The Paul Brock Interview – Part 8: The Influence of John McCormack and Life in Retirement from the day job

Athlone Miscellany

By Gearoid O’Brien

The Paul Brock Interview – Part 8: The Influence of John McCormack and Life in Retirement from the day job.

Before we finished our interview Paul Brock steered me back towards McCormack because he saw him as such a great influence. “When I was growing up I was always hearing about the houses he lived in or his appearances in the Fr Mathew Hall. Later, of course, I regretted that I never got around to meeting some of the great Athlone champions of John McCormack. I’m thinking about people such as Kitty Kilkelly and Gerald Dowling who once owned the house that John McCormack lived in at the time of his death”. Kitty Kilkelly was only a generation removed from McCormack as her father had been his choir-master in the old St Peter’s Church when McCormack sang in the choir there and indeed he is one of those credited with ‘discovering’ John McCormack. Paul continues talking about the influence of John McCormack on his own life “it was progressively, over time that I realised that McCormack was at the centre of a lot of my musical thought and musical development. I became more and more interested in McCormack and then about ten years ago a man called Ed Ward called here to see me in Ennis. Ed ran the Irish Fest in Milwaukee, one of the biggest Irish musical festivals in the world, attracting 130,000 participants and when he came here we got talking about McCormack. I had known Ed for years and our band had played at the Irish Fest but they also ran a School in the University there in the week leading up to the festival and Ed asked me to do a talk on McCormack for their Irish studies programme. I jumped at it – a rush of blood to the head – without realising what I had let myself in for. That was the starting point for the McCormack talk which I put together – I don’t consider myself an expert on McCormack but I am greatly indebted to him”.

Who will Perpetuate McCormack?

When we speak about the name and reputation of John McCormack and how he will be remembered in times to come Paul says “Years ago there were more great public figures who used to perpetuate the name of John McCormack. People such as John Skeehan, Ciaran MacMathuna and others but there are less and less playing McCormack on the radio today. Younger people are just not as connected with McCormack as the previous generation were”.

He tells me about his illustrated talk which he has delivered in both the United States and Ireland. “My talk looked at my father’s connection and what he passed on to me and I also took a close look at the music, and you were very helpful to me in particular with sourcing visual material and bit by bit I worked up ‘Impressions of the Great Irish Tenor’ which is my view of McCormack: his musicianship, his life, his family, his travels and anecdotes which I had gathered from various sources.

Originally I used both audio and visual clips and then I moved forward and used various tenors, live tenors – a combination of McCormack audio clips and live tenors. I used Anthony Kearns in the Concert Hall and in Limerick it was Kenneth Rice from the Irish Chamber Orchestra doing the role of Fritz Kreisler – I have also done the show with different tenors. I continue to listen to McCormack and to perpetuate his music and memory at every opportunity”.

Retirement from Shannon Development

Paul Brock took early retirement from Shannon Development six years ago and since that he has some free-lance work as an economic development consultant working for IDI Ireland in advising overseas governments on investment promotion programmes. He has worked in South America, in African countries and in Eastern Europe but he is doing less of that work now and concentrating more on the music. He now does some work with the University of Limerick as a visiting lecturer, both teaching music but also lecturing on the business side of the music industry.

So far Paul has had a very busy and fruitful retirement. Having studied French he then decided to take the Masters programme at the University of Limerick where his thesis and studies embraced both the music business and music itself. He managed to pull together the separate strings of his life bringing together his experience in business, in international marketing, in economic development and at the same time his work as a professional musician. His thesis involved writing a hand-book on making-it in the music business. He wrote about “all the different elements including: touring, promoting yourself, recording, working with professionals, negotiating, putting a price on yourself. In short all the things that come in to play for an emerging musician”.

“Humdinger” a by-product of his studies

It is very obvious from speaking to Paul Brock that he is a great advocate for the Academy in the University of Limerick. “The opportunity to take on the Masters arose after I left Shannon Development. I had already some connection with the University of Limerick having given lectures there. So I decided to put my head down and give it a go. It was a great decision. The Masters gave me a framework for a number of projects that I couldn’t otherwise have done. One interesting by-product of the Masters was the recording of the album “Humdinger” with the banjo player Enda Scahill. The background to this element of the project was that I had looked at the banjo and its emergence as an instrument and how it came from Africa and worked its way into popular American music; how it came to Ireland in the mid 1800s with the Virginia Minstrels and its emergence and evolution into Irish music in the early era of recording in America. There were so many original banjo / melodeon combinations because these instruments were loud and assertive and were suited to dances in an era before amplification. I did a lot of work on that era and on the origins of both instruments and that culminated in a very fruitful collaboration with Enda Scahill which looked back to the early twentieth century recordings and then we produced what has been described as “the first ever CD of Irish traditional music on the melodeon and tenor banjo” – it was voted ‘The Irish Times Traditional Album of the Year’ that year. My research also looked at the banjo playing of Enda Scahill, I took an in-depth look at his technique, style-analysis etc”.

Another project which he undertook during the course of the Masters programme involved a visit to France where he met a very famous French Canadian accordion player, Philippe Bruneau, who is now retired in the South of France. They spent some time together and learned from one another. “He’s from the French-Canadian tradition with a keen interest in Irish music as I have in the French-Canadian music – again this was a very fruitful project as far as I’m concerned”.

A Musical Household

Today Paul lives in Ennis in a very musical household. His wife, Aineis, who is a native of Gormanstown, Co Meath, is very interested in music and trained as a singer and dancer. They have three beautiful daughters: the eldest, Aimhirin, is, according to her father, a very good singer but modest about her talent and won’t sing in public. She works as an Accounts Manager with an advertising agency and is about to move to London to work in advertising. Their second daughter, Siomha, is a full-time musician and student. She’s at College in Cork and she is interested in pop-music from the 60s to date. She also composes her own material, is a very good guitar player and a talented jazz singer. When available she sings with Black Magic an 18 piece Jazz band which is Galway based. She’s kept busy with lots of gigs in Dublin, Galway, Ennis and Limerick. Their youngest daughter, Cadhla, is in her second year studying music in College in Cork and she is interested in voice and piano and also plays the fiddle.

For me it has been a great learning curve following Paul Brock’s career from his first interest in music in Athlone in the 50s to the present day when he is a greatly revered traditional musician both nationally and internationally. While he could very justifiably celebrate fifty years in the music business I get the feeling that his retirement from Shannon Development has just heralded a new beginning in his life and we can look forward to many more recordings from this great Athlone-born musician and like his great hero John McCormack hopefully his story will be an inspiration to many other young Irish musicians.