LIAM CARSON
Some years ago I was standing talking to a couple of guys after a show I played at The Errigle Inn, Belfast. It was a good conversation about music, life, fish and chips etc. The conversation came to a natural end and we all shook hands. Then, to my astonishment, one of the guys turned to the other and got properly heavy about how, next time they met, remember he was an Orangeman, with the clear threatening implication that our cordial discussion was now over and hostilities between this Belfast Catholic and this Belfast Protestant could be expected to resume. The Orangeman left the room with hardman theatricality, and the remaining two of us watched his retreating back without saying anything.
When he was gone, the other fellow turned to me, and for the life of me I can’t remember the words he actually used, but his assessment of the event was a work of comic genius. How do you know that if you can’t remember what he said, I hear you rightly ask? Trust me on this – in my mind’s eye I can see Liam Carson turning to me and starting to talk in such a way that we both entered a rare space of Liam’s design.
We’ve worked, laughed and talked together ever since down the years. Liam introduced me to the work of his brother, the great Irish writer Ciaran Carson, and you may remember that Ciaran performed with me, Ian Rankin and David Thomas at Crossing Border Festival in Den Haag, Netherlands some years back. (This was captured in a superb documentary called The Meeting Of Remarkable Men, available on Cooking Vinyl)
Liam is as powerful an advocate of the living Irish language as it is possible to get, working with publishers of books written in Gaelic, and organising the IMRAM Festival once a year in Dublin. He has sent me an irregular but steady stream of such books over the years, and these have enriched my understanding of Celtic soul and my own creative impulse in ways I could never have previously imagined. Some of these books are constant bedtime reading, like the particularly beautiful tome AN LEABHAR MOR (‘The Great Book Of Gaelic’, publisher, Canongate). This is what I read last night from it:
I SAW AT A DISTANCE THE HILL
By Murdo MacFarlane (1901 – 1982)
I saw at a distance the hill
And I travelling by air,
And old age I cursed;
For I desired to be young again,
On the hill without cap or shoe,
A desire never to be granted to son of woman
And the Gatherer of each generation seeking us.
_
It seemed to me that I could live on the hill
Champions of a generation not living,
With a band beneath their knee and they hurrying,
Climbing and descending the slope;
And that I could hear the whistle and the shout
To dogs to collect the flocks,
And the shears at work.
Liam also affords me the honour of working with poets who are as good as poets get in this world – my recent appearance for him at the last IMRAM Festival in Dublin was with the outstanding Irish women poets Paula Meehan and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill – let me here and now recommend THE MAN WHO WAS MARKED BY WINTER by Paula (Gallery Books), and THE FIFTY MINUTE MERMAID by Nuala (Gallery Books).
Liam is a big softie with a warm heart, but as rigorous in his thinking and as tough in his outlook when he chooses to be as a man ever wants to get without noticing that his little fingers are turning to stone, shortly to be followed by the rest of his being. After shows in Dublin we retire quietly (?) to a pub in the city – this last time was to Brannigan’s in Windmill Street, just opposite the Spike, and Liam holds forth to the great entertainment of all. Other people are, of course, allowed and encouraged to speak, but it had better be good, and anyway, you just don’t hear this sort of stream of consciousness every day. I sat with Michael Cosgrave, a great Norwegian journalist called Jan Myrfold and his gorgeous Irish moll, and a few other folk we managed to pick up and we just let Liam be at it. It’s what you live for, not some bastard in Coventry mumbling ‘I thought you were better last year’....
But Liam has touched my life in other ways which I am not going to be forgetting any time soon. He has an autobiography coming out in the next few months which he has entitled CALL MOTHER A LONELY FIELD after my song of the same name. The candour and quality of his reflections on his childhood and his family are absolutely scintillating, and are also very healing for me. I have tried to write about the death of my parents as well as I can, and I sometimes worry that I’ve overdone it. The way Liam has approached the same kind of emotional arena has afforded me a unique look into my internal workings, and has shown me that all this stuff can pass into a place where the hurt is at least bearable.
There is an Irish poet who Liam and me have never discussed, called John Montague – further down the ancestral line from both Liam and myself, he has this to say about the passing of time:
‘Gaunt figures of fear and friendliness,
For years they trespassed on my dreams
Until once, in a standing circle of stones,
I felt their shadows pass
Into that dark permanence of ancient forms’
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