Marti Pellow brings his Private Collection tour to Dublin and Glasgow this month. "I'm a fan of music like everyone else is," the singer tells RTÉ Entertainment.
Marti is not hidebound by a fixed set-list and he decides what to sing on the night, so the show is about surprise and serendipity. Last year he did some shows talking about the music that had inspired him and thus came about the Private Collection concept.
"I’m a fan of music like everyone else is, and there are certain songs that happen in everybody’s life which instantly take you back to a period in your life," says the affable musician who is a sprightly 53 years of age.
"For me it’s an Earth, Wind and Fire Song, I’ll hear like Boogie Wonderland and that will instantly take me back to being an uncomfortable 12-year-old having to ask a girl would she like to dance.
"That was the idea of it, me, shooting the breeze with the audience, talking about what the message behind the songs are, what was going on in my life at the time when I wrote this song, be that Wet Wet Wet records or my own solo work.
"Or they could be songs that I borrowed from other songwriters that have been quite poignant in my life."
The skilled band of musicians he is touring with are familiar with a whole raft of possible songs, which facilitates changing the set-list as he chooses.
"I engage in the night, I read my audience, I see who I’m dealing with and if it’s an audience that looks a wee bit more song-writing and storytelling, then I’ll have loads of songs that will cover that."
He does Lennon and McCartney's Yesterday, no? "If you shout out loud enough, y’know I’m sure I can do a wee rendition," he replies.
That Yesterday cover featured in a Richard Curtis movie, which always helps. Indeed, much of the success of Wet Wet Wet’s cover of The Troggs’ song Love is All Around derived from its prominence on the soundtrack to a very prominent, wildly popular film, indeed, the Richard Curtis-directed Four Weddings and a Funeral.
First released in 1994, Love is All Around was one of the biggest-selling hits of the 1990s. It sold almost nearly two million copies, and is, according to Marti, the tenth-biggest selling song of all time.
The mid-tempo romantic ballad spent 15 weeks at the top of the UK chart, and was Number One in the charts in 14 other countries. Wealth and trappings and some wilderness years, characterised by drink and drug addiction, came in the wake of the single’s overwhelming success. Wet Wet Wet actually got tired of it and deleted it in the end.
"Eventually we felt it was time to give someone else a shot at the Number One spot so we stopped pressing the record," the singer told the Daily Mail.
"We said to the record company, `Don’t make any more.' But then people started panic buying it. I often get asked if that was a marketing ploy on my part. I’d like to say it was, but I’m not that smart."
Reg Presley, the song's writer, used some of the sudden influx of royalties to further research on corn circles in the English landscape, which is a decidedly quaint thing to do.
For Marti, It was all a far cry from getting the bus home after one of the first Wet Wet Wet gigs in 1988 as indeed the Clydebank man did.
On that occasion Wet Wet Wet supported the band King who were recording a session for The Old Grey Whistle Test at the Barrowlands venue in Glasgow. "One minute you have adulation and the next minute you’re back on the bus, and careers can be like that," he says reflectively.
An intensely driven musician, Marti has travelled the world in a variety of high profile touring musicals, Chicago and Chess and others.
Balance, however, is all-important, and spending time with loved ones is a priority in Marti’s life. His long-term partner is former Miss Scotland, Eileen Catterson. "There is no point in it all being about work because if it’s all about that, then that will feed me as an artist but it doesn’t feed my soul."
That Earth, Wind and Fire song to which he referred, might get an airing in Dublin or Belfast, as might Pellow’s reading of James Taylor’s Fire and Rain. There might be some Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills & Nash or Jackson Browne.
"It just depends on how I’m feeling. I think as a songwriter and a musician you engage in the moment. What’s required, who am I engaging with in the audience, what do they want?
"If it’s people who like to dance and who want to have a dance at that particular time in the auditorium then that is the kind of songs I will pull out. As a song-writer and a story-teller these songs that I’m talking about are great crowd-pleasers."
Paddy Kehoe
Marti Pellow plays Belfast Waterfront on Wednesday October 10 and Bord Gáis Energy Theatre Dublin on Saturday October 13
