Freddie back this weekend
"It was the early eighties when I was last in Kilcullen. I used to play in Berneys when Pat Keane ran it. I've travelled a long way since, and I'm still travelling. But it'll be nice to be back in the town."
Two decades on, Freddie White is a musical icon. But he's more, much more. A true self-contained musician. A modern version of the medieval troubadour, going from town to town, singing his stories. Country to country too, which was more difficult for his counterparts in the middle ages. He's currently doing a lot of work in Holland and Belgium, and, more recently, Denmark.
Over the years, Freddie doesn't think he's changed much. "I still do music basically that I love to do," he says in that native Cork accent that works so pleasantly in between sets. "I don't do music that I think people want to hear, I do music that I like to play." Whatever, it has worked for Freddie down the decades and he's still happily making a living doing simply what he loves to do. "I'm privileged in that sense."
Very much a solo performer all his life, at the moment Freddie is working with a few other musicians in Cork, a 'kind of a band', and with them building up a new album. "Again, though, it's a labour of love with me, as it always has been. But I'm strictly a solo performer, and I'll be playing solo in Kilcullen."
There are a few of Freddie's own songs on the developing album, just as there were on his most recent one launched a year ago. He's good at that, though he still maintains that he is very happy just interpreting the songs of the people in the business he admires the most, such as Randy Newman, Tom Waits, John Hiatt and Guy Clark. But he was a writer from his early days.
"I used to write my own songs when I was in school. Then I started busking in London when I was in my early 20s, playing the songs that I liked to hear. I didn't have an inkling about career motivation or anything like that, I was basically just a bum on the road, hanging around with my buddies there."
When he came back to Ireland, it was in Dublin that his career took off, playing the clubs and pubs like Toners, with musicians such as Sonny Condell. "I started playing these songs that I had been doing and they went down a bomb. So I didn't see the need to keep writing my own. And I was getting songs from the people who were the best in the world as far as I was concerned."
Freddie is still doing that today, but he has gone back to writing again. "Every record I bring up has a few. 'Stormy Lullaby' has some, including one I co-wrote with Jimmy McCarthy, who has done stuff for Mary Black and Christy and people like that."
'Jimmy Mac' is an old friend of Freddie's, they knew each other in school. And there's also Jim Barret, another local writer, and there's one on the CD written with him, as well as a few of Freddie’s own.
No more than any other business, music has been hit by the recession tsunami, but Freddie says, despite some venues 'being a bit sparse', he's 'ticking over OK'. "People say to me that recession is good for the arts, but the last recession we had here was in the 80s ... and all my audiences emigrated. They were all young, and I had to emigrate myself because of it."
His audiences these days are a wider mix, certainly in ages. "They are people who grew up with me, and their kids. They bring their kids along, and in some cases their grand-kids, so there's often a house of at least two generations, and sometimes three. Particularly around the Dublin area, where I cut my teeth over the 20 years I lived there and where my career blossomed."
It'll be interesting to see how many generations turn up in Kilcullen to hear the amiable Corkman do his much-delayed return gig in the town, in the Town Hall Theatre on Sept 25.
Kilcullen's own modern troubador, Roy Thompson, will open the show, which has been organised by local community man and music lover Ray Kelly.
Tickets are available from Berneys Chemist, Kilcullen, or by calling 087 2636375. The best of music in County Kildare's most intimate theatre venue.
Brian Byrne.
