Via The Journal Of Music: Saxophonist and former member of Moving Hearts Keith Donald has recently published a memoir, Music & Mayhem: Passion, Addiction and Redemption in the Golden Age of Irish Music. James Camien McGuiggan reviews.
What do you think of mayhem? Is it a fecund spring of excitement, novelty, craic and rock 'n’ roll stories, or a car crash of financial stress, shame and lost years? Keith Donald has lived through the sort of mayhem that not everyone has survived; his new memoir Music & Mayhem recounts his regrets, but neither can he keep himself from the odd wry smile.
Donald is probably best known for his brilliant saxophone work with the groundbreaking Irish fusion band Moving Hearts, but Moving Hearts were only a full-time concern from 1980 to 1984 and take up a small part of Music & Mayhem; more remarkable is how Donald seemed to have been involved in one way or another with just about every Irish musical movement of the second half of the twentieth century: his collaborators across thousands of gigs include everyone from showband (and later Eurovision) singer Tina Reynolds to Paul Brady to Louis Stewart to Bill Whelan. And for most of this time he was suffering from a profound addiction to alcohol, the real centre of this book.
Listen: Keith Donald talks to Ray D'Arcy
Donald was born in 1945 to a relatively poor but musical and loving family in Portstewart, Co. Derry, moving to Belfast at four years old. His path to mayhem seems to have been set for him before he had any chance to resist: he was physically abused (Donald repeats 'tortured’) by his primary school headmistress. He took refuge from this in two ways. First, he practised the recorder given him by his parents incessantly, becoming something of a prodigy. (Music & Mayhem is replete with anecdotes; one of my favourites is how the BBC caught wind of the ten-year-old Donald playing jazz on his recorder; tickled, they invited him on to play live on air with their studio pianist – but without rehearsal, probably assuming that this child would only play something very simple. But Donald learnt by playing along to LPs, so no-one taught him what’s ‘simple’. When he started in on the complex ‘Lullaby of Birdland’, the pianist was struck dumb.) Donald’s second refuge was alcohol: at eleven, he snuck a drink at a family party and was immediately taken.
with Keith Donald pictured third from right
In 1956, Donald’s grammar school gifted him a clarinet and in 1959, he joined his first band (with three schoolboys who all went on to be serious musicians). By sixteen, he was playing jazz semi-professionally, playing over a hundred gigs per year, and bingeing. At eighteen, he went to Trinity College Dublin to start his undergraduate degree (in classics) and had to rebuild his musical life almost from scratch, and in a city with a less active jazz scene – so he drank even more. In 1964, he found musical work again: not in jazz, though, but in a showband, that Irish curiosity of eight- to ten-piece groups playing music that closely followed the charts and who were stifled by ballroom owners’ edicts. Donald writes evocatively and bitterly about the showband world, but he nevertheless played with them for years. Why? Because, especially with such prominent groups as the Real McCoy and the Billy Brown Band, he got paid. There was no drinking money in playing jazz in Ireland in the 1960s and ‘all my choices… were increasingly being determined by the short-term dictates of addiction’.
An aspect of Donald’s showband success, which it is unclear whether he considered a cost, was the constant touring. It was a slog, but also a source of countless stories that Donald palpably enjoys telling. Another aspect, which he probably doesn’t consider a boon, was the money and success itself: ‘When I was twenty-five in 1970, I had "everything"… But I knew that inside, where my spirit should be taking shape and blossoming, there was nothing’.
Donald’s showband days came to a sudden end in 1973 when he rear-ended a truck. The accident almost killed him; it was ten days before he fully regained consciousness. The extended hospital stay and rehabilitation period also gave this frenetically active man plenty of time to reflect on his musical life, and he forswore his hated showbands. (He doesn’t say, but he may have read the writing on the wall: showbands were on their way out.)
From sax to social work
The next chapter in Donald’s life took me by surprise: for the next several years he studied social work to postgraduate level and then became a social worker, funding his degree with and then earning some money on the side as a pit musician, drinking before, during and after all of it. He ostensibly gave up showbands to focus on playing the music he loved free of financial obligation, but ‘[by] unconscious design or by accident I had created a non-stop life of wildly varied activity and no real achievement or creativity’. Donald writes repeatedly of his emotional immaturity and fear of asking probing questions of himself: alcohol, he says, was his way of avoiding thinking about his trauma (which, by this point, included not just his childhood abuse but several friends’ deaths and some nasty injuries). ‘I wasn’t creative because I didn’t allow myself take the risk of experiencing emotions’. So his plan to give himself space to become a deeper musician was never going to pan out: whenever he wasn’t shielding himself from himself with booze (and from 1978 he was occasionally off it), he was shielding himself with busy-ness.
Donald has now come through the far side of alcoholism, and the extent to which he has been able to face his demons can be a beacon for anyone suffering similar problems.
He left social work in 1980 with the formation of Moving Hearts. Moving Hearts were an internationally renowned group, but for Donald it was less an artistic than a managerial experience. The band was run cooperatively, and Donald is still seething that he found himself somehow always the one booking gigs and organising bank loans. ‘I had no time to think, to write music or to practise’; ‘I… resent[ed] every minute of it, bar the two hours on stage’. (Donald acknowledges that everyone else seemed to feel the same way: the problem was deeper, and he avoids accusing anyone of laziness.) He returned to itinerant collaboration.
Donald may not have become the artist he felt he had it in him to become, but he was evidently a talented administrator and seems to have known everyone in the business. So a few years after Moving Hearts ended, he was offered a new post in the Irish Arts Council, Popular Music Officer, starting his final chapter as an arts administrator. This period also marked a serious decline in Donald’s alcoholism until in 1989, after a drunken car crash that could have gone much worse yet to which the only response the hungover, filthy and miserable Donald could think of when released from the Garda station the next morning was three stouts and a whiskey, the mayhem finally got to the point that he went to an addiction support group meeting. His last drink was in 1991 and there, more or less, the narrative ends.
Diary insights
Many readers will probably be interested in Music & Mayhem for its anecdotes and its insights into the characters of his collaborators and friends such as Christy Moore and Mary Coughlan, or into how it serves as a window to bygone ways of life such as the showband era or the laissez-faire approach Ireland used to take to underage and problem drinking. And to be sure, Donald, who always kept a diary, is a perspicacious observer of people and currents. I enjoyed being regaled and I didn’t mind the occasional repetition.
But there is more than that. Some of the passages have clearly been worked over and have literary aspirations, and when they do, they are engaging. His bitter and detailed story of playing in The Twelfth as a pre-political teenager is a brilliant set piece, as are his account of his last binge and an amusing and slightly shocking yarn about chasing a petty thief through Dublin. But the core of this book is indeed, as he claims and intends, alcoholism. The refrain of the book is how insidious his alcoholism was, how it prevented him from being a better musician, a better father, a better husband and a better friend, even while, superficially, he was highly functioning. Donald thought he was coping because he expended so much energy but in fact, none of these things are done well just by being done vigorously. His addiction needed him to think this, but it’s only later that he realised they’re done well by being done from the standpoint of someone who has reckoned with his own grief and trauma well enough to accept his daughter’s or friends’, or well enough to probe deeper for the honesty art requires.
Donald has now come through the far side of alcoholism, and the extent to which he has been able to face his demons can be a beacon for anyone suffering similar problems. But he presents himself as someone who is now ‘totally at peace’, and I don’t entirely believe this. He doesn’t exactly tell his tales dispassionately: you can still hear him chuckle with pride at some of the mayhem he wreaked or survived, there’s still lingering resentment at some misfortunes and there’s still a reluctance to accept his share of responsibility for some of the things that happened him. And these co-exist with contrary tendencies: the voice here is not exactly unified. But this critic can say what he likes. I believe Donald when he says he’ll be happy if nothing comes of his memoir but that it gets one poor soul free of the mayhem. And when a message is couched in humour, openness, geniality and humility as this one is, I reckon it has every chance of doing just that.
Music & Mayhem: Passion, Addiction and Redemption in the Golden Age of Irish Music by Keith Donald is published by Lilliput Press. Read more from The Journal Of Music here.
