{"id":648585,"date":"2026-08-21T06:20:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T06:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/648585\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T06:20:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T06:20:12","slug":"i-couldnt-listen-to-it-brendan-oconnor-frankness-with-phil-coulter-is-an-unmissable-moment-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/648585\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I couldn\u2019t listen to it\u2019: Brendan O\u2019Connor frankness with Phil Coulter is an unmissable moment \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere\u2019s no such thing as a born songwriter,\u201d Phil Coulter<\/a> tells Brendan O\u2019Connor <\/b>(RT\u00c9 Radio 1<\/a>, Sunday). \u201cIt\u2019s a craft you have to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n

There follow tales of Coulter\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat if the muse didn\u2019t hit you that week?\u201d O\u2019Connor<\/a> asks. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s what you had to learn,\u201d Coulter replies. \u201cThis concept of a songwriter wandering through the forest, waiting for a flash of inspiration, that\u2019s grand \u2013 except if you\u2019re a professional and the publisher is knocking on the door, saying, \u2018We don\u2019t want it great, we want it by Tuesday.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

A few years later, fresh from winning the Eurovision Song Contest<\/a> with Puppet on a String and, in his telling, \u201cselling six or seven million records\u201d, Coulter admits to losing the plot. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d have to confess, we got carried away. I\u2019m coming from a terraced house in Derry. I think I\u2019ve won the Lotto. Songwriting took a backseat.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, flushed with anger by a publisher\u2019s claim that they were merely \u201ca flash in the pan\u201d, they endeavoured to win pop\u2019s biggest prize again the following year, only for their Cliff Richard<\/a> classic Congratulations to be beaten by Spain. <\/p>\n

\u201cWere ye robbed by General Franco?\u201d O\u2019Connor asks, referring to a persistent rumour that their efforts were stymied by the mobilised forces of Iberian fascism. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0RT\u00c9 dominates airwaves despite Radio 1 rescheduling losses, figures showOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was one theory,\u201d Coulter gamely replies. \u201cI don\u2019t know how accurate it is, but I\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Talk then moves to a deeply moving discussion about Coulter\u2019s son Paul, who died aged four from heart complications connected to his Down syndrome<\/a>, and whose birth inspired Coulter\u2019s song Scorn Not His Simplicity.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s this that prompts the most unmissable moment of the show, as O\u2019Connor, himself the father of a child with Down syndrome, deploys disarming frankness with his guest. <\/p>\n

\u201cCan I tell you something?\u201d he asks. \u201cI couldn\u2019t listen to it for years after my own daughter was born, because I just thought, \u2018It\u2019s wrong. I don\u2019t like some of the things it says, and it\u2019s not right.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd 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\u2019t legislate for how people react in those situations, how they feel about it. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat was your deeply honest reaction to it, wasn\u2019t it? And you\u2019d probably react differently now. I would react differently now to the birth of my own daughter. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Rose of Tralee review: Westmeath winner is a good-news story from a creaky eventOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s a snapshot of time for that person \u2013 a person completely shattered.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEntirely,\u201d Coulter replies. \u201cAnd, 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\u2019t speak about.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a testament to O\u2019Connor\u2019s tact, and Coulter\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere was that kind of hiding-away thing,\u201d he says, \u201cand I was determined that that wasn\u2019t going to happen: I had to say my piece, good, bad or indifferent.\u201d<\/p>\n

A similar dive into the deep stuff emerges when the novelist Andrew O\u2019Hagan<\/a> begins his moving and thorough interview on Second Captains Saturday<\/b> (RT\u00c9 Radio 1) by telling Eoin McDevitt and Ciar\u00e1n Murphy about his unlikely days as a budding ballet dancer in a working-class Catholic family in Ayrshire. <\/p>\n

His football-fanatic father wasn\u2019t quite sure what to make of it. \u201cWe had pictures of Danny McGrain and Kenny Dalglish in every significant part of the wall in our house,\u201d he tells us. \u201cFootball was the religion \u2013 competing only with religion, of course.\u201d<\/p>\n

His father, we hear, imagined his boys at Parkhead \u201crunning toward the opposing goal for Celtic\u201d, but O\u2019Hagan\u2019s rebellion took the form of the Jacqueline Thompson School of Ballet, a local organisation that was \u201cstrictly not for working-class boys. It didn\u2019t actually say that on the poster, but that was the truth of it\u201d.<\/p>\n

The bulk of the conversation, however, is devoted to the story that inspired O\u2019Hagan\u2019s novel Mayflies<\/a>, from 2020, which is being adapted for the stage in Edinburgh. <\/p>\n

Book, play and real-life experience all hew to the same basic script: a close friend of O\u2019Hagan, 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 \u2013 one last assertion of his willingness to live, and die, on his own terms.<\/p>\n

In the fictionalised versions of this tale, both in print and on stage, this brings the old friends to Dignitas<\/a> to see the process<\/a> to its conclusion. In real life, we discover, death intervened the night before the fated trip to Switzerland was due, sparing O\u2019Hagan that final ordeal.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Hagan nevertheless made the trip himself, journeying to the clinic and the room in which his friend would have seen his end. It\u2019s 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\u2019s final resting place.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s how a book can happen to you,\u201d O\u2019Hagan says amid the pin-drop silence his tale has engendered. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s 10 years\u2019 worth of slog and research and dreaming, and sometimes it\u2019s a three-minute pop song that just comes out of the speakers, and you just think, \u2018It was always there.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Moment of the week<\/p>\n

Claire Byrne<\/a>\u2019s programme erupts into horror on Tuesday, in light of a UK concertgoer reporting that their tardy arrival at Moby<\/a>\u2019s recent gig in London was greeted with a \u00a330 fine.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> for offering a note of conciliation beforehand. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Soon, bad behaviour by fellow attendees takes centre stage: loud eating, sniffing, snorting \u2013 even phone conversations \u2013 during packed-out gigs. Byrne mentions a recent cinema trip marred by a neighbour using their phone \u201con full brightness\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cInsane,\u201d Hanratty says, his ire quickly rising.<\/p>\n

Even this, however, is swiftly one-upped by his own account of someone attending a Massive Attack concert while eating a salad.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t be bringing your Caesar salad to the gig,\u201d Byrne says by way of conclusion. <\/p>\n

\u201cCrazy,\u201d Hanratty says with a sigh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThere\u2019s no such thing as a born songwriter,\u201d Phil Coulter tells Brendan O\u2019Connor (RT\u00c9 Radio 1, Sunday). \u201cIt\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648586,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[274231,23901,167905,49161,23898,126610,274230,30593,18,117,10893,19,17,33798,5287,274229,1181],"class_list":["post-648585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-andrew-o-hagan","tag-anton-savage","tag-assisted-dying","tag-brendan-oconnor","tag-claire-byrne","tag-cliff-richard","tag-dignitas","tag-down-syndrome","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-eurovision","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-moby","tag-newstalk-radio","tag-phil-coulter","tag-rte"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117132055314899932","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}