|
From jazz to The Other Side for Honor
 Martin
Doyle talks to Ireland’s leading jazz singer HONOR HEFFERNAN about
her new album.
Hard though it is to believe Honor Heffernan has been making her living
as a singer for 40 years. Hard to believe because although she is over
50, she could easily pass for 40, and because it means she must have started
out when she was just 14-years-old.
Honor is Ireland’s leading jazz singer but she started her career
as the kind of showband performer she played in Neil Jordan’s film
Angel.
Her latest album The Other Side sees her paying homage to her roots, a
hymn to Dublin in the ’70s when the capital was rocking and she
was the only female rock singer, fronting Alan Dee’s band The Watchtower.
“I love singing jazz but I started to miss the other kind of energy
that you get from singing in a rock band,” says Honor. “Mum
loved the way I sang rock. When I started singing jazz, she said, ‘we’re
only hearing a quarter of your voice’.”
The singer has dedicated this album to her late father Charlie and to
her mother Breda and sister Fiona, who died of carbon monoxide poisoning
four years ago. Honor acknowledges how much she owes her parents.
“All my life,” says Honor, “I had everybody pestered
to be a singer. My mother had to teach me songs, I organised concerts
in school, I had all the kids in the neighbourhood singing.”
Alan Dee and his band were playing in the River Club one night when Honor
went up and asked him if she could sing her version of Ruby Tuesday. She
stole the show and got the gig. “I went home and told my parents,”
she recalls, “and they were shocked and thrilled and worried, as
you would be if your 14-year-old came home and said they’d got a
job in a band.”
Barely a teenager, she was now on the road seven-nights-a week but her
parents met and trusted the rest of the band who, she says, were like
brothers.
“My parents must have been great to put up with me, I was so independent.
My mother said I started walking at 10 months, and from that day I was
walking away. If I had a child like me, I would be up the walls, but I
was so determined. They spoke to a counsellor, who told them to let me
go.”
The Other Side was recorded in a studio in Montpellier owned by Neil Conti,
Prefab Sprout’s drummer. Apart from a couple of years in Canada,
however, Honor has been a home bird.
She is conscious that she has performed only rarely across the water,
yet one was filmed and recorded a Beatles tribute at the Royal Albert
Hall where she sang The Long And Winding Road with the Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra and Mull Of Kintyre with Roy Wood from Wizzard.
“I’d just done Angel so I was news,” she recalls. “My
biggest fear was I was going to fall down the stairs as I was wearing
this long ball-gown and had to walk down through the audience in the dark
on to the stage.”
She was no stranger to the stage having played Mary Magdalene in Noel
Pearson’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar back in 1971 and
spent three years playing Annie Oakley in Annie, Get Your Gun.
Honor rents a nice flat in Dun Laoghaire. She has never owned her own
place or made her fortune. In fact, her last two albums have been self-financed.
“It would have been nice to have both fame and fortune but since
I can remember all I ever wanted to do was sing and act. I feel I’m
successful for I’m still doing what I love. People often ask a child
what they want to be and they say I want to be famous. I teach singing
and sometimes students think celebrity is what it’s all about. You
sing because you love it. Once you lose that, there’s no point.”
There was a point when she did lose her focus. Alcohol took her over.
“In the mid-’80s I started to realise I didn’t like
the way I was drinking, I drank because I didn’t seem to have the
resources other people had I fell apart when they would get up and fight.
I got to the point that the singing didn’t seem real any more, I
started feeling I was false, phoney. It felt like I was abusing something.”
A friend introduced her to Alcoholics Anonymous and her first meeting
was “like 40 coats being taken off”.
“I realised a lot of stuff. I didn’t like myself, was very
insecure, I learned it was OK to be me.
“I learned a long time ago you have this idea of the perfect life,
if I do this, this and this, my life will be perfect, well, I learned
that is rubbish, life is what happens every day, I don’t think you
ever get to the point where all is perfect. It’s about accepting
life.”
The Other Side is Honor’s greatest hits in the sense that the songs
are the ones that made the greatest impression on her.
“I only wanted songs I could truly identify with,” she says,
“that I could say if that’s the last thing I do I’m
really happy with my choices.”
The album is bookended by JJ Cale’s After Midnight and Janis Joplin’s
Move Over, tracks which she feels capture the mood of the ’70s.
John Martyn’s Some People is her tribute to a hero, though her version
is faster, with more instrumentation.
“When doing covers you start first of all with liking what the song
is saying,” she says, “liking the melody. I then try to make
it mine, not copy the way it was performed originally. I don’t even
think of it as a covers album because most people record songs that are
written by someone else.”
Joni Mitchell’s All I Want is another debt repaid. “I fell
in love with Joni Mitchell when I was about 14 and I’ve been a fan
all my life.”
Neil Jordan once praised Honor’s “beautiful, classical sense
of detachment”, which seems to contradict her desire to embody a
song’s emotions.
“I’d be reluctant to analyse his words,” she says, “You
do need to be able to detach, to channel something. First you find out
how the song works. Once the song is part of you, you get out of the way.
It’s not me putting my stamp on the song. The song puts its stamp
on me.”
n The Other Side is available on www.honorheffernan.com |
