Still crazy for country

There are not too many people around these here parts who can say they played at Wembley. But Matt Leavy can. Back in the early 1990s, Leavy stood up in front of a couple of thousand people and did what comes naturally; he sang a few country music songs. He was one of a list of artistes taking part in what turned out to be the last country music festival to be held at the famous Wembley Stadium before the bulldozers moved in. Singing country music has been something Leavy has done professionally for some time now. It began in earnest for him 20 years ago in 1989 when he appeared on the Bibi Baskin Show where he sang 'The Piano Man", a Billy Joel number. 'Sing us a song, you"re the piano man/Sing us a song tonight/Well, we"re all in the mood for a melody/And you"ve got us feeling all right,' crooned the young man from Athboy who made an instant impression. He was on his way. Singing has been part of Matt Leavy"s life since he could walk. His father, Johnny, played harmonica and Matt feels a lot of his music may come from that source. On Monday 27th April, Leavy, now married to Rose with four children, will officially launch his fifth album - 'Songs I Love so Well" - at the Old Darnley Lodge Hotel in Athboy. Leavy has spent the past year or so putting the record together, recruiting a troupe of musicians, including Ray Lynam and local man Joe Murray. Leavy"s approach this time was to take numbers such as 'Spancil Hill," and the 'Town I Loved So Well" and give them a fresh, country and western flavour; he wanted to put his individual stamp on old, tried and trusted classics. He recognises that what he does for living is a demanding, if fulfilling vocation; standing up in front of people, guitar in hand, night after night, singing country and western anthems that invariably tell stories about loss, heartbreak and the despair that lies at the end of a bottle. Like any job, he says, there are good days and bad. There are the good times when it all goes right and there"s a feelgood factor to it all. 'I"m very fortunate to be doing what I am doing and it certainly has been good to me.' Then there are times when it can be a challenge. The nights at the end of a long tour when the acoustics are wrong, the audience unresponsive. Leavy has learned from hard experience. 'You just have to keep going and hope that, as the gig goes on, it will get better.' And then there is the travel, the long interminable drives through the night, just you and the long, dark, lonely road, on the way back from some faraway gig; perfect raw material for any C&W singer looking for material to compose a new song. Despite the downsides, Leavy loves the life that goes with being a country music singer, especially on the good nights, and there are plenty of those to sustain him. It is then that the countless, tedious, miles can seem all worthwhile. One of Leavy"s favourites songs is 'Seven Spanish Angels" by Willie Nelson and Ray Charles. The opening verse goes: 'He looked down into her brown eyes and said 'Say a prayer for me"/She threw her arms around him/Whispered 'God will keep us free"/They could hear the riders coming/He said 'This is my last fight/If they take me back to Texas, they won"t take me back alive".' Famous faces For Leavy, the biggest kick-back is the opportunity to do something he loves and get paid for it. Then there is the chance to meet some of the great names. He has placed on the same bill as many of the icons of the genre, including Johnny Cash, George Hamilton and Tammy Wynette herself. Just last summer at a two-day country music festival in Dungannon, Co Tyrone, he lined up alongside George Jones, Nancy Griffiths, Ricky Scaggs and Stonewall Jackson. This year, the festival will be in the Kings Hall, Belfast, with Randy Travers headlining. 'To have your name down on the same bill as George Jones was a lovely treat, a privilege for me because he is an icon, really,' said Leavy as he took time out to talk to the Meath Chronicle. 'The buck stops with him when it comes to country singers. Every country singer in America has George Jones down as one of their all-time greats.' Leavy also picks out as something really special an Irish tour he completed with the legendary Buck Owens, the Texan who had 21 number one hits on the Billboard country music charts. At the Wembley Arena gig, Leavy played on the same bill as Cash and Wynette, whom he also toured with in Ireland. 'If anyone wanted to meet Cash, they could. If you look at the movie about him, he came from nothing, He appreciated everything he had, his wealth, he treated everyone the same, nobody was different to anyone else. 'The day I met him he was just a pure gentleman, my brother, John, stopped him and we had a photograph taken, there was absolutely no problem, there was no big entourage of security men. It"s amazing still when you"re at gigs, the young people, they want to hear the 'Ring of Fire," something like that, he is still popular with the new generation. 'It was fantastic to play in a place like the Wembley Arena, there were 8,000 or 10,000 people on that particular day, it was fantastic. When the brothers are watching soccer matches from Wembley, I say to them, 'I played there",' he adds with a laugh. Spiritual home Country and western singers are drawn to Nashville as moths are to a bright light. Twice Matt Leavy has visited the capital of country music and lived to tell the tale. It"s not a tale of glamour and glitz. It"s more a story of people looking to fulfil a dream that is usually dashed against the rocks of reality. The Athboy singer had few illusions when he went to the Tennessee city and saw what it was really like. 'To make it in Nashville now, you would probably need about three million dollars in your pocket and that is the truth. It"s all money now and that"s the sad thing, because there"s many the great singer who is left behind. 'I went there twice, went to the clubs and was lucky enough to get up there with the bands. That was back in 1994. I don"t know if I was good enough to go to Nashville and make it big. Country singers in Nashville are ten a penny. Randy Travers used to wash delph in the Nashville Palace; one night they called him up to sing, there was a record producer in the audience who signed him up, he got a stroke of luck, that"s what you need.' Ireland, he added, can be every bit as hard to break and that"s where the importance of getting a hit record comes in. Then, once you do hit the road, people will know you and make the effort to get to a gig. These days, added Leavy, there are precious few opportunities for country music singers to get on Irish television with RTE looking elsewhere to fill the limited music slots available. Local radio, he asserts, continues to fly the flag. 'RTE just don"t seem to recognise country music in this country which is very, very sad, it"s our national station. Only for the local stations, it definitely would suffer.' Over the past two decades, Leavy has seen a lot of changes in the country scene. There have been ups and downs. He has sang his way through them all and is still standing, still going strong. It"s all about the next gig, the next record. There are downsides to the music business but Matt Leavy wouldn"t want to do anything else.