Brian Kennedy – Radio interview with Gloria Hunniford

The VIP Room - January 1999

GLORIA HUNNIFORD:  Passing through today with his guitar is the Belfast born singer who has been described as having a voice to charm the angels. Van Morrison says he has a huge pair of lungs, and what I do know is that he has a huge talent. Apart from his multi selling albums he has performed in his time beside Van Morrison for President Bill Clinton to a television audience of over a billion people. Now we may not quite have that many listeners this morning but it is an enormous welcome of course to Brian Kennedy. How are you Brian?

BRIAN:  I’m very well. Happy New Year to you.

I hear you’ve had the most hair raising drive from Belfast.

I know! Just when you think life gets a bit simpler and you get a slightly bigger car and so on ….. I think bigger cars and mobile phones and fax machines just make life more complicated. We ran into fog for 45 minutes, then they were unloading a crane or something but I’m here in one piece thankfully and it didn’t make me drive too fast.

Well the mere fact that I’ve aged about ten years worrying if you’d arrive or not…

Oh I’m sorry….

What were you doing in Belfast?

Well, I was recording for three nights in St Paul’s Chapel, just off the Falls Road there, right where I grew up, and we initially – my musical director Calum MacColl and myself – went there to record a selection of short stories which I had written. I wanted to record them in some of the places that meant a great deal to me, so we went to my old school, St Paul’s, which is now Corpus Christi, then we went to St Paul’s chapel, and we also went to Milltown cemetery where my Grandmother is buried. Now, it does sound a bit strange, but what I wanted was to try to influence the emotional performance of me narrating these stories because in these stories these places are mentioned, and I was thinking about how all the generations of my family would have been through this church and through this school and so on. So right at the end of the sessions we decided to do one song from the balcony just for old times sake, because I sang in there as a boy, and I stood up there and sang a song and the sound was so beautiful . It was an empty church, the last mass had happened and we brought the tapes home and listened to them and it gave us the idea to go back there for three nights and record, really any kinds of songs or poems, for example, that I’d set to music or favourite songs that we hadn’t got round to recording.

It’s very interesting that you’ve gone back to the church where you grew up. Presumably that would have been quite nostalgic to sing these songs and to talk, in that church?

Totally, because the first time I experienced that church I was a small, small boy. Then one of the first times I would have sung in public would have been in there and had some encouragement from, say, local priests and so on. I sang with St Paul’s choir among other choirs, but that’s really the first time I heard my voice being carried in a building like that. You know what those buildings are like. They smell wonderful, the lights are beautiful and the sound is exquisite. It doesn’t sound like that anywhere else. And there’s an ancient quality to it as well when you’re standing in a room like that letting your voice reach to the cloisters and to stop singing and yet you can still hear your voice ringing.

So did you have to wait until mass finished before you went in to record?

We did. We got special permission from Fr. Murphy and Fr.Crawson, because we did go in there one time and of course there was a kind of little army of old ladies who were going round polishing things and squeaking on their wee shoes and we did need as much silence as possible. But the church – it’s funny because it also speaks in a certain way. Its old so it kind of groans a bit every now and again and kind of stretches itself which just lends to the atmosphere, but I must say that I was just remembering all kinds of things I hadn’t thought about for years.

Like?

Being in there as a young boy and the first time I went to confession and how terrifying the thought was.

Do you remember what you confessed?

Oh yeah! Well of course I was such a good boy I had to make something up! Because they said to you "You have to go in and tell your sins, and everybody is a sinner"! That’s what they used to say to us, and I couldn’t really think of anything too major, maybe a bit of swearing or something like that. The favourite one was taking Our Lords name in vain – that was the famous one – and of course the really important stuff you wouldn’t dare mention! So I remember it was Fr. Dargan – it was almost like Fr. Darth Vader, you know – big long black cloak, and we’d rehearsed so much. We had to get in this line, but no one told me there were two boxes going on with the priest in the middle so the minute I got in the box I was like "Bless me Father….." and I kind of reamed it off, but he hadn’t even turned round to open the box , he was still hearing somebody else’s sins. So of course I did the whole speech and there was total silence. And I thought oh my God, he must be thinking what an awful person I am – and these sins are just unbelievable and suddenly the door opened, and he waits, and he goes ‘Is anybody there’ and I go "Yes, yes father’ and he goes ‘Well? Go on then!’ And he got really bad tempered, so I had to do it all over again and this time I messed it up and he got really upset with me and he made me say all these Our Fathers and everything. So I was thinking about that and laughing to myself, and thinking how times have changed.

Give me an idea on the guitar of what you would have performed over the last couple of nights.

This is a Neil Young song called ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’

Sings some of ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’

I’ve been up very late so excuse my morning voice there!

Well I was only thinking that after that hair raising drive, and rushing about, and you’re able to sing as sweetly as that! If the Father in question who took your first confession had known that you’d turn out like this he might have forgiven you more easily.

He may have been a bit gentler on me. Who knows?

Now, you were born in 1966…

Exactly. My mother brought me into the world in the back room of 60 Walmer Street. Now at that time things were beginning to really change politically and every other way, and it was deemed safer for us to move closer to where my mothers mother lived in Beechmount, for all kinds of reasons, There were Catholic families being burned out of their homes and so we ended up in the Beechmount area. We stayed in that area for years, and my brother, Stuart, came along, and then we had another brother, because I’m one of six children. It really was an extraordinary time because we were very definitely growing up in a war situation. I know it wasn’t called that for a long time but certainly we had to negotiate soldiers every day on the way to school who would follow you with their rifle, point the rifle at you the whole way up the street, pretending they might shoot you, and all this kind of stuff.

And how did you react as a child because you were looking at it obviously from a childs perspective?

Well, there were moments of intense fear and really thinking that this was the end of the world and so on, and that we would never survive, and our parents might be shot. My father was hijacked a number of times in his post office van at that point, and some people didn’t survive that kind of thing. The message was really strong and clear, and it was ‘do not leave your area, do not go over the door’. The minute any kind of riot happened – given how difficult life was, one of the great things that our parents did was to make sure at all time we were behind that hall door, and we were not allowed out onto the street. Often of course these things are unpredictable and a riot would happen so suddenly I’m seven years old and I’m coming back from school and there’s an outburst of gunfire and I’m caught in the middle of it. There isn’t really much you can do apart from take cover – get under something – and of course people would just open their front doors and drag you in, because it was very much that kind of community. People would, in their own way take care of each other and watch out for each other.

So, if you were growing up with your brothers and your friends and your schoolmates in this ghetto environment, were you being sign posted or given a role model as to how you were supposed to react as a lad in a ghetto?

I think one of the things about me was that I was certainly quite different to most of the other boys. I was much more of an emotional character, history tells me, because I was much more prone to tears and to feeling things very much to the core of myself and not just on the surface. I was very untypical in terms of I didn’t enjoy sport, you know all the things that are revered in our society. If you’re male in particular, if you’re good at sport - that’s it, you’re just going to sail through life, through school and so on. Of course, fighting was a big thing on the street, and I was just so useless at all that. I really loved to talk so most of my friends were girls. They played these really great games.  All the boys would be booting some ball around. Calum MacColls’ father, Ewan MacColl, says a really funny thing about that – why don’t they give them ALL a ball, these football players? And I totally understood it because it was the most boring game in the world! But girls had all these really intricate games, and they talked all the time about stuff, and there was always kind of secret things going on and it was just so much more interesting to be around girls, and certainly that’s true even now as an adult.

So you didn’t like the violent side and the gangs as such?

I’ll tell you another memory, my first day at secondary school, being again a mixture of terror and delight to be doing something significant. And immediately there was a circle of about 200 boys and these two boys were kicking lumps out of each other, and one boy kicked all of the front teeth out of this other boy and his teeth were in a pool of blood on the ground. I thought to myself, I have to be here for five years…. That was my first thought and we hadn’t even done assembly, this was before we were even put into the classes, so it was really hard and really frightening most of the time. Of course what happens is you sink or swim and I developed a kind of a sense of humour about it and I think that’s something that really carries the community and Northern Irish people, wouldn’t you say?

I do think its that sense of survival really, That sense of humour has kept them going and helped them survive.

You have to in order to think, well tomorrow might not be quite as bad as today. I met Patrick Kielty and remembered a thing I had read in the Hot Press about his father being murdered, and there is someone who spends his life making his world laugh, bringing a smile to people. What an amazing thing to be able to turn that awful situation around, and again that’s a good example of what we do as a race.

Were you affected by the troubles in the sense – you’ve already talked about the emotional side and how it upset you – but did it affect you from a long term point of view even if that only shows itself in your writing?

I think it didn’t come into the writing immediately because strangely enough it wasn’t really one of the big factors in terms of me moving away. I was outgrowing all kinds of things, and like I say I wasn’t kind of a typical boy at all, I’m sure you can imagine that, my sweet voice running about the Falls Road you know….

Angelic voice!

Well I don’t know how angelic it was at that point, but certainly my reaction to the Falls Road – if an ambulance came down the road I would think of a harmony for those notes

What, you would sing along to the ambulance?

In harmony to the ambulance siren, right. I don’t know why, I just did it. And so life did become difficult, I was being beaten up almost every day in all kinds of areas just because I was so unlike others, and part of me understands it more now. If your life is in danger every day it’s helpful if you can handle yourself and I just couldn’t find it in myself, I really looked for it everywhere and I couldn’t find that part of me that wanted to use my fists. I was more interested in going ‘But why, why do you feel that way, what can we do to change it?’.

Well, we want to talk about finding your voice and how you put that to the most magnificent use, but we want to hear a track, in this case off your debut album . Would that have been around 1990?

1990 exactly. And of course it was my biggest dream in the world to make a record and here it was, I’d made it, and I was 22 or 23 at that point. This song is called ‘I Would Not Forget You’. It’s about an old friend of mine, but it also has Gaelic as well as English lyrics

I Would Not Forget You

A track called ‘I Would Not Forget You’. That’s off the debut album by my guest today in the VIP suite. The year we’re talking about is 1990, the album is the ‘Great War Of Words’ and the guest of course is Brian Kennedy. I should imagine that conjures up all sorts of exciting memories of, as you say, the breakthrough really.

Oh it does, because I’d dreamt of making a record for so long and then, suddenly, there I was and my name was on the master tapes. I had this wonderful producer Tim Friese-Green, and I just couldn’t believe it, you know, because I’d dreamt about it SO much. Like I say, it had such a big build up and then suddenly there I was, and what you’re hearing are mostly live performances in the studio in London. This song has the Gaelic words because I had learned Gaelic at school - Kieran Austin taught me - and I was really glad of it because I did find it very difficult to actually enjoy school because of all those reasons we talked about before, but thankfully I managed to find a subject I was madly in love with and that was Gaelic so it was always an ambition to try and write something in Gaelic as well as English and I managed it, which was in that song.

I do find it hysterical the thought of you harmonising along with an ambulance siren, but now that you look back on it – and I think we all, particularly through interviews with journalists and so on, start to analyse what happened at a certain time - when you look back on it now, when did you realise that you had a voice?

Well, you know when you’re part of a big family, as well as wanting to fit in and be part of that family you also want something that makes you different from the family at the same time, so you have your own identity I suppose. At that point, certainly, if a relative arrived on the doorstep it would be like ‘Now Brian do a song for Auntie Sadie’ and I’d do ‘I’m a little teapot short and stout…’ and it really stemmed from that kind of thing. It’s a really hard thing to give words to because singing is ultimately such an emotional thing that its about trying to explain music being the language of emotion. I think I was just trying to find a way to communicate, to try and give a sound to the things I felt, I suppose, and so whether it’s an ambulance going down the road or it’s an actual song with words it just seemed to absolutely arrest my attention when I heard a song. My mother would sometimes be doing the dishes – well would always be doing the dishes for six kids, you can imagine - but she would sometimes be singing the first line of a song that would be like ‘And it’s getting better…’ in her Belfast accent, and I thought she was just reassuring herself about the situation but it turns out that it’s a Mamas and Papas song called ‘It’s Getting Better’ that she must have heard on the radio.

So there was always a bit of music around?

Well there was fragments of it, and then I remember we did get a radiogram, and of course the radiogram turned into a place to store clothes within about four months - you can imagine in that kind of house - but with it came a couple of singles. One was a blue Decca label Tony Bennett record - Candy Kisses (sings a few words)- so now I am a huge Tony Bennett fan. It was funny just getting those little indications of even holding a vinyl single in my hand. If someone then had fast forwarded the tape of my life to me holding my first single in my hand in 1990 when it first came out and went in at number one in Northern Ireland! It was an extraordinary moment really.

Have you ever done any jingles because I can get you to sing us into the commercial break if you like?

I will happily do that. For you, Gloria, anything…

Can we get you to do a generic jingle then that doesn’t exactly promote any product?

Okay sure. What shall I sing then?

Anything.

Anything at all. Okay – I’ll sing one of the songs from the church then, will I?

Sings a bit from ‘I Will Lift You Up’ and ends it by singing ‘here comes the commercials……..!’

Following the break, in order not to cheat the listeners out of hearing the song, Brian sings more of ‘I Will Lift You Up’

Wonderful – Van Morrison was right, you have a huge pair of lungs.

Well, sometimes I do, it depends on what I have been doing the night before!

It’s the ease with which you sing, that’s what staggers me, and it doesn’t matter whether you are on stage, in an intimate situation like this or at a party, you just seem to be able to pick up the guitar and sing with enormous ease.

Well it’s something I suppose I find quite natural to do. I mean I never thought about it until other people would say it to me. We had a music teacher at St. Paul’s school called Mr. Seamus Ewings. He would have been one of the first people to say to me ‘You know boy you can really sing’. And I was like, what?! I remember I had flirted with smoking for about a week - I was terribly asthmatic and I really shouldn’t have been doing it - and he said to me ‘You can really sing, but I tell you what, if you’re smoking stop it right now because you’ll really harm your voice. Your voice is too sweet for that kind of stuff’. And so eventually enough people started to say to me ‘You know, if you were only as good at your maths as you are at that bloody singing you’d really be somebody!’

And so in a roundabout way that’s a compliment of course, but it came at me sideways. You know how it goes – people would never sit you down and say ‘I think you’re fabulous and you should do this that and the other’. It was always kind of ‘Would you shut up that singing, you’re never done doing it’. I think I did drive most of the family nuts because I was the kind of child who would be eating dinner and singing at the same time, so I’d be chewing away and humming!

So do you not smoke these days?

No, absolutely not, I tried to as I say because I was thirteen and that’s what everybody else was doing, but it made me so violently sick. So now I look after the voice because I know more – much more – about it, and if I’m going to do a tour of forty five shows, talking all day, doing interviews and then a two hour performance in the evening, and then you go off and meet and greet people after that….. I love to do all of those things. The problem really is shutting me up. Like you were saying, at the opening of an envelope I’ll start singing - the problem is shutting me up not starting me, so I have to be careful of not overusing it.

And do you drink much?

Not really. We had a glass of champagne last night because the recording had gone so well

So you’ll use it to celebrate but you don’t drink as the norm?

No, no I’d much rather have a cup of tea, wouldn’t you?

I would, I love a cup of tea. Do you remember those walkers that had walked the world and when they came back they asked what they wanted to drink and they said a cup of tea! They’re my sort of guys!

Exactly – I’d much rather have a big cup of tea than anything else.

You know, you have to have stamina in terms of doing dates and the sort of work that you do just to be on the road.

You do, and that’s why I started to get fitter. I got a personal trainer about two and a half years ago before we started to promote the Better Man album because I knew it was going to take in more or less a tour of different countries in the world. And I did a tour with Tina Turner throughout these huge stadiums and so on. The message really came home to me that energy is something you really have to go out and find. I’m not going to wake up suddenly after sleeping seven hours and feel refreshed, but if I wake up and eat fruit in the morning - that kind of thing - then go and run at some point in the day for maybe fifty minutes or an hour I have so much more energy. It’s incredible.

Are you serious as a runner?

I am more serious now than ever. I have been running almost every day. I ran for an hour and five minutes the other night before I went into the studio.

How do you do it? Because you stay up half the night talking and singing, you don’t go to bed until late then you get up and go and run. I don’t know where you get the energy from!

Well, like I say, the more energy you give to thinking ‘I haven’t got the energy’ – that’s wasting more energy, I think. But I know what you mean, sometimes you just cannot get out of bed. Sometimes I’ve been like that when I’ve just been so tired I cannot get out from under the duvet, and that’s the point at which you really do have to stay under the blankets and go ‘Okay, I’m defeated now, I have to stay here’.

Now, I know that when you go on tour with Van Morrison that you DO stay up all night chatting and singing.

Life is about fifty times more interesting when I’m on tour with him. He’s an incredible person, and if you want to talk about energy there’s somebody who is a ball of energy twenty four hours a day.

Well I do want to talk about this fantastic professional relationship but we want to hear some music first. Now clearly you’ve recorded so much with Van Morrison, and you’ve heard so much of his material, so what if anything would be the track you would isolate for todays programme?

It’s a very, very hard choice as you say, but there’s a song of his called Someone Like You which I think is one of the most beautiful love songs ever written

And what is it about, apart from the fact that it’s a love song?

The lyric is so simple and he sings it really tenderly. It’s from an album called Poetic Champions Compose, and is from a period in my life before I knew him, but I knew that song and I just remember thinking what a beautiful song. We actually got to do it once in a show in Amsterdam.

Van Morrison singing ‘Someone Like You’

I mean, even how that track ends, the way he talks about how the best is yet to come, it’s such a hopeful record and like I say, having performed and sung with him – and he’s singing this with a blues saxophone – he’s a real powerhouse, but I think he’s even more powerful when he’s singing tenderly, and I think that’s a lovely example.

What I find is really interesting is the blend of your voices and the fact that he has that rough gravelly edge and you have that sweetness alongside it. It’s just a really interesting mix. How did it come about that you started to record with him?

I first met Van when John Kelly introduced us at the IRMA awards that they’d started to have in Belfast. It was a really brief introduction and so on, and then he also performed that night. Of course I’d been very aware of him but like I was saying earlier about family members, my eldest brother was a devotee of Van. I didn’t embrace it in the same way at all, and I was maybe much more distracted by the voice of Joni Mitchell, I’d say. So, when I met him there was very little I knew about his music at that point, and so I then went on to make my subsequent records. Then we were asked to do a project called Peace Together that was being set up by a drummer from Dublin. We were asked to contribute a track of Van’s called Celtic Ray. At that point my brother had a band called Energy Orchard and so we were asked to record it and he (Van) was MAYBE going to be involved. But we did the recording and Van ended up hearing me singing it, and I think maybe my voice in the context of one of his songs threw a different light on my voice at that time, so he requested that we meet up.

So were you impressed?

I didn’t quite believe it really because I couldn’t quite figure out why on earth he would want to. And so then after a number of phone calls we eventually met, and this would have been nineteen ninety two and a half, ninety three maybe, very early on, and within 5 minutes we really established that we had loads of things in common about music, like both really loving people like Sam Cooke. He asked me who my favourite singers were and I said ‘Well, apart from you, Tony Bennett, Sam Cooke , Mel Torme– you know, those kind of people. He was surprised that somebody of my generation would be so familiar with these things. Then I talked about singing Gershwin songs in piano bars in London and so he, I suppose, realised that I was coming from another place. And then he did ask me about his music, and I thought to myself ‘I have to be absolutely honest because if he asks me one question I’m going to get it wrong’. So I just said ‘Well, to be honest with you, I know a bit of Crazy Love, a bit of Moondance perhaps but that’s it, I don’t know anything else’.

He must have been quite bemused by this!

Well he did exactly what you did, he threw back his head and laughed! I think maybe it was quite refreshing. I hope it was anyway. And then we just started to meet every now and again and then he asked me to come and do a show, be a guest at the Womad festival in Wiltshire. It was on a beach and it was really beautiful. I just showed up and I met his band there and then, he arrived minutes before the show started and he said ‘Okay, I’ll call you on about halfway through’. Now I didn’t know what I was going to be singing, when I was going to be singing or anything! And so he called me on and I thought well, here goes nothing! I’ll just give it all I can and be honest. And he asked me did I know a song called ‘Gloria’ and I sort of knew the chorus but I didn’t know the verses. He had just re-interpreted it with John Lee Hooker so I think maybe he was interested in touching on that version. I just said to him ’Look, I don’t, but tell me what the words are and I’ll come up with something’.

And this is all in the middle of the concert?

This is all in the middle of the concert in front of 15,000 people, maybe more. I think he liked my bravado in a sense, but I thought to myself ‘Look, I'll probably never do this again so I may as well just be brave about it’.

Isn’t it the case sometimes that naivete in a way appears like bravado?

Yes and that’s all it was. And I was thinking well, I’ll learn, I’ll have a go, because I was really keen to learn it and I did love some of the music that I knew of his.

We talk about turning points on this programme. Would you say that what you’ve just described was a major turning point in your career and in your life really?

Very definitely because from that moment on I went on to tour with him throughout the world for five and a half years, contributed to five of his albums, ended up singing to President Clinton with him….

What was that like by the way?

That was extraordinary.

A billion people!

I know, I know. Thank goodness we didn’t realise that at the time ‘cos it was nerve racking enough. We were standing at the T- junction at the City Hall in Belfast and there’s maybe something like 70,000 people there watching us. We realised that the cameras were on and the President and the first lady were maybe a hundred yards from us, you know, and you really felt like whatever was going to happen it would never be the same after that.

What did you sing?

We sang ‘No Religion’….…

How does that go?

(Sings) ‘Then there’s no religion, no religion here today…." And of course the journalists couldn’t help but say that I was a Catholic from the Falls Road and he was a Protestant from East Belfast and there’s the two of us singing ‘…no religion here today’. Then of course Van dedicated ‘Have I Told You Lately That I Love You’ from Bill to Hilary at that point, so we duetted the song.

Would you sing me a little bit of that because I just love that song.

Easy, that’s easy that one.

Actually, now that you know of course what’s been going on you must find this a stroke of irony? When you think of Washington and the viewpoint that day!

I don’t pay any attention to that!

Sings ‘Have I told You Lately…..’ without the guitar which was out of tune.

I hope you were all singing along at home there!

Those words must be just the most amazing lyrics to sing.

I think that’s one of the best things about Van. Aside from the amazing songs he’s written and his amazing ability to perform and sing, when you really study the words, like in ‘Someone Like You’, or there’s another song called Queen of the Slipstream that I recorded with him for a movie, the words are so beautiful. He’s a real poet, I have to say. I could talk all day about Van because there’s so many interesting things about him.

I want to talk more in a minute about touring with him and all those big names and going to Madison Square Gardens last year and things like that, but we have a further choice of music and in this case it’s Rufus Wainwright. Now I do know that Rufus is Lauden Wainwright’s son, is that right?

Yes and Kate McGarrigle is his Mum, you know from the McGarrigles – Kate and Anna McGarrigle. And really, I heard about Rufus because someone had given me the McGarrigle Hour CD, which is all the family recording a record, for my last birthday. There was this song on it which was really, really funny, you know, the difference between I love you, and whatever – it goes ‘This song is helpful when you’re really really drunk…!’ A really mad song, and I was thinking who is this, but his voice was beautiful, he sounded like a cello to me when I heard him sing. Then it make me check out his solo album which I adore, and it’s hard to pick out a track from it because they are all really good, but this is it. Foolish Love would be the track.

Foolish Love by Rufus Wainwright.

He’s somebody I’m not terribly familiar with, I have to say, this is fairly new to me. He has a real rawness, hasn’t he?

It’s wonderful to hear a contemporary singer, someone in his twenties, who is about real songs, real singing and real instruments. He is a wonderful piano player, wonderful guitar player, and he’s written all the songs on the record, so it’s wonderful to see that the art of real songs is not dead in somebody so young. And I just find his voice really moving. You can imagine the amount of voices that come at us every day and this was one that just made me listen a bit more intently. Its no surprise when you think about the stock that man is from.

I remember being in Belfast a couple of years back and Michael Ball was going to be on this programme I was introducing, and so were you. The pair of you met in a restaurant the night before and both of you, much to the delight of everybody sitting around you, started to sing Joni Mitchell songs……

I suddenly had met someone who knew as many Joni Mitchell songs as I did! So of course we couldn’t believe it, and he was like ‘So do you know this track off the very early album?’ And of course I know almost all of them, so it was such fun to be able to sit down with someone like Michael Ball, who maybe I had some kind of preconception about because I only knew him from the musicals and so we are only aware of his one side of singing. But he, again, is another person that has such a broad appetite for music and I had such a laugh with him. You know, from that day we’ve become really close friends. We go to each others gigs, each others houses, and now I have contributed to a Christmas record of his.

Fantastic. However, the point of asking the question is this… When you eventually got to the point of playing at venues like Madison Square Gardens alongside Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison – what a gig…

I know. I really couldn’t believe it. It was one of those periods in your life when you just think ‘Am I actually here?’ And although you can see your journey, and you know exactly why you’re there and so on, there I was suddenly face to face with someone like Joni Mitchell! And Bob Dylan came on stage a couple of times and sang with us. We did Blue Suede Shoes as a tribute to Carl Perkins who had just recently died so that will date exactly when that was. (January 1998). And so there I am sharing the stage with really, of this century, the greatest contemporary artists that have been, I think. Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, and it was really extraordinary. Every day I had conversations with Joni Mitchell and she’d be warming up in the next trailer to us, and telling us these amazing stories about doing a biography – even the way she talks is the way she sings and writes. She was talking like ‘You know I tumbled into the night and went walking in Los Angeles…..’ And she bumped into this old black man – she has this thing where she thinks that in a former life that she was an old black man - so she was telling me all about this, and you could listen to her all day. But more importantly in some sense she’s one of those artists that are greatly underrated too. She is one of the most phenomenal guitar players I have ever seen and heard in my life and nobody ever talks about her guitar playing. Her singing is better than ever, and her new songs – her new album is called Taming The Tiger. When I was thinking about which one of her songs to choose - it was so difficult to choose any of them and I don’t think I actually managed to agree on one because I was even arguing with myself about which song! So I kind of gave up because I don’t know how anybody does a best of Joni Mitchell. The best of her albums are all of her albums.

And did you find that Bob Dylan, for example, was as accessible?

Not as accessible but I remember him saying to Van ‘Have you got that guy with you that sings with you?’ And I’m kind of standing there, and Van says ‘Yes’, and I go ‘Hello’, and Bob Dylan goes ‘Oh, hi’ and that was kind of the extent of the conversation! But you know, at the same time you can imagine the kind of magnifying glass that these people are under and I was able to walk freely. You know I don’t have that kind of magnifying glass on my life so I mean, really, the icing on the cake was that we all managed to be on the stage together at one point, so that was great.

So what is the feeling when you are actually standing on a stage like Madison Square Gardens and you are looking out at people who are witnessing these legends in their own time. What’s the feeling like looking at them?

Well you see, I had to go out and introduce the show and so on and then sing two numbers up front, and then do a big roll call and get Van on - which I really love to do. But you know, it does occur to you that suddenly you’re looking out at maybe 10,000 people who all have come through the sixties and so on, because although there were lots of young people there, it was a very generational audience and it was just one of the most exciting things ever because of the importance. I might tell you as well that the Rolling Stones were playing upstairs in one of the other venues. It was insane.

And who came in to see you all?

Let’s see, we saw people like Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Woody from Cheers, Sheryl Crow, Isaac Hayes, Suzanne Vega, Bruce Springstein. George Harrison watched us from the sound desk. I mean it was ludicrous the amount of people. You’d just turn round and go ‘Oh there’s George Harrison’.

So do you ever sit back almost like in a cocoon type feeling and say ‘If I had only known when I was growing up in the Falls Road, singing to the sound of an ambulance, that one day this would be happening to me? Is there that sort of unreal factor?

There is that quality to it. I have to say - you know what it’s like yourself – I’m sure there are lots of people you admire and then you end up maybe interviewing them or working with them. And it’s a different thing, because music is a language I use every single day of my life. When I’m making music with Van it feels completely natural, so whether Bob Dylan is joining us or not, and certainly not to play down any of it at all it was very exciting and so on, but there is something that takes over when you’re performing and the performance takes over so I really only ever thought about it pretty much afterwards. I suddenly thought ‘Oh yeah, Bob Dylan came on and sang with us, how amazing!’. But you know he’s an old friend of Vans, so that’s something that Van would do. John Lee Hooker came on stage with us one time in San Francisco which is captured on the live album. That’s a really high moment too.

So in hindsight has it been really good for you that you have this tag with Van Morrison or in some ways as a solo artist has it been a bit detrimental?

I can’t see how it’s been detrimental at all, because if anything it’s stretched me as an artist. It’s made me a better performer, I can’t really think of anybody in Vans shoes right now, who is a contemporary artist, who could go out, do a greatest hits tour, clean up and go home on your private jet. But there he is, working as hard as he possibly can, inviting relatively unknown singers like myself to join him out on stage, especially in America, and to share that spotlight. I mean if that doesn’t tell you how generous that man is I don’t know what would.

Well now clearly Van Morrison has been a huge turning point in everything you’ve described and your career is just escalating all the time. I know you presented some awards a couple of weeks ago.

Yes the National Entertainment awards, I did indeed, which I really enjoyed. Its something I’m not that familiar with, but I also got the chance to debut what will be my new single in April, and it’s a duet with the wonderful Ronan Keating and it’s a song called ‘These Days’.

Which I’m going to play in a second, but are you now off to your relatively new house in Ireland?

I am, I am. I managed to find a wee place in the hills near Limerick that I go and hide out in when ever I want to, and make music and so on, so yeah I’m going off to do that now.

Are you happy there?

I couldn’t be happier. I’ve got wonderful neighbours who look after me brilliantly and so yes, I’m very happy there.

Brian, thank you so much for coming along to the studio and bringing your guitar. It’s been a real treat to talk to you for this amount of time, and hear you and watch you play on the spot. Now just tell me exactly about this single because it hasn’t been released per se, has it?

It won’t be released until April we believe. I think it’s going to be the first single from this brand new album that I’ve made and it’s a track written by James McMillan and Pete Murray and Shelley Piken and it’s called these days.

What type of song?

It’s a kind of mid tempo ballad and it’s a really positive love song, and I tell you I fell in love with it the first time I heard it. It’s a big favourite live.

Brian Kennedy, thank you very much for being in the VIP Suite Live today.

These Days