In this era of the cult of personality, broadcaster P. J. Curtis stands out because he does not waste airtime selling himself, making stupid jokes or reading out his fan mail. He is unlikely to do oily voice-overs selling cars and chocolate. Nor does he spend sleepless nights wondering if his public loves him.
Instead, the listener hears all the music he or she could want, accompanied by an informed commentary. As a self-confessed music fanatic, he certainly keeps his obsessions well under control. Currently presenting A Century of the Blues on RTE Radio 1 (the series ends this Sunday), Curtis is also to be heard on Lyric FM where Reels to Ragas, a mix of international traditional, folk and ethnic music, is broadcast on Wednesday evenings. The Rhythm Room, a new radio series, begins on RTE Radio 1 on Sunday March 5th. Listeners may be assured that by the end of it they will know a lot more about music than they will about P. J.
His programme may have acquired a large following of late, but Curtis was an early pioneer in the area of blues and other forms of American music, broadcasting on the subject back in the early 1980s when the audience was a lot smaller than it is now. Having written histories of the slide guitar and black gospel, Curtis can also point to a history of the uilleann pipes and Notes From The Heart - a celebration of traditional Irish music. Always able to put music into context - "Doolin is to Irish traditional music what New Orleans is to traditional jazz" - his musical range is impressive. Interestingly, as a Co Clare man, coming from that most musical of Irish counties, Curtis says his first love was American music: "I had to come back to Ireland to discover Irish traditional."
On returning to Ireland in 1973, after years abroad, he joined the Bothy Band as tour manager/sound-man, an experience which helped lead him towards his other main activity, record producing. To date he has produced 45 albums, the latest of which is his first with singer Mick Hanly. It was recorded in Curtis' home, in an old-style, high-ceilinged parlour boasting perfect acoustics. "Listen," he says, the sound is good. "It all happened in here; we had a forest of microphones." He is the ultimate music fan. The room is a library of LPs, CDs, and books on music.
P. J. Curtis lives in Killnaboy in the Burren, side on to Mullaghmore mountain which is three miles away, its distinctive layered steps visible from the house. At the top of the lane the ruined church of Killnaboy stands high over the road. Over the door in the south wall is a characteristically blatant sheela-na-gig about which Curtis wrote a play, The Stone Goddess, which was broadcast on Clare FM.
"It was a bit of fun. It was about two men from the OPW coming down to take her to Dublin - they didn't." His family have lived here since the early 1700s, the long, low house in which he was born and lives, was built about 1770. His father was a farmer and blacksmith, and the forge where pikes were made for the 1798 Rebellion still stands across a small yard from the front of the house. "But my father was best known as a healer," he says.
Curtis senior had been bound for America in 1919, but when his mother, four brothers and two sisters died in the great flu epidemic, he, as the last surviving son, had to give up his plans and stay on the farm. "They had all been wiped out; there was only my father and one of his sisters left." While his father was a silent man, Curtis's mother was a fiddler. "She ran a shop here at the front of the house. People would come here rather than travel on another two miles to Corrofin."
Sarah Lynch, was a great character; she came from a musical background from Lissroe, near Ennistymon: "She played the first music I ever heard. Her uncle, John Jo Lynch, my grand uncle, had co-founded the Kilfenora Ceili Band. She tried to teach me the fiddle," he says with some regret, "but at the time all I wanted to do was play the guitar. And she gave me the money to buy it."
The eldest of four, Curtis was born in 1944, and makes no mystery of himself as a boy. "Don't forget we had no electricity until I was 10. We got a radio when I was eight and it became my world. I discovered jazz and blues. All I was interested in was music and books."
He attended the local national school. To use the word "nearby" might give the wrong impression; the school, built in 1880, is a matter of yards from the forge. He bought it in recent years and would like to turn the fine, small building into a small music centre or workshop. For the moment, it stands as it was, a valuable piece of Irish social history.
On completing national school, he was sent at 12 to the Christian Brothers in Ennis where, he says, "I suffered two years of hell, absolute physical and mental abuse. The savagery was beyond belief. Two of the brothers there had serious problems. They made the Gestapo seem like characters out of Beatrix Potter." It was all more than 40 years ago, but he says he has never forgiven or forgotten any of it and wouldn't like to meet up with any of them now. "I saw blood every day of the two years." So did his parents take him out? "My father took me out of school - to work on the farm and to be a healer. I never wanted any of it. I was miserable. My father and I were never close. He was very . . " - a long pause - "authoritarian." Curtis senior no doubt harboured his own resentments.
For P. J., who endured three years of misery - "driving my father mad. All I wanted to do was listen to foreign music and read foreign books" - it ended with his running away. Did he feel guilty? "No. I didn't. I had to go." He arrived in Belfast and fell in with a group who made their way to Liverpool, where he joined the RAF.
Based in a training camp at Bridgenorth in Shropshire, he learnt to be an air traffic controller. But within two years he found himself in a war in North Borneo, fighting the Indonesians. He saw action and was, as he puts it, "injured rather than wounded" when he fell into a bamboo trap. It all sounds fairly exciting stuff, for a man now living back home in the place he was born. But the tenacious Curtis, for all his mild nerviness and energy, has his own angers and says flatly: "I had no youth." He was denied the teenage years of fooling about and having fun.
His broadcasting career has tended to move in waves, particularly his relationship with RTE, and he has done many things, including turning to fiction. One Night in the Life of R. V. Mulrooney, a comedy, is set in a country village. "It took me 13 years to get it published," he says. "You can take it that it is not the great Irish novel."
During his years on the road with the Bothy Band, years which he says were tough and prepared him for anything ("they were also the best fun I've had in my life"), he travelled the world. All the while he was expanding his knowledge of music. He doesn't like claiming to have "discovered" people, "but I do have a good feel for talent." Music consultant on the Emmy Award-winning Bringing It All Back Home, a BBC/RTE/Hummingbird co production in 1991 which was extremely effective in developing a re-think about the origins, development and influence of Irish music, he has also lectured on his subject in Britain, the US and Australia as well as Ireland.
Joining Mulligan records in the late 1970s led to his becoming a record producer, and he has also worked in the business in Nashville and Memphis.
But there is nothing of the returned super-Yank about Curtis, who has remained a Clare-man, albeit one with no interest in hurling. "My mother died in 1989 and she left me the house. My brother farms the Curtis land: we have about 100 acres. But I just have what is around the house." Even if P. J. has no wish to work the land, he does love it and can remember his father after he had been ploughing, sitting down to look at the soil. "I think some farmers have lost that basic love of the land."
Despite having roots here reaching close on 300 years, Curtis, along with his fellow Burren Action campaigners, has been dismissed as an interfering "outsider and blow in". The battle to over-turn the government's decision to build an interpretative centre at the foot of Mullaghmore has been a hard one and, he stresses, it's not over yet.
"I certainly don't feel triumphant. I'm worried. We are still waiting for the results of the Bord Pleanala hearing last June. We are expecting a positive result. But we are also facing another court case in which we are hoping it will be accepted that we brought the action not as individuals but on behalf of Ireland." Otherwise the core group of seven campaigners, including Curtis, film-maker Lelia Doolin and poet John O'Donoghue, will be personally liable for legal costs of up to £70,000.
This dispute has caused enormous rifts locally. It has divided families, ended friendships. Some of the campaigners were spat at in the village streets. "We were called blow-ins, dropouts, hippies, weirdos, drug addicts, homosexuals and best of all, non-meat-eaters, implying vegetarians are subversive. My own family has been subjected to insults and hurt. But I don't want to open up old wounds. We all want a time of healing, not more anger."
Sitting in the small conservatory built on to the back of his house, he still looks bewildered as he outlines a saga that should never have begun. Building an interpretative centre in a unique landscape, an area of immense cultural and ecological value, never made sense - particularly considering the proximity of existing centres in the neighbouring villages of Corrofin and Kilfenora. Curtis recalls the people of Kilfenora being informed that their centre, already some 20 years old, would be killed off within five years if the Mullaghmore one went ahead.
The building of these invariably controversial interpretive centres dates back to the Haughey era. "It was a Fianna Fail initiative and, far from providing local employment, which at best only translates to three or four jobs - and they're mainly pouring tea or manning the souvenir shops - the only people who really benefit are the builders and coach companies. And it has come to light - in fact it was never a secret - that many of the builders are known Fianna Fail supporters." So the local benefits are really once-off, a lot of money for whoever wins the building contract? "Exactly."
Timing played a big part in Curtis becoming involved. He came back to Clare in 1990 when a personal relationship in Dublin had ended. Just when it seemed he was back in the ideal place to settle himself after years of travelling about, he gets involved in saving a 600-foot mountain which has been here for millions of years. "It was the last thing I wanted; I was never political. I just wanted to come back home. I certainly did not want to be treated as an outsider or an enemy in my home. You know, we never actually even set ourselves up as the Burren Action Group; the other side described us as such."
The Sound of Stone, a CD featuring Artists for Mullaghmore, was released in 1993. All the proceeds, as well as all monies from fund-raising concerts, have gone into the campaign. Luka Bloom's The Fertile Rock became a kind of anthem. The group took their case to Europe, outlining not just the threat to Mullaghmore, but also to Luggala in Co Wicklow, Dunquin in Co Kerry and the Boyne Valley in Co Meath. "We went twice and presented our case to the commissioner, Bruce Millen. The only two politicians who ever supported us were Mary Banotti and Pat Cox. Their help was crucial in allowing us a voice in Europe." The proposed centres in Co Kerry and Co Meath went ahead and have since been opened.
Aside from the beauty of the Burren, a surreal masterpiece created by glacial erosion, there are practical aspects which the planners appeared to downplay. For instance, as anyone who visits here in the winter can confirm, the area is prone to serious flooding. At the foot of the west face of Mullaghmore is Lough Gealain, part small, permanent lake, part turlough. In dry weather it contracts to a scant, water-filled hollow. But in wet conditions it expands and fills the surrounding area.
Several car parks now occupy the approach to Mullaghmore. Curtis points to them neutrally and refers to the place as his playground. "This is where we spent our childhoods. Here is was what we knew." The Burren - whether bare as now, except for some robust ferns, or covered as it will be in a couple of months with its magnificent juxtaposing of Arctic-alpine and Mediterranean mountain flora - possesses a haunting, dramatic splendour.
"The planners were going to put a network of footpaths across it," comments Curtis as we walk in the clear afternoon light, taking in the spectacular views of the wide landscape. The idea of man-made walk-ways obscuring the natural limestone pavements is shocking. Common sense, however, has won, and a natural treasure has been saved.
"It is worth saving, as you can see. It is a spiritual place of solitude and peace as well as beauty. It's time we got rid of this idea that unless something can be built on and be made money of, it's worthless."
While Mullaghmore is P. J. Curtis' special place, his passion remains music. "I love music. I only feel alive when I am listening to it. There is so much great music; I just love telling people about it and playing it for them."
