Oddly enough, it's not often that you see a novelist endorsing a musician, but Phil Callery's first solo CD, From the Edge of Memory, has a rave review from Colm Toibin on the back of its sleeve notes: `The tragic inevitability of the stories speak from themselves, using arrangements which are imaginative and unobtrusive and subtly haunting."
Callery, who's probably best known for his partnership with the Voice Squad, first came across Toibin when he turned up in a pub in South Armagh at the time he was researching his book, Walking Along the Border. Callery was doing a gig there at the time. Since then, Toibin has taken an interest in the singer's career: "I've been told he wrote one of his novels to the sound of the Voice Squad playing in the backdround."
One way or another, Callery has been making music since the late 1960s, starting out in the Dublin folk club scene. He was in Slattery's for the first Planxty gig, probably the musicians' landmark equivalent to being a bystander at the GPO in Easter 1916.
In 1970, he founded the Singers' Club in Dublin, which provided a stage for singers such as Triona and Maighread Ni Dhomhnaill, Dolores Keane, Christy Moore, Mary Black and Paul Brady. He was one of those who carried Luke Kelly's coffin in the church. "I would never sing Raglan Road because he sang it so well. I leave it with him". What, for Callery, made Kelly's interpretation of Raglan Road the definitive one? "It became part of him," he explains. Home was Cavan, where his father played the fiddle and sang. As a boy, Callery sang with the church choir in Inniskeen, Paddy Kavanagh's parish. "My father was crazy about Shakespeare. He'd be walking around the house before breakfast, reciting Hamlet." This easy inclusion of literature focused the son's attention on stories.
Most of the long songs on From the Edge of Memory are sung stories or versions of poems, such as Yeats's The Stolen Child and Robert Burns's Westlin Winds. "I'd say I'm a storyteller. That's very important. I'd believe more in that than in the melody." This is Callery's first solo venture after his successful partnership with the Voice Squad. He has pressed the CDs at his own expense and is waiting a bit nervously to see how they will go. Well, according to Colm Toibin, he has nothing to worry about: "A talent at the height of its powers, which means that From the Edge of Memory will certainly become a classic recording."
Phil Callery's From the Edge of Memory is distributed by Tara Records (016776921) and available from all leading record outlets at £12.99. He will be touring nationwide from next month.