them because I was drawn to that kind of music. My father had no time for that kind of music. I didn’t get on well with my father.”
What kind of man was Johnny’s father? “He was a very handsome man. He was a very good man. He was a bus driver in Donnybrook.”
Maybe he didn’t want you to have this kind of life, I say to him. “I don’t think he really understood it. He was a very kind of ‘leave school, get a job, become a plumber or a carpenter. Get a trade’ kind of man. I didn’t want that kind of life.”
Maybe he was worried for Johnny? “He was worried. But he never actually said it. And when I started singing he never gave me any encouragement at all. He just avoided contact with me.”
This was in contrast to Johnny’s mother who gave him, he recalls, “the encouragement all the time”.
“In fact, when I was first going over the songs that I was thinking of recording, I was in my bedroom at home — I was 21 — up against the mirror in November, 1966, and she said to me, ‘Go and do Mursheen Durkin’. I did it the next day and the rest is history as regards my profession,” he remembers. “But during my childhood, I had a huge interest in music. I used to sing in bed. I was about nine. I think my father didn’t understand. I would sit in front of the radio and listen to [American folk singer] Ramblin’ Jack Elliott in the dining room with my ear to the radio so that my father wouldn’t hear it because he didn’t encourage that.”
Johnny’s father was “a ceilidh man. Ceilidh was the only music he listened to. Ceilidh and GAA was his life. He was from Galway and he always wanted to go back to Galway. He hated Dublin. He hated the city. So he wanted to go back, but none of us were going to shift.”
How did it affect Johnny psychologically growing up that he didn’t have a positive relationship with his father?
“It wasn’t a bad relationship. We just seemed to have no relationship. We didn’t have any relationship,” he says, before adding, “Until, I became famous.”
I ask them did they reconcile before his father died.
“Oh, yeah. We just didn’t communicate. We just didn’t talk to each other about anything, really.”
Did Johnny’s mother ever have a word with the Dad? “She did once, and he brought me to the pictures. He wasn’t a great reader. So, we went to see a movie called Miracle of Marcelino. It was a very religious movie. It was about a boy in Spain and the crucified Christ comes down to him and takes his hand. And it was subtitled! My poor father found it difficult to read the subtitles,” laughs Johnny all these years later. “I was about seven! He never brought me to the pictures again.”
Johnny McEvoy: My Songs, My
Stories, My Life In Music by Cherrywood Publishing is out now. Johnny’s nationwide tour starts on February 1 at the Parkview hotel in Newtownmountkennedy, Co Wicklow, followed by McWilliam Park Hotel, Claremorris, Co Mayo, on February 2 and the Great National Hotel, Ballina, Co Mayo, on February 3.