The Singing Horseman

Songwriter Jimmy MacCarthy stands on a high ridge overlooking his house in Co Wicklow. It is mid afternoon and the winter skies are already darkening. The view includes the sea as well as extensive evidence of the impact man has had on the Wicklow landscape. Planners have their hearts set on this county.

Protected in his own 30-acre kingdom, MacCarthy, surrounded by his three lively horses, seems content for the moment. It is a scene well removed from either the world of the concert stage or the recording studio he is more generally associated with. There had been a time when he toyed with moving to Nashville. But the mood passed. "All my life I've wanted to live in Wicklow," he says. "It's more natural for me to be in the countryside, but I also love big cities."

About two-and-a-half years ago he bought the 500-year-old, now-yellow farmhouse and has spent most of his time since restoring its stables, where he may one day build a recording studio. At any place on his land, a visitor is likely to be aware of constant flashes of black and white darting about. An extended family of wild cats have made their home here.

MacCarthy leads the way across the yard into a small tack room. A row of rubber boots stand neatly to attention. Three saddles hang over a wooden trestle, one of them is a standard western, an unusually plain one. There are two trays of tinned dog food. Most of the memorabilia is related to horses, not the music business. The tack room adjoins the kitchen.

It is the day after his birthday and he offers some of his pink and white cake. "I was 45 yesterday," he says with the same mixture of wonderment and practicality which shapes so many of his comments.

Standing in his kitchen, he looks more like a jockey than a singer. A small dog bounces around at his feet. The house is big, even rambling, and in an earlier life was extended - a feature MacCarthy does not endorse. It is also quite sparse.

He mentions his brother, Sean MacCarthy, the sculptor whose huge bronze of the legendary hurler Christy Ring stands at Cork Airport. "It's eight-and-a-half feet," he says. MacCarthy has been given many paintings but the walls remain defiantly bare. "I love pictures but I just like bare walls, that's it."

He is a singer/songwriter and says he enjoys performing, yet the best known versions of his songs tend to be those sung by other singers. It is a reality which does not appear to bother him. "For me the most important thing about a song is that it's sung."

He recently performed at the National Concert Hall in aid of Clasac, a new centre in Dublin for the promotion and performance of traditional arts. Among the attendance was the President, Mrs McAleese.

"She wrote to me, I was delighted. It was also great to be invited to sing at it, I wasn't expecting it."

That recent performance and his participation in the new album, Warmer For The Spark - The Songs Of Jimmy MacCarthy, suggest he has decided to come out of what seemed to be retirement.

He laughs and says "you could be right". But behind the good humour lies a more deliberate purpose. "It's too easy to become over-exposed as a performer in Ireland. If you're doing gigs here and there and it's easy to see you on stage, I think people get fed up and move on. It's better for me, for any singer, to kind of disappear. Lie low and come back, it keeps the interest."

Horses and music have always fascinated him. "I've been around horses all my life, I'm happiest with them. I love the power and the energy." Not surprisingly horse-imagery features throughout his work.

He was born into a large Cork family: "There's 12 of us. Ten boys and two girls, including two sets of twins." His father ran a large transport business. A fleet of vans distributed newspapers throughout Munster, up to the Midlands - and MacCarthy did his share. "February made me shiver, with every paper I'd deliver" - he sings a snatch.

MacCarthy can point to a great grandfather who was a successful horse trainer. "The interest was always there," he says, and mentions he raced a few times on the flat.

When he wasn't singing with his brother, he was messing about with horses. He left school at 15 to train as a trainer under Vincent O'Brien at Baldoyle, in Co Tipperary. Referring to O'Brien as "a genius" he mentions his time there coincided with that of two of O'Brien's greatest charges, Nijinsky and Sir Ivor - "I did ride him. Well, I made a point of getting up on his back the day he was taken off to stud." While there he met another genius, Lester Piggott: "He is an amazing character, very intelligent." From Baldoyle, MacCarthy moved on to Newmarket at just 17. But he broke his leg and spent six months in traction.

His training career was further disrupted when MacCarthy's father became ill and Jimmy returned to Ireland. The business was sold off - but while recalling that difficult time, MacCarthy does not complain. Instead, he comments on the importance his parents have always placed on life itself. "Wherever we've been, there's always been a great quality of life. Even when my father was ill and my mother had the six younger ones to look after, she was able to give them this."

For a while though, MacCarthy had been driving for his father in the mornings and afternoons, and singing by night. Among the songwriters who most influenced him are Paul Simon "without the Garfunkel", Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits. Musically, MacCarthy is self-taught and plays guitar and keyboard. Most of his songs are composed on the piano.

For a writer who has had more than 120 covers made of his work, he stresses: "I've never written a song for anyone but me." His lyrics are dense, stabbing and rather staccato. He says he likes "colour" and is clearly a person who seems to weigh language.

It is a quality which has made some critics dismiss him as overly precious. There is no bravado. There is a disarming naivety about the way he speaks about songs sung so widely by private citizens in their cars and baths as well as by professional singers.

Candidly admitting to putting great effort into his songs, "I spend a lot of time, I think songs should mean something", his belief in them is unmistakable. "My work is all very organic, there's no `click', no sound effects, no synthesiser, nothing electronic." Aside from the three guitars in the small drawing-room, there is no indication that music is his business. Even his sound system is a standard one. "A lot of my stuff is still in the car," he says. Describing his music as a form of "folk pop" or "Irish pop", he says he "came to" traditional Irish music after rock and roll. MacCarthy makes no apologies for having a musical sensibility which is definitively "popular".

Nor does he seem to expect everyone to know his work. Quoting freely from the songs he explains them, placing them into exact contexts. The title of the new album is a line of one of his most famous songs, No Frontiers. Initially appearing to mythologise Amelia Earhart, the song is about hope soaring as well as exploring the ability to imagine the future, particularly in Ireland. The philosophy of the song is, he believes, expressed in the closing lines: "And Heaven has its way/When all will harmonise/And know what's in our hearts/The dreams will realise." Another, The Morning Of The Dreamer, refers to Martin Luther King.

While so many of his songs are famous throughout Ireland, MacCarthy remains a tense, nervy person, if far more relaxed about life now than he has been in the past. More idealistic than cynical, he still seems very boyish as well as unmistakably from Cork. Glamour does not feature in his conversation, nor does name-dropping. Not for an instant is he planning on turning his early years into an account of struggle and humiliation. Busking in the London Underground was an experience he enjoyed. "It suited me. I have a good loud voice for a small person."

Later he remarks that something he has had to work hard at is reducing the volume of his voice. "It can sound very loud in a room, or a studio." Being Irish in London was not particularly fashionable when he was starting out though and he recalls the hostility created by the various IRA explosions and the media coverage surrounding the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four.

The atmosphere had begun to change by the time Shane MacGowan appeared on the scene. Of MacGowan, MacCarthy says: "He's a genius. I also think he's kind of sad. But he's written some great songs."

A significant difference exists between being famous or at least recorded - and being yet another hopeful living in squats, as he did. "I can remember going in to a famous London record producer with a demo one summer - and do you know, he was watching the cricket on the telly and he never took his eyes off it all the while I (the demo) was playing."

With two singles behind him, including Miles Of Eyes, his first big break came in 1984 when Christy Moore recorded Ride On, a raw song of partings. Much has been made of the drama of the lyrics, particularly the line "Run the claw along my gut", but MacCarthy feels the true meaning of the song, the rejection of violence, has been missed. "It's about two people choosing separate paths because one has a gun and the other can't go along because he doesn't believe in bloodshed. `I could never go with you/ No matter how I wanted to'." An extra layer of loss is expressed because there is also a sense of lovers parting.

The songs kept coming and other singers became famous through them. In 1990 he released his first solo album, The Song Of The Singing Horseman. Four years later, The Dreamer followed.

MacCarthy has become increasingly spiritual and is interested in healing and bio-energy. This holistic attitude has also been reflected in his songs. His time restoring the house - "the work was so physical I found myself going to bed early each night, completely exhausted" - as well as living alone, have helped settle him. The first year he lived in Co Wicklow, he had 30 foals living on his land. These Swedish trotting horses had been sent over from Sweden to put on bone by grazing on limestone-based pasture. He remembers the impressive sight they were, playing in the big field. Pointing toward the kitchen where his own horses are galloping up the ridge, he says it was even more dramatic when the foals charged up the field. "There were so many of them."

Reflection, he feels, was not only vital, it came just in time. MacCarthy stopped drinking when he was 30, "apart from a three-month slip, I've stayed away from it."

Unlike many recovering alcoholics he does not romanticise his years of drinking. "I was miserable drinking, it made me very depressed. Others would be wild and having a great time, and I'd just feel worse and worse." His father accompanied him to his first AA meeting. MacCarthy has never not forgotten a remark his father had made when he was only 12. "I was taking a drink and I could feel my father looking at me. He said `you're just like me' - it was later, years later, when I knew what he meant."

Throughout his conversation he refers to his parents and how much they worried about him during the bad times. He seems the sort of character who should have a team of children following him about. But as yet, he has none. "I like children, I grew up with so many of them. But then," he reasons, "growing up in a house of 12 possibly explains why I've none."

There is a smiling stone Buddha sitting in a corner of the garden - in keeping with the importance meditation now has in his daily routine.

He seems happy. Is he? "I've had very black times. But I can say my life is good and I've enjoyed it so far."