1997 interview with Brian Kennedy

From The Times, January 17, 1997

Brian Kennedy: "I'd settle for being at this same level in 20 years' time, if it meant I could still be singing live"

Improving the life of Brian

He has one of the most extravagantly beautiful male voices in popular music, recording modern originals that at once stay within the Celtic tradition and update it. He is also a dazzling interpreter, able to make you hear as if for the first time lyrics made famous by Sam Cooke, say, or Van Morrison. His new album, A Better Man, held even teen-heroes Boyzone off the top spot in their native Ireland. And Morrison prizes him so highly that he has awarded him residency in his band. So why doesn't Britain realise the star it has in Brian Kennedy?

The answer lies in an almost textbook case of adventures good and bad in a potentially wicked world. "My daily life has often seemed like an attempt to wade through the syrup of the music business with whatever honesty and integrity I can muster," says the man who, if talent is rewarded, will end 1997 with a far higher profile than that with which he begins it.

One of six children brought up on Belfast's Falls Road, he recalls a childhood punctuated by the sounds of explosions and sirens, and says that the sense of confinement this brought went beyond the merely geographic. "The sense of being mentally enclosed goes in tandem with physical enclosure. And you either accept that, or hunger for a different reality. After I got over my initial fear of it, I became very curious about the wider world."

Now 30, Kennedy remembers school with little pleasure. "I didn't fit in with the boy-code of playing sport and fighting. Music meant nothing there. I was mortified when, in a class of 25, I was the first to repeat a note pitch-perfect for the singing teacher; the implications were at once awful and really great. Increasingly, after that, I got a reputation for having a bit of a voice. Still, though, singing remained a largely clandestine activity."

At 16, Kennedy was invited to join his older brother's five-piece band. After 18 freezing months living together in a caravan, a squat in north London, a few doors down from that occupied by fellow Belfast band The Adventures, seemed a warmer option, and Kennedy abandoned his A-levels to cross the Irish Sea. "I had to give singing a good shot, because nothing else made me feel as useful."

He grins at the memories surrounding his emigration: "I moved here on July 11, 1985. The flight from Belfast took an hour, but I was an hour and a quarter getting from Heathrow to Tottenham on the Tube - I remember thinking, just how big is London? And two days later it was Live Aid. Suddenly, it seemed like the whole world was having a party." Reality soon hit.

"Simple. We needed money to live, and that meant getting jobs. Immediately, the others thought, building sites! But I'd moved away from home to make it as a singer, not a construction worker, so I fell into performing in piano bars instead." From Irish-themed wine bars to nightspots such as the Hippodrome, he refined the art of crooning Cole Porter to candlelit couples. At weekends, it was back to the band.

"But they'd spent their time digging holes in the road and wolfing down fried bacon, so they wanted to make loads of aggressive noise, whereas I . . ." Creative differences, in short. Disengagement was painful, but a suggestion that he listen to and learn from the Billy Idol LP Rebel Yell finally made it necessary. At once, he was a solo artist, and, thanks to the interest of The Adventures' mentor Simon Fuller (later to manage Annie Lennox and the Spice Girls), a much-courted one.

Excitement gave way to bafflement as to why an impressive debut album, 1990's The Great War of Words, made zero impact on daytime radio programmers and, hence, on record buyers. "I was so proud of it, and had worked so hard, and naively thought that my enthusiasm would enthuse other people. When it didn't, I was left thinking, 'But it's really good. What else does it have to be?' Fashionable, I now realise."

A similarly acoustic second LP made with the former Fairground Attraction writer Mark Nevin met a similar fate, and a dispirited Kennedy found himself accepting Fuller's advice to negotiate his way out of his deal with RCA. "It felt oddly good to be a free man again. Afterwards, I spent two months travelling slowly by rail from New Orleans to New York, getting up to sing in places if I felt like it, or the situation arose naturally. People would say, 'Great! You should do this for a living', and I'd reply, 'No, I don't think so'."

A voice this good cannot stay silent, though. "If you call yourself a singer, you should be out there singing," is his own admission. And, gradually, his luck began to change. Morrison, on hearing Kennedy's version of his song "Celtic Ray", asked to meet him: a four-year stage and studio friendship has resulted, with the younger man's vocal presence reviving memories of the veteran's own, earlier self. Better still, perhaps, he has had the satisfaction of being re-courted and re-signed by RCA.

"I'd love to be the most successful singer who's ever been, because of the artistic freedom afforded you at that level," he muses. "Equally, I'd settle for being at this same level in 20 years' time if it meant I could still be singing live and making records."

If justice is done, he will be closer to the former than to the latter come the year 2017.

* A Better Man is available now on RCA. A single, "Put The Message In The Box", will be released on January 27

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