“There’s no such thing as a born songwriter,” Phil Coulter tells Brendan O’Connor (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday). “It’s a craft you have to learn.”
There follow tales of Coulter’s upbringing in Derry and a musical education in Belfast that was split between analysing 16th-century harpsichord music by day and devouring the brand-new form of the three-minute pop song by night.
His obsession with pop overwhelming his studies, Coulter eventually finds himself tramping to a studio every second Friday to demo six new songs, replete with melody, lyrics and orchestral arrangement, to a prominent publisher.
“What if the muse didn’t hit you that week?” O’Connor asks.
“That’s what you had to learn,” Coulter replies. “This concept of a songwriter wandering through the forest, waiting for a flash of inspiration, that’s grand – except if you’re a professional and the publisher is knocking on the door, saying, ‘We don’t want it great, we want it by Tuesday.’”
A few years later, fresh from winning the Eurovision Song Contest with Puppet on a String and, in his telling, “selling six or seven million records”, Coulter admits to losing the plot.
“I’d have to confess, we got carried away. I’m coming from a terraced house in Derry. I think I’ve won the Lotto. Songwriting took a backseat.”
But, flushed with anger by a publisher’s claim that they were merely “a flash in the pan”, they endeavoured to win pop’s biggest prize again the following year, only for their Cliff Richard classic Congratulations to be beaten by Spain.
“Were ye robbed by General Franco?” O’Connor asks, referring to a persistent rumour that their efforts were stymied by the mobilised forces of Iberian fascism.
[ RTÉ dominates airwaves despite Radio 1 rescheduling losses, figures showOpens in new window ]
“That was one theory,” Coulter gamely replies. “I don’t know how accurate it is, but I’m happy to believe that he dispatched TV producers around Europe, maybe with cases of Rioja wine and promises of holidays in Mallorca, to bribe the other juries around Europe.”
Talk then moves to a deeply moving discussion about Coulter’s son Paul, who died aged four from heart complications connected to his Down syndrome, and whose birth inspired Coulter’s song Scorn Not His Simplicity.
It’s this that prompts the most unmissable moment of the show, as O’Connor, himself the father of a child with Down syndrome, deploys disarming frankness with his guest.
“Can I tell you something?” he asks. “I couldn’t listen to it for years after my own daughter was born, because I just thought, ‘It’s wrong. I don’t like some of the things it says, and it’s not right.’
“And then it took me a long time, and I came back to it, because I used to love that song, but I realised you can’t legislate for how people react in those situations, how they feel about it.
“That was your deeply honest reaction to it, wasn’t it? And you’d probably react differently now. I would react differently now to the birth of my own daughter.
[ Rose of Tralee review: Westmeath winner is a good-news story from a creaky eventOpens in new window ]
“But it’s a snapshot of time for that person – a person completely shattered.”
“Entirely,” Coulter replies. “And, of course, a more mature person would have reacted differently. A more cultivated person would have reacted differently. But that was my raw reaction to it. And, you know, at that time a mentally challenged child was something you didn’t speak about.”
It’s a testament to O’Connor’s tact, and Coulter’s ease, that the resulting conversation is elucidating rather than judgmental, as Coulter relates the realities of having a child with special needs in the early 1960s.
“There was that kind of hiding-away thing,” he says, “and I was determined that that wasn’t going to happen: I had to say my piece, good, bad or indifferent.”
A similar dive into the deep stuff emerges when the novelist Andrew O’Hagan begins his moving and thorough interview on Second Captains Saturday (RTÉ Radio 1) by telling Eoin McDevitt and Ciarán Murphy about his unlikely days as a budding ballet dancer in a working-class Catholic family in Ayrshire.
His football-fanatic father wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. “We had pictures of Danny McGrain and Kenny Dalglish in every significant part of the wall in our house,” he tells us. “Football was the religion – competing only with religion, of course.”
His father, we hear, imagined his boys at Parkhead “running toward the opposing goal for Celtic”, but O’Hagan’s rebellion took the form of the Jacqueline Thompson School of Ballet, a local organisation that was “strictly not for working-class boys. It didn’t actually say that on the poster, but that was the truth of it”.
The bulk of the conversation, however, is devoted to the story that inspired O’Hagan’s novel Mayflies, from 2020, which is being adapted for the stage in Edinburgh.
Book, play and real-life experience all hew to the same basic script: a close friend of O’Hagan, with whom he bonded as a teen over soccer and music, reconnects in middle age, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His request to his old friend is that he help him end his life through assisted dying – one last assertion of his willingness to live, and die, on his own terms.
In the fictionalised versions of this tale, both in print and on stage, this brings the old friends to Dignitas to see the process to its conclusion. In real life, we discover, death intervened the night before the fated trip to Switzerland was due, sparing O’Hagan that final ordeal.
O’Hagan nevertheless made the trip himself, journeying to the clinic and the room in which his friend would have seen his end. It’s there, he tells us, that he spied the impossibly apposite image of young boys playing soccer, directly outside what would have been his football-mad pal’s final resting place.
“That’s how a book can happen to you,” O’Hagan says amid the pin-drop silence his tale has engendered. “Sometimes it’s 10 years’ worth of slog and research and dreaming, and sometimes it’s a three-minute pop song that just comes out of the speakers, and you just think, ‘It was always there.’”
Moment of the week
Claire Byrne’s programme erupts into horror on Tuesday, in light of a UK concertgoer reporting that their tardy arrival at Moby’s recent gig in London was greeted with a £30 fine.
The podcaster Dave Hanratty is on hand to express his strident opposition to such a move, firing pot-shots at his fellow broadcaster Anton Savage for offering a note of conciliation beforehand.
Delightfully, their discussion of the evils facing concertgoers quickly dovetails into a frank catalogue of grumbles and gripes the pair have about attending live events in 2026.
Soon, bad behaviour by fellow attendees takes centre stage: loud eating, sniffing, snorting – even phone conversations – during packed-out gigs. Byrne mentions a recent cinema trip marred by a neighbour using their phone “on full brightness”.
“Insane,” Hanratty says, his ire quickly rising.
Even this, however, is swiftly one-upped by his own account of someone attending a Massive Attack concert while eating a salad.
The resulting horrified uproar is an enjoyable reverse manoeuvre for a segment that began by espousing the values of people power only to end with a dark current of purest misanthropy.
“Don’t be bringing your Caesar salad to the gig,” Byrne says by way of conclusion.
“Crazy,” Hanratty says with a sigh.