After 45 years and almost 30 albums, Christy Moore is still striving for perfection by asking why some songs connect, others don’t, and which can be revitalised. But it’s a struggle he enjoys
IT’S A MISERABLE Monday morning and Christy Moore has been up for hours honing a song he first recorded 16 years ago. As he picks out chords in the upstairs study of his home in Monkstown, Co Dublin, his acoustic guitar competes with thundering rainfall and the sound of a neighbour’s chainsaw. But Moore won’t rest until he’s nailed the song.
The focus of Ireland’s most cherished folk singer, now 66, has only intensified with age. If a certain line in a song no longer guarantees the laughs it once did, he wants to know why. If a song he loves isn’t clicking with the audience, he can spend years trying to make it work.
“Sometimes, I suppose, I verge on being obsessed by it, really,” he says. “As time has gone on, I’ve become more interested and involved in the process of shaping up songs until they’re as good as I feel they can be. There are certain things I hear in songs, and it’s very frustrating if you can’t get them out. But it’s a struggle I enjoy.”
Sometimes the songs have to change. Weathered over countless practice sessions and at least 60 gigs a year, some need updating, some evolve by themselves and some are almost forgotten until called for over the din of a sweat-soaked atmosphere.
Unlike Bob Dylan, with his Never-Ending Tour, Moore prefers to keep things low-key. He doesn’t like to advertise (“I love going into a town where the only people who know you’re there are the ones with the tickets”), is particular about where he plays (“I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about art centres; give me a community centre any day”) and refuses to fly.
Instead, he sees marathon road trips as a chance to write rollicking tour diaries teeming with observations, witticisms and nostalgia.
Though he’d prefer to be at home with his family, strolling on Dún Laoghaire pier, he admits that he lives for those two hours when the venue lights dim. With Declan Sinnott – Ireland’s most successful producer and, in Moore’s view, a master of the guitar – by his side, any song from almost 30 albums’ worth of material can be dipped into spontaneously. But how long can that appetite for gigging last?
“For as long as I’m physically, mentally and spiritually able,” he says. “Hopefully that’s a long time yet. But I often wonder how many gigs are left. Is it 10, 100 or 1,000? I never would have thought that way in previous decades. But when I look back on any aspect of it, even the time when I couldn’t get gigs and I couldn’t afford guitar strings, I loved it. If [the income] was gone next year, I’d still feel the same. I’d be hitchin’ into town to gig somewhere with a guitar and a shite mic. I still want to do it. I don’t want to give up.”
The only time, it seems, that Moore has ever paused was during the hiatus prompted by a nervous breakdown in 1997 following a tour of Ireland, the UK, Germany, the US, Australia and New Zealand. “That was the most difficult time of my life,” he says firmly, his tone underlining how closely he guards his privacy. “It’s too complex and difficult to talk about publicly.” A silence settles outside.
Moore, dressed in a navy fleece with the collars up and a black woolly hat, has been speaking slowly and carefully, though few sentences pass without an expletive. He leans forward. “Let’s just say I find myself in a very good space now.”
The momentum began back in 1966 when Moore was faced with a choice: stay in Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo and keep spending over half his £8 wages from the bank on digs while getting spurned by cailíní at the local dances; or venture to England and earn £4 a night by powering jigs and reels with his burgeoning talent. It was an easy decision. When the Kildare man eventually stepped into a London folk club, finding Annie Briggs singing unaccompanied to a packed but silent room, he discovered a new platform.
“That was a revelation,” he says softly, noting how he remembers the time better than the 1980s or 1990s. “Suddenly it was all happening for me and it was all new.” The Grehan Sisters of Roscommon helped Moore break into the folk circuit, giving him support slots, contacts, transport and floors to sleep on. By then he had nurtured a fixation with the hypnotic power of song and the draw of interpreting timeless masterpieces – something he first picked up from the Traveller singer John Reilly, who showed him the difference between a ballad and a big song.
“It took me a while to get my head around that difference but it was important. I still feel the spirit of John Reilly in my life. There’s never a night goes by where I wouldn’t think of him. I’m intrigued by the fact that he was an illiterate man and yet his head was so full of these wonderful songs he learned from his father singing at the side of the road; the beauty in his language, the way it evolved, the way he sometimes wouldn’t understand what the song meant but he put his own take on it . . . that lives on with me.”
Moore's faithfulness to the spirit of a song means that material gleaned from elsewhere, whether it's the traditional Black Is the Colouror Christie Hennessy's Don't Forget Your Shovel, can appear distinctively his own. But he believes that authorship is irrelevant. A song is a song, he says, delivering the same impact whether we know who wrote it or not. In fact Moore defines himself by his repertoire so much that his autobiography, One Voice, took shape as an annotated songbook, the memories and sounds inseparable.
Yet delving back through his career has brought up headaches: songs he feels were never done right or overlooked gems with the potential for renewed relevancy. Seven of the 11 tracks on new album, Folk Tale, retreat as far back as Moore's time with the group Planxty to revitalise pieces that only his "long-haul listeners" might recognise.
It makes for a warm collection that, as in his performances, flows seamlessly between biting social commentary and Joxer-style craic, stitching past and recent events together. On Morecombe Bayrecalls the drowning of 23 Chinese immigrant cockle pickers in 2004, while the legal battle behind Farmer Michael Hayes(originally recorded in 1978) has become topical once again now that Irish people are losing their homes.
“God, Ireland has changed,” Moore says. “We used to have respect towards the pillars of society and the Church. How could you respect those people anymore? I realised recently that what happened at Morecombe Bay, I feel, is what has happened to Ireland. It’s what happens when utterly ruthless people are in positions of power. They have a total disregard for those under them, so much so that they’ll let people drown and won’t even bother their arse to pick them up and let them know the tide is coming. It’s the same. Look at the developers: they’re laughin’ up their sleeves. Their behaviour hasn’t changed. They’re in Nama but they’re still flaunting their wealth.”
WITH THE REFLECTIONof the window frame twinkling in his glasses, a hint of silver stubble creeping along his jaw line, Moore seems like a figure within whom the magic of nights gone by still burns brightly. Given that this year has already seen Coldplay inviting him on stage at Oxegen and the Irish rugby team belting out Ride Onwhile in New Zealand for the World Cup, does Moore feel he has anything left to prove?
"I never thought of that before," he says, having initially dismissed the idea only to return to it later. "Am I trying to prove something here now? Are you? Or are we just talking about this work that I do? Am I trying to prove something with Folk Tale? I don't know. It's possible. Maybe I am trying to prove something and I just haven't discovered it yet. I'm still finding out things about meself."
He trails off, eyes shifting between a Brian Maguire painting and a bodhrán hanging on the room’s mauve walls. Asked, then, how would he like to be remembered and Moore cocks his head, shoots a grin and doesn’t hesitate: “Couldn’t give a shite.”
Folk Tale
is released on Columbia
