First encounters

In conversation with FRANCES O'ROURKE

BILL WHELAN

The Grammy-award winning Riverdance composer has worked with U2, Van Morrison and Kate Bush. The RTÉ Concert Orchestra will perform the premiere of his Symphonic Suite from Riverdance on May 17th at the National Concert Hall. Born in Limerick, he lives in Roundstone, Co Galway

‘IT WAS 1981 and John Hughes’s manager called me to ask if I’d listen to some stuff by a band called Minor Detail. So John and his brother Willie turned up, and we went into the studio and recorded four demos. Months afterwards, I was in the studio with U2 when I got a phone call saying CBS records was looking for us. This was off the scale at the time: the excitement about Minor Detail, especially from the US, was unprecedented. John and Willie made their album themselves and Minor Detail was signed by Polygram in the US. Then the guy who signed them was let go, and although they had a chart entry in the US, there was no follow-through. It was a lesson for John and me about the music industry.

“We lost contact for a while but then I got a call from John asking me to make a few more demos. It’s one of the things about John, he’s like a dog with a bone, he’s extremely focused. By the mid-1980s we used to meet regularly in Paddy Kavanagh’s coffee shop on Lad Lane. We were both married with young children, both working every hour of the day. We’d try to dream up projects, but our backs were to the wall. What drew us together was that we both had blind faith in the music.

“We teamed up again in 1989 when I was producing a show called I Am the Music on RTÉ. John did a lot of work finding artists for our show, and The Corrs made their first TV appearance on it. I had become friendly with Jean Kennedy Smith and said, ‘Come to Whelan’s and hear this band.’ She was very taken with The Corrs, and said, ‘You must come and play for Teddy in Boston.’ Saying that to John meant that it happened.

“John is all quiet determination, and used that meeting as a springboard to go to the US. He convinced the producer David Foster to allow three young girls and a boy to play for him, and the rest is history. That was in the late 1980s. By 1994, he had The Corrs, I had Riverdance. Our relationship started as a professional one but in the arts, relationships don’t stay that way. You have to reveal a lot about yourself if you’re going to be working honestly.

“I’ve worked with John on his new album and on his Mandela Suite. He’d call me and play it, use me in the way I like to be used, as a distant pair of ears.

“We’re good friends, linked by music and rugby – I’m Munster, he’s a fan of that current flash-in-the-pan team Leinster. We go to matches with his old friend, Fr James Moran, one of his teachers from Belvedere; he’s a Jesuit who had taught me in the Crescent in Limerick. Fr Jim is a great rugby man. Ollie Campbell was one of his proteges. John and I are proof that if you hang in, it can happen.”

JOHN HUGHES

is a musician who started his first band when he was 10 in Sandymount, Dublin 4. He is the manager of The Corrs. A long-time fan of Nelson Mandela, the Mandela Suite, on his album Wild Oceans II, will be launched this summer. He lives in Glenageary, Co Dublin

‘I WAS ALWAYS IN a band of some description from the age of 10, and got serious at about 12 or 13. We used to play Wanderers rugby club every Saturday. It was the 1960s, it was music all the time.

“Then there I was watching TV in the 1970s, seeing this young fella play piano, singing his own music. It was Bill Whelan, and I thought how great he was. But I didn’t meet him until my brother Willie and I became a duo, Minor Detail, and Bill became our producer. We made a record together, got signed in the US and then it just stopped. It did what most records do – nothing. So I went back to the day job, working in the family drapery business, never intending to give up music.

“Bill and I had many days drinking coffee together. He introduced me to a great bank manager. We’d both be looking for loans and I’d say, ‘What story are you going to tell him?’ He’d say, ‘The one about the TV commercial coming up’; I’d say, ‘Well, I’m telling him about the record commission coming up.’ There’d be truth in both, but we had to make sure not to have the same story.

“I decided to have one last go and formed a band called the Hughes Version. I was now getting past my sell-by date for a certain kind of music. I was getting on for 40 and had four children. Then one day Ros Hubbard – I’d known her since I was four – asked me to find bands and artists for The Commitments. Jim Corr, who had joined the Hughes Version as a keyboard player, asked if he could bring his sisters. Ros said, ‘You should manage them, they’re stars.’ Bill did The Corrs’ demos, and they went to play in the US. We crashed the New York studio where David Foster was producing a Michael Jackson album, The Corrs got his attention, and that was that.

“Just before we had left, Bill had said, ‘I’m working on this thing for Eurovision, it’s called Riverdance.’ He played it to me, and asked, ‘What do you think?’ To my ear, it had everything. And he had arrived. It’s hilarious. We were two guys who used to meet for coffee, who had music in them all their lives, who hadn’t a notion what the future would bring . . . Now, instead of Paddy Kavanagh’s it’s ‘Are you in Barcelona this weekend?’ ‘No, we’re in Paris.’

“Our friendship is based on acceptance and support. We care about each other, have fun, laugh at the same things.

“I’ve been working on the Mandela Suite for years . . . it all started after The Corrs and I met Mandela in the 1990s. I value Bill’s opinion, and he’s brutally honest. I was with Michael Longley and said, ‘I played it to Whelan and he tells me it’s half-finished.’ He said, ‘Isn’t he the type of friend you want?’ I said, ‘No, Michael, he’s the type of friend you need.’

“Bill is a genius.”