Eurovision legend Brendan Graham on his new show
He’s72,but songwriter Brendan is still ...
Brendan Graham is best known for writing the lyrics to You Raise Me Up, a song that resonated with so many people all over the world. But the Tipperary man also wrote Rock’n’Roll Kids and The Voice, which gave Ireland two of its Eurovision wins in the Nineties.
Those songs and a host of others will be performed at You Raise Me Up – The Songs and Stories of Brendan Graham on October 12 at the National Concert Hall.
Despite his success – he is also a novelist – in conversation he is humble about his achievements. You can tell he thought long and hard about being lauded at an event such as the one in the NCH .
‘I’m 72 years of age and I just thought, “To hell with it, I’m going to do it,”’ he says. ‘I’m experiencing a mixture of excitement with a slight peppering of terror. What is alleviating that to some degree is that I will be fortunate enough to present a great selection of artists to play on the night.’
That’s certainly the case. Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan, who tasted Eurovision glory with Rock’n’Roll Kids in 1994, and Eimear Quinn who did so in 1996 with The Voice, are in the line-up. Kathy Jordan of Dervish and Seán Keane will sing too. As well as that, there will be a rare performance by the man himself.
‘I thought I should put myself on the line on the night. I’ve written a new song and I will perform it at the piano.’
One of his earliest musical memories is hearing Elvis’s That’s Alright Mama on the car radio on the way to his first day at boarding school. But, he says, he was always interested in those who lay behind the making of the great songs.
‘I remember playing the jukebox in my local chipper and wiping the grease away, so I could see who wrote the song,’ he says.
‘Like many kids, I got a guitar and wanted to play the songs of the Beatles or Elvis. I never intended to be a songwriter but I always just liked scribbling down words.’
Early songs of his were recorded by Johnny McEvoy and Joe Dolan. Some became Irish Eurovision entries in the Seventies and Eighties. Still, songwriting was not his full-time job at that stage .
‘I was an industrial engineer by trade. Then in 1993, at 48, I was made redundant. That’s when I became a full-time songwriter by default. I was never prepared to take the plunge before that. Rock’n’Roll Kids made the Eurovision in 1994 and won it, and so I began to earn some money from that.’
It would be another eight years before he wrote You Raise Me Up, which, he says, was nearly never written at all.
‘Rolf Lovland and Fionnuala Sherry were making their second album as Secret Garden. They had a melody called Silent Story, which wasn’t even in the top songs likely to make the cut for the album but Rolf loved the tune,’ he says.
‘Fionnuala had given him my novel, The Whitest Flower. He loved it and something about it made him think I could come up with a lyric for Silent Story. Primarily, they are an instrumental band, so the chance of the actual song being written was a long shot. More so, I had stopped writing songs and was concentrating on writing books, and that is so all-consuming that I wasn’t even thinking of writing any songs... it was as random as that.’
You Raise Me Up is estimated to have been recorded over 500 times, in 40 different languages. He has written countless others, and still does in his Mayo home where he lives with his wife. He knows how good songwriting has been to him.
‘I still have the first royalty cheque I ever received,’ he says.
‘It was for a song I wrote called Father Dickens. It ended up on an album by Johnny McEvoy. The amount was £1, 1 shilling and sixpence. It wasn’t a huge amount even then. I’ve kept it because it reminds me of the journey. People don’t write songs for money. You write them because you have to.’
You Raise Me Up – The Songs And Stories Of Brendan Graham is on at the NCH on October 12.
‘People don’t write songs for money. You write them because you have to’