They showered him with derision for daring to 'step out of the box' and they made fun of his lyrics, but in the end, old-fashioned songwriting values helped John Watersbeat the begrudgers to represent Ireland in Eurovision 2007.
People keep asking me about "last year", as though there were some ineluctable narrative dynamic between what happened then and what is happening now. But Tommy Moran and I did not enter They Can't Stop the Spring in this year's Eurosong because of our "disappointment" last year. In fact, we weren't all that disappointed. We hadn't expected to win, although we fancied we had a chance of making the long shortlist.
We've learned a lot in the process of winning this year. I've got to know and like some of the people I gave such a hard time to last year, and got to see things from their side of the fence. For me the most upsetting thing about last year was the way Joe Duffy sought to belittle both the songs we'd entered (by reading the raw lyrics out on air with a sneering tone) and the very idea of a mere journalist seeking to move beyond his station. I make no apology for admitting that I was hurt by this. In this context, I see Joe as a custodian of deeply reactionary elements in Irish culture and society, which cling hard to the idea that everyone should remain in the box they've first been put in. As Brian Eno said, culture is what people do when they don't have to do anything.
I once asked the playwright Tom Murphy why he had started to write plays and he replied that he had started because he felt he couldn't do it. "If you can do it," he said, "why bother? If you can't, try it." If freedom means anything, it means the right to start ageing in a place of your own choosing.
I think of Mary Wesley, who died a couple of years ago at the age of 95, after a glittering career as a novelist, which started when she was 70. The strange thing is that, the week after our on-air altercation over Eurosong 2006, Joe Duffy sent me a very nice card thanking me for my contribution to Liveline and wishing me well. It was a hand-painted card with a landscape which he had painted himself. And it wasn't at all bad.
Tommy Moran and myself have been writing songs again for about the past five years, after a 30-year hiatus. They Can't Stop the Spring came about in a rather unusual way for us. Most of the time I send Tommy a few lyric ideas. Sometimes, when writing these, I will have a melody of a sort in my head, but I never convey this to Tommy and he never comes up with anything remotely similar. We don't meet to write songs. He lives in Galway and I live in Dublin, and the first time we saw each other for years was on the Late Late Show last week. We communicate by means of e-mail, text, occasional phone calls, MP3 files and CDs sent in the post.
When he's worked on my words, Tommy will usually send me back the bones of a melody, utilising perhaps the hook line and a couple of other scraps of the lyric I've sent him. I then reconstruct the idea within the melody he's arrived at. They Can't Stop the Spring came about the other way around: he sent me a CD with the complete melody line. I don't like this approach as much, because there's nothing to go on. This time I got lucky, however. Going through old lyrics that had never gone anywhere, I came across one of my favourites, a celebration of the Prague Spring, and spotted that one of the key lines fitted the end of the chorus in Tommy's melody.
When love is forbidden,
The whole world's a Kremlin.
Let the tanks roll in.
Let the tanks roll in.
They may crush the flowers,
But they'll never stop the Spring.
I had written this one day about three or four years before, after coming back from lunch with my dear friend, the then Mexican ambassador to Ireland, Agustin Basave. We had been talking about the Czech Republic and how politics are so different there. Agustin recalled Alexander Dubcek's response on watching the Soviet tanks rolling over the flowers thrown by protesting students as they arrived to put down the modest, gentle revolution that became known as the Prague Spring. I rushed home to try to put it in song.
Knowing what the song was about, the construction of the chorus was a simple matter of finding appropriate rhymes and following their logic. Taking "flowers" as my defining colour, and with Dervish at the back of my mind, I tried to construct something that would sound and look like an Irish folk song:
They might scare the blackbird,
But they cannot stop him sing.
They can steal the honey,
But they cannot steal the sting.
They may crush the flowers,
Trample every living thing,
But they can't stop the Spring
The chorus I identified as being about hope, resurrection and the defiance of the human spirit, so I decided to experiment with the idea of making the verse about the Eurovision itself. (I didn't realise at the time that the Czech Republic is to participate in Eurovision for the first time in 2007.)
A few years ago, Brendan Graham, who has written a host of successful songs, generously gave me a few songwriting tips, one of which involves getting a large sheet of paper - an A3 or larger - putting the key idea of the song at the centre and placing balloons all around for every word or thought even tenuously connected to the theme. I ended up with "spring" at the centre and, all around, these balloons containing concepts such as "flowers", "wall", "curtain", "cold", "party", and so on.
Usually I write songs sitting up in bed at night, but this one started on a car journey from Dublin to Castlerea when my daughter and I went to visit my mother. It took about 24 hours from start to finish, although several lines changed afterwards. The "Archipelagic icicles" were added in a hotel in Lusaka after I downloaded an MP3 of the first studio demo. I had been reading about Solzhenitsyn on the plane. It's now become something of a national joke, which delights me greatly.
Once I heard the finished demo of the song, prepared by Tommy with the help of Eugene Killeen, Mick Conneelly and the angel-voiced Fionnuala Deasy in Galway, I knew that we could win Eurosong. I now believe we can win Eurovision. The coming week will be crucial. At the beginning of March, Dervish head to the US for a month-long tour. This means that we have one week to get the backing track right. As Frank McNamara pointed out on the Late Late Eurosong Special, there are a couple of fundamental problems with the arrangement of the song as performed by Dervish that night. These are easily fixable, but the clock is ticking.
I feel immensely proud. Proud of the song, proud that Cathy Jordan and Dervish will perform it, proud to be representing Ireland in probably the only way I ever will, proud to have won against some of the best songwriters in the country and outside it.
I find it amusing that for years people who've been complaining about my alleged excess of seriousness are now outraged to discover I'm a lightweight. Another prejudice demolished. And I can't wait to meet Joe Duffy and show him my etchings. Oh, didn't I mention that I used to be a painter as well?