A musical Midas in the Mayo silence

Top international songwriter Brendan Graham operates in splendid isolation at home in the west - but life would be easier if the technology worked, he tells Martin Doyle.

It's a hard act to follow, but on Christmas morning, hours after Santa visits material blessings on Irish homes, Brendan Graham will be on the airwaves with a more spiritual offering when he delivers a Christmas Miscellany piece on RTÉ Radio 1. It's a rare moment in the spotlight for a songwriter whose songs are never off the airwaves, not least the myriad versions of his greatest hit, You Raise Me Up.

His subject will reflect his "philosophy of stone walls and bare fields", a closeness to nature in his adopted Co Mayo that is also the wellspring for his lyrics and music.

"I feel most at home in the west," he says. "We live in a pretty isolated country area. I love that isolation and serenity, particularly for work. It's a geography of the mind; down there is my space for writing. I'm looking out at Lough Mask, the mountain is behind me, and there is silence."

Graham signed a major music publishing deal last year, committing him to produce a quota of hit songs. His publishers haven't been disappointed, as his songs are everywhere this Christmas. He has only written 20 this year, which is not great for a professional writer, he says, but because he is writing on demand rather than on spec, the strike rate is extraordinary.

Crucan na bPaiste, about a burial ground for unbaptised children near his home, is on the new Dervish album, as well as on Transatlantic Sessions 3with Karen Matheson. Le Cose Che Sei Per Me (The Things You Are to Me) is on Welsh star Katherine Jenkins's hit album, Rejoice.

Lullaby for the Worldis the only original song on Kindred Spirits, a Christmas album by a children's choir released by EMI. Aled Jones sings Always Thereon his new album, Reason to Believe. He has nine songs on Secret Garden's Inside I'm Singing, currently number one in Norway. The 2008 Grammy nominee, Sissel, of Titanic soundtrack fame, is currently singing three of his songs, When Will My Heart Arise, Hymn to Winterand Icelandic Lullaby.

Isle of Hope, Isle of Tearsis on Tommy Fleming's A Journey Home. Paul Potts sings Por Ti Sere(You Raise Me Up in Spanish) on his debut two-million-selling album. You get the (surround sound) Brendan Graham picture.

The serene but vital 62-year-old songsmith takes great delight, he says, in being stuck in the middle of nowhere, yet in communication with LA, New York, Sydney and London.

"I can get something out from behind a half-door in Mayo and the next thing it's on in the Sydney Opera House or the Albert Hall," he says. "I get a kind of anarchic satisfaction from that."

Less satisfying is the lack of broadband in rural Ireland, which means that Graham relies on a satellite dish to receive and send MP3 files of songs and tunes. It's an unreliable system that often crashes, so he ends up flying to London with his songs in a suitcase. It's all very well being a one-man Tin Pan Alley in Ballygobackwards until tinpot telecommunications cut you off from the outside world.

"I've written to ministers to say I'm a global industry operating in rural isolation, I'm dealing with people all over the world who can't understand why they can't get an MP3 file of a song from Celtic Tiger Ireland," Graham says. "If they're doing an album next week and someone wants a song that quickly, they'll approach someone else if I can't get it to them on time, and then the opportunity is lost not only to me but also to Ireland Inc.

"On the other hand, what worries me is that everything seems geared to the economy. We are not looking at what kind of society we want. I've always said, half-jokingly, there should be two new ministries, a ministry of vision and a ministry for stillness and silence. There is a lot of passive politics - things happen, and then we react."

THERE IS SUCH a spiritual dimension to Graham's songwriting that it is no surprise to learn that he was once a seminarian at All Hallows College in Dublin, destined (like Father Ted) for a parish in Los Angeles.

"I had this fanciful notion - it was probably the fledgling writer in me - of hearing the sins of movie stars, and giving them absolution . . . on condition that they didn't sin again," he says. "But I wasn't cut out for it."

He spoke to his spiritual director, who told him it was not his call to leave the seminary, it was up to God to decide. Graham reflected, but his mind was made up.

"I'll never forget what he said: 'If you leave here now, this could be the loss of your immortal soul.' That's a very threatening thing to say to someone not yet 18. Maybe if I'd stayed, I would have [lost my soul] - maybe I still will."

Now, he says, he's an a la carte Catholic, more in tune with the Aboriginal view of life, the interconnectedness of matter and us.

"I have my own unorthodoxy, my own way of praying, but I ponder the great questions like everyone else," he says. "Why are we here and does it matter? I go to a rock above Maamtrasna, just to sit, but sometimes things present themselves. Maybe it's the stillness, maybe it's not in the rocks but deep within."

He has London to thank for his big musical break. After working in a shoe shop in Knightsbridge, where the cheapest shoes would cost a week of his wages and the chequebooks were the size of Dickens novels, he got a job boning pigs. But he also joined a band, the Moonshiners, who were resident at the Shamrock Club in Elephant and Castle. He had got his first guitar at 16.

"I tried to get the curls out of my hair and slick it back like Elvis," he says. The Moonshiners wore orange dinner jackets and green knitted ties - "we were ahead of reconciliation, Stormont Agreement and all that" - but they weren't as bad as they looked and eventually they got their big break, playing support at the Gresham on the Holloway Road. Bob Dodds, the Scottish guitar player, took Graham for a few Drambuies to settle their nerves.

"The Gresham had a revolving stage," Graham recalls. "The idea was that the first band would finish on an instrumental and the incoming band would play the same instrumental in the same key and everyone would keep dancing and then look up and be amazed that the band had changed unbeknownst to them. But when the stage started turning round that night, the Drambuie kicked in as well as the faux slickness of it all, and Bob and me burst into fits of laughing. We stopped playing, the whole band stopped, the dancers stopped. That was our first and last night of real fame."

Later, back home after a stint in Australia, he ran a struggling clothing business in Dublin, until cheap imports closed him down in 1993. He was 48 and decided to have a go at turning his hobby, writing songs, into a career. A year later, he wrote the Eurovision winner, Rock'n'Roll Kids, for Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan.

"I know Eurovision is not chic, but it gave me the cash to keep writing," he says. Two years later, he won it again with The Voice,sung by Eimear Quinn. "It's a very uncertain business," Graham adds. "It ebbs and flows, but I was at least earning some royalties and now had the freedom to experiment with my writing."

Along the way he found time to write a trilogy of novels following a Famine survivor to America, culminating in the civil war there. But a song he co-wrote with the Norwegian, Rolf Lovland, was to change his life. Josh Groban and Westlife sold millions of their versions of You Raise Me Up, topping the charts in the UK and the US, and making Graham a musical Midas.

"When you get a song like You Raise Me Up," Graham says, "all of a sudden everything changes. Everyone wants the son of You Raise Me Up. What they really mean is they couldn't give a fiddler's if it was Baa Baa Black Sheep as long as it was a hit."

GRAHAM HAS GONE from being a pitcher to being a fielder.

"I remember, in this city, hanging around outside the back doors of dancehalls till two or three in the morning, waiting for singers who said they'd be out after the dance so I could give them a tape, only to find out they'd gone out the front door," he says. "Now I get calls out of the blue from record labels and producers from London to LA looking for something for an album. Universal in London meet me once or twice a year, to tell me what they're looking for. That's how the song came to be on Katherine Jenkins's new album. Likewise, EMI called me to write for Kindred Spirits.

"I tend to be working now more with producers, rather than writing songs speculatively. Of course, you have to keep delivering or the calls will stop. In this business - and it is a business - you're not as good as your last song, you're only as good as your next one. An artist is not going to put a song he doesn't believe in on an album just because you once wrote a hit.

"I was recently sent a track to see would I do lyrics for it, but it didn't give me any buzz at all, so I said no. The person said this is going to sell a couple of million, but sure I've had that. If I don't like their work or I don't feel a connection, then I'm too long in the tooth to be bothered."

The band Celtic Woman, the biggest Irish phenomenon in the US since Riverdance, sing five of his songs. Graham is only sorry they are not better known at home.

"They suffer from the same slight begrudgery as Riverdance did, that it's for export only, the Americans," he says. "That is a very peculiar view to take, as we have to be an exporting country. I have to export my songs, I couldn't live if it wasn't for people all over the world recording my songs."