...from left, County Down singer Tommy Sands, folklorist Mick Moloney sitting
This interview with Tommy Sands was conducted February 11, 1994 by none other than the mighty Irish troubadour Mick Moloney himself. We are honoured he slipped us this historical document for all to read.
MM: I’m here on the 11th of February 1994, talking to Tommy Sands. We’re going to talk about songwriting, but first of all, I’ll ask you, Tommy, when you were born and where.
TS: At 11 o’clock in the morning, the third of seven; born in Newry on the 19th of December 1945.
MM: You’ve been around a fair bit.
TS: I’ve been around a fair bit, Mick, yes.
MM: Of course, I know you primarily as a singer-songwriter, entertainer, storyteller and that. Was that always your main occupation or did you do other things fulltime before that?
TS: Well, at home there was always that going on. My mother’s people—my mother played the accordion, but her father was a poet, a local poet, and his poems would still be recited by the children in the area of [Burn]. My father’s people all played the fiddle. He had five uncles that played the fiddle and five aunts who were… what was called ‘diddlers’ or ‘lilters.’ And they would play at local dances and different houses. When I was growing up there was a lot of music in the house, neighbors coming in… that was one… I suppose my earliest memory would have been being put to bed early and the light of an oil lamp and the music leaking under the bedroom door. By the time I was old enough to stay up, I knew a lot of the songs, the music and the tunes that I could hear.
I went to a seminary, actually, after leaving secondary school, and I suppose a lot of us went to seminaries around home. I had a couple of uncles… I had three uncles who were priests; one went to China and one went to Africa, and one went to the Philippines. I suppose they would send back cards and Christmas cards, photographs of people pulling bananas off trees, and it was all very romantic. I had an uncle who was captured by Mao Tse Tung in China, and he was a popular man around home. I suppose that must have been—I suppose at that age, you want to do something useful, you think, with your life. So I went to a seminary. I certainly don’t regret going, and I don’t regret leaving it either. But I suppose I learnt a little bit about reading and writing there. Then when I got out of that, I taught for a couple of months, and then we won a competition in Dublin, the family did. [I] went to New York and left the job, more or less, and I’ve been in music in one shape or form since that.
MM: Now, first I heard of you was as a member of the Sands family. How did that all come about?
TS: Well, funny enough, when I decided to leave the seminary, I didn’t know what I was going to do. The people at home didn’t know I was leaving either, and as you know, at that time it wasn’t so easy to leave, and I had done five years in the place. So I decided to walk home, and it was a walk of about… well, about maybe 100 miles, I suppose. The reason I walked home was because I was trying to decide what I was going to do. I was looking over the ditches and I saw the men working with the hay and I wondered if I would be working at hay—I didn’t know what I was going to do. But just as I arrived in Newry, I met a taxi with the family in it—Colm and Ben and Dino—Eugene (we used to call him). They were going to Gormanston to do a concert there for the people who had been burnt out of their homes in Belfast. They rolled down the window and they didn’t say ‘where are you going’ or anything else, they said, ‘your guitar is in the back. Would you like to come and play? So I did.
And in a strange way, that was… that had a certain part in the decision as well, to play the music. And then of course, family played, as you said, and we played at home first, then local halls, then we played in Dublin a little bit, and we made some records, going to America and then back home again. Went to Europe—for a long time, we did most of our playing in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe, East Germany and Czeckloslovakia… and of course, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, in the west, in western Europe.
MM: When I first heard the Sands family on record, I thought it was a good record; it didn’t seem to be, to me, particularly unusual or different from a lot of the other ballad groups that were around at the time. And then the next time I heard you and Colm, years later, it was totally different. It seemed in the earlier records, the material was fairly standard and [with] a fairly standard approach. And then when I heard you years later, there were different songs, your own songs… it seemed something had changed. How did that all happen?
TS: Well, I think that we started to write songs very early on. In fact, we didn’t even think about recording them. The first record we made was for a record company in Belfast and they wanted us to do some songs from around the Mournes, and some songs that didn’t really suit us all that well. We had already been writing some songs, very simple ones—maybe about events that had happened on the farm at home. But they would be interesting for the audience we had at the time, who were local farmers, basically. So we were very much playing for the local farmers—maybe a frog jumped into someone’s well when the corn was being cut; so that was a relevant thing to write about. Of course, we were singing the usual songs about the pretty fair maids in the month of May, but when July and August happened in ‘68 and ’69 and people were getting killed, the whole Troubles were beginning to affect us very much. It was very difficult to ignore that in things that we wrote.
We started writing basically after internment. There was a series of concerts organized to raise money for the dependents of the internees, because there was no breadwinner in the house. There was a very large, enthusiastic audience at these concerts, who were very interested in the idea of civil rights—of course, begged [for] it. They were looking for some hope and encouragement. So a lot of the early songs we wrote would have been very much with that in mind. In fact I remember one night, one of the first songs we wrote about that—we were coming in in the car and of course, very often we would be stopped. The army might know that we were going to a concert, and they would stop us and hold us up. Very often we would arrive late or maybe not arrive at all for the concert. But I remember one night, we made a song up after being stopped, and we went on the stage with our coats on because we were late, and the song was
‘We’ve just been stopped by British soldiers on the way to town.
They took us all out of the car and searched us up and down.
Where are you from? Where do you go? We may not let you through.
Must we put up with soldiers who tell us what to do?
But right will conquer might, we’ll let the whole world know;
And we will work together and reap the things we sow.’
So I remember that as one of the first songs, and a lot of the songs then would really have been around that.
MM: Songwriting obviously is something that people have been doing in Ireland for centuries, otherwise there wouldn’t be as many songs around as there are. But only a few seem to be able to write songs that other people want to learn. An awful lot of people write songs they like to sing themselves, and it seems to me that you and your brother Colm have a gift for writing songs that are not only attractive to audiences and entertaining, but also attractive enough for other singers, including myself, to want to learn. I’m just wondering, what is it that makes a songwriter, do you think?
TS: I really don’t know, Mick. I’m very happy that I can string words together very well; I am very proud that people like yourself think they’re good enough to record. Absolutely! In fact, it was recordings that yourself and Robbie made which led people here to invite me over here, and it’s been very, very important for me. I think in writing songs, a lot of people, especially modern songwriters who don’t necessarily have a tradition to dip into, a lot of it would be very personalized stuff, and I think that sometimes people might be inclined to treat the audience like a rubbish bin, to dip… to throw their frustrations into. I think it’s very important to give the audience something they can identify with, for a start. It’s just… maybe like telling a story, a good story. A story that’s relevant is always that much better.
I remember coming home from school, when I was a child, we’d always have some news to bring home. We’d sit down breathless after walking the three mile[s] home, in fact, and everybody would… we’d save up certain news, and we would say, ‘that’s my news, and right, that’s your news.’ Something else is somebody else’s news. And we’d sit down and try to tell that news. Even then, we felt that it was important in order to keep our parents’ attention you’d have to let it out by degrees—keep their concentration and suspense as well. And I think it’s a bit like that in a song; it’s a bit like that in any art form, maybe spoken art form, anyway. Or even in a film. I’m always very interested in what other people have to say too. I remember Hitchcock talking about suspense, about creating suspense; you need suspense all the time, I think. But he talked about the difference between fear and suspense. Fear was when the hero was about to be attacked, and he knew it and the audience knew it. But suspense was when the hero was about to be attacked, and the audience knew it but the hero didn’t know it. Shakespeare used the very same thing in Hamlet, for example. He knew there was something rotten in the state of Denmark, but he didn’t know what it was, but he knew there was something wrong.
So to create hunger for the story, a need for it… I think it helps an awful lot if you have something you really want to say, something you feel is important to say, and indeed, unfortunately, so many things happening around home that need to be said, and people haven’t said them enough, I think. So you’re kind of armed with that hunger to tell the story, for a start, and I think that helps an awful lot. I think there’s no point writing a song except if you have something to say, and very often people write songs that say nothing. I’m not saying people don’t have something to say, everybody has something to say. But very often, they don’t write about the important things that they have to say.
As well as that, I think you’re letting out the story the way you’d let out a grass rope, almost—bit by bit, bit by bit. Don’t tell it all at once, let it out a little bit and whet the appetite. I think that a chorus is very important as well, to let the audience become part of it. If an audience sings a song, they’re automatically committing themselves to the story, if they sing the chorus. I suppose the chorus, in a sense, is a little bit like the headline of a newspaper. It draws people’s attention to it, and it also restates what you’re saying in the song, but in kind of an opaque sort of way, because you can’t tell the end of the story in a chorus, what you’re striving for with the words, very often.
MM: What was the first song that you can ever remember writing?
TS: It’s a song about my father going to the bus. It’s called ‘The Half-eleven Bus.’ And there’s a parody. I remember hearing a song on the radio, I can’t remember what the song is called, but I know the air is… “It’s 11 on the clock and I’ve only on one sock; the bike’s punctured so you understand my rush; I’m for the town today, stand back and clear the way; for I’ve got to catch that half-eleven bus.’ The song is about my father going up the road, and lifting the bicycle, which he did fairly often, and the people he met—mentioning all the people he met on the road, so all the people on the road would be interested in that song. All the people on the road that I know of course would come into our house for sessions, and I think that is the first one I wrote. I wrote a few other things that meant nothing to anybody, so I quickly realized, you know, maybe—‘walking down the road and the rain is coming down on my head, and I’m feeling blue.’ I must have heard that on the radio; it really meant nothing to anybody, and to be quite honest, it meant nothing to me. It gave me no sense of healing or satisfaction, either.
MM: As somebody who’s never had either the ability or the urge—I’m not sure which would come first—to write a song. I’m curious as to what would make you want to express yourself through writing a song.
TS: Well, I think the first thing that made me want to write a song was that everybody in the house knew all the songs that were being sung. The old songs—there was a certain repertoire. It’s very hard to get… well, of course, someone would always come in with a new song, but it was important to have a new song. But I felt that the songs that we were singing, the songs my father would have song—indeed, emigration and lots of very important things—they were about real events, and they meant an awful lot to the people that wrote them. They mean an awful lot to us, too, looking back at it. But it must have meant an awful lot more to the people who wrote them and the people who were directly affected by it.
So I really set out to write something that the people in the room… I was always writing for people in a room, in a house, in a kitchen, that would move them and affect them. I was trying to find topics that did affect them and that I knew it did. For example, if the spuds were turning brown, if there were a couple of bad spuds in a ton of spuds that we’d spent weeks gathering and skipping and picking and all that, that was a very important event in the town land. So If I wrote a song about that, people really listened to it.
I think the first thing is that you must feel, you must feel the song, I think. It must be an important part of you, otherwise it won’t come out… well, some people of course—commercial songs are very different. There’s formulas for that. That’s very different. I don’t think those are the types of songs we’re talking about. I think you have to want to say something, in a certain situation. You want to need to say it enough to discipline yourself into actually sitting down and grabbing it by the neck, the same as learning an instrument. It takes a lot of discipline, an awful lot of work, and if it is just work, you never could have learned, except you get that great surge of enjoyment out of the learning of it. Because someone who doesn’t want to learn an instrument, like a child learning the piano that hates it, it’s a terrible, terrible thing to do.
So I think you must want, for a start, and you must have something to say, would be the next thing. And then, the actual formula for writing the song would be the third thing, I think. There’d be different ways of doing that. I would actually get a line; the way I would do it, I’d get a line—the first line of a chorus, usually. That would more or less—usually I’d start out with an idea for it anyway, that I wanted to write about, this particular event or that. So I’d get one line to sum it up—an opening line for a chorus, and even when I say that line, the inflection of the saying of it goes up and down, and there’s certain notes, natural notes involved in the saying of it, and the urgency of it. And I would just exaggerate those notes, or those inflections. In that way, I would get an air. I would very seldom write a song with an instrument in my hand because I think that would limit me right away—to try and use too many chords, and make it complicated. I would try to keep it as simple as possible.
MM: Did you ever do any kind of formal study of the craft or the structure of songwriting?
TS: I didn’t and I would like to. I did sit in on some songwriting workshops with Robbie O’Connell, for example, a man who is a great friend of ours, of course, and a man I admire very much. Robbie has it well structured out, and I’m always very interested in that. Usually what he says, after he says it, I say ‘yes that’s right’ although I wouldn’t have thought about formulating it that way. But no, I haven’t—I haven’t learned that. I think maybe just by… I think I would know what a good song was. At least I would know when I finished it that it was right, and how I came to that, I really haven’t formulated it, although sometimes I am called upon in workshops to do this sort of thing, so I really should sit down and formulate something. Actually, sitting and talking to you like this now is useful for me.
MM: So you had, I suppose, an instinctive, intuitive awareness of structure, would you say?
TS: Yes, I think so.
MM: Yes… because it doesn’t have to be formalized, but obviously you have the structure in your head because your songs are structured in a traditional way.
TS: Yes, there would be—I think—a bit like a story; for the most part, like a story. I think that if you write a song, it depends what way you direct the song, how the song will come out. If you’re singing to a big audience and you’re writing a song that you know you’re going to be singing to a big audience, especially a non-English speaking audience, it must be—out of necessity—very simple. A lot of the songs I wrote in the past number of years would have been directed very much towards a non-English speaking audience. So I would have a chorus—a very simple chorus, like ‘sailing through the sky’ for example.
I remember going to Moscow to do a concert for the refugees of the Armenian earthquake, and at that I knew nobody would understand one word of English. So I had a chorus they could sing; actually, I repeated the word ‘Armenia’ a lot of times, and then I had things I wanted to say in the verse. That’s the extreme thing, to a non-English speaking audience. But to a big audience, when you have to get down to the lowest common denominator, the simplest common denominator—not to go over the head of…
They say in writing news, that you shouldn’t write (for the newspapers or the news readers in the radio stations, I’d be talking to the people who write the news)… they say that you shouldn’t write anything that a thirteen year-old can’t understand, because they’re appealing to a very, very wide audience. The same with a song; it’s appealing to a very wide audience. There would be the odd song that would different from that, that would be more specific, maybe. But it would depend on the kind of… where you were looking when you sang this song.
MM: Do you think your songwriting has been influenced in any way by your travels to Eastern Europe and non-English speaking countries?
TS: I think so. I’ve always been very interested in some of the French songwriters, their way of telling a story; from Jacques Brel to… even George Moustaki, even Theodore Bikel, a Greek songwriter who wrote a lot of film music—of course, ‘Zorba’ and all of that sort of stuff. I spoke to him about the same thing, and most of his stuff is political—most of his songs are political songs. Victor Jara songs as well; I was very much moved by his songs—Chilean songwriter. So I think I would have been. It was Eastern Europe that I met those people; I never met Victor Jara, I met his wife, Joan. But people who are coming from a situation of struggle, and who in a sense, are giving a voice to the voiceless, if you like, to their people—in a sense, a lot of songs came out of that.
MM: Is there a big difference in your thinking between poetry and song?
TS: Well, I would see them as different things. A poem rarely stands up as a song, and vice versa, because a song can be one word repeated a lot of times, but they’re both the same in the sense of an emotional purchase. They would be appealing both to the soul and the logic, the brain. The song, in particular, even more than the poem, I think. I often see… I often talk to painters, and we talk about the same thing, about trying to put something across. They talk about the drawing part of it, and the colors. There would be different artists who would be strong in drawing and not as strong as a colorist. For example, the French Impressionists, Gaugin, in particular. Not such a great drawer, but of course, a wonderful man in color. The drawing would appeal to the logic side of the brain, and the colors would appeal to the emotional side.
The same way with song; the words would be a logical side, making sense out of it all, and the air would be the real moving force, the emotional factor. I think that’s why a song is very strong in changing things, because you can tell someone easily what they should do; I could be told what I should do, and logically I know that I should do that, but if my heart is not with it, it doesn’t have the effect that it should have. I think that’s why a song can move, because it’s got that other element in it. Of course, a poem can do it too, with its use of sense of smell, colors… getting right into the senses. It can do that. But a song can do it even more so, I think.
MM: You mentioned some songwriters you admire. Who are your favorite songwriters?
TS: I think…
MM: Ones that have influenced you?
TS: Yes. I think people like Pete Seeger have influenced me a lot. Not so much as a songwriter, but… yes, as a songwriter—a man with ideas, with great ideas. In fact, there is a song that I’m writing at the minute, when I was up in his house the last time, he gave me a few great ideas, and I started to write a song and I rang him up and I sang part of the song to him and he was very interested to hear the rest of it. Pete Seeger certainly would be one person. Funnily enough, my brother Colm as well—his songs influence me, and vice versa. People like Mickey O’Connell, I think, is a great songwriter. A lot of the modern songwriters people regard as poets and as songwriters. I must say, I’m missing out. They don’t move me, and that’s something that’s obviously my problem, because a lot of these modern songwriters move thousands and thousands of people. But somehow, I’m left cold with them. But people like Victor Jara as well; I don’t speak Spanish but Katrine does and she often translates stuff for me. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet as well. Very often, novelists would influence me as well.
MM: It seems that there’s one thing in common with the people you’ve talked about—a lot of songs that they write come out of oppression.
TS: Yes, that’s true. I think that
[tape break]
TS: Maybe in a sense, that’s an Irish legacy, too. I know that a lot of the songs that we would have been singing when we were growing up would have been relating to that, and giving a voice to the voiceless, again. I think that the revolution… in ’68 and ’69, there was a revolution going on that spurred all sorts of thoughts, because it makes you think. And whenever you think, you want to put across those thoughts to someone else. Like as we were talking about, standing at the top of the Grand Canyon, you say, ‘well, look at that!’ Even though everybody else is looking at it! You’ve got an urge to share even that one vision with people, and in the situation of oppression, we’d be sitting in the pub after the Civil Rights march or even in the present time, talking mainly about hope—you know… where do we go from here?
And also with people, some of whom might have been very depressed; they’d gotten nothing out of the whole thing… to show that it is worthwhile, somewhere along the line. I know you have to step outside of it a little bit because sometimes it is a luxury to be objective in anything, and when you’re right in the middle of it, it’s difficult. I often write songs when I’m away from home, on planes—being physically removed from it all… having the chance to gather it together and look at it a little bit from afar.
MM: Do you ever write songs about things that are non-Irish or part of your immediate experience at home?
TS: I do. I’ve been very moved by… well, I’ve written songs about Chile, for example. I’ve written songs about Dresden, Eastern Germany. I’ve written songs about the charitable thing, and I’ve just finished a song about a young girl in Japan, Sedaku [?], I mentioned earlier on. But also, I think recently I find that… maybe as I grow older… I find myself writing about all these things like my parents; my mother in particular, who I just finished writing a song about. I suppose even though she’s Irish and I’m Irish, it is universal, that particular theme. In many ways, growing up in Northern Ireland is a great thing because—not only the struggle going on there and the division going on there, it’s a microcosm in the sense for a much wider world. But indeed, growing up on a farm and seeing the seed and planting it, and the harvest reaped; in many ways, it is a poetic microcosm of a much wider thing, too. I would tend to use that sort of imagery, the imagery that I would be very, very familiar with in a non-dispute sort of a way, that I know exactly what I’m talking about, and apply that to wider principles.
MM: A lot of the songs you write are funny. Where does that part of the songwriting vision come in?
TS: I think it’s very important to laugh, and I think it’s also… I like to laugh myself, and I love hearing jokes and I love telling jokes. I think serious subjects don’t have to be serious. I think sensitive subjects—if you treat them with an edge, you get an edge back. But if you treat them with gentleness and above all, humor—you can sing them anywhere. I’ve noticed in doubtful enough situations in Belfast, for example, where it will be a mixed audience and people would be very sensitive and they’d be listening to every word that you said. If you get them laughing, you can say anything. For example, the song when Humpty Dumpty is pushed, it’s a bit absurd and it’s a bit funny, and people will laugh at it. At the same time, it’s putting across a very vicious message, at the same time. Or the mixed marriage song is another one, you know, about a Catholic and a Protestant getting married, and it sends up the division in a pretty irreverent way, but I think humor is very important. Not only to put across messages, but because humor itself is very important, and laughing your head off is absolutely vital.
MM: Well, I think the mixed marriage song is dark humor… I can’t remember who said it but I heard dark humor described as the most effective kind of humor because it changes the meaning of the situation without changing the situation.
TS: Yes, that’s very good. That’s very apt. Yes, it changes the whole thing all around, and people look at themselves from a different perspective. It’s a bit like… if you’re down up to your knees in muck, you feel very wet, but if you can imagine yourself sunning on a roof and looking down on someone in muck, it’s almost funny—even if it’s yourself. Of course, humor is… [there is] such a thin thread between humor and sadness. The man going up the street with a dickie bow, all dressed up, and he slips on a banana skin, and the more sophisticated he looks, the more hilarious it is. But if that man happens to be your father and he breaks his leg, it ends up suddenly very sad. Humor can pull people away from the immediacy of the situation and let them look at it in a fresh way.
MM: How many songs have you written? Do you have any sense of it?
TS: I think… not all that many; maybe about forty.
MM: What are your favorite ones?
TS: I think ‘There were Roses’ was one of my favorite ones because it’s a complete song. ‘Dresden’ is another one, which I think is a complete song. I think this one about a mother is a pretty good one too. The 1999 one is a good one. But ‘Humpty Dumpty’, I like that too. I think… I’m happy with them. I think it’s hard, in a sense, to differentiate them, because in a way, they’re a little bit like children to you. You spend so much time at them, and most of them I spend a lot of time at—maybe not quantity time but quality time. Whenever they’re finished, you know, you watch them heading off up the road on their own and you wonder what winding road they’re going to turn up, and very often, they’re up the road before you are, and they introduce you to people rather than you introduce them to people.
MM: When is a song finished?
TS: Well, you know when it’s finished. Very often, if a song of mine happened to be played on the radio or become popular or something, people say, well, you must be very happy now. Of course I am happy, but I’m really satisfied when I finish the song and I know it’s finished. I think it’s a rounded event; the circle is completed, in a sense, even though the song itself might end on a minor chord and ask more questions than it answers. As an entity, you know it’s finished, and you know when it’s good. Very often I go over to Colm and Colm comes over to me with a song saying ‘what do you think of that?’ And very often, I would suggest something to him or vice versa. 99% of the time we wouldn’t alter it in the slightest, because I might say to him, ‘there’s a word there that I wouldn’t have,’ but he will already have built the wall, and it’s just like taking a brick out of the wall, and it’d fall. He would know why it was there even though he couldn’t really say it, maybe.
MM: That’s interesting. Do you ever go back and rewrite the songs?
TS: One. One song. One of the first songs I ever wrote that was recorded, I wrote in the seminary. It was called ‘I Hate to Hear People Cry.’ Looking back at it now, I don’t think it makes sense to anybody. It doesn’t make sense to me. It was written very much in the style of the 60’s; full of hidden meanings and that sort of thing. I want to get away from that. I think it was straight up as a sort of a poem, but I don’t like… I think it’s a very selfish thing, to come out with something that sounds good but means very little to anybody. I rewrote that one and I’m recording that one, hopefully, on the next album.
MM: The [?] that you pick for your songs, do you try to stay within your own idiom of South Down, or do you try to get more universal than that?
TS: Well, I would stay very much within the idiom that I would use speaking and talking. I would feel uncomfortable with words… in fact, that’s one of the reasons why I rewrote that song. There’s one verse… I had been reading philosophy and psychology at the time… words, which after a lot of years living, didn’t come into my vocabulary. So generally it would be the words of South Down in many ways, but I have traveled so I am outside of that now, I am a different person to that, to an ordinary person in South Down, so I would feel comfortable using the words I normally use in speaking. But there’s a rhyming dictionary that you can buy, and I bought one of them but I very, very seldom use it, because I would already know the word anyway. I would use it to eliminate things. If I couldn’t think of some word, I might look it up, and all of the words I would see, either I would have already considered them and rejected them, or they would be all of the words that don’t fit into my language. So I have very much my own words.
MM: Which is this rhyming dictionary?
TS: You can buy this. You can buy a rhyming dictionary. I think Robbie introduced me to it. You get one word and you get all of the other words that rhyme with it. Or rather one sound, ‘speech’ for example—and you’d get the word ‘each.’ Well, speech is not a good example, but… ‘bag’ for example. You’d have rag, lag, all the other words, you know, going with that. You can buy them things. I like to have it even though I would very rarely use it.
MM: How long does it take you to write a song?
TS: It varies an awful lot. ‘There were Roses’ song, I was working on it for years. More or less working on the shape of it and the idea of it… Most of the time, it would take me maybe about two or three days, if I was well concentrated. There’s only a certain amount of time you can concentrate; you just have to leave it. About three days on a song, usually; some would come quicker than that. What I would regard as the big songs like ‘the Roses’ or ‘Dresden’ or ‘1999’, these last few songs about my mother and the Sedaku song, they would… I’d just be carving and chipping at them for a long time to get the right words, because such are the words to tell of it… words that are gentle enough in a certain moment or shocking enough in another moment.
MM: Here in America, of course, you are best known for ‘There were Roses’ and I know there’s an interesting story not only about why you wrote the song, which is the most dramatic part of it, which is the story the song tells, but also how the names of the people in the song changed. It’s interesting that when myself and Robbie recorded it, we have the original version, and you came out then singing a different version. And I know there’s a story behind that. I wonder if you could tell that.
TS: Yes. Whenever I recorded the song, it was put out as a single. I was to do it on the Late Late Show, which is a program in Dublin, that you know, Mick. Before I actually appeared singing the song, I decided to speak to two families involved, and I went to one of the families, a Protestant family, and they were very happy with it. But the Catholic family was very, very worried about it. The mother was very ill, for a start, and they thought if the mother heard Sean McDonald and them on the radio, that it would kill her. So I did not know what to do. I already had the song recorded, and I suppose a couple of thousand singles made. I remember Katrine was away from the house and I was in the house on my own, and I took down a bottle of whiskey and threw some whiskey into me and I said, ‘I really don’t know what I’ll do!’ Here was a song I thought I was going to have to never sing again! And I could have went on and sang it but it could have caused trouble and anyway, the whole idea of the song was compassion.
So I remember going in and I rang up the cardinal that same night. The cardinal, we were very good friends, and I often talked to him about all sorts of things. He also knew the family, and he said that he would talk to them because he thought it was important that the song should be sung. But then, I went to see Peter Makem, who was a very good friend of mine. Peter and me took another wee sup of whiskey each, but suddenly whatever chemistry was in the air between us—change the names! Now it seems so obvious, but it didn’t seem one bit obvious then, because I thought by changing the names it was going to destroy the whole power of the song, but than I thought, sure, very few people know the actual names anyway, so I decided to change the names.
I went into the studio and I kind of re-recorded it. I already had the music done, so I re-recorded that one line—there were a couple of lines, actually, in the song. I remember going up to the program, and into the make-up [room]; Gay Byrne, he was getting made up and I was getting made up. He had to rewrite his script and I had to try to remember the correct name, or the new names on the live program because it had only just changed. But I’m very glad that your version is the right names, in a sense, because it’s truer. But I promised the family that I wouldn’t, and even though the mother’s dead now, I still hold on to that.
MM: Have the families ever heard our version?
TS: Oh, they have, because they heard it played on the radio.
MM: What did they think of that?
TS: Well, I haven’t been speaking to the O’Donnells, but I think they’re happy with it, because they’re sufficiently removed from it now. Although they went through a hard time; their cousins… they had two or three cousins shot as well. They were very nervous about the whole thing at the time. The thing is, your version has been recorded now by several people, including Sean Keane—so that’s played quite often on the radio.
MM: One last thing; it seems to me that the songs that you and Colm (though I won’t ask you to speak for Colm) are different than a lot of the songs that have come out of the North of Ireland, in the last thirty years since the Civil Rights movement. A lot of the songs are partisan; a lot of the songs, even if they are pro-Civil Rights, are very obviously against the British occupation of Northern Ireland or against the status quo. Your songs aren’t quite like that; what do you think is the difference?
TS: Well, I think a lot of people who write the so-called ‘blood and thunder’ songs… well, maybe that’s unfair to call them that because a lot of them are very good songs. But the one-side idea song, most of the people probably don’t live in a mixed area, or they probably don’t know the other sort. From the very beginning, we lived in a mixed area, and even though we didn’t agree with the politics of Unionism, these people who literally lent us a spade and helped us dig the spuds and we helped them… they were very real people with very real fears, as well. My own feeling is that we must learn from each other because we are only half of what we could be. If we only stick to our own point of view, certainly we never would have gotten any crops done if we had stuck to our own point of view, in that sense. Again, that’s symbolic of a much wider thing. Our audience was always people from both sides. If you go in and you sing a song which takes the feet totally from underneath half the audience, they’ll never listen to anything else you’ll ever say, no matter how true it is. So to be true to your own feelings and your own message, if you want to put it that way, I think you must take that into account, the other person’s fears and feelings, because you’re doing them a great disservice and you’re doing your own tradition and your own message a terrible disservice by turning off the very people who need these thoughts and who need these feelings.
The ‘Roses’ song, for example, is a song that I’ve spent an awful long time to make sure that both sides are suffering. I think the Protestants, they have been the bully in many ways, but most of them have been victims as well, in a sense—they have been the victims too. I remember talking to a man one time, in and around the time of power-sharing, an executive in the North that actually fell. He came up to Shankill Road and I said, ‘would you share power?’ And he says, ‘I don’t have any power.’ This man had no job on Shankill Road. These people… we all have the same legacy of poverty. Some of us have been told that we’re better off than the other person, but we’re not, and I don’t want to turn those people off. I would have my own feelings about how a solution should come about, but I think that they must be part of it.
MM: It seems to me, just from listening to you talk then, that the fact that you come from a community where there has been some positive contact between both communities gives you a different perspective than somebody who would have come from west Belfast, or from the bog side, who wouldn’t have had very much positive contact.
TS: Yes, I think so. I think so. Because you know, I was just doing a piece in Paris, I think I mentioned, with this Iraqi painter, called [Neman Saman] who’s an excellent painter and a wonderful human being. He’s doing an exhibition called ‘Without Faces.’ It’s all about the bombing of the most ancient culture of the planet by the US or the UN troops, or bombers. He was saying that it was easy to bomb people if you don’t see their faces. The television showed these shots, almost computer shots, of firing a rocket in some direction, but you’d never, not one picture, of an Iraqi. Never, not one injury, nothing like that… if you keep faces away from it, and if you can keep people from ever knowing each other, you can create war—it’s easy. But if people know each other and see all the positive and good aspects, they will see it in a much better perspective.
MM: Thanks a lot Tommy.
TS: You’re very welcome, Mick.
MM: You went over a lot of topics there, and I think the mystery of songwriting is still there; I think that’s something that some people just seem to have.
TS: I’m sure, Mick, like anything else, it’s not a mystery, and that someone much better versed in it than I would be could explain it much better. I think maybe telling a story and putting it into a rhyme, and picking a chorus… well, you don’t even need a chorus. If you’re playing to audiences, I think a chorus is good. Pick a chorus that sort of sums it up.
MM: I think what’s come out of our talk is the fact that you don’t have to have a knowledge of the formal structure, you don’t have to study something. What you have is an intuitive ability and talent to be able to encapsulate experience in that powerful way that enables you to create a song that will rivet a lot of people. Obviously not everybody has that ability.
TS: No, maybe not… But I think somebody who is already musician and is really good with words, I’d be very surprised if they wouldn’t come up with a song. It’s just maybe the matter of getting into the mood of it.
MM: It’s the same thing in traditional and the instrumental music too. Only a certain number of the musicians, no matter how great they are, will compose the tunes. And of that number, the ones who will compose the tunes, a tiny number, a very tiny number again, will have their tunes played by other people. So we’re never really going to get to the bottom of it all, because it really is mysterious.
TS: I think it is. I think it is dipping into a well, and you’re not too sure what’s going to come out of the well. You know there’s going to be water in it, but the elements in it… and we’re all dipping into the same well, with different buckets and at different times. You’re never quite sure—there might be a frog in the bucket one time. And that’s what you’re looking for!
MM: That’s a good way to end!
[...] View article: EXCLUSIVE: Interview with Tommy Sands [...]
Fascinating..