Articles

scroll on down

By Gerry Quinn, Irish Examiner, Oct. ‘08

Johnny Duhan is a born storyteller. The Limerick man’s songs have been covered by the likes of May Black, Christy Moore, The Dubliners, Ronnie Drew and Dolores Keane. The late lamented Drew once described Duhan as one of his favourite songwriters, while Christy Moore’s version of ‘The Voyage’ has become a classic. Johnny began as a teenage lead singer with sixties Rock group ‘Granny’s Intentions’ and for over three decades since, has produced a series of albums that vividly portray his life, reflecting on his boyhood in Limerick, his youthful attempt at seeking pop fame, his celebration of family life and his own spiritual quest. Now, those songs have manifested themselves into a foundation for an autobiography, ‘To The Light’.

“It’s a book of the journey that I’ve made since I was a kid,” explains Duhan. “I wanted to go back in time,” he says. “I was living on my wife’s parents farm, cut off from everything for about three years when I actually began writing seriously. First of all, I wrote prose and then the prose began to turn into songs and I realised that by being cut off from the mainstream, I could go back and try and learn who I was.” This was at a time after the demise of ‘Granny’s Intentions’ and as a young man he found himself at a crossroads. “When I was in the ‘Grannies’ I didn’t know what I liked or didn’t like anymore – in musical terms anyway. We were so manipulated by record companies and managers that you didn’t know where you were, so you didn’t know what you liked. It was great for me to go out into the wilderness and spend three years on a farm after that.” But temptations to continue on the path of fame followed Johnny to the West of Ireland, from the bright lights of London, as he explains. “When I found myself on the edge of a bog in Co. Galway, there came a day when I had to make a decision – sign on the dotted line and you’ll be moving into a nice pad in the Chelsea High Road or else don’t sign. I turned my back on it and suddenly I find myself on the Old Bog Road. But it was the making of me as a songwriter,” he reflects. “Some of Granny’s Intentions mightn’t like that I’m saying this but I don’t think I wrote one decent song up until I was about 26, when I wrote Just Another Town’.”

That song inspired a body of work that focused on the writer’s boyhood in Limerick and in particular the nearby docklands, where his father embarked on numerous adventures as a merchant seaman. It’s also the title of one of the book’s four chapters. Both as a prose-writer and a tunesmith, one of Duhan’s stronger points is his meticulous attention to detail. “I’ve written thousands of songs in my day and I’ve come up with an awful lot of rubbish. But I knew I hit a seam of real songs when I hit ‘Just Another Town’. I wrote the best part of thirty songs in a few months and then I reworked them for about four or five years after that.” But, acknowledging that inspiration cannot be turned on like a tap, he says, “once that period was over, it was gone again, I had to start digging once more and I came up with a lot of crap stuff for a while.

‘To The Light’ if nothing else is brutally honest and within it, Duhan bravely attempts to come to terms with his mother’s depression - an affliction that was very much a taboo subject in his childhood years. “It had a huge impact on me so I couldn’t just skirt it,” he confesses. “And I don’t think it should be evaded,” he adds. “It has upset a few members of my family. But I think that if everybody adopted that same attitude we’d still be back in the old days – the no go area. As a kid I was a very happy-go-luck lad. Suddenly I discovered this when I was nine or ten and it really impacted big time on me.” The lyrics of his song ‘Everything Will Be Allright’, featured in Chapter one, are a fascinating and poignant summary of his take on the subject.

Referring to, perhaps his most recognisable song ‘The Voyage’, Duhan is unapologetic about its subject matter, that of the importance of family.
“It’s a sentimental song,” he admits, “but as Robert Lowell said, some of the best poetry ever written has been sentimental. It’s not a sin to have an ideal,” proffers Duhan. “The Voyage is the ideal of marriage. You put that out there and then you give what it’s really like in the other songs. But you also have to try to show the joy of it.”

To The Light by Johnny Duhan is published by Bell Productions.
To celebrate its publication, it will be launched by Ollie Jennings
at The Warwick Hotel, Salhill, Galway on Thursday October 16th at 7pm.

For more info see www.johnnyduhan.com

LIMERICK LEADER 2 Sat. 1 March 2008
Norma Prendiville

IT’S an ambitious project – to harvest four collections of songs from more than three decades of writing songs. But that is what Johnny Duhan is about these days. And although he has neither scythe nor binding twine between his fingers, this child of the city is bending into the work like a true son of the soil.
This image becomes oddly apt when he reveals that most of the songs on “Just another town”, his extraordinary hymn to his Limerick-city childhood, were written while he was working on a farm in Connemara.
It was the late 70s and although Johnny Duhan was then only about 27 he had already experienced the extemes of the music-business. He had gone from turning professional musician with Granny’s Intentions at 16 to playing London’s top clubs, securing an impressive record contract and being known as one of the first orignial Irish pop stars. But now, having walked away from a solo album deal, he thought he had “come to the end”. “I was stuck,” he says.” I was living out there, working on the farm, helping out the father-in-law, cutting the turf and cutting the hay. And while I was there I really started thinking about the past.”
“I had,” he continues, “lost all clue of myself in the 60s”.
He is forthright about this – the high hopes starting out, the compromises forced by commercialism and the need to stay in the loop, the mad lifestyle. But now, he was stepping back to rediscover himself.
By then too, he says, he had completely turned his back on rock music and had turned to folk.” Living out on the farm, first of all, I tried to write my autobiography and wrote all about growing up in Limerick. It wasn’t very good. It wasn’t that well written but by delving into the past I somehow connected.”
The title song of the eventual album, Just another town, is, he says, an overview of the street he grew up. “The rest of the album relates to all the characters I knew and I take on the persona of some of them. I wanted to capture all the different elements, the personalities who had an effect on me growing up.” But, he insists, it is not a nostalgic album. “I wanted to give an honest picture of the city.”
In conceiving and giving birth to the album, he also rediscovered the truth of the saying that “the boy is father to the man”. And he quotes Pascal: “Wisdom returns you to youth.”
The boy in “Just another town” is a hopeful kid, he says, full of the joys of life, a boy mesmerised by the glamour of ships who ply the high seas with their different flags, a boy who was both dreamer and sharp observer.
The songs on the album also revisit some of the dark moments in the boy’s life: his mother’s break-down, a neighbour’s suicide. Johnny Duhan’s take on this is uncompromising. “If you are trying to get at the truth, you have to face the reality.” And he quotes the poet WH Auden who said “A poet cannot bring you truth without the problematic, the painful, the disorderly and the ugly.”
It is an idea that threads its way through his entire conversation: how to recognise your own truth, know to get at the truth of an emotion or an idea, how to present the truth.
For Johnny Duhan, there is even a truth in how he has ordered the songs on the album. It opens, he explains with the sun coming up and a young boy waking up to the possibilities of a new day and ends with the moon high in the sky. Along the way, it weaves its way through different songs but he has consciously followed the darkest one, The River Shannon, with Margaret, a magnificent recapturing of a young adolescent’s first intimation of love – “to show you the great joy that is in life, that comes unexpectedly”.
Some of these songs didn’t appear on the first version of “Just another town” but they do appear on the re-released version, which is now available through Johnny’s own Bell label.
The revisited version is part of a bigger project to reshape all his previous albums into four collections: the first, Just another town, the second, likely to be called “To the light” which deals with his time on the road with Granny’s Intentions; the third, The Voyage which contains songs to do with love, marriage, family and getting the balance right. The final collection he plans to call “The Flame” or maybe “The Beacon”.
To accompany these collections, Johnny has written four “chapters”, each containing song lyrics and little stories about the songs and his life. He had considered releasing each chapter along with each album, he says, but decided against.
But anybody who goes to his one-man show, Just another town, which takes place in the Belltable on Saturday, March 8, will literally get the full worth of both chapter and verse.
He has been asked: why a full album about Limerick? He has even had an A&R man from a record company tell him it would be “too parochial” to succeed.
But Johnny Duhan’s response to that is a chuckle and the words: “You could be anywhere. It’s what is going on in the kid’s head. The locality isn’t that important. And he recounts the story of the American in the audience who told him his hometown was “just like that”. Why would anyone want to write a full album about Limerick.
The reality is that Johnny Duhan’s songs are “everyman” songs that speak to the heart and to the emotions without being sentimental. They are lucid, diamond-bright and utterly human. But they haven’t alway come easily.
For about seven years, he admits, he wrote hundreds of songs or “what I thought were songs”. “I was struggling. It was like starting out all over again and then I had to discover my voice.”
In time, he realised that “ if you sat down and took your time, you could explain things fairly well”.
Getting the words right though is important and he tells of one song where it took him three years and hundreds of versions to get the last verse right. But without that right last verse, the previous three were just a bunch of dead words.
“The great thing about song writing is it makes you condense everything down and down..You get a melodic form and within that melodic form you have to try and say something. It took years of studying poetry and listening to music to get to that stage.”
“I jot things down,” he continues. Each day, he writes something in his song journal and, sometime, whenever, those little pieces can turn into a song.
“You have the opening line… the DNA is in there… then you get on a roll and it just comes.”
He has great respect for traditional folk-songs in the way they marry two very different entities, music and words, and that carry a very universal appeal. For himself, he says, he likes “brave songs”, songs that somehow carry the idea of another tomorrow or another chance or simply say “don’t give up”. But his most consistent musical choice is Bach, “because you know it comes from somewhere beautiful”.
As to the music business, he says: “I have never got on with record companies. At a very early stage I decided to go completely on my own.” He no longer has an agent or a manager but he is content with that.
“I really love what I do. At this stage, success isn’t important. When I started out I wanted to be a celebrity. None of that means anything to me anymore.”
What matters is doing the work, finishing off the “harvest” project, writing the new songs. “I have a routine… I get up very early. I read for a few hours. I spend a good few hours singing and searching for melodies and writing.”
“I prefer coming up with the songs” he continues. “But I love singing live. There is something about singing a song live that you will never create in a studio or an album.”
But, and he looks around the room which is his workroom:” This is where I live. It is not much. A room full of books and music. I live in my head. Trying to find order..”
The sense of peace he has now is hard-won, he acknowledges. “What I really found was I had found to go back to where I ran away from… You can’t get away from yourself..
I have spent years trying to get it right.”

Odds and Ends

THE Limerick of “Just another town” is “totally and completely changed”, says Johnny Duhan who grew up, the son of John and Chris Duhan in Wolfe Tone Street. Unlike much of Limerick today, he says, there was a social mix, where labourers and professionals all lived within a small enough area. A CBS boy, left school, Wolfe Tone St and Limerick at the age of 16 to go professional with Granny’s Intentions. The band, which started out as a soul and a rhythm and blues band, gravitated more towards rock and had a number of hits. Their reputation as one of the best bands of the 1960s still stands however.
“It does bug me a little at times,” Johnny Duhan says when asked if he minds that, four decades later, his name and that of the band are often mentioned in the same breath. But he goes on: “That is the way it is. People have long memories.”
In the 40 years since Granny’s Intentions broke up, Johnny Duhan has written hundreds of songs and produced several albums. Many of his songs have taken up by singers such as Ronnie Drew, Christy Moore, Mary Black, Dolores Keane, the Irish Tenors and others.
He has been described as a songwriter’s songwriter and a sensitive and passionate performer, a man who is highly respected within the business for the depth and maturity of his music.
For all that, he describes as “one of the best things to ever happen” the fact that the late Jim Kemmy nominated “Just another town” as one of his favourite albums.
As a child in Limerick, he says, he haunted the docks and was always fascinated by the sailors, the different nationalities, the different flags.
Even now, when he returns to Limerick, he says: “I always gravitate towards the river.”
“It doesn’t matter to me where I live. I kind of live in my head. But I love going back to Limerick.” Johnny Duhan now lives in Galway city with his wife and family.

____________________________

IRISH EXAMINER Tuesday 25 September 2007
Album Review - Gerry Quinn

Johnny Duhan is probably Ireland’s most undervalued song-writer. The Limerick man is best know for his penning of ‘The Voyage’, covered successfully by Christy Moore, and in recent years the song has developed into the soundtrack for numerous wedding ceremonies and family festivities. But Duhan is no one-trick pony. On his latest release Just Another Town (Bell Records) he revisits an older recording of eleven songs and expands it into a seventeen strong suite of reflections, reminiscences and acute observations of his childhood dockland hometown. The additional songs were written at the same time as the original collection, so there’s a consistency of theme and style throughout this fascinating concoction of potent images and deep perceptions. For all intents and purpose this is what could be termed a concept album. All the songs here are hung upon Duhan’s razor-sharp yet non-discriminatory scrutiny of his boyhood reflections. The title track with its luscious string arrangement opening, portrays a lucid image like that of a slightly blurred but extremely perceptive painting. ‘Benediction’ is a non-judgemental gaze at religious worship and faith, while ‘Stowaway’ is a sort of aspirational or prophetic yearning of a young man coming to terms with possibilities and life-choices. On Just Another Town every song has a story and Duhan’s superb and measured narrative maintains a noble tradition of chronicling emotion and feeling through the medium of ordinary and descent people’s everyday existence. ___________________________

IRISH MUSIC MAGAZINE
Volume 13. No. 9 June 2007
CD Review
Nicky Rossiter

JOHNNY DUHAN
Just Another Town
Bell BLCD 07

Remember the days of the concept albums of the 1970’s or 1980’s where we got collections of songs built around a single idea? In Ireland we have a modern maestro of the genre but we have to look closely to identify the concept in his work.
The Voyage was a fantastic example taking family and relationships as his motif. Duhan has returned with an even better collection of songs on this new album where the town and its inhabitants are at the heart of the wonderful compositions sung in his own inimitable style.
Opening with the beautiful Another Morning we awake into a musical landscape that will be familiar to all. The one track I recall from another performer is the enthralling and absolutely profound portrait of urban life called Always Remember. If the adage that Dublin could be rebuilt from Ulysses then in a few centuries this song could show students of social history the very real ingredients of any town and its people.
Johnny Duhan not only gives us exceptional quality, he is generous in the quantity of songs on offer with seventeen tracks on this CD. In The Garden reminds the listener of the ordinary innocent pleasures of adolescent life in unsentimental lyrics. A lush string arrangement introduces us to the title track. Again Duhan draws lyrical portraits of very real people with their flaws and foibles. Listening to the track you can feel the chill of evening as he sings of the sun going down on the myriad scenes of town life. A simple track listing will give an indication of the diversity of songs on offer. And these include, Mary, Benediction, Daredevil and The River Shannon.
One of my favourites among 17 favourites is One Hundred Miles. Like all Duhan’s songs it is simple and deep in equal measure. The language is simple but the musical arrangement and accompaniment combine to make even this four-minute tale of a person living away from home memorable.
Listen to Young Mothers and you are transported to the reality of everyday life once more. We all know these people but could never express the vision as Johnny Duhan does.
This is one of the best albums that will be on sale in 2007 and it is all the more valuable in coming from Ireland and from the genius of one songwriter who is sadly underrated in his own land. If enough airplays were given to any single track here he would be a superstar. As for now you have the chance to acquire a masterpiece ahead of the crowd.

Nicky Rossiter

___________________________________

Irish Mail on Sunday - July 29, 2007

JUST ANOTHER TOWN
Danny McElhinney

Johnny Duhan’s songs have been covered by Mary Black and Christy Moore among many other stalwarts of trad. He is one of Ireland’s finest songwriters and I confess that his Don Quixote is one of my favourite songs of all time.
And album by the Limerick man himself is a rare enough thing. The quality ofg of his singing, the quite power of his vocal delivery, is often overlooked beside the songwriting talent. I can’t imagine anyone singing Always Remember better than Duhan but I don’t doubt that someone will try before long.
The imagery of Just Another Town displays a wonderous artistry; its evocation of returning to a much-changed hometown is quite moving. Daredevil displays more of that melancholic beauty and Young Mothers shows the astute observation he is renowned for.
Sadness and longing underpins most of the album - perhaps that means you might not want to ingest the entire 17-song content in one sitting too often. It’s not music to hit the town to, but beautifully realised music for the wee hours.

____________________________________

Gerry Quinn, The Clare People, 2006

Johnny Duhan turned his back on the ‘bright lights’ ofstardom after his ‘beat group’ “Granny’s Intentions” folded in the early seventies. As the spotlight dimmed, he began an enduring and evolving journey of self-exploration and discovery, shaping his own identity through sensitive and intuitive song composition. A life-time of committed graft and earnest observation moulded the Limerick native into one of this country’s most respected and sought after writers. But like many other worthy and earnest tune-smiths Johnny found his chosen path to be strewn with metaphorical land mines, temptations and distractions along the way. In Duhan’s speaking or singing voice one can distinguish the cadence of his native city. Yet there is a worldly quality to his annunciation that reflects both a strong hometown bond and a universality born out of an early departure from there as a teenager.

“I started out in my first band when I was about fourteen - out in the shed down the back”, he recalled. “But the first ‘big’ band I was part of was “The Intentions”. We were very much into black soul music like Tamla Motown. Then, there were a lot of groups with names like “The Temptations” and “The Impressions” so we became The Intentions. Later, “Granny’s” was added on during the psychedelic phase in the mid-sixties”, he said. “We were all from Limerick originally but then we brought in John Ryan from Athlone on keyboards and it took off rather successfully”, he explained.

They quickly realised that moving to Dublin was the preferred option if the band were to make any headway. “In those days there were loads of ‘beat groups’ in Dublin and it was pretty tough trying to break into the scene, but eventually we became one of the top ones”. Once Dublin was conquered, Granny’s Intentions ambition was fixed on the escalating scene of swinging London. “After Dublin we got a chance to go to England. We moved there and lived in London for a number of years. We brought out a few singles and an album and then it kinda ran its course”, reflected Duhan.

Were you disillusioned after the break up? “Yeah, I became totally disinterested in the pop/rock side of the business. I began to develop a real liking for folk music along the way and I gravitated towards that. At the end of Granny’s reign I turned down a lot of offers to join other bands. I didn’t want to go that route”.
So did you instantly decide to take the songwriter track? “Well I had written a few when I was in the band. In fact I wrote the first single “The Story of David” with John Ryan. It was a strange subject for a pop song about a fellow who wanted to become a poet. But it was played extensively on the B.B.C. Other than that I wrote most of the songs on the album as well, but I would consider them early trials rather than anything else”.

How long did it take for you to believe in yourself as a writer of worth? “I think the first song I wrote that gave me that feeling was “Just Another Town”. It didn’t happen until my mid to late twenties and that’s a long time because I started out at sixteen. I certainly wasn’t precocious. A lot of ‘numbers’ as I’d call them were written before then. But when I wrote a group of songs around the time of Just Another Town it gave me the confidence to find my own voice”. After a measured pause Duhan
reflected on what he had just said. “Then again you can’t rely totally on that either. When songwriters find their own voice they often begin imitating themselves. Basically you’ve got to keep re-inventing yourself. Or find different layers of your being to give you something fresh and new rather than repeating oneself over and over again. It can easily happen”, he warned.

“But it’s always the real stuff I go for, said Johnny.” I was in Nashville a few years ago and I was asked to write with other people. I had to explain that for one of my songs called “Flame” it took me three years to get the final verse written. And these guys wanted me to go into a room with someone else and write a song in a few hours! I probably could do it. But it wouldn’t be a song - it would be a pastiche. Every day on the radio you hear pastiche or fake songs, basically made up from nothing. It didn’t interest me and I didn’t go for it”.

No Johnny Duhan interview would be complete without mention of an instantly recognisable composition “The Voyage”. This is the one that has become a staple at wedding ceremonies and sentimental family occasions. How do you feel that your composition elicits strong sentiments of both adoration and loathing? “Well a friend of mine teaches music and he gives each class a questionnaire that includes their ten favourite songs and the ten they like least. The Voyage comes up in both polls. So I suppose if people really like something, there’s always going to be a group that really dislikes it”.

______________________

Ita Kelly, Irish Music Magazine, 2005

Songwriter Johnny Duhan continues to chart his course, navigating his way even further into our hearts, with his latest album, ‘The Voyage’. A familiar title from a familiar and much loved song, this, his seventh album is a collection of old and new songs, that travels to the heart of marriage and family life, encompassing the aspirations and struggles of several generations. Like all Johnny’s work, these songs are highly personal explorations on themes of birth, marriage, commitment and the tension, reconciliation and joy that happens within the family circle.

“The first group of songs I wrote many, many years ago” remembers Johnny, “was called ‘Just Another Town’ and that was about community, the city where I grew up, the street where I grew up, the family I grew up among and the people that affected me most growing up. All my work since then except the album ‘Don Quixote’ which is about my travels with the rock band and the people I met along the way, is related in some way or another to family and this album is very much related too. All the songs are about family relationships, the ups and downs, the struggles of everyday life for a family.”

Though now living in Galway, Johnny originally hailed from Limerick. He first came to public attention as the lead man with the blues based rock band ‘Granny’s Intentions’ in the 1960s. He chucked the heady rock n’ roll lifestyle for virtual seclusion and found in himself the passion which has since guided his star, song writing. His songs have been sung all over the world and have been recorded by many great artists. Johnny himself is the supreme interpreter of his own material which with each new round of words and melody become more and more poetic, full of imagery, graceful and sensitive, and always highly personal. ‘In our Father’s Name,’ a song with a very memorable melody is Johnny’s personal favourite on his present collection:

‘In the long shadow
of our family tree
that darkened once
the heart in me
I found good reason
to believe
in our frail seed.’

“I met a guy at a gig one time who told me that the song ‘The Voyage’ meant very little to him because he had no time for his family” says Johnny. “In fact he told me he hated his brothers and sisters and he hadn’t been home in years. There’s a lot of fractured families out there like that. I wrote ‘In our Father’s Name’ for them and for all divided people.”

The title track of this new album ‘The Voyage’ is already well known to us. “A lot of people think it’s Christy’s song” says Johnny, “I actually recorded it a long time ago on an album called ‘Family Album’ which in many ways is the only album of mine I was never really satisfied with. I recorded it for another company and since I parted with them I’ve worked on my own and I don’t have to compromise at all. When the rights to the album reverted to me I decided I couldn’t re-release it without getting rid of the dud songs. I went to work on it so there’s about half of the old songs and half new. I believe the five new songs are the real thing – inspired by real events and real people.”

‘The Voyage’ is Johnny’s best known song, popular all over the world particularly for weddings and anniversaries and Johnny has a constant stream of emails and letters from people requesting the words of the song or the sheet music or telling their own story about it. The Irish Tenors also recorded it and sold one and half million copies of the album it was on in America alone. Christy Moore however, admitted in his song book ‘One Voice’ that he had some reservations about recording it at first. “In a way I understand that” says Johnny. “Soon after I released the song on ‘Family Album’ my Dublin booking agent phoned me and told me he was having difficulty getting promo spots on TV because most of the people in RTE thought the family was a dead institution. I don’t think this was true. Deep down, most of us love our families, but it had become a taboo subject to sing about. In a way it was a radical thing I did turning this notion on its head.”
Despite Johnny’s reservations, ‘Family Album’ was one of his most successful collections, with its songs being covered by Dolores Keane, Mary Black, Francy Conway and of course Christy. ‘Trying to get the Balance Right’ was recorded by Mary Black and again it’s a song about relationships. “I struggled with this one for a long time” says Johnny, “then I remembered a circus I went to when I was a kid, watching the high wire act and I kind of compare that to that of the struggle of two people trying to stay together without falling overboard.”

Like most songwriters, Johnny sends his songs to singers he thinks they might suit. One of his favourite singers is Dolores Keane who sang his song ‘After the Dream’ for the film ‘Reefer and the Model’ and ‘The Room’, one of Johnny’s most melodic songs, which she recorded some years ago. “For me she would be up there with the great singers like Billy Holiday and Ray Charles,” says Johnny. “There’s no other Irish singer like her.”

Many of the songs on ‘The Voyage’ relate to children. “They inhabit the whole album in a variety of ways,” Johnny explains. “They’re the ‘crew’ that keep the ship afloat, though they can be mutinous at times, and occasionally even make us walk the plank.” Johnny’s own children are now having children of their own and ‘Aoibheann and Alanna’ is a song celebrating the birth of twins born to his son. “On the morning they were born” Johnny remembers, “our area was full of magpies, and I saw three magpies in different spots, three and three, three for a girl and double. The melody came to me first and I wrote a little piece around it, then a little later the actual song came. It’s a pretty song and they are two pretty girls.” Going back a generation, the pretty girls’ father, Johnny’s son was the inspiration for the song ‘When you Appeared’ written about his birth. It explores the apprehension of bringing new life into a sometimes violent world. Birth is touched on again in the song ‘Woken Gently’. “This one comes from a very old memory,” says Johnny. “I was born in a house with two rooms up and two rooms down and there was a lot of us so I ended up sharing a bedroom with my parents and I remember I had this hazy recollection of my mother giving birth in the room and I waking up in the middle of the night to it, so I tried to capture a bit of that in this song.”

Another song was inspired by his youngest son, “‘Brian’s song’ incorporates a shanty my son composed on my shoulders when he was five or six on the way to a beach near our home.” Possibly the most beautiful song on the album ‘Cornerstone’ is dedicated to his wife and reaffirms eloquently and emotionally his commitment to their marriage and their love.

Inspiration is crucially important to Johnny. “You need as much patience as skill in the making of a song” he says. “I often think that real songs write me rather than I them. Deep down my work is a quest to understand the experience of my life – my upbringing, the town and people I grew up among, the girls I’ve fallen for, the family that nurtured me and the family I helped form.”
“The words of my songs are more than fifty per cent,” he adds. “ I love melody as well but I spend an awful lot of time trying to write poetry and then converting it into songs. I wouldn’t claim that the songs are poetry but at their best they would be.”

___________________

Frank O’Reilly,The Word Magazine

The usual chitchat which two people who haven’t met for well on fourteen years usually indulge in has come to its natural close. It’s time now for Johnny Duhan to get down to the business of talking about himself and his art, oblivious of the lunch-time crowd around us in this Ballsbridge pub.

Born and reared in Limerick city, the singer-songwriter has been living in Galway for the best part of thirty years now. But being away from the business hive that is Dublin is no handicap, and he works better in a relative wilderness. “I always notice when I go on tour and spend a lot of time away from the day to day grind that the writing deteriorates. I made a conscious decision years ago to put full focus on the writing and perform only as a sideline. Most people want the opposite.” Because he works as a solitary songwriter, it is easy to overlook the fact that he has been married for many years with a growing family.

Johnny enjoyed a faltering, nervy kind of fame as a singer with 60s band Granny’s Intentions, as detailed in his autobiography, There is a Time. In grim London and Dublin bed-sits, Johnny and his fellow band members and friends (including one youthful Phil Lynott) eked out a feckless existence, doing dope and other drugs. Anxious to concentrate on song-writing, he left the group to become a career song-writer, and he has been one now for over thirty years. But he has never written to order, or indeed never wrote with Mary Black or Christy Moore in mind. It just so happens that both performers have recorded his song, as have a host of other artists from the Dubliners and Elenor Shanley to Sean Keane and his brothers and The Irish Tenors.

He talks of a grueling six years spent writing the songs for Flame, his penultimate album. “It took me longer than ever, and I didn’t know where to go at the end of it. Each of those songs coast me an arm and a leg.”
A painstaking, meticulous writer, the classical grace of his songs is not achieved without the expenditure of considerable mental energy. He wrote roughly a thousand versions of the final verse of the title song alone over a three year period. “Each song on Flame took me so long to write I was reluctant to buy a copybook to start another album.” But, as night follows day, another, fourth album, would indeed be made, the recently released ‘Tree’, which features what may well be his best song, ‘Inviolate’.

In the liner notes he explains the song’s genesis: ‘Inviolate laments a tragedy that impacted on three generations of our family, the after-effects of which reverberate to this day in our bloodline.’ In his autobiography, Johnny explains, as a child, he discovered the death certificate of his brother in an old tin box. The first born son, he had pre-deceased him and was also called John. His father would subsequently tell him how his dead brother died from gastroenteritis on the same day as Johnny’s paternal grandfather - who had also been living in the family home - died. To compound matters, his father was away at sea and had to be summoned home. Astonishingly, from our perspective today, his mother did not attend the funeral, as it was not the custom in those day for a mother to attend the burial of her first son. The events of that profoundly tragic day tipped his mother over the edge, and she became a patient in St Joseph’s psychiatric hospital in Limerick. “She was devastated by the whole experience.”

To condense this trauma into the few minutes of a song became a burning challenge through the years. A psychotherapist friend suggested that Johnny address his dead brother in the song. He had a vivid dream that night in which he saw a line of desks with nameplates near a holy water font in a church. In the dream he noticed a shadowy figure behind one of the desks. ‘I looked at the nameplate and saw it was my name. I think it was my brother. I woke and a few hours later I started writing the song.”

Another song, ‘The Blight’, harks back to a nervous breakdown he himself experienced when he hit thirty in 1981. An international recording deal he had fought long and hard for went sour on the eve of the release of his first solo album, leaving him marooned and disillusioned. ‘It seemed like I didn’t sleep for months. It had taken me years to get to that stage and then to lose it overnight! But my eldest son was born at the same time, which was a wake-up call.”

I note that the last time we met we never got into talking about this breakdown. “I hadn’t worked my way through it, but, looking back, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Had it not happened I don’t think I would have developed as a songwriter. But I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” He concedes that he was somehow rescued by marriage.

“All my songs aren’t like this,” he says at one point, anxious to show the lighter side. And it is true that many of his songs celebrate life, songs like ‘And the Band Played’, which recalls the night his parents met at a dance.
Because his father was a sailor, the sea and nautical images infuse many of his compositions. ‘The Voyage’, with its metaphor of the family as ship’s crew in undoubtedly his best known song. Written nearly twenty years ago, the lyrics celebrate a by now almost out-dated notion of the traditional nuclear family. He still receives emails about the song from all over the world, from Australia, America, and Hong Kong. I suggest to Johnny that the basic premise of the song is a little snug, or even smug, that families are more complicated than the family that fits between the neat rhymes of The Voyage. But Johnny counters that the song was written as the ideal of the way it should be. “I still totally feel that the family, for all its warts, is the place to be.”

He says he ‘drifted away’ spiritually at sixteen and spent many years trying to find a way through various belief systems. His father had been skeptical about spirituality and organized religion. “But towards the end of his life, he ended up in churches himself. My mother wasn’t a bit doubtful, but I have the two aspects in me.” Although he talks of periods of doubt still, he strives nevertheless to be a deeply committed Catholic. I recall the rosary beads hanging in his room when I visited him in his home in Galway fourteen years ago. “It’s still there,” he says. There is a crucifix in the room in which he writes his songs and he goes to early Mass most mornings. Ultimately his faith has sustained him through the low periods of his life. “It’s the most important thing in my life, without going on stage and blaring on about it.”

__________________________

Ita Kelly, Irish Music Magazine, 2002

Johnny Duhan's latest album, Tree, is the culmination of several years work. They are distinct projects started and finished in a cycle, which can be a tough and trying process, he tells our Galway correspondent, Ita Kelly. 'Tree' is a cycle of songs about family life, his own family and like all his work it's highly personal. His albums are a portrayal of his journey through life from his boyhood in Limerick in 'Just Another Town' to his musical escapades in 'Don Quixote' where he refers to himself as a 1960's Don Quixote, 'My lance a guitar, my horsepower, a transit van.” 'Flame' his last album is very personal in that it describes his own spiritual journey in life. 'Tree' much of it written at the same time Johnny was writing his autobiography 'There is a Time' (Brandon Books 2001), is deeply rooted in his own family history, exploring the pain and tragedies but also rejoicing in the love within the family and the ability to remain close knit.
'I once climbed the branches of our old pear tree and found some hard fruit where none used be It tasted bitter, still we all ate”

These words set the tone and the theme for the album and were the first words Johnny Duhan wrote down in his song journal five years ago when the writing process for this album began. “Basically the whole album is written around that, it's the bitterness of things that people have to go through and experience. Kids know the fruit is going to be very bitter and very hard but they still taste it because they know it will be a new experience. All this album is based on family, family memories of tragedies and of good times, but the whole thing is facing into the reality of some of the tragic things that happen in life.”
The central song on 'Tree' is 'Inviolate' based on a real life event that happened before Johnny himself was born. His mother who was an orphan herself lost her first son and the event upset the whole balance of her life. Johnny precedes the song on the album with two love songs; “What I'm doing” he says, “is telling a story of the whole thing starting off with the relationship of my mother and father ('And the band played'), then you hit on another relationship ('After the Dance') about my wife and myself which could be the same couple in a way. Then suddenly out of the blue tragedy strikes and that's usually the way it is for most people in life. Out of the blue things happen in most families or to most couples, and this was overwhelming for my mother.”
The thread of thought and the generic life story of a family continues; “From then on you move through the thing and you're slowly trying to get your balance back.” 'The Dark Side' is a song about facing the demons or the darkness of everyday life. 'All at Once' is about getting in touch with a spiritual side and 'Your Sure Hand' is a song dedicated to Johnny's daughter Niamh who went through a shaky time when she turned seventeen. “I wrote that just to assure her” Johnny says; “or to remind her that she was very steady when she was young. Parents need to keep reminding their kids first of all that they love them and that they believe in them and that they know even if they go slightly off the rails that they're going to come back.

‘The Second Time Around' is a song about his father who faced serious illness really stoically; “I have great admiration for him” says Johnny; “he had that attitude to life, no matter what comes, what knocks you take, you have to bear with it and not go over the edge. It must have been tough for him in the end but he managed to have a good death and as the Romans say a good death is the sign of a good life.” 'Ireland' is a song that grew from wanting to write about being proud about being Irish; “there's a cynicism that has crept in and it's very hard now for people to sing a song about nationality or about being proud to be Irish, and I said to myself I want to do one like this.” 'Morning Star' and 'We've Come Through the Night’ concludes the family collage and ends the story saying not only have we got through, but we're still close, the house has been rocked a bit, its optimistic, but realistic.
Much of what Johnny Duhan writes is highly poetic, “Usually for me the melody comes first” he says about the song writing process, “and then it will be going around in my head often for years and I'll attempt every now and again to put words to it. I could be waiting five years and then it'll hit me what the subject should be and I'll sit down and it'll come easily.” Each album he produces is a complete project from start to finish and he's not happy to let it go until he has completed the cycle. “Usually it takes me about five years to assemble the collage, and the songs slowly slip into place. I don't think I could set out to do it, to sit down and try to write songs specifically.” This is the main reason why he releases and publishes all his own albums himself, maintaining control over his music.
Johnny is highly esteemed as a songwriter and many of his songs have been made popular by singers such as Christy Moore, Eleanor Shanley, Ronnie Drew, Mary Coughlan, The Irish Tenors and Mary Black. His song 'The Voyage' has been recorded widely and is used at weddings and family celebrations all over the world. 'Don't Give Up Till It's Over' another song inspired by his father's attitude to life, is fast becoming a popular anthem too. Reluctant to fall foul of any commercial traps Johnny has declined offers to have his music and songs reproduced in a commercial way, on advertisements, and there have been several offers, his philosophy is simple; “There is a purity about songs, you have to have respect for them. What people don't realise is that if you hear a song on an ad, it really diminishes the value of that song. It might actually make it more popular for a while but in time it will erode it.”
Born and raised in Limerick, Johnny Duhan has lived in Galway for more than twenty-five years now. His early foray into the world of rock and roll in the 1960s (lead singer with rock and blues band Granny's Intentions) ended abruptly when he jumped off the bandwagon for the quieter and more solitary existence as a songwriter. In song writing Johnny Duhan found his inner voice, found his expression and liked it. “I found when I wrote songs, I could take time, think about what I would say and then be able to articulate it in a clear way. I got to love that, it's great to be able to express yourself clearly, so that's what I've been doing for more than thirty years now.

Although we don't get to see Johnny Duhan performing very often, he is doing a tour in September and there will be a chance to sample his words and music in an acoustic setting. He sings at home every day for anything up to three hours, it's all part of the composition process. His voice is deep and rounded, very bluesy and his songs are strong stories, folk stories and personal songs of life and about people. For Johnny Duhan the song is everything.

_____________________________