because it made me think about songs in general and what made them good, or bad. “I Say a Little Prayer” is my favourite song, but only if it’s sung by Aretha Franklin. “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” is a dreadful song, but I wish Otis Redding had recorded it. I’d never liked “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” another of the songs I was unable to avoid when I was a child, until I heard and saw it used at the end of a documentary film called Rocky Road to Dublin. The film was made in Dublin, in 1967. The camera is on the back of a lorry as it passes a school, very like the school I went to, just as the school is emptying. The boys, very like the boys I knew and the boy I’d been, spot the camera and run after it. That’s what you see as the Dubliners start to play and Luke Kelly starts to sing, the boys charging after the lorry. It’s an exhilarating end to what is a brilliant, but depressing, film about the misery of life in Ireland in 1967. These boys cheerfully running after the lorry become the country’s future, the children who’ll grow up and rescue the place. And the song, a song about emigration written sometime in the nineteenth century—saluted father dear, kissed my darlin’ mother, drank a pint of beer, my grief and tears to smother—becomes the rhythm of that future. One of the songs I’d taught myself to hate became wonderful—even with the banjo.
Why am I writing all this? (By the way, I’m listening to Grizzly Bear now.) I suppose it’s to suggest that I’m qualified to write the foreword to a book about songs. I’ve never written a song, or a line from a song. I’ve met people who think I wrote the soundtrack to The Commitments and, once or twice, I haven’t put them right. I have to admit, it’s nice being the man who wrote “Mustang Sally.” But I know: I didn’t write “Mustang Sally,” or “Try A Little Tenderness.” I currently have 4,920 songs on my iPod, and I wrote none of them. But I love all of them. I love yapping about songs and their composers and interpreters, probably more than actually listening to them. My books are full of songs. Subtract the song lyrics and one or two of my novels would immediately become short stories. So, I’m qualified.
But that’s not why I was delighted to be asked to write this foreword. I wanted to do it because I wanted Paul Quar-rington to read it.
I have friends I grew up with, and friends I’ve met along the way. Paul Quarrington is one of the latter. If I try, I can calculate the number of times I’ve met him. All I have to do is work out the number of times I’ve visited Toronto, add a trip to Calgary and a few meetings in New York. It might be ten, or nine, or thirteen. But it doesn’t feel like that. I met a friend of Paul’s recently and I assumed, because of the way he spoke about Paul, the obvious affection that was there, that he’d known Paul for years, decades, significant chunks of two centuries. But I found out later that they’d met less than a year before. It didn’t really surprise me. Ten minutes in the company of Paul Quarrington, and you’re instantly an old friend. It feels like that and—I don’t know how—it is like that.
So, I can claim, if only to myself, to be an old friend of Paul’s. And I can claim to be an admirer of his work, because it’s true. I think Whale Music is magnificent. Or, if I had to restrict “magnificent” to just one book, I’d give it to Civilization and declare Whale Music “an inch short of magnificent.”
At this point I stopped writing the foreword.
I went to India, to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival. It took me a day and a half to get there. I had to leave Dublin earlier than I’d planned, to avoid a strike by Dublin’s air traffic controllers. At the other end, the journey from Delhi airport to Jaipur was a seven-hour terror, as the driver slalomed between trucks and camels, off the road, back on the road, around sacred cows and through crowds of people, past rows of elephants, thumping the horn and muttering to himself all the way. When I finally got to the hotel, I slid onto the bed and slept like an unhappy baby, my body on the bed, my head still in the car. But my head eventually stopped, and I slept properly. I woke the next morning, happy to be in India for the first time. I plugged in my laptop and checked my e-mail. There was far more incoming mail than was usual, most of it from friends and acquaintances in Canada, and the subject lines on all of them—Paul, Paul Q, Paul Quarrington—told me that Paul had died. I felt very far from home.
I answered most of the e-mails and texted my wife, Belinda. She phoned later. (There’s a five-and-a-half-hour time difference between Jaipur and Dublin.) By that time I was at the festival, and I cried a bit as I spoke to her. She’d never met Paul but she knew how highly I regarded him. (Writing about Paul in the past tense feels like betrayal.) I always came home from Toronto with new Paul stories; he was always on his way to Dublin.
Belinda never met Paul but it was through her that I met him. She’d worked in a college in Dublin some time in the mid-1980s when a young man from Toronto called Dave Bidini came visiting. They became friends. He stayed a summer, I think, then went back home to Canada—and Ireland breathed a giddy sigh of relief. Years later, he wrote to her, with the news that he was coming to Dublin with his band, the Rheostatics, and that they all loved a book called The Commitments. She wrote back with the news that she was married to the man who wrote The Commitments. So, I met Dave—another instant old friend. He introduced me to Paul.
I cried, a bit, as I spoke to Belinda on my mobile phone, in a quiet corner, perhaps the only quiet corner in Jaipur. I told her how I’d hoped that Paul would read the foreword, that he’d read how much I admired his work and how much I admired him, how much I just plain liked him and loved him. But, even as I spoke, I knew: Paul had always known that. He’d have seen it on my face every time we met. What made me cry was the obvious, stupid fact that we’d never meet again.
I had a great time in Jaipur. I thought about Paul a lot. He’d have loved the cows. On the way back to Delhi, in a fog as thick as old milk, the car I was in nearly—really very fuckin’ nearly—crashed into the back of a stationary truck. In the split second before I died—I was calm, terrified, certain of this—I didn’t think of Paul at all. There were no nice thoughts of the bar in heaven, where Paul would be waiting, with a cold beer for me; or thoughts of the bar in hell, where Paul would be waiting, with a warm beer for me—and a banjo. An eternity of warm beer I could tolerate, even enjoy. But an eternity of the banjo? Even un-strummed, it would be torture, squatting there waiting to be strummed.
But the brakes worked, finally, and I didn’t die. I survived, and so did my atheism. Paul is dead.
But how he died. It’s in this book. A book about music becomes a book about music and death, and Paul manages to make them hold hands. (When considering Paul’s work, I can use the present tense and it feels like honesty.) A hugely enjoyable, very funny book about Paul’s career in music becomes a magnificent book about his death and remains hugely enjoyable and very funny—in fact, funnier. He saw it coming and he took control.
Paul died. But, as this book so brilliantly reveals, and as those of us who are so, so lucky to have known him and to have been known by him understand—in all possible meanings of the word—Paul lived.
RODDY DOYLE
AT THE beginning of 2009, I completed a draft of a book I was calling The Song. It was a slim volume that dovetailed my involvement in music (I am assiduously avoiding the word “career”) with a look at some songs I felt were noteworthy and influential: “This Land Is Your Land,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” the enigmatic “Pancho and Lefty.” The Publisher quite liked the draft—“Some fine writing here,” he said, “some of your best”—but there were problems. Apparently, when I attempted musicology, things flattened out some. My attempts to explain the intricacies of chord theory were confusing. “But,” said the Publisher, “the personal stuff is great. You learning to play the guitar, those groups with your brother, then all the songwriting stuff, the stories about Martin, Joe Hall, Dan Hill, Dan Lanois1
