Paul Brady is pop music's biggest fan. He's devoted to it and wants to play as much of it as possible. His new album, Oh What A World, is therefore a broadminded piece of work - a slick yet earthy pop record which successfully smuggles a dose of Tyrone soul into that often bland terrain.
It's a democratic project too, with many of the songs co-written with the likes of Will Jennings and Carole King. The single The Long Goodbye, perhaps surprisingly, is a collaboration with Ronan Keating - a song which has taken Brady back, on his own terms, into odd places such as the 2 FM play-list. And he's delighted with that. Paul Brady is, after all, a pop singer and proud of it.
But Keating in the credits is not the only curveball on the album. Recorded in his home studio, there has been ample room for manoeuvre and experimentation. The string arrangements of Fiachra Trench bring in new textures of their own and yet the closing track on the CD is, without question, something which Aerosmith might fancy. It's a very mixed bag indeed. And Brady feels it should be.
"I think it's a lot more rounded than some other albums I've done. It's very varied, yes; but I come from an era where people made those kinds of records. In fact it's very exciting that I can turn a corner in a record and I'm in a different street entirely. I've always been fairly eclectic in my approach to making music - to the building blocks of music - and I've never had a problem with sequencing or putting things into machines. I believe that it's the imagination that makes the music and it's OK whatever it bounces off."
But to get to this particular confident stage in a long career, Paul Brady has enjoyed many highs and endured many lows. The shorthand version of the story is that Brady the folk singer chucked it all in and became Brady the rock singer, but that's to miss the point entirely. In fact, remarkably, Brady sees his time on the folk scene as something of an interruption. Back then, in the late 1960s, Brady was already deeply immersed in soul, blues, rhythm and blues and pop. He was also just on the point of trying to write songs when along came a thing called the Irish folk revival. He was in his final year at UCD, suddenly it was folk music which was the order of the day.
"First of all what happened was Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary. That started to become a cool thing in the college set in Dublin. There was a whole different political climate at the time and I think that was the main key to the success of the thing. Everybody was left-wing. It was anti-Vietnam, it was the Paris riots and it was real cool as a student to be in the Labour Party. And if you were even more cool you'd be a Trotskyite. What drew people into that music was the political content of it and the protest content of it and it became in a way the voice of that generation - it was a political thing really."
Brady was living in a flat in Moyne Road in Ranelagh. Mick Moloney who was in The Emmet Folk Group with Donal Lunny lived downstairs and, through the floorboards, Brady began to hear foot-stomping, guitars and mandolins. He recalls not being particularly impressed by rowdy political ballads, but can well remember the three of them staring at the first Bob Dylan record and not quite knowing what to make of it. There was, however, as Brady describes it, "an edge and an attitude" to the music which appealed to them. And through Dylan, Baez and others, something new and American began to enter the Irish folk scene.
"Gradually it all began to feed its way in. People started splitting off into those people who were trad and could not deal with Dylan, and those people who liked it and bought harmonicas, wrote their wee songs and played in the Universal Folk Club. Initially it was like a throwback to me because, when I was 11 years old, I was playing Burl Ives stuff along the cliffs in Bundoran - I Am A Wayfaring Stranger and all the old hootenanny stuff like John Henry and all those old Folkways ballads. In a way when you heard this stuff you felt that it was deep in your spinal chord. You knew this was music that had originally come from here - it was just their misunderstanding of it."
And so began Paul Brady's career as a folk singer. He started performing solo in the clubs, working through the entire Mississippi John Hurt, Leadbelly and Howlin' Wolf songbooks. He recalls that, on any one night, he might also hear instrumentalists such as James Keane play the box, or singers like Danny Doyle perform The Shores of Americay, and that gradually it was something he came to like. He also recognised that, in a practical sense, there was no chance of playing in a soul band at that particular time. The climate had changed. The business had changed entirely. And maybe this folk stuff wasn't so corny after all. He joined the Johnstons.
"I said OK, I'm not sure I like playing a minor all night but I'll go with it because I don't know what else to do at this point in time. But I have to honestly say that the minute I got into it I began to enjoy it. The Johnstons were kind of middle-of-the-road, but through them I went to the hardcore trad because Moloney himself was hardcore trad. He took me out there and then we brought it back into the group. And so the Johnstons changed from a Peter, Paul and Mary folk-pop group to being a fairly intense kind of thing. But it was really seannos singing as a musical phenomenon that completely blew my mind. I listened to Darach O'Cathain and Joe Heaney and I started having a go at it in the privacy of my own flat. The more I tried the more I realised I could do it. Then it was a simple step to jump back into Ulster. I would meet someone like Paddy Tunney at a Fleadh somewhere and he'd be singing Lough Erne Shore. I started moving towards that sort of thing and learning more about it."
Brady's deviation into folk reached its high point in his legendary partnership with Andy Irvine. As someone who had virtually no serious exposure to Irish music until the late 1960s, Brady found himself not only a star within the genre, but also one of its hippest presences by far. There had been a spell in Planxty too, but it came at a time when they were on the point of finally calling it a day. In fact, Brady maintains that the Paul Brady/Andy Irvine record would, in different circumstances, have actually been the next Planxty album. There would surely have been more from the duo but, by now married and with a baby daughter, Brady was getting tired of sleeping in a Renault 4. He said a fond farewell to the lay-bys of Europe.
"Bit by bit I began to say, I love you Andy but I have to put roots down. And that's essentially why Andy and I split up. But I love that record. I absolutely love that record. And it gave me a kind of confidence and energy to do anything. I firmly believe, the more I understand the nature of creativity and the market place, that it's really essential to be accepted - to be popular. If you're constantly trying to justify what you're doing it erodes your own creative energy. So the reason I was able to do Welcome Here Kind Stranger is that I was roller-coasting on this vibe of energy. And having come from a backing guitarist in the Johnstons who sang harmonies every so often and looked over the shoulder of Mick Moloney, I was suddenly this thing! I didn't think twice. Everything I did, I felt good about and I don't think I've ever regained the sense of confidence in myself that I had when I went to do that record."
And so the big questions for those who worshipped at the feet of Brady back in the 1970s. Why (as it seemed) did he do a Dylan? Why did he plug in, go electric and become a rock star? And even from a strictly business point of view, why did he trade in super-stardom as a folk-singer for something less than that as a rock performer? Why not simply stay where he was?
"Well, if that had been the whole picture I might have stayed there. But I felt empowered enough to go back to the music that I had loved before I had loved traditional music. It had been there all the time and this was a decade when all of it had been happening - Bowie and all that kind of stuff. I was listening to it and I thought right, I can get back in here. I decided I had to try to find out whether or not I could do this. It has always been my philosophy in life that once I know how to do something, I don't want to do it again. I've never been able to look at music as a career where once you arrive at a certain situation, you milk it. What I want to do is all the things I can do before I die. To have continued on the road I was on would have meant postponing finding out about myself."
In 1981 Brady released Hard Station. It was a hit in Ireland and hailed as an instant classic. But that, in many ways, was as far as it got. Outside the comfort zone of Ireland, Brady began, for the first time, to encounter closed doors. Within the business itself there was very little interest in what someone like Paul Brady was about. Suddenly he found himself adrift, cut off and very unhappy. The last thing he needed were those endless requests to sing Arthur McBride.
But Brady persevered, employing what he refers to as "a kind of brute instinct". He continued to make album after album and soon there were the "wee carrots", as he puts it, which helped him keep going. When artists such as Santana and Tina Turner began covering his songs it gave him both encouragement and a certain amount of financial security. In later years, Bonnie Raitt and others contributed further to those funds. Even Bob Dylan name-checked him as one of his heroes - but none of it was ever quite enough for Brady himself. His own creative muse remained extremely restless as he doggedly continued to write his songs with little or no regard for what was fashionable, cool or otherwise. He was clearly his own man, and there were many who responded and liked what they heard.
"People who like my songs tend to be people who have made a commitment - a permanent commitment - that's why I won't appeal to people who are still playing the field. They don't understand what I'm talking about. I regret that in a way because if I was to apply myself to topics with more street credibility I might get more street cred. But at the end of the day, I'm not the rebel. I've never felt comfortable wearing shades at night-clubs because I'm not that sort of person. I suppose, partly defensively, I tend to put down that element in people - but that's kind of a Tyrone thing. And I'm too open for my own good - and I'm not cute enough. But now I've stopped struggling and screaming "look at me!"
Paul Brady is certainly on a roll these days. Since signing with RYKO he has reissued his back catalogue, brought out a greatest hits, which featured a new version of Arthur McBride, and now he's about to go on a tour which includes six nights in a row at Dublin's Olympia Theatre. Oh What a World indeed. And for Paul Brady, it's a much happier and more comfortable place than it has ever been.
"It takes a very long time to figure out how to make your own music. I will never feel that I have arrived at my destination but I like the stage I'm at. Maybe now that I've done a lot of stripped down, basic, simple pop songs, next time out I might want to go kind of weird - and see where that takes me. You never know."
Oh What a World by Paul Brady is on RYKO Discs, to be released on April 14th. He tours Ireland next month: University Concert Hall, Limerick on May 12th; Leisureland, Galway on May 13th; the Olympia in Dublin on May 15th, 16th, 17th, 19th, 20th and 21st; Mount Errigal, Letterkenny, May 24th; Opera House, Belfast, May 26th, 27th and 28th