By: Simone Ribeiro
Photos: Simone Ribeiro and The Destroyers site
Before meeting Paul Murphy I
had a list of possible words to describe his work:
composer, storyteller, folk musician, lead singer of the band
The Destroyers and so on.
Since I have met him, on the last Friday of September at the Kings Norton station, to make this
interview at his house, the list has grown considerably, but I
prefer to describe him in just one sentence: a beatnik, in the
best sense of the word, in the Midlands.
Beatnik because in each year of his career, which are not few ones, Paul Murphy knows
exactly how to use and
abuse of the words to get his message across, whether as teacher,
musician, poet or storyteller Always on the road!
The nice Irish from Belfast, who came to Birmingham in the early 70s, is one of the most respected musicians in the city. In this exclusive interview to Midiativa, Paul talks about his childhood and early career in Ireland; family; travelling; influences; his remarkable career as a teacher in Birmingham and of course, about life on the road with his band, The Destroyers.
The nice Irish from Belfast, who came to Birmingham in the early 70s, is one of the most respected musicians in the city. In this exclusive interview to Midiativa, Paul talks about his childhood and early career in Ireland; family; travelling; influences; his remarkable career as a teacher in Birmingham and of course, about life on the road with his band, The Destroyers.
The first part of
this chat, which lasted 1 hour and 16 minutes, you can
check here now. Are
you ready? So here we go!
Ma: What does inspire you as songwriter, poet and
storyteller?
Paul Murphy: I am inspired by many things. At the heart of it I
suppose the inspiration is the need to express myself. I started writing songs
when I was 14 years old. So I have been writing songs for almost 50 years.
(laugh ). I find it really hard to say that, do you know (laugh). I was always
interested to music when I was a kid. I love performing, you know. I love to
entertain people to be honest and I love the spontaneity, you know, making
stuff up on the spot, which I still love.
And then when I was 14, just turned 15, the Beatles
came to Belfast (it was 1964). I hitchhiked up to
the airport with a couple of friends to see the Beatles arrive. It was very
early in the Beatles career because it was in 1964 but they have already
started the phenomenon. We ran out and we broke from the police, then we got a
couple of autographs and went to the concert that night.
So I love all that kind of thing that
music has in term of youth seemed to me. It was
different of the music my father was listening to. My father said “this is not
music, yeah yeah yeah", you know. That kind of thing of melody, songs we
just could walk around and sing songs, you know. Then it was about 1965 I got
my acoustic guitar, before it I have been in a small band playing bass guitar,
not very well...
Ma: Not in a Paul MacCartney style?
(laugh)
Paul Murphy: No...(laugh) So by the time I was 16 I
bought myself a 6 strings guitar and started writing songs and that coincided
with the emerge of the new folk tradition. So people like Donovan, Joan Baez,
Dylan and so forth and that really captured my imagination because it was about
the songs seemed to deal with the real subjects, like for example Bob Dylan's
song The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.
I grew up in a society that was a white society. I
knew something about racism. However I grew up in a sectarian society in
Ireland the only black people I saw were the sailors around the docks. We had our
police station were covered of bombs, guns and etc...So I heard The Lonesome
Death of Hattie Carroll and it really fired me because it told a really fine
story in a very interesting way.
(Then Paul declaims the lyrics of the Bob Dylan's
song, in a truly storyteller way, of course)...
The poet Allan Ginsberg said "Bob Dylan has all
his best when he is telling the news". This is the sense of obviously our culture
has changed enormously in terms of communication. We were just in the threshold of a global village.
That is what inspires me, you know. The kind of notion of being able to write
songs but that way people think, may people reevaluate stuff but by doing in
the way that is was a storyteller way. Kind of telling the story that make
people thing if it is right or no. So that kind of notion inspires me and I
said it when I was 16. I kind of really fired
me up on that.
For example, when I have met Joan Baez, in
Ireland, I was really on fire. I wanted to write songs and be part of all that
stuff.
(Read the story about Paul meeting Joan
Baez here)
I have met her again 30 years later, and
it was very interesting. I have met Donovan and people like that and I love
that notion of being like a travelling minister with the guitar and sleeping
bag over my shoulder. So I set off from Belfast, I got expelled from the school
, it was in January 15th 1966, I was 16
years old and I had just the guitar, sleeping bag and the songs I have written,
so I came to England and I travelled around the world for almost three years.
And in this time I have met a lot of
interesting people, quite famous ones like Lemmy, from Motorhead who I shared a
place and I came to live with him, Van Morrison put me up in London and took me
to my first publish deal sort of music and I played at the Marquee Club at theWardoor street.
I found this quotation 30 years later and
it was from March 1966, from a newspaper called City Beat and the London
correspondent had written a bit who said: is this true that Paul Murphy is
working in the Salford Laundry? (It was up to Manchester) because John Lee
Rocker saw his performance at the Marquee Club and pleased “that
is high praise indeed!!”
Once I had sold songs, I sold three songs.
Van took me too Denmark Street sort of music. They published Donovan, they
listened some of my songs and said they would buy these three songs and gave me
contract and some money. Once I had published those songs I kind of felt like
“I am a songwriter” I felt I was a songwriter anyway but it was like an
endorsement.
After that I never really sold publication.
I got really inspired about just travelling and meeting people living on the
road. By the mid 66 and 67 I was in London in the song of Love and group and all
in the underground stuff and I kind of went in completely direction. I left
London, I worked for this port for a while, and I went to the remote west of
Ireland and end up living in a Monastery.
That was a really important part of my
journey and as a result of that I have decided that I wanted to be a teacher
and I kept the guitar and kept writing songs and performing sometimes but I chose
to study in a big way and I ended up studying Theology and took a degree in Theology.
That changed my sort of direction. I came to Birmingham, in fact, to study.
Ma: It is
interesting because I was about to ask how Birmingham happened to your life…
Paul Murphy: I never have been to
Birmingham I was in England before and I passed by Birmingham in a motorway but
I never have been to Birmingham. I came to Birmingham to study and to become a
teacher and that was 40 years ago (this month, in September 1971). My
girlfriend came to join me and we got married here in 1972 and we had our first
child, Mark, in 1973. And by the time I have qualified as a teacher in 1974 and
I took a job here.
I taught 3 years and then we moved to Ireland during
the troubles and I came back here. I temporally I went to Ireland because my
wife was in Ireland because her mother was really ill and I came back here and
I worked in previous school for 1 year. And someone told me to I started in
this new school and said “it is the inner city; it is really challenging and
really perfect for you why don’t you come and work with us?” (laugh).
So I did. I went to 1976 and the first thing I did was
write a musical called “Rats” and I got the inspiration because this area was derelict
and there were rats everywhere and like they said in the war “bring back the
cat get rid of the rats” so became the inspiration from this musical and I
developed it with the group of the kids and we performance, the first one was
in 1979 and we took either a bit of tour and stuff a couple of people have
produced it.
Ma: So you
never left the music…
Paul Murphy: I never left the music. Music was central. Music was a
really fundamental part of my Pedagogy and drama and story obviously. It was a great way
of Friday afternoon, you know, kids love to sing songs by them. I can make up
songs on the spot it just hold that kind of
skill of being able to be spontaneous.
Ma: Were you
teaching English?
Paul Murphy: No, I started off by
setting up the drama department. They asked if I could be involved in drama
music. I developed drama music, performance, arts and these kind of things and
I took the responsibility of the R.E. across the school which was not a great
idea because it was about the authorities, about what you can do or not. But once you started to apply it to the mainstream and
challenge the way things were done so then things became a bit dangerous.
I had a bit of the battle about ideology about the way
in which you can have religious education in schools and in order to make insure
that it isn’t indoctrination. And then I decided to get out of mainstream
education. By the stage, it was 1983 and our first child was about to be born
so I had to work. I tried to do work that was compatible with I wanted to do
and believed.
I ended up working until 1989, with the National Anti
Racist Movement Education, an organization called Name and I was the community
education officer so it gave me freedom to work in the different level so my
first project, three months after I took the job, was to take a group of 22
artist from Birmingham to Belfast.
It was a multiethnic group and we went to Belfast, and
this was in 1983 when you had all strikes and stuff out there and our thing
were to look at the similarities and differences between sectarianisms and racism
using music, poetry, photograph and drama to explore those things.
And we set up a twin link with a Polk music workshop
in Northern Ireland. So our kids exchange and came across and so forth. A Nobel
Peace Prize that time called Mairead Carrigan came to work
with us for a week and we developed a peace festival in the community and that
was the kind of way that I saw education wasn’t about schooling.
I was informed by people about a Brazilian writer
called Paulo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And that
was hugely influential on my work and the way he can see education and also another
writer called Ivan Illich which was also connected with Freire. That Pedagogy
of the Opressed and their analysis of education and so forth informed what I
did and also in my additional study I had a specialised in philosophy of Laboration
So that let me be in contact with a lot
of Latin American writers like Sabrino, Gutierrez and etc.
I had gone to Grammar school as a kid I was a working
class kid, my father was a postman and I was the only one person of my family
to get the exam and go to the grammar school but when I got to the grammar
school it was so oppressive I couldn’t wait to get out of it, I knew that in a
way I feared the education but my journeys and travels taught me that education
is more that schooling.
So I know that it is a really long way of try to
explain what my influences are but you know my influences are about the use of
music, but also to provoke thought. That kind of notion that it is not about to
tell the people what to think but it’s about to get them to think!
I wrote a musical and I wrote a lot of thing when I
was a teacher, I encourage kids to write and built up new bands at school. I
always written songs which were also personal songs and the album I am working
in this moment called The Glen, it is
a series of ten songs. They are really a reflexion, you know, my wife died 12 years ago, and it is an
exploration of love, loss, memory, experience, light, shadow so I always written
songs that were close to me as a person but I also write songs like Out of Babel which is at the destroyers and
that song I wrote before met The Destroyers, 15 years ago, and it is a song
about the notion of unity and diversity, about cities and a place like
Birmingham, about music as a kind of universal language something which crosses
the frontiers. So, I obvious, written a lot of the things about my hometown…
To be continued...
(Portuguese version of this interview here)
**
Paul Murphy website
Paul Murphy at Myspace
Vídeo: Out of Babel, The Destroyers
