Brothers in music
His sibling succumbed to cancer but as the Belfast singer fights his own battle with the disease he vows not to give in
Ask Brian Kennedy how he is these days and he may just say ‘I feel really good. How do I look?’ The answer is he looks really well. His energy levels were high when we met a few weeks ago to discuss his participation in a concert next Sunday night celebrating the work of Burt Bacharach. The 51 yearold Belfast singer will top a bill of artists performing a selection of songs from the canon of 90 year-old Bacharach and his song-writing partner Hal David.
Brian says he is sounding great, too. Although he was given the dreaded news of a cancer diagnosis two years ago, he is thankful that the various treatments never affected his voice.
‘My voice never let me down,’ he says. ‘Even when I was wearing a bottle of chemo around my waist that was feeding the liquid into me through a portal in my chest, I was still on stage singing. The chemo bottle was clanging off the guitar at times and I still kept going.’
They breed them tough in Belfast. As the man from the west of the city tells me: ‘I didn’t survive growing up on the Falls Road to be beaten by a little tumour.’
Sadly, cancer did get the better of his older brother Martin, who was known to everyone as Bap Kennedy. Bap fronted Energy Orchard, while Brian concentrated on a solo career. They had been estranged for many years until they were reconciled shortly before Bap’s death in November 2016 aged 54.
‘I hadn’t seen Bap in such a long time that when I visited him my eyes took a while to adjust to how he looked. I had great difficulty adjusting to that,’ he says.
‘I didn’t tell Bap that I had cancer when I met him. I had just heard the news and I wanted that meeting to be all about him because I knew he say goodbye properly. Now if I was very unwell. My brother only hear his music somewhere I feel a survived six months from diagnosis great deal of peace about it.’ to death and here I am two Brian is currently focused on years later. It was difficult, but it his preparations for next Sunday was brilliant because we got to night’s concert. Although he was known primarily as a singersongwriter in the beginning of his career, and how he still describes himself, he is now lauded as one of our best interpreters of the work of other songwriters. Albums such as Interpretations and A Love Letter To Joni, where he tackled the songs of Joni Mitchell, have cemented his reputation. It is, however, his work with Van Morrison that perhaps introduced the world at large to this voice in a million. I joke to him that he must have the patience of a saint to have worked with the seemingly irascible singer for so long, or that Van has been fooling us and he isn’t as curmudgeonly as appears.
‘I would say the second one. But people don’t really have a clue who he is. I’m still getting to know him after all these years,’ he says.
‘I first met him after he’d heard a song I’d done with my late brother’s band – that’s a phrase I’m still finding difficult to say. We talked into the morning in a bar. We just hit it off. I know him to be very funny, exacting, very hard-working and very generous.’
Brian is allowed to use the cliché about taking one day at a time after the last two years he’s had and that’s what he is doing.
‘Here I am two years on... the music sustains me in every way. Unless I’m lying on the ground, I will keep going.’
‘I didn’t survive growing up on the Falls Road to be beaten by a little tumour’