My Cork: John Spillane

I’m from the edge of the city, Laburnum Lawn, in Wilton. The back of our back garden was the ditch, and beyond that was the orchard and then the meadow and the countryside. It was a magical situation.

Then we were sent to school, to St Joseph's on the Mardyke, which is in the heart of Cork city, a very old part. Our school backed on to the River Lee. There was a big flock of swans at the back of the school. Fitzgerald Park, the shaky bridge and the grounds of UCC were kind of our playground.

There were five brothers in our family, and we used to go into the Central Library once or twice a week. I was born in 1961, so I’m talking about the 1960s, really. You’d be going down a series of narrow lanes down the back of Christchurch and on to the Grand Parade.

It always seemed a completely magical and mythical fantastic place, with great street characters and a sense of a very old city.

The closing of the Beamish brewery was a big thing, because it took away the smell of malt from the city centre, and that was a big atmospheric thing – a huge change.

Some of the old stuff has been polished up very well, like Elizabeth Fort, which we weren’t aware of, because it was covered in ivy, the Crawford Gallery. Emmet Place is lovely now, where the Opera House is. The Coal Quay, that was a very ancient place.

I do think it is a beautiful city in terms of the architecture and the shape of it. As Frank O’Connor said long ago, the ups and downs of it are like it was built in a Cork accent.

I started writing songs about Cork when I was 21. I wrote a song called ‘Princes Street’. I would have been the opposite of Cathal Coughlan [the Microdisney and Fatima Mansions singer]. He was giving out about Cork, and I was writing that Cork was a magical, golden, mythical and fantastical place. Two people can look at the same place and see totally different things.

There was always a fabulous music scene in Cork, but it wasn’t done in any subsidised way. It was real. Sir Henry’s was the place we hung out. There was a very strong Irish traditional crowd in the Phoenix Bar. There were a lot of punks and a crazy mixture of people in Heaphy’s Bar, which became the Lobby. The Lobby is gone now. It’s called Latitude 51. I wrote a song about it, ‘Magic Nights in the Lobby Bar’.

The live music you get around Cork is unbelievable. You go to Cork on a Monday night and you have the Lee Valley String Band in the Corner House, Ricky Lynch playing in Counihan’s, and Hank and Ray playing in Charlie’s Bar. Three brilliant gigs for free.

It’s a generalisation, but I think in terms of music and songwriting, a lot of the Cork stuff is quirky and individual.

Music doesn’t incline to being mainstream. Sultans of Ping, Microdisney, there were a whole string of bands that were a bit mad.

It’s nice to have the craic about these things and ascribe personalities to cities or towns, but I think people are the same all over the world. The differences are smaller than the similarities.

I still I do a lot of travelling, but I always come back here. I was never attracted to go anywhere else.