Johnny Duhan
Ireland’s troublesome troubadour
There’s a description in
The Voyage, Johnny Duhan’s new book of autobiographical stories, of a gig at a club venue in Waterford in the early 1990s. He gets the bus from Galway with his son Ronan, who is about 12 at the time.
Arriving at the depot in Waterford, they go looking for a place to eat and to check on their B&B before the gig. Ominously, there are no posters to be seen in shop windows or on billboards, though Johnny had sent some to the promoter a month before.
After their meal, they drop into a newsagent’s, and Johnny scans the entertainment pages of the local paper to see if there is any mention of his gig. There is nothing, but he sees a copy of the new edition of Hot
Press magazine, which, he reckons, should have a review of his new album, Just Another Town.
Sure enough, it is there, but it is not a good review. The album is given seven out of 12 — “Johnny Duhan makes heavy records. So heavy, in fact, that you could give yourself a hernia listening to them...” he reads, cursing the magazine for giving his album to the wrong reviewer.
The venue itself looks quite impressive, decked out in the style of a French cafe. The promoter is not there, but the barman directs Johnny to a public phone from which he rings the promoter to enquire about the apparent lack of promotion: “It’s not my fault that you’re a good-looking guy and all the birds want to take you home to pin you to their walls,” the promoter quips, though Johnny does not appreciate his levity.
By the time the gig starts, there are two couples in the room, sitting at candlelit tables furthest away from the stage. Ronan turns to his father in bewilderment: “There’s nobody here!”
The promoter has arrived now, and he offers Johnny the chance to call off the gig, to pay him his guarantee anyway. Johnny decides to play, figuring it wouldn’t be fair on the four people who came if he cancelled.
He goes to the toilet, and as he is washing his hands at the sink, he starts to cry. A customer comes in, and he wipes his eyes with the towel so that the customer will not see him crying. Turns out that the customer is a big fan, who apologises for the poor turnout, and declares the new album his best yet.
Mounting the stage, Johnny spots Ronan at one of the tables in a shadowy corner without a lighted candle. Ronan looks away in embarrassment.
Strapping on his guitar, Johnny dedicates a song to the chap he met in the toilet, “one of the handsomest men in the room”. Later, he dedicates a song called A Winter’s Night to Ronan. In the two hours of the performance, one more person shows up, a man who sits on a stool at the bar.
The B&B was good, though. There are a few remarkable things about that story, the first being that it exists at all — in the entertainment business, they tend not to dwell on such sad nights, or if they do, they remember them fondly as they are taking the fifth encore at Madison Square Garden. And even then, they’d perhaps bump up the size of the audience to double figures, and as for the bit about the son being embarrassed, they might leave that out altogether.
But Johnny tells it exactly as it was, though it is doubly remarkable that a singer and songwriter of his stature, one of the founding fathers of Irish
rock ’n’ roll indeed, would be drawing crowds no bigger than you’d expect for a complete unknown.
And the other remarkable thing is that this is not even the worst gig recalled in the book. There’s a night in a pub venue somewhere in Co Cork, where the few souls sitting as far away as they can from the stage are suddenly joined by a football team which has just won the county cup, and are insisting that Johnny immediately plays his most famous song, The Voyage.
There’s about 40 of them, carrying the captain shoulder-high, drinking from the cup. When Johnny obliges with The Voyage, they insist that he drinks from the cup, too.
They then start asking for a Wolfe Tones number, with one of them jumping on stage and grabbing the microphone to sing it, to Johnny’s accompaniment — realising that he is defeated, Johnny eventually finds himself playing If I Were a Rich Man. When they have departed, he starts the second half of the show with his classic Just Another Town. A girl with purple spiky hair and a ring in her nose comes to the front of the stage and requests London Calling by The Clash. He tells her he doesn’t know the words and starts another of his own songs. She calls him a “dickhead” and goes back to her table. Oh, and this time the B&B is poor — really, exceptionally poor. But perhaps the most remarkable thing of all, about this book and about Duhan’s work in general, is that it may tell of depressing things, but it is not itself depressing. Indeed, his mission in much of his work has been to find the spark that banishes the darkness, just to tell the truth, knowing that in some strange way the truth is never depressing. It is bullshit that is depressing.
Yet there is this intensity about him, and his voice, or maybe just this fierce integrity which has kept him away from the great prizes of Irish show business — there has been no Late Late tribute show for him, though he has certainly been around for long enough, doing good work, to be considered for such an accolade. Instead, these days the best he expects is to hear one of his songs on the radio now and again, usually played by Ronan Collins.
Collins would know his pedigree, how he started out in virtually prehistoric times with Granny’s Intentions, at the time of the ‘beat groups’. The late Philip Chevron of The Radiators From Space and The Pogues knew deeply of such things, too, and on the night of the Chevron Testimonial concert in the Olympia Theatre, shortly before his death, Philip made sure that one of his songs, The Dark at the Top of the
Stairs, was performed in his exquisitely meticulous style by one J Duhan. Indeed, given that Duhan has written that one really famous song in
“After being in a rock band, I started reading a lot of poetry. I’m often asked about my favourite songwriters, but I divide them between writers of songs and writers of poetry”
The Voyage, which is now being sung at weddings, not to mention by drunk footballers, and which may be around for hundreds of years, perhaps it is just the lack of some vital strain of eejitry that has kept him still having to face those half-empty rooms on his travels.
He speaks of it now with a kind of acceptance that there is a price to be paid for fighting the good fight — mostly you’ll lose. “I have this thing about not compromising, and it’s gone against me in a lot of ways. I was in trouble from the word go with Granny’s Intentions. I remember we went in to record the first album and because I created so much havoc, the producer banned me from the control room. I just didn’t agree with some of things he was coming out with...”
Then again, the ‘havoc’ in question must be seen against the backdrop of a record company which put out a rough sketch by band member John Ryan as the official album sleeve, thinking it was a finished piece — and later in Duhan’s career, there was a top producer who declared that they wouldn’t be including Just Another Town on the album, because the lyrics were, to him, radio-unfriendly. It is, as we have observed, a classic.
So yes, one man’s havoc is another man’s perfectly reasonable objection which is vindicated in the fullness of time. And the other almost inexplicable aspect of Duhan’s distance from the mainstream is the beauty of his voice — perhaps again it is coming from an unusual place, being a soul voice, not that of a folkie.
“I suppose that soul sound really has separated me. My voice developed listening to black music from an early age,” he says. “Even my father was into jazz; a bit like Van the Man, you kinda grew up on New Orleans music. Then a friend of mine and I were listening to the blues, and on to the Motown stuff, which was a bit more commercial…”
But Johnny has no objection to that, if it produces records as great as the ones he was hearing: “I still maintain that the best of pop music is the best music going at any given time — even today, I listen to the radio all the time and I’m amazed at some of the songs I hear. I’ve always felt that, and I still feel it. Some of the Beach Boys, now, some of their great songs, they’re as good as… Bach… they really are, they’re outstanding. Pop music at its very best, it’s terrific.”
But he has also read books, the best of books.
Controversial views
“After being in a rock band, I started reading a lot of poetry. I’m often asked about my favourite songwriters, but I divide them between writers of songs and writers of poetry; I see no distinction between them. Even The Beatles at their best point must have been reading some very good poetry to come up with songs like Eleanor Rigby, almost as good as a Philip Larkin poem…”
One of Johnny’s more controversial views, for such a powerful songwriter, would be the fact that he “lost” Bob Dylan a long time ago, after John Wesley Harding.
“In the Grannys there was a big debate about it… but I think Dylan realised himself that he did his best work back then; I saw an interview with him and he’s very honest about it. And of course, every now and again, he does come out with a terrific song. But it’s just when you’ve produced so much, when you’re signed up with a big record company, you have to produce so many albums, again, that’s a lot of pressure on people. I think it was Joni Mitchell who said basically every artist probably has about five albums in them, and after that they’re struggling.”
So now we should be coming to the part where Johnny Duhan, this exemplary artist, this largely overlooked legend, will be receiving the acknowledgment of a grateful nation on the publication of these absorbing memoirs.
But there is a slight problem — Johnny “came out” a few years back as a practising Catholic, and since most people who love good music are whatever is the opposite of practising Catholics, this again places him in a “difficult” position. Again, he makes the perfectly reasonable point that an artist’s religious beliefs or lack of them never made any difference to his appreciation of their work.
“Philip Larkin is one of my favourite English poets of his period. I don’t think there was any Christian poet would beat him, he was far superior and he was an out-and-out atheist. But that didn’t affect me judging his value, and the same should apply to me. If I can come up with good work, they shouldn’t be judging the work because I’m a practising Catholic. If you were to do that, you’d have to go back in time and get rid of Michelangelo — and Dante would be out. But it does happen, I know. If you look at TS Eliot, people thought he was great when he was a professed agnostic, the minute he changed and became a Christian, he was ostracised, they all said he wrote his best poems before he became a Christian, and that’s not true.”
The great Johnny Duhan is on tour in April and May, including a gig at the NCH on April 23.
Be there... it’s never too late to do the right thing.