FT: How are you, Ralph? The last few years have been very hard for you. (Ralph’s wife of 57 years passed away two years ago, and he was diagnosed with prostrate cancer
RM: I can’t say it’s been easy; in fact, it’s been the worst time of my life. But you know, music and performing and being with those you love, that’s good. It’s great compensation.
FT: As fans, we are so glad to have you, and we all continue to send our love and positive thoughts to you. I know you don’t like giving interviews on the day of a gig to save your voice?
RM: I don’t actually do any exercise on the voice at all. I just trust that when I open my mouth, it’ll come. I practise the guitar every day, but I don’t ever practice singing.
People ask why I’m so tired coming off stage, and I say, ‘But you don’t realise how much concentration goes into it’. You know, I’m working on two things. I’m not a strummer; I’m a guitar player as well.
I always wanted to be a guitar player, so I find the guitar playing demanding. My hands get tired, arthritis now, of course, at my age. But you know, it’s one of the great joys.
I enjoy it. I get through it, and I’m proud of what I’ve done. I know I’m pedalling uphill sometimes, but that’s okay.
If the song is worth it, it’s worth giving it your best shot, and that’s what I do. It’s a challenge, and I come off stage with a mixture of euphoria, excitement, overstimulated, too much adrenaline going round- all the kind of things that all performers get. It’s all part of the mood changes music can give.
FT: You’re exhausted coming off stage, and yet at any gig I’ve been to, you always take time afterwards to chat to the fans and sign, and have photos taken. Which speaks very much to you as an artist and a person
RM: Well, I’m still on a high. When you’ve got through a gig of an hour and a half, and the crowd have clapped throughout and asked for more. I always think performance is a two-way street. You’re directing the music at the audience, but you’re waiting on their response. I’ve watched acts that play like parrots, and the performance is exactly the same night after night. I don’t want that; I want that human communication. I might stumble sometimes over my introductions, and maybe on the song itself. But that reminds the person watching that I’m a human person too, and we have that commonality. But I’m striving for truthfulness in what I do.
I love my work, and I dread to think how my life might have panned out.
FT: Can you imagine a life without music? What would you be?
RM: I honestly don’t know! A helper in some form? As a teacher or something along those lines. I did try that for a year, but music took over; I’m glad to say! I like to be outside. I had a happy time working on buildings. I also love landscaping and gardening. I’ve got no head for heights. I was a scaffolder for two weeks before I knew! (laughs). I did all sorts of jobs, but I’m naturally inclined to helping, I think.
FT: Well, I think your music has helped an awful lot of people through many tough times.
Ralph: Well, that’s kind of you to say, man. I do get a lot of letters about it. Now that there’s a threat of, let’s put it bluntly, the dark, the shortening road, and the age I am, and the fact we use ‘final’ tour of Ireland, has sharpened people that haven’t written to me before. There’s a steady flow of letters from people that just say the music has been part of their lives and so on. And I’m grateful for that, because it means the songs don’t just have a short pop life. They have a longevity to them.
FT: We chatted about 8 years ago, and we had a long conversation about your history with Ireland, Belfast in particular. You were one of the few artists to cross the sea and play during the worst excesses of the Troubles. That was the start of a wonderful relationship with Ireland.
Do you remember playing a gig and getting a standing ovation even before you played a note?
RM: I do! It was a theatre called the Grosvenor Hall (long since demolished). I walked out on stage, as I normally do, and the whole audience stood up and just gave me a most thunderous applause. I was moved to tears by that.
You see, that’s the commonality. That’s the common humanity, isn’t it? And I didn’t feel like a hero, man.
The troubles were on, and Billy Connolly and I did a week here during the troubles, in the Whitla Hall, and Billy had the same attitude as me. People were so grateful that we just turned out.
I don’t mean to aggrandise myself for bravery or anything, but I would point out that many bands would have liked to have come, but it only takes one member of a band to say, “I’m not going”. Then the band won’t be able to go.
And I think people should remember that. To me, that experience during the Troubles was enriching. Sounds awful now, but I had no idea that the beginning of the Troubles were about Civil Rights, until I got there, and I was fairly incredulous that such a system existed, and people were peacefully protesting. I don’t lay the blame on anyone’s door.
There is a whole generation of young Irish people in the North who know nothing of the troubles. It’s just history to them, and long may that continue!
FT: Your connection to Ireland is well known. Can I ask where that simpatico came from?
RM: My connection with all things Irish goes way back to when I was very young. First of all, it’s important to state that my father left home very early in the marriage. And my mother raised 2 boys by herself. She had to go out to work, and I was minded during the holiday times by a neighbour across the road. One day I was on the pavement, looking in the sweet shop window, a lorry, driven by a drunken driver, came out of a turning and swung up the road and pushed me into the window. The window came down and chopped into my legs, leaving me with very severe lacerations, and I was taken to hospital.
My brother told me fairly recently that the whole family were kind of shocked and tickled because when I came home, I had an Irish accent!
Now, that was because of the waves of nurses and people that came over from Ireland after the war; I was born in ’44, and the accident happened in ’49. Mary was one of the nurses, and she looked after me. I didn’t know she was Irish; I was 4 or maybe 5 at the time.
And then my neighbour, Mr. Connaughton, and his family moved in upstairs in the flat where we lived.
He was someone who would have been about the age of my dad, if my dad had been around. And he did things that dads do, right? Yeah, a motorbike and a bicycle, and he spoke with an accent that I could understand, and you know, he turned up in a song eventually. There was a lad, Stephen McDermott, who was a childhood friend of mine. There were connections all through my life. When I was a boy soldier in the army, I sort of moved towards the Irish lads. I’ve written quite a bit about the connections in my autobiography.
And then, of course, the music came along. The folk clubs were full of Irish singers. I first heard Luke Kelly before he joined the Dubliners. So you can see the Irish, and Irishness is woven into my whole development really.
FT: In light of the Ed Sheeran and Macklemore controversy, there’s been a lot of discussion recently about music artists making political statements. You’ve been highlighting issues of social justice all your career. Songs like ‘Streets’, ‘Harry Don’t Go ’, ‘Craig and Bentley’, Water of Dreams’, ‘Martin ‘, to name a few. Some suggest the artist should just entertain. What’s your take on it?
RM: Well, it’s absolute nonsense to say music shouldn’t be political! My earliest influence from the earliest days was Woody Guthrie. And that’s about the only weapon a man can have, against his employers and exploiters, is to withdraw his labour. And that is the beginning of the unions, and I’ve been a union man all my life and remain so.
Of course it’s political!
Dylan is political. I wish more big musicians would speak out.
Springsteen stopped Trump from using his song. Good on Bruce! I know he got a veiled threat from the orange bastard. I don’t mean to reflect on the Orange Order (laughs), I’m talking about the Orange-complexioned bastard. He’s frightened by words! They say it mightier than the sword; well, it certainly rattled old Trump, didn’t it! Bruce said, you can’t have ‘Born in the U.S.A.’, and you don’t understand it anyway; you’re so thick.
You know, as someone who is not a believer in anything other than this, you know there’s no god, when you saw Trump hold up the Bible. In the old days, that would have been a puff of smoke, and that would have been the only thing that was left, because they’d have been dealt with by your God. But he actually got away even with that heinous kind of sacrilegious, sanctimonious posturing, and for those idiots in America who don’t understand the world at all, and vote for a thug like him.
Doesn’t it remind you of a certain German dictator?
One of my friends, Will Kaufman, is a Woody Guthrie scholar and a great intellect. He said, ‘No one can ever say they didn’t know what was going on, not this time, not with social media, not with the facts before us”. We all know! And it’s the duty of anyone on a public stage to make it clear where they stand on these issues, and if we don’t, we are part of the problem.
FT: If we can talk about the new album, ‘From Clare to Here ’. It’s a collection of songs that you’ve written, or songs that connect you to Ireland over the years, performed by a host of wonderful artists.
They are a veritable ‘who’s who’ of Irish music. Moya Brennan, Paul Brady, Phil Coulter, Finbar Furey, Andy Irvine, Declan O’Rourke, Damien Dempsey, Wallis Bird, the list goes on and on. You’ve obviously got a lot of friends in the Irish music community, but how did you decide which artists to choose, and how did you match each artist with the different songs?
RM: Well, the short answer is empathy. I read character pretty well on meeting. And the right mixture of sensitivity, bravado, and voice.
I’m a big Cathy Jordan fan. I was a big Moya Brennan fan. Finbar Fury, I respect him for all kinds of reasons; he’s got a voice, an authentic voice of Ireland rather than, like Dolores Keane. And with all of them, there was an empathy Phil Coulter has been a mate of mine for years. He respects what I do, as I respect his music. We are a little different in, in our presentation, but we care about lyrics, we care about musicality, and he’s been supportive of me, especially when I wasn’t so well known.
Wallis Bird is a new voice to me, and she was, we came in touch with her, in Australia, and my son Tom said, ‘she’s a special talent dad’, and she’s done a lovely version of ‘I loved the ground’, a very original version of a song that Phil Coulter and I wrote together.
Moya did a beautiful, sensitive of ‘The grey sea strand’, and played harp on it. I was there when she recorded it, and that was lovely. I’m very, very sad about losing her. I did‘ the realise just quite how poorly she must have been. She had an extraordinary talent, and was so modest about it. But she also had a wonderful sense of commonality and kindness. The first thing she would ask me on meeting would be, ‘Are hungry, have you eaten yet. A wonderful person.
She is going to be deeply mourned, and deeply, deeply missed.
So empathy, you know, reading the character of the person, is something that I feel I can do. If I click with someone and I respect their music, I have reason to believe they will click with me.
So I didn’t interfere with the production of the songs at all. I just trusted them and to get it.
FT: The album was going to be called ‘Time drift of the Road’ at one point?
RM: It was, but now it’s going to be called from ‘Clare to here’. Somebody suggested ‘From there to here’. I said, no, no gimmicks, no clever titles. I am honoured by the fact that people treat from ‘From Clare to here’ as an Irish song, even even as a traditional song sometimes.
And so why wouldn’t I call it that?
It’s a song that I hope will resonate with Irish community and outside the Irish community, wherever there are people that like good music. We’re hopeful that a bigger record company will take it on board, and I would be able to get it to more people than I would when I was doing our own records. It’d been hard to ignore these wonderful artists.
But I think I think you’ll enjoy it. I’m pretty sure you will.
FT: ‘From Clare to here’ has become a anthem for the Irish dysphoria all over the world. It has such a beautiful insight into loneliness and missing home. A song that has indeed seeped into the Irish psyche.
RM: Well, thank you.
I’m glad you approve because I have such respect for those two melodies. The sentiments are so deep and profound.
But the complexity of ‘On Raglan Road’ song, it has such a steep sense of loss and failure, and it talks about the lightness of being in love and the desperation and the sadness of not being. It’s incredible.
Parting glass. What else would you wish anybody, but the sentiments of that song? It’s just so brilliant, and it’s got such a strong melody as well. It’s a beautiful song.
Yes, and um, I’m delighted with both versions.
FT: Ralph, it’s always a pleasure chatting to you, and thank you for your own kindness. Safe travels on the tour, and hopefully catch up with you again when you hit Belfast.
RM: Always good to chat, see you in Belfast.
Ralph McTell plays Derry on 24th of October and Belfast (sold out) on 29th October. Limited tickets available for Derry via Music Capital.