The late songwriter Fergus O’Farrell wrote music of heartbreaking beauty and of breathtaking tempestuousness.
So it is apt that his story should be brought wrenchingly to the screen by director Michael McCormack with the documentary Breaking Out (RTÉ One, Wednesday, 10.35pm).
It is a feature-length sobathon filmed over 10 years and forged grippingly from the stuff of life itself: hope, struggle, death and the redemptive power of a great tune.
But there is humour too – and a surreal cameo from movie star Jeremy Irons, a neighbour of O’Farrell’s in west Cork who we see appearing to the singer in a dream, after he suffers an accident and wonders if he has the will to carry on.
READ MORE
O’Farrell passed away in 2016 during the shooting of the documentary, shortly after he had finished the album he had set out to make with his band Interference – and with the help of his friend Glen Hansard, of The Frames.
Diagnosed in childhood with muscular dystrophy, the Schull, Co Cork, artist was forced to stop touring just as his career was taking off.
“An Irish Jeff Buckley” is how he was described by Steve Wall of The Stunning, a contemporary of O’Farrell’s in late 1980s Dublin, when every new Irish band was heralded as potentially the next U2.
As a kid, O’Farrell was always less athletic than his siblings. When he was eight, the postman told his parents there was “something wrong” with their son, and they took him to Cork city for tests. His mother recalls how the doctor ignored Fergus and told her that her son would be in a wheelchair by 12. “And at 18 … he snapped his fingers.”
But Fergus made it past 18 and, having moved to Dublin, found healing in music. Gregarious and charismatic, O’Farrell was a lodestar to other artists. He came from comparative wealth (he was educated by the Jesuits in elite Clongowes Wood College) and his father had been able to lease for him an old shoe factory in Dublin that served as both digs and rehearsal space.
“There was a constant shuffle of sleeping bags,” recalls singer and actor Maria Doyle Kennedy. “It seemed to be a home for the bewildered.”
O’Farrell was an artist’s artist – an inspiration to a young Glen Hansard and countless others. “You could see this frail being – this huge ego of a soul trapped in a very limited physical body,” recalls Hansard, who describes O’Farrell’s singing as the sound of “pure freedom”.
Hansard felt he owed a creative debt to O’Farrell, and he repaid it by having Interference’s song Gold feature in the soundtrack to his movie Once.
The track took on a life of its own – it was performed at the 2012 Tony Awards and, in one of Breaking Out’s most moving sequences, we accompany O’Farrell to New York where, alongside Hansard, he plays it at the famed Radio City Music Hall.
But it is O’Farrell’s final years in Schull that yank at the heartstrings. McCormack doesn’t soft soap the impact of O’Farrell’s declining health, nor the pressure it places on both O’Farrell and his wife, Li. In the end, Breaking Out is really about their relationship as much as it is about Interference or their fans.
“She is my controlled nuclear explosion, she is my happiness,” says O’Farrell, recalling how they met when he was in hospital in Cyprus and she was the nurse assigned to care for him.
It’s one more emotionally devastating scene in a film packed with them.
Breaking Out can be viewed on RTÉ One at 10.35pm.
