Songs usually mean a whole lot more to the listener if they mean something to the writer to begin with. ‘Sugar Island’, the latest recording from the Murphy Brothers AKA The 4 of Us, is a musical tribute to growing up in the North in the 1970s – specifically growing up in Newry, hometown to Declan and Brendan.
Named after a well-known gathering spot in Newry, ‘Sugar Island’ gives an honest depiction of growing up in the 70s and dealing with all the normal stuff teenagers had to contend with as well as some of the more abnormal stuff.
With twelve songs in all, ‘Sugar Island’ offers a little bit of everything that we have come to love and expect from the band – the soulful voice of Brendan against a backdrop of Declan’s stunning acoustic guitar playing.
There is something very distinctive about Brendan’s voice and similarly with Declan and his guitar playing.
In music, as with art and literature, it is impossible to be all things to all people but I don’t think the Murphys care too much about that.
The 4 of Us have consolidated a strong Irish support over the last 26 years or so and ‘Sugar Island’ will definitely appeal to those fans of a certain vintage, with those many references to life in 1970s Ireland.
Anyone who considers Brexit a good idea should pay close attention to ‘Going South’ – a song which will give a clue as to what life might be like with a hard border. For anyone in their late 40s and over, the song will bring back the horrors of a standard summer holiday trip down to the Republic of Ireland and a vivid reflection of a darker time. ‘Birds Eye View’ almost makes light of the carnage and mayhem which was lived out on a regular basis across much of Northern Ireland. Written from the perspective of a teenager looking out from his bedroom late at night, there was also a touch of magic to it all, in a mad way.
Strange kind of music. A background to a young boys dream.
It brings back memories of a time in the 70s when we got a call from neighbours to evacuate our house. We ended up playing football at 5.00am in the primary school yard, waiting for a bomb in the village to go off.
There’s nothing glamorous in it at all but for a young child at a certain age, there was an incredible drama to life in the north, which is well captured in this song. ‘Sugar Island’ is a very personal collection of songs for the Murphys and whilst it may be easier for some of us to relate to their narrative, nobody should feel excluded.
By Paul McAnallen
Apparently Brendan’s mum wasn’t too keen on the line about the cigarette smoke. “My mum was saying – I don’t like that song, it makes me look like a bad mother”
Brendan talks to Culture Hub about the stories behind Sugar Island.
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The 4 Of Us | Interview
By Cara Gibney
The 1970’s are a lifetime away, generations ago. A decade of its own very specific hue. Mungo Jerry summed up the summertime; there were flares and Kojak, and Creamola Foam.
Northern Ireland had its own specifics to add; we had The Troubles. The check points and the bomb scares and for many, unyielding pain.
Declan and Brendan Murphy of The 4 Of Us were growing up in Newry at the time, and while Wizard’s ‘See My Baby Jive’ was riding the waves on Radio 1, the Murphy boys were living at the top of the hill in Newry, with a birds eye view of the havoc being played on their city.
Since their 1989 hit ‘Mary’, The 4 Of Us have written, performed and toured their own material at home and abroad; winning awards and wooing fans. Innumerable singles later they are releasing their 10th album, Sugar Island in October, and this one is different. This one is looking back at the 70’s, at growing up with all of these things – normal and abnormal – as a backdrop.
“The album is primarily about me and Declan growing up” Brendan Murphy told me over coffee. He and brother Declan had driven up from Newry where they are still based, for a session on Radio Ulster with Ralph McLean. Explaining the idea behind the album, he was pointing out that it isn’t written about ‘The Troubles,’ it is about their life and times, their own history, of which the conflict in Northern Ireland was a huge part – but not the only part. “The troubles were just a backdrop,” he continued. “That makes it interesting. Otherwise it’s more an exercise in nostalgia, and there’s less reason to do it. Ultimately it’s an interesting story that I haven’t really heard in a song before.”
The Murphy brother’s story is pretty typical of a lot of people at the time. The conflict had always been there, it was normal, there was nothing outstanding about it. It was only when The 4 Of Us started touring that he realised that The troubles/the Northern Irish conflict/the guerrilla war he had grown up with, was indeed a big deal to people outside Ireland. “When the band first took off we were touring all round Europe. It used to really bug me because everybody would be questioning us about The Troubles in the north. In England, Spain or Sweden, we’d go into radio stations and they would say “Oh you’re from the north,” and they’d have this pained expression. You’d get really defensive about it because for me everything was fine, it was no problem. Then I came home and for the first time I realised hey, this isn’t that normal at all.”
Sugar Island is dotted with songs illustrating this very point. Tracks like ‘Bird’s Eye View’ talking about living on that hill as children, watching the blue lights and red flashes in the city below as another night of violence unfolded. “I’ve heard a lot of songs about the Troubles but what I haven’t heard is what my experience was, which was people trying to live normal lives with the Troubles in the background.”
Brendan is well aware though that this reality or ‘normality,’ was so much starker for others caught up in the turmoil, and that it wasn’t a task to take lightly. “We were just kids … I knew people who had tragedy, but I didn’t have it directly” he was keen to point out. “I knew that if I did write about it, that it’s a dangerous area to get into. It would put me off nearly listening to it if someone said to me here’s a song about The Troubles. I’d be thinking “Ah Jaisus, here we go again”.
However if the brothers were to write this album, then ‘The Troubles’ needed to be addressed, so they did this through the eyes of the children that they were, just getting on with their lives. “There is a song called ‘Going South’ he continued by way of illustration. It’s the story of Murphy family summer holidays in the south of Ireland, which ultimately ended up in long queues at the border checkpoint. “You couldn’t wait to get to the beach or get to Butlins or wherever. But there’s the checkpoint, and there’s loads of you [in the car]. It was that annoyance of taking forever to get just across the border. Belfast was the same; it would take you forever to get to the other side of the city because of bomb scares or whatever. To us as kids it was just the annoyance of it.”
“Counting every car behind us in the line
Waiting at the checkpoint marking time
Rolling down the window so I don’t have to share
The cigarette smoke hanging in the air”
Apparently Brendan’s mum wasn’t too keen on the line about the cigarette smoke. “My mum was saying I don’t like that song, it makes me look like a bad mother” Brendan laughed. “I just told her that everybody was doing it back then. In a funny way for me a line like that exemplifies the idea of the 70’s because it’s more of a reference point … people can relate to it.”
There is another angle to all this that deserves to be noted and those of us of a certain age will relate to it well – the challenge our parents had bringing their children up in these dark times. “For me on the album, I don’t say it, but the heroes are my mum and dad” Brendan told me. “They knew what was going on, and they were trying to make us feel like nothing was going on. That it was all normal … they couldn’t really shield us from it – it was on our doorstep. But they really did a damn good job in our case of making us feel like we had a normal childhood. We just did what other kids did.”
Not all the tracks on the album hark back to the conflict. Title track ‘Sugar Island’ for example is a tale of throwing away that love, the one that will haunt you for years after the event. “It’s not real” Brendan admitted. “Anybody I said goodbye to on Sugar Island, I’m glad I said goodbye to” he added with a laugh. “I know people who have let the one go, they’ve made that mistake, but luckily I haven’t”.
Continuing on the 70’s theme, the track ‘1973’ gifts us with vignettes of characters from the era. It stems from a conversation Brendan had with his father. “I asked my dad about what period of his life he had the most fun in, and he told me it was when the kids were young.” This inspired Brendan to write the song. “I started off [writing the song] with daddy in mind, and then I started writing about a different character completely.” With a sense more of the changes that age brings to us, the song is gentle, wistful, is riddled with references to ’73, and rings true with anyone who has parents of that age.
In its final track the album has moved on. In this song the band see what was happening through grown up eyes. “At the end of the album there’s a song called ‘Hometown On The Border‘, Brendan explained. “It’s the only song that speaks about how what I thought was ordinary, actually wasn’t really ordinary at all. In every other song I’m in the mind of a kid, it’s all happening in the present tense. But in the last song it’s me [as an adult] looking back. We put that song on the end just to explain the context. [The point being] that it shouldn’t have been ordinary. Without putting that in, the record didn’t seem complete.”
Around 50 songs were written for the album, which Brendan pointed out is the most narrative collection of songs they have released in their two decades as a band. “As a lyricist I wanted it to be more in terms of short stories” he explained. Because his background is more “rock and roll with not much story telling going on,” this was somewhat of a departure for the band.
Nashville is one reason for this shift in direction. A few years ago Brendan started visiting Nashville to work on his song writing. While there he met song writer Sharon Vaughn who subsequently, so many years later, travelled over to Ireland several times to co-write Sugar Island with Brendan and Declan. Her angle on the songs and the writing of the songs was incisive. “We knew that if we worked with someone who was a stickler for detail, and who was outside our experience that it would be good for us” Brendan told me. “Sometimes I would be writing something and she would say “I don’t understand that.” This helped the whole song writing process because it clarified what wasn’t clear; it helped with the things that were only really understood by people who had been there.
“She’s used to working with acoustic guitars” Brendan went on to explain of the experienced hand who was so influential on the album. “Her background is country – old country. She has written for Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. She wrote one of Willie’s biggest songs, ‘My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys’ so she was a great sounding board.”
Other collaborators on the album include percussionist Peter McKinney and multi-instrumentalist Enda Walsh, each adding their own specific touch to the sound. For example, the songs of Sugar Island generally don’t involve drums. This was as much to give the record its own unique sound as it was for practical touring reasons, as Brendan explained. “Because we are touring this primarily as a two piece with Declan playing the stomp and rhythm guitar, we thought let’s have it sound rhythmic without having a drummer. If you listen to the record you’ll be hard pressed even to spot a cymbal. We knew early on that if we went down that route we’d end up sounding different from other records.”
It’s a notable achievement that THE 4 OF US have created such a potent-sounding record while keeping it simple and acoustic … John Kearns, Irish News
THE 4 OF US return with a brand new album, Sugar Island, and a series of live dates scheduled in their increasingly busy diary. The band are in fine form musically and creatively, with the new record representing the latest impressive chapter in their illustrious career.
Sugar Island is very much an autobiographical tale of the Murphy brothers’ formative years in Newry and how the surroundings affected their lives and their songwriting. Frontman Brendan tells me that this collection of songs has been steadily brewing for decades.
“The album is mostly about about our lives and experiences growing up – from family life to romances and all the the things we saw and learned along the way. I suppose it’s best to write about what you know and everyone, whether they’re a songwriter or not, carries so many memories that make them the person they are, so these songs and themes have always been in my head. It was just a matter of getting them out and turning them into songs.”
Thematically the material touches on everything from first loves to family holidays, the latter beautifully illustrated by one of the album’s stand-out tracks, Going South, where Brendan sings of crossing through the border checkpoint with the whole family crammed into the Murphy clan’s saloon and how the songs on the radio or his father’s 8 Track stereo system filled him with excitement.
“When I look back at those trips I still laugh and think how times have changed. Five kids on the back seat – there were no seatbelt laws in those days of course and the car was filled with cigarette smoke. There we were loving it and having the time of our lives as the radio blasted Mungo Jerry’s In The Summertime. I think that was my first realisation of the power of music.
“We made a video for Going South and we actually found and digitised our parents’ cine camera footage and used it throughout, so it’s a really authentic accompaniment to the track itself.”
Other salient moments on Sugar Island are the title track, 1973, Bird’s Eye View, which tells of watching the Troubles unfold from a child’s perspective and my personal favourite, Just a Drop which although is a sparse acoustic driven song, like all of the album, still manages to swagger and posture as if it was a blues rock stomp.
In fact it’s a notable achievement that The 4 Of Us have created such a potent-sounding record while keeping it simple and acoustic.
“That was the brief we set ourselves,” Brendan reflects, “We put rules in place for ourselves that this record would have no electric guitars and no cymbals, to create the pure sound we wanted but the challenge was that it wouldn’t suffer because of that – it still had to sound energetic and have plenty of groove and rhythm. I think we managed to do that.”
The guys will be putting those songs to the test in their upcoming show.
“The Lyric is a fantastic venue for us to play and it is such an imtimate setting especially for these new songs but we want people to come and have a party. A lot of our fans have grown up with us and maybe have booked babysitters for the night. Let’s hope they don’t waste the chance to dance and sing and go home with a real buzz. It’s our job to make that happen and that’s what we are certainly setting out to do.”
:: The 4 Of Us play Belfast’s Lyric Theatre on November 6. Sugar Island is released today.
This Wednesday, 2 November | 8:00 pm
Two Hour Special on THE 4 OF US | Ralph McLean Show, BBC Radio Ulster
Available on FM, AM, DAB and live web stream
www.bbc.com/radioulster
