Paul Brady likes to say that Tina Turner bought his house and Bonnie Raitt pays his pension: his songs have been covered by both of them. When he opens the door to his place in Dublin, he’s softly spoken; when we part ways an hour later he says, “to be honest, I was completely surprised when you wanted to come”. Brady talks with a light kind of irony, punctuating things with a high titter: he holds something back of himself. In his autobiography Chronicles, Bob Dylan wrote: “Some guys got it down. Leonard Cohen, Paul Brady, Lou Reed – secret heroes.” And at 78, Brady is more at peace with being “secret” than he used to be. For a while, everyone from Eric Clapton to Mark Knopfler was working with him. But dropped by his major label in the mid 1990s, Brady enjoyed a complex feeling of relief. “I’d always felt like a spare prick at a wedding.”
It is somewhat hard to align this Brady with the singer of “Nothing But the Same Old Story”, an astonishing musical portrait of anger and hurt. Inspired by the Irish experience in London in the 1970s, in its tone and imagery it reaches back a century further: “Built a hundred houses, must have pulled half a million pints of beer.” In the spaces between the words, and without a single note of overt politics, are nationalist sympathies and the building threat of violence. A guitar note bends into the sound of a police siren. On stage, Brady pulls a taut line between vulnerability and rage. “I am taken over by someone that I call the Beast when I walk out in front of the audience,” he says. “You never know whether the Beast is going to arrive. You’re always afraid that tonight it might just be you.”
Bono once said that as far as Irish music was concerned, Paul Brady was the “iron fist in the velvet glove”. But Brady thinks he scuppered what might have been a fruitful friendship with U2 in 1982, when he appeared on a radio panel with them fresh from the wake of an uilleann piper called Séamus Ennis. Enlivened by pints, he ribbed the fledgling band on air, later explaining in his autobiography: “It was all that showbiz ‘image’ bullshit, ‘style over content’ glam, posing crap that had sickened me in the excessive 1970s and sent me deep into hardcore traditional music…” Though Brady wrote two of the songs on Private Dancer, the album that reactivated the career of Tina Turner in the 1980s, he had become “overwhelmed” by folk music and had “disappeared inside” it for a decade. He replaced Christy Moore, then Ireland’s biggest folk export, in the beloved national group Planxty, and rediscovered 19th-century ballads in folk collections around the world, bringing them back into popular use.
Brady was born in the town of Strabane, Northern Ireland, a “crucible of unrest” on the border with County Donegal in the Republic. He was permanently shaped by his time at Sion Mills Elementary School in Derry, one of Northern Ireland’s few integrated primaries, run by the Quakers (boys and girls, Protestant and Catholic), where his mother was a teacher. While she was trained in the British education system, his Sligo-born father, also a teacher, was trained in the “southern ethos”, which put an emphasis on the Irish language and a “heroic” version of the struggle for independence. The couple bought a house on the border, she driving into the North, and he cycling across the bridge to the Republic. Since earliest infancy, Brady has felt what he jokingly calls a “terminal sense of non-alignment”.
At The Favourite pub in Holloway, north London, in 1968, “The Fenians from Cahirciveen” – a rousing song about an attack from the Catholic “boys” on the occupying redcoats – was one of Paul Brady’s “good time” concert closers. Just two years later, when he moved to London for a time, things were changing. He first lived in Willesden Green in the house of a Polish woman in 1971, and later with an Irish friend in Shepherd’s Bush. “You walk off the gangway and the first thing you see is a Special Branch man asking for your identity. You immediately feel like a terrorist. I found that profoundly upsetting.” It was, he says, the fundamental Irish experience of the time.
As the 1970s progressed, the traditional Irish music he loved so much became the music of the Republican movement. Brady, whose great aunt had been a hunger striker in the Irish Civil War, found himself both critical of British government policy in Northern Ireland and opposed to the embrace of the “armed struggle”. Yet his songs added a layer of complexity because of his powerful ability to empathise if not to condone. He liked to “perplex” his audience by selecting plenty of Protestant ballads if he thought the songs were good enough – tales of British wars in Europe, fought by Irish people of all persuasions.
The 1977 track “Arthur McBride”, a rambunctious tale of two Irish men beating up officers recruiting for the Napoleonic Wars, was one of his most famous reworkings: a song of resistance loaded with wit and irony, about throwing off oppression, but about pacifism too. Brady tweaked the lyrics, which is how he noticed that Bob Dylan was playing his version a few years later. Dylan became obsessed with Brady’s take on the Louisiana ballad “The Lakes of Pontchartrain”, but he couldn’t figure out how to play it. Brady had invented his own guitar tunings as a teenager. In July 1984, Dylan asked him to fly to Wembley Stadium, and in a caravan backstage, Brady spent an hour pushing, pulling and reconfiguring Dylan’s fingers on the fretboard.
The political associations of traditional music in the 1970s were, he recalls, “a latent thing all the time. You were expected, if you were in the folk scene, to automatically side with the Provos, which wasn’t easy. The Wolfe Tones were into the Republican ethic and pro IRA. Christy was very much in that direction. There was an element among us from the North who were pissed off at Southern people presuming to know what it was like to live in Northern Ireland. Our feeling would be: you know nothing about this – how dare you presume?
“You don’t know what it’s like until you’re driving home with your parents from Donegal, coming along a country road, and there’s a red light flashing you down. You stop your car, wind the window down and there’s one of the B-Specials there with a gun pointed at you. ‘Name please, sir.’ And my father would say Brady – obviously a Catholic name.”
In July 1975, three members of the long-haired supergroup often referred to as the Irish Beatles, the Miami Showband, were murdered by a loyalist paramilitary group in Buskhill after a botched attempt to plant explosives in their tour van.
“There is not one thing that would make me live in Northern Ireland,” Brady laughs, when I ask why he doesn’t. “Because even now, you’re still not sure who you’re talking to.” He has said before that the UK doesn’t give a damn about Northern Ireland; is that still the case? “Yeah, well I’m not a great fan of colonialism. And don’t get me started on Gaza.” He gives another high titter.
Despite his strong feelings, Brady seems to have tried to manage his politics for the sake of the music. In 1979 he left folk behind: he had no friends in rock, so in an attempt to make some, he sat and played a demo to Van Morrison, who said bluntly, “I don’t know what I can do for you.” He became obsessed with Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street”, listening to it an obsessive number of times. And in 1980, with two young children, he made his magnum opus, Hard Station, which included “Nothing But the Same Old Story”, and the title track set in Dublin, about a former criminal trying to go straight in the 1980s recession.
“The Irish press said I’d done my Dylan at Newport. Rock was limitless in its breadth and it all came out of me in a rush.” But unlike for Bob Dylan – who, if you believe the recent biopic A Complete Unknown, freed himself from politics by swapping folk for electric rock at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival – it was in pop and rock that Brady became truly political. In the same year Hard Station was released, he began a song inspired by his horror over Maze prison hunger strikes and the death of Bobby Sands – though it took him three years to finish it, “because I was so conflicted. Because I understood them.” The song “The Island” emerged in 1985, saturated with irony about IRA violence.
… this twisted wreckage down on main street
Will bring us all together in the end
As we go marching down the road to freedom, freedom.
At a venue in south Dublin, shortly after the song’s release, a man tried to throttle him, saying, “You turned your f**king back on your own.” “He was from the North, obviously a Provo supporter. A lot of people in the Sinn Féin area of things did not like that song. I was not surprised.” Brady spent much of the 1980s on a press blacklist in Ireland, and Christy Moore wrote “The Other Side” in honour of the Maze prisoners, mocking what he saw as Brady’s dreamy pacifism: “Where Tyrone boys dream of loving on the strand”.
One person who valued Brady’s song was John Hume, leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party, and an architect of the Good Friday Agreement: he quoted lyrics from “The Island” in a 1986 party address. Hume was Brady’s French teacher at St Columb’s College in Derry, before he went on to work with the Credit Union: “He spoke French with a Derry accent.” Seamus Heaney was a few years above Brady at the school, while other attendees included the playwright Brian Friel, the novelist Seamus Deane (Reading in the Dark) and Bishop Daly, the “Bloody Sunday” churchman, who was pictured waving a blood-stained handkerchief as he helped carry the body of 17-year-old John Duddy out of the Bogside. They were the first generation of boys to receive free education after the 1947 Education Act in Northern Ireland, and the first to put the Troubles into creative and intellectual perspective.
Yet when asked what he learned from his time at St Columb’s – which was still, for all its progressive alumni, a Catholic boys’ boarding school run by priests – Brady replied, “I learned, you’re on your own, pal!” The feeling of not fitting in was the dominant emotional backdrop of his life, he says. There were many reasons for it, in retrospect. The climate of tolerance provided by his earliest education, which once seen, could not be unseen; the folk world that could not contain his conflicted politics – and Brady himself, who wanted to be the radio-friendly rock star, but was on some deeper level, duty-bound to represent things people didn’t necessarily want to face. He smiles and gives a little shrug. “I have taken for granted that whatever I’ve done is going to be not… quite… got.”
“Paul Brady: The Archive” is released on CD on 28 March. Brady plays London’s Bush Hall on 3 and 4 April
[See also: The rise of Gracie Abrams]
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This article appears in the 19 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Golden Age