'All I have is two dogs and a thousand songs'

Barry Egan Twitter Email

October 20 2013 02:13 AM

Jimmy MacCarthy says that his father, like him, suffered from "anxiety, on reflection, most of his life". He mentions his father had eight massive coronaries in one week but "lived for 26 years after that. Can you imagine trying to feed and educate 12 children when interest rates were up at around 20 per cent?"

Jimmy doesn't have to feed or educate any children of his own.

"The only thing I have is two dogs [Ernie and Vincie]. And a thousand songs," he says.

Ah, yes; the songs. The man from Macroom has written some of Ireland's most compelling compositions – songs covered and made famous by artists such as Christy Moore (Ride On, Missing You), Mary Black, Maura O'Connell and The Corrs (No Frontiers).

He smiles and brings up the aforementioned Ride On. "Take the very feral line 'Run the claw along my gut one last time'. I actually believe that Christy would never have recorded Ride On if it wasn't for that feral line. Christy likes feral language."

Jimmy adds that the song is "about parting and the angst and the deep, gut-wrenching aspect of losing somebody or somebody leaving you or emigrating. So it is as valid for Michael Collins and de Valera as it is for Johnny down the road who has just split up with his girlfriend or whose dad just died".

I ask him if he is in a relationship at the moment. He almost repeats the words back to me.

"No. I am not in a relationship at the moment."

"I was poverty stricken most of my life," he adds later. "By the time I was in a situation where I could get married I already had become very bachelor-like . It was very hard for people that I was involved with because leaving was something I did a lot of. I was drawn to creating. You serve the muse."

Jimmy, who was born in 1953, spent the first four years of his life with his grandfather James Manly in Church Street in Millstreet while his parents and his 11 siblings – two sisters and nine brothers – lived 30 miles away in Cork.

"I wasn't very well," he says ,adding that he was born 13 and a half pounds, very sickly, and refused all earthly nourishment for a long time until his grandfather raised him with the milk of the Black Kerry Cow from Muckross.

"My grandfather took me rather than me being given, because he could see that I was on the way out and he was a kind of a wise old owl. He sang music to me and showed me nature and all those different things."

Jimmy, as a child, was obsessed with horses, ponies and music. He got a guitar when he was seven; he and his brother Dan had a garage band at the age of 12. The song of his that he loves the most is, he says, The Bright Blue Rose.

He also includes No Frontiers as a song he is "very proud of. It entails my mother in the first verse; the second verse is my father who had an alcohol problem but most of our lives he was sober apart from a few lost weekends – a bit like myself," he adds.

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"I had a couple of lost weekends."

When was the last one?

"Do you have to know?" he asks. "A couple of years ago I had a return to something for the hell of it."

Asked how he felt afterwards, Jimmy says he was accompanied by a metaphorical camcorder clamped to the side of his head: "Which in my mind is God. I witnessed something in my cups. I have come through a lot of things and I have been involved in a lot of different healing aspects like the Alexander Technique and like AA and many other things."

Jimmy stopped drinking about 29 years ago. Before he gave up, everyone he knew told him his creativity would dry up after he stopped drinking. "But I wrote after I stopped drinking. I wrote No Frontiers, Adam At The Window, Katie. Ride On was written before I stopped drinking."

What do you get out of writing? "Living. Fulfilment and a purpose for living. To create art is not just a thing – it is a living thing."

Jimmy MacCarthy Live In Concert is at The Source Arts Centre, Thurles, Co Tipperary on October 26

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'All I have is two dogs and a thousand songs'

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