Mary Black’s first album in seven years is very much a family affair featuring songs with her three children as well as collaborations with Imelda May and Janis Iain. Alan Corr meets the singer and hears about her son Danny, her late mother, and the dark times in her life
Times are very interesting in Mary Black’s house right now. recently she released Stories From The Steeples, her first album in six years, and soonafter, her son Danny O’Reilly released his third album with his band The Coronas. To complete the sense that maybe the Black/O’Reilly clan are on a mission to take over the country, Mary’s 24-year old daughter Roisin O is currently playing gigs as she records her own debut album.
“It’s hectic,” Mary says. “We’re all releasing stuff at the same time so it is a bit of a battle. To be honest, there was a bit of space between the releases so that’s ok and we wanted that space but I would have been happier if The Coronas get to No 1 rather than me. Looking at them and how hard they’ve worked and what it would mean to them I would have given mine up for theirs.”
Ah a mother’s love is a blessing but then again Mary Black has already had seven No 1 albums in her near thirty-year career. At the height of her fame she was pretty much the Voice of Ireland, the woman with a tone as pure as a mountain stream who was called upon to sing for Presidents and whose recordings were used to test hi-fi equipment by audiophile magazines.
At 56 years of age she cuts a youthful figure as she arrives for our interview at a local pub just around the corner from the family home in Terenure. She is with her husband of 32 two years, Joe O’Reilly. He is a tall and gentlemanly character who has guided his wife’s career from her early days as a solo artist and he's also head of the 3ú record label which is home to Mary, The Coronas and Roisin. Naturally he’s very busy these days and after a brief hello he’s off, possibly to plan the future singing career of the family dog.
Stories From The Steeples is Mary Black’s first album in seven years but she hasn’t been hanging around in that time. “I’ve be gigging in Australia and America. I’m touring all the time. It’s not like I’m sitting at home!” she laughs as she pours herself a mineral water. “I have been working on recordings but I feel I have to have the passion for it so I wasn’t willing to create a situation that wasn’t real.”
Given the rich seam of music that has run in the Black family for three generations – from Mary’s amateur musician parents Kevin and Patty to her sister Frances and brothers Shay, Martin and Michael – it’s no surprise that Stories From The Steeples is very much a family affair. Danny wrote three of the songs including The Night is On Our Side which marks the first time he, Roisin and Mary’s eldest son, 30-year-old Conor all appear together on an album.
“That was the last track we recorded but Danny went off to LA with a bunch of songs and that was one of ones he was thinking of putting on his own album but it was knocked out of their list and he said Mam, if you’re interested in that song . . . I thought I’d love to get Conor playing bass on the album because he’s a lovely bass player and a nice singer. It’s the first time the whole family have appeared on a song with me and I loved it.”
Having already collaborated with Emmylou Harris, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Joan Baez and Van Morrison in the past, Black’s new album also features several duets. Janis Iain appears on The Lighthouse Light, a song Mary first heard at a session right up on the tip of the Innisowen Peninsula and knew she had to record. She also duets with Liberties Belle Imelda May on Mountains to The Sea and it was a collaboration that brought both of them right back to their roots.
“Last Christmas she put me in a box at The Olympia Theatre in Dublin and at the end of the night she called me down to sing! So I went down and did White Christmas and it was mega. I felt very emotional because there we were on a stage which was only down the road from where we were both born and reared. My mother is from Cork Street and her mother and father are from just off Cork Street so the similarities are just so close.
“Obviously she’s a younger generation but the Dublin thing is there. There’s less of that Dublin thing around now because Dublin has changed. I was born and reared in Charlemont Street. Great people, spirited people who had hard lives and still looked after their neighbours but that world is changing with television and the internet and the whole social networking. It’s a different world but thankfully I see a lot of the younger generation and they still have a lot of spirit through their parents and their grandparents.”
Black's father Kevin, a keen musician, was born on Rathlin Island and moved to Dublin where he worked as a plasterer on building sites. Her mother Patty was a factory girl at Rowntrees who would regularly sing at sessions around the city. Both of them a huge impression on their musical offspring. “Mam died at 87 She lived to see all our successes and was very proud of us all. She was very proud of my brother Michael,” says Mary. “He was in Guinnesses from 14 and he put himself through night school, got his Leaving, went to college, got a hDip and then he went over to San Francisco and got a masters and got a job. She was very proud of us all for different reasons.”
The first song Black composed herself was about her mother. “I came back from the hospital after she died and I was very emotional but the first thing I felt was relief because her death was beautiful, she didn’t suffer, we were there and we held her hand and sang to her. I kept going over that in my mind thinking thank god it as ok. It was nice to say something was beautiful but then there was that gaping feeling of emptiness because we were very close so during the night those lyrics were going round in my head. I wrote them down and I said to Danny the next morning I need your help to record this song so between us we finished it and people at concerts love it. Lots of people have someone close to them who have died and it strikes a chord with people.”
A large part of her success, right from the seventies General Humbert and De Danann singing with her brothers to her own phenomenon solo career, may have something to do with the fact that she harks back to simpler times. “Well I always kept my feet firmly on the ground even when I was in the big time, well the big time in my life, it was big for me. But I would do an Albert Hall gig in London and I would still come home to Dublin and I’d be making the dinner the next day and out cleaning the windows. I loved that. It meant a lot to me to just be a normal person.”
She says the only time she draws the line in her touring commitments was when it meant being away from her children.
“I’d say no I’m not doing it no matter how great it would be for my career, I don’t care and that’s where I maybe stepped back in a way. I made sure the kids didn’t suffer, three weeks is my limit away. There’s no way I’m going on a world tour. When I went to Australia for three weeks that was really my limit.”
Danny has said that when their mother came back from being on the road he, Roisin and Conor would give her the cold shoulder. “The first thing they’d do was give me a hug and see what presents I had in my bag and once they got the presents they didn’t even realise it but for the next day or two they’d be cranky. I used to say that’s them punishing me now – who do you think you are? You go off for three weeks and you think you can saunter back in here and everything’s ok because it’s not ok. I understood that.”
Her own sister Frances who works as a drink and addiction counsellor with the Rise Foundation has just left for India to accept an award for her work. “She’s busy, busy, busy with all that stuff and she takes it very seriously and she does counselling herself and she helps so many people that you’d never hear anything about.”
Having struggled though some dark periods herself, Mary sees music as the ultimate cure. “Oh yes the amount of people I get letters from tell me I’ve got them through a really hard time, I was diagnosed with cancer or my father died or my husband died. A song that might have helped them. I think that music is incredibly therapeutic. You lose yourself in the moment of what’s happening with the music and you can let go of the stress and whatever it is that’s on your mind.
“I have had dark times and you never know when it’s going to kick in. People say to me sure why would you be depressed? You’ve no money worries and you have a husband and you have three kids but that’s not relevant in the slightest when you’re depressed. It really is an awful thing on anybody to be stricken down by it and that’s why I talk about it. it’s not something to be embarrassed by and it can happen anybody and I’ve had a few bouts of it in my day but thankfully I’ve been ok for the last eight to ten years. I only really had two bouts where I had to go on medication in my whole life. It’s not too bad.”
A battle royale didn’t quite take place in the Black/O’Reilly household over that No 1 slot and right now Mary is making the most of Danny because in January he’s moving to London to be with his girlfriend, tv presenter Laura Whitmore who has recently been out in Australia for I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! “Laura is a lovely girl but the good thing about Danny moving to London is that when he’s back here he’s going to have to move back into our house because he won’t have a place in Dublin!” says Mary. “So I get him back because I miss him and I like having him in the house and we’ve loads of space.”
Mary Black plays The Abbey Hotel, Donegal, Dec 28, the INEC, Killarney, Dec 29, Cork Opera House, Benefit Concert in aid of Chernobyl Children’s Charity, Feb 18 2012 and The Grand Canal Theatre on May 13 2012.
