Freddie White is renowned for his sharp take on the American songbook. Three years after his return home from the US, he's back with his best album in years, writes Siobhán Long.
For many punters well-versed in the fine art of ferreting out decent music amid the dross, Freddie White is a name that conjures up lean times, when seriously good gigs were gold dust and the fine art of interpretation was something we thought we had to leave to Sinatra, Streisand and Sammy Davis jnr.
White hasn't so much been around the block as built it himself, brick by brick. He's a singer who excavated gemstones from the catalogues of Randy Newman, Tom Waits, John Hiatt, Joni Mitchell and Hoagy Carmichael, and made them all his own, often adding layers of subtlety that their composers never dreamed of.
LONG RESIDENCIES IN intimate venues such as the Baggot Inn and the Lobby left him with a cult following but precious little by way of collateral. Irish audiences might have had disgustingly eclectic taste when it came to music, but making the break into the big time proved eternally elusive. With a back-catalogue built on the back of the American songbook, White took to the road, emigrating to the US in the early 1990s in the hope of finding like-minded audiences who would appreciate his sharp-edged take on their home produce, in greater numbers than were available to him at home.
Fast forward to 2004, and Freddie White returns home, inured to life in the not-so-fast lane. In a world soon to become obsessed by the The X Factor, he had struggled to find listeners who appreciated his.
Three years on, and he's gone and produced his best collection of music in years. Stormy Lullaby is a snapshot of a consummate interpreter whose own songwriting efforts, tentative as they are, are slowly evolving, peeping out into the daylight with the wariness of one whose reputation is built on the greats.
"The three original songs are all written within the last year," White says, referring to Tia, Material Mile and The Boy Talks Tough, the last one co-written with Jimmy McCarthy, with whom he formed his first (virtually pre-pubescent) band, Beathoven, in 1964, when both were students at Presentation Brothers College in Cork. "My own songs are small in number. There are people out there who can bang out songs 90 to the dozen, but I'm a poor finisher, whereas Jimmy will take an idea and he just will not let it go until he finishes."
The Boy Talks Tough tackles the subject of boyhood conflict with the insight of a parent who's been there. "I dedicate it now to anyone who has a teenage boy, and it's an optimistic message that true love will find its own, although I realise it's often a hope rather a fact," he says. "When you see young boys and the trouble they get into, with these anti-social behaviours, as soon as they find a girl, everything changes, usually. Of course it doesn't always work out like that, but when they start out, they talk as if they're cock of the walk."
White was a virtual DJ to the listener starved of good music, back in the dark days of the 1980s when only Mark Cagney's Night Train offered a beacon of civilisation amid the disposable pop of Phil Collins, Kajagoogoo and Haircut 100. His take on Tom Waits's Martha was a heart-stopper long before notions of positive ageing ever wheedled their way into our consciousness. In his hands, Randy Newman's Christmas in Cape Town was a razor-sharp indictment of apartheid, while Wedding in Cherokee County was drenched in phallic imagery set against a backdrop of pure Deliverance country that would've drawn the wrath of the censors had it raised its deliciously ugly head anywhere above cult ground. On Stormy Lullaby, White brings a characteristically fresh perspective to another Newman classic, I Think it's Going to Rain Today.
White finds himself drawn to such diverse songwriters for myriad reasons. "John Hiatt's a rock'n'roller really," he explains. "His music is either fairly basic rock'n'roll or fairly basic country, but his lyrics have such great bite that I can really get into them. With Randy Newman, it's his music that I find so interesting, and so beautiful. They're my reference points when I go to write too. Those guys are the bosses, as far as I'm concerned." These days, White's palate is as adventurous as ever. His listening tastes stretch from American jazz pianist Tommy Flanagan to Brazilian bossa nova composer Antonio Carlos Jobim and Cuban music.
His return home came about on the back of a realisation that life wasn't getting any easier in the US, and that some of his best gigs annually were happening in the numerous new arts centres dotted around Ireland, where White found a listening, attentive audience hungry for his music. Live performance post-9/11 wasn't a peach Stateside anyway.
"There's a bit of a siege mentality since 9/11," he says, "and people are inclined to be ghettoised, in their own minds. It's more an internal thing than an external one, which is a real shame. Now though, at home, I can play in these lovely venues, and I think this country is a fantastic place for performing live. These new theatres are so gorgeous to play in."
BUT WHITE ISN'T afraid to cast a critical eye on home turf. Material Mile, for example, is a paean to other times, when life wasn't so readily reduced to euro signs.
"It started out as a simple song about a country girl coming to the city, and going through a transformation, but then I realised it was a bit like Ireland coming into the 21st century," White explains. "This country has been transformed, but it's not without a cost. I think that materialism has become very invasive to our culture and to our way of thinking about things.
"Nobody wants to go back to the way things were, but we've become so money-orientated, and very like America in so many ways. This low-tax, two-tier health service is so American. Our Government are American idols, no question about it."
Stormy Lullabyis on Little Don Records. Freddie White plays the Half Moon, Cork, tonight, Áras Chronáin in Clondalkin on Fri, and the Blackbird, Ballycotton, on Feb 15. www.freddiewhite.com