Phil Coulter: ‘The song Congratulations has fed, clothed and educated my children’

In his very large office in a nondescript industrial estate, Phil Coulter is playing an electric baby grand piano. He is surrounded by the gold and platinum records he has earned for songs like Puppet on a String (for Sandie Shaw), Shang-a-Lang (for Bay City Rollers) his instrumental Tranquillity albums and much more. “You don’t buy these in Dunnes Stores,” he says. There’s a lot of memorabilia. There’s a framed letter from Margaret Thatcher’s government offering him an OBE and then their response when he turned it down. “The hunger strike… The miners’ strike, all of that Iron Lady shit just stuck in my throat. I didn’t want anything to do with [Thatcher]. My ego’s in good enough shape. I don’t need an OBE after my name. Who am I going to impress? The postman?” There is a copy of the Anglo-Irish Agreement signed for Coulter by John Hume and Garret FitzGerald in 1985. Coulter and his friend James Galway performed at the Nobel Prize awards ceremony when Hume and David Trimble won it in 1998. Galway, a Protestant marching band flautist in his youth, said to Coulter [Coulter, who is from Derry, does an impression of Galway’s Belfast accent here]: “We’re sort of a musical version of Hume and Trimble.”Nearby there’s a stack of shelves filled with sheet music and papers all being archived. Legacy is on his mind thanks to the recent deaths of friends like Moya Brennan and Gerry Kelly. “It reminds you you’re not bullet proof,” he says. READ MOREThere’s also an annex with a rack of touring suits and a pile of suitcases. At 84 years old he still tours regularly, with 24 concert dates in November and December. “When you get a couple of standing ovations… if you don’t get energy from that you’re in the wrong game.” He doesn’t really “practise” piano, he says, but he plays every day. “I find it hard to walk past a piano without sitting down and seeing what it sounds like. But I don’t sit down and do five-finger exercises.” He plays a bit of a fast song, Appalachian Round-Up, from an album he did with Galway. He tells me about family sessions in Derry when he was a child with his fiddle-playing RUC dad (“There weren’t too many Catholics in the force in those days”) and his mother “vamping along on the piano, often in a different key”. He wasn’t hugely enthused by his classical music focused piano lessons initially. “I wanted to learn…” He plays A Nation Once Again… “These were the tunes I’d been taught at the Christian Brothers. I wanted a piece of that action.” He started working things out by ear. “The first one I could pick out was a tune called Buttons and Bows.” He plays it one handed. “All the black notes.” Phil Coulter at his office surrounded by hit records. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times Derry was in the throes of the showband boom when he was growing up. “There were breeze block dance halls in the middle of bogs and insatiable appetite for dance bands,” he says. “There was a high level of unemployment in Derry. If you were looking for a job as a civil servant or whatever, the first question you’d have been asked was: ‘What school did you go to?’ Which was the code for: ‘Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?’ But when you went for a job in a band, they just wanted you to play your instrument... It was a very nonsectarian world.” He started a band when he went to study music in Queen’s University. The music scene in Belfast was very stuffy and he was influenced by the explosion in rock’n’roll. “There was a change in power,” he says. He plays a little Fats Domino. “I found my freedom,” he sings. He wrote his first song, Foolin’ Time, for a rag week charity record. “We strolled about campus the rest of the term, like rock stars.” Were they treated like rock stars? He laughs. “Nobody got the memo except us.” In the summers he played piano as a Butlin’s Redcoat and in a hotel in Bundoran. One night a fan of his piano playing rang the hotel to tell them that members of The Capitol Showband were playing an impromptu session at a pub nearby. He hotfooted it up the road and sat in at the piano. “I lost no time pressing a copy of my record into their hands whether they wanted it or not.” One weekend after hitching home from Queen’s, as he was eating his favourite home-cooked dinner (mince and onions) he got a call from The Capitol’s leader, Des Kelly saying: “We love that song… Would it be okay with you if we recorded it as our first single?” It was one of the most important calls in his life, he says. From then on “I was unemployable”. He points to his heart. “I was a hit songwriter in here.” [ The Script’s Danny O’Donoghue: ‘I was in therapy, saying all the right things but drinking at weekends’Opens in new window ]His parents weren’t enthusiastic. “For a Catholic to have availed of a university education… and then to throw it all away, in their estimation, was a flagrant abuse of trust and of the privilege you were given and of the talent that God gave you.” His dad “sat me down and said, ‘mark my words, boy, this’ll all end in tears’. My mother was saying rosaries, reciting novenas, lighting candles so that I wouldn’t end up living in the streets.” He snagged a job with The Capitol’s London agent Phil Solomon as a general dogsbody and eventually, he and his friend Bill Martin were hired as a songwriting duo working for Jimmy Philips at Keith Prowse Music. “I think we got 25 quid a week. We had a little office… It had a beat-up upright piano, a desk, two chairs and a sink. We used to say we were the cleanest songwriters in Denmark Street.” Their cubbyhole was on the same corridor as Cook and Greenaway and an array of other songwriting duos. They could hear each other work. “Any illusions you had about art in pop music, you were soon f**king disabused of all of that after a few months in Denmark Street with the publisher knocking on your door saying: ‘Where is it?’” They learned about spotting gaps in the market. In 1970, for example, Coulter and Martin wrote one of the first World Cup songs, Back Home, which was recorded by the England squad. “The most important people in the studio, apart from myself, Bill Martin, and the players, were the press.” Does he remember the first song he wrote on Denmark Street that he really liked? He launches into a song called Hi, Hi, Hazel recorded by Geno Washington. It sounds, weirdly, like a Lou Reed song, which isn’t that surprising given that Reed too once slaved away at pop in the Brill Building in New York. Cliff Richard performing Congratulations in 1968. Photograph: Getty Images What was their first big hit? He plays me the opening motif of Puppet on a String which he and Martin wrote for Sandie Shaw and with which she won Eurovision in 1967. He knew that for the Eurovision they needed some sonic novelty. He wrote the intro and told Martin: “I’m going to use a bassoon.” Martin said: “What’s a f**king bassoon?” He laughs. Shortly after this they wrote Congratulations for Cliff Richard. “Congratulations has fed, clothed and educated my children... When we started in Denmark Street we would dream of ‘a pension song’.” In the 1970s he began getting more ambitious. He became a producer, inspired by Phil Spector (He plays Spector’s Da Doo Ron Ron “Three chords. Three notes. Genius”). He produced for Irish trad acts like The Dubliners, Planxty and The Fureys. Luke Kelly inspired him to write “grown-up songs”. “I’d already won the Eurovision and sold a few million records for the Bay City Rollers and The Dubliners were singularly unimpressed… They turned up two hours late and Ronnie [Drew] tells me: ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist.’” He laughs. “Kelly’s knowledge was encyclopedic… He’d spent a couple of years in the UK hanging out with the likes of Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, Ian Campbell… [He] introduced me to all of that but again encouraged me to go a little deeper.” Why hadn’t he tried that before? “I was trying to sell records. You’re a pop songwriter. You’re not expressing your ‘inner being’. Get the record f**king recorded, get it in the charts. And we don’t want personal. We want a hit. Anybody who’s writing a pop song who tells you he’s not interested in the charts is either a) a fool or b) a liar, because that’s by definition why you write pop songs.” Kelly changed Coulter’s process. He began writing about real things. He wrote Free the People, an anti-internment ballad, and The Town I Loved so Well about his hometown. But Scorn Not his Simplicity, about his son Paul with his first wife Angela (he subsequently married Geraldine Brannigan), was “the most personal song”. He sings a bit of it. What was it like to write that? “It was a therapy. I was only early 20s when all of a sudden the paediatrician tells me my newly born second child, my first son, has got Down syndrome… How do you process that? So, part of coming to terms with it would have been trying to write Scorn Not His Simplicity.” It was an era when disabled children were hidden away, he says. “I said: ‘I’m not going to hide this away. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.’” Did writing music become a way of processing things? “Yes,” he says. “And here’s the curious thing. Of my canon of songs, when I look back on the track record, the songs that would be most important to me, and the songs which have probably endured best, would be The Town I Loved so Well and Scorn Not His Simplicity. Neither of which were written with an eye on the charts at all.” Phil Coulter is preparing to go on tour. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw/The Irish Times Does he ever get emotional when playing? “Sometimes,” he says. “There are a lot of ghosts about the place. [My dad] was always in the middle of the front row of the balcony [in Derry]. So when I played a song like The Old Man there and I’m thinking about him, that association became very real and I kind of choked up a bit.” Derry is more stressful to play than “Carnegie Hall”, he says. “Because it’s home. You’ve to step up... Everybody’s a singer in Derry, whether they can sing or not.” What’s fascinating about Coulter is that he somehow balances two very different parts of the music world. He embodies the part that’s novelty-seeking and entrepreneurial. His hugely successful Tranquillity series, for example, was a product of him being unable to find unobtrusive dinner party music. And he also embodies the part that’s about self-expression and authenticity. His most recent song, Wild Flowers, which he plays to us as an “exclusive”, came out of a lifelong love for Donegal. “Growing up in Derry, Donegal was our escape. When you’re educated by the Christian Brothers the Free State was the promised land. And also, in the postwar era there was rationing in the North so people would come back with butter and eggs. Donegal was always in colour.” Phil Coulter embarks on his annual 24-date nationwide tour this November which includes the National Concert Hall on December 2nd, Theatre Royal Waterford on December 8th and Wexford Opera House on December 12th.