In the 1960s and 1970s, Keith Donald was a saxophone player with Dublin bands The Greenbeats, and then Real McCoy. Alongside Christy Moore and Donal Lunny, he became a founding member of Moving Hearts.
He’s played with Van Morrison, The Pogues, Ronnie Drew and countless others.
He composed music for Neil Jordan's Angel, for plays by Brian Friel and Frank McGuinness, for television and documentaries.
Now Donald is 72, and in his new show, New Bliss, it's just him up there on the stage with nothing but his instruments and the script of his own life.
“I was in a position to write a memoir that’s different – a kind of musical memoir. [I thought] if I’m to be honest in this, its gotta be about addiction.”
Enough time had passed for him to cast a cooler eye on his life.
“I’m kinda well adjusted now . . . Do you know anybody else that’s been on the edge of an avalanche, a hurricane, an earthquake, who has seen a plane crash, who was sexually abused and who was an alcoholic and recovered? That’s the story of the show.”
Donald grew up in “pre-troubles” Belfast, where life was relatively “peaceful and middle-class”. He got a ukulele from his father at age five and was playing jazz on BBC radio by the time he was 10. As a child, he structured his life around study and music. “I didn’t think of it as discipline, it was just pure escape.”
A child that age doesn't have the vocabulary to describe what's happened
His family were unaware of the sexual abuse Donald was suffering at the hands of his headmistress between the ages of five and eight.
“A child that age doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe what’s happened, and also feels a kind of terror that they have to get away from, and talking about it will bring it into the home – so I didn’t.”
Fill the silence
In all those years of not talking, music rushed in to fill the silence. And Donald found early solace in alcohol.
“I was an alcoholic from my first drink,” he says about a stolen sup when he was 11. “And I felt such a relief from chronic tension that I didn’t even know that I had, that of course I was going to drink again.”
He went to study Classics in Trinity at 18, and was well paid from gigs. “I became an everyday drinker when I was maybe 20.”
He recalls those times in Dublin bands “gigging five or six nights a week all over Ireland”. He would park a Volkswagen minibus on Dawson Street at 5am, go into Trinity for a coffee, then lectures, then back out to the van by the afternoon to drive to another gig.
His time in The Greenbeats ended in disaster for the band when, in 1968, a car crash injured Donald and killed band member Paul Williams. He vividly remembers that accident down to the patch of mist on the country road. He then joined Real McCoy and enjoyed great success and a number one with Quick Joey Small. But a second "horrific" car crash in 1973 stopped him short.
I said to Sid one night, how much am I drinking on stage, as a matter of interest? He said, 'I buy a bottle of vodka every day'
Donald took some time away from bands, terrified by travel, before becoming a member of Moving Hearts in 1981.
“In Moving Hearts, one of the road crew used to make sure we had drinks on stage. My drink on stage was a water bottle full of vodka and mixer. So I said to Sid one night, how much am I drinking on stage, as a matter of interest? He said, ‘I buy a bottle of vodka every day and there’s only been once or twice that I had to go out and get more.’”
He always saw himself as a functioning alcoholic and he surrounded himself with people who were fighting their own battles.
“I think that addicts generally seek camouflage of people with the same problem so they’re not extraordinary.”
Mother of all binges
But something changed in his 30s, when Donald’s best friend died suddenly from a brain tumour. Donald went on the mother of all binges. “Two weeks and I never once woke up at home. I slept wherever I found myself.”
Then, walking to his local one night, there was a voice clear in his head: “If you keep this up, son, you’re going to end up in a gutter.” He didn’t go in.
After that, between the ages of 33 and 46, he would “give up” every year. “They call it ‘white-knuckle sobriety’. You don’t change the old habits; you still go to the old boozers . . . There’s danger all the time.”
But at 46, his 12-year-old daughter Alex came to live with him. “She needs me, I’ve gotta get sober,” he told himself. He saw a therapist for the next four and a half years.
Ivor Browne brought me back to the school that I had been abused in by the headmistress
He is a big believer in therapy. At 62, he underwent six months of hypnotherapy sessions with psychiatrist Ivor Browne, “who brought me back to the school that I had been abused in by the headmistress”.
Donald was sceptical, but “as he brought me through what was happening in the school I became aware that every muscle in my body was shaking violently . . . I knew it had happened on a ‘this is my history’ level, but not on an emotional level. What Ivor was dealing with were the emotions I was incapable of expressing back then.”
His attitude to his abuser now is startlingly pragmatic.
“I had to say I forgave her many times before it took. It’s a kind of intellectual approach to it. I wouldn’t have had the incredible life I’ve had in music if it weren’t for her forcing me to find escape. That’s the intellectual rationalisation. Emotionally, I just have to say, well, nobody’s perfect, and that was her fault, and she shouldn’t been left in charge of a private school with no regulation at all and small children.”
Truth-telling
Donald believes in the power of truth-telling. Addiction, he feels, “is not blameworthy. It’s just an illness that happens to you.”
He recalls a recent show in the Glens of Antrim, when a very old woman approached him afterwards “and said ‘my son has the same problem as you’. So I brought her over to the corner and we talked.”
Donald also just wants to keep playing music. He is now the chairman of the Irish Music Rights Organisation, a new challenge which doesn’t leave a lot of time for gigging. It’s “a whole other side of me that I hadn’t expected to happen in my 60s. The only time I ever talked in public was when I had a saxophone in front of me.”
I don't really recognise this me back there
It is all a drastic change from that drinking man.
“I used to beat myself up about everything. When I look back on some of the madness, I don’t really recognise this me back there. I do feel shame about a couple of incidents. No permanent damage was done – I just feel, you were a shit that night.”
He goes quiet, and then says, “And the interview paused for 20 minutes while he sighed.”
Was he trying to kill himself?
“I took risks you would not believe,” he says. He tells a story about an outdoor Sunday jazz gig in the Cliff Castle hotel in Dalkey.
“Nobody was fucking listening, and I thought to myself, I’m going to get their attention. So when it came to my turn to play a solo, I got up on the wall and I knew what I was doing, but I was a bit jarred. God, did I get their attention. On the other side of the wall was an 80ft drop on to rocks. I really played with life and death.”
And so when the protection of alcohol was removed, what was underneath? “Pain and zero confidence. My life is now precious to me.”
Lifeline
His daughter was a lifeline. “Funnily enough, it was me who suggested having a child in this tempestuous, disastrous relationship . . . and me that ended up with her, thank God. And we’re great pals – we text or talk every day.”
He’s done the show around Ireland and in Belgium but after Belfast, Dublin will be a second kind of homecoming. And it is the first time he’s been solo on stage.
“And, by God, are you solo on stage with this,” I say.
“Tell me a-f**king-bout it,” he smiles. “I have no safety net. How I am doing it is I am telling myself I am not an actor, and I don’t think I should be judged as an actor. I’m a storyteller. I had a need to do it in that I wanted to keep playing, but now that I’ve seen people get something from it . . . it feels like the right thing to do.”
He stands up to leave and a memory intrudes: his very first, somewhat stilted interview in RTÉ when he was with Real McCoy. Gay Byrne asked him, “What’s a man with a degree in classics from Trinity doing playing in a pop band?”
“And I hadn’t thought about it before, so I thought about it live on air.” He laughs.
Then he dons his black hat and coat and heads out into the street.
Keith Donald – New Bliss is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin on February 28
