Fact #195994

In the course of twenty years in the music business, Brian Kennedy has been there and done that. He's won awards, published two best-selling novels, shifted albums in platinum quantities, wowed Broadway, represented his country in the Eurovision Song Contest, topped charts and sung not just with music icons, but with Hollywood greats and US Presidents.

Through it all, though, it seems to be the little things that have most pleased the Emerald Isle's self-effacing favourite son. Take, for example, the night of June 17, 1996, when he found himself standing in the wings of The Point, Dublin, as soul legend Ray Charles started to sing his classic I Can't Stop Loving You.

"Standing next to me was Carole King," recalls Kennedy, as if he still can't quite believe it. "When Ray began to sing she asked me, 'D'you wanna dance?' So I ended up slow-dancing with Carole King while Ray Charles sang this incredibly romantic song. I mean, how nuts is that? It was amazing."

It should be no surprise that Kennedy seems to value the romance, the sheer magic, of music above all else. After all, his early years were spent in strife-torn Belfast during the troubles. "When you grow up in a war, living in a tiny house with eight people," he explains, "there's not a lot of downtime or relaxation time. You're constantly on edge and you have a particular soundtrack to your life."

The most piercing part of that soundtrack was the constant howl of sirens. "We lived so close to the Royal Victoria Hospital that I heard ambulances coming in and out all the time. You feel a kind of panic when you hear an ambulance, because you know it's an emergency," he says. Bizarrely, though, it was the ambulances that started him singing. "I used to harmonize with them. Maybe I was just trying to make it less scary."

And once Kennedy started using his voice there was no stopping him. Parts in school productions, choir memberships and gigs with amateur bands led to an invitation to join his brother Bap Kennedy's punky group 10 Past 7 which moved to London in mid-1985, changed its name to Energy Orchard and eventually released five well-received albums.

Brian, however, had quit long before they even signed a deal. "Our musical interests were actually poles apart," he remembers. "They were totally into rock'n'roll, electric guitars, smoking, drinking and hanging out with all the other London Irish rockers, but I joined a gospel choir in Neasden and I was secretly sneaking off there once a week to rehearse."

His love of gospel and soul wasn't his only secret. He had now realized he was gay but found it impossible to share this realization with the band. Luckily, his gospel activities attracted enough attention to his ethereally beautiful voice to land him a regular piano bar gig at London's Limelight Club. "That was an amazing time because Tom Jones would come through the room and give me a thumbs up, or Boy George would stagger through and say hello. That's when I developed a lot more confidence about being a solo singer."

He also started composing his own songs and slipping them into his set, discovering to his delight that his audiences lapped them up as eagerly as they did the jazz standards he had been hired to play.

Word about this impressive newcomer on the London scene reached Simon Fuller who, although not yet having discovered the Spice Girls, was already a powerful manager. With Fuller's backing, Kennedy signed his publishing to Chrysalis and secured a recording deal with BMG, which led to the 1990 release of his acclaimed debut album, The Great War Of Words.

Disastrously, just as his recording career seemed to be shifting into high gear, the BMG team that had signed and nurtured him moved on to pastures new, leaving Kennedy high and dry. Fuller, realizing nothing could be gained by staying with BMG, got him out of his contract and, instead of running pell-mell into another deal, Kennedy lit out for the USA.

"I wanted time to think," he explains, "so I bought an Amtrak ticket and traveled from New Orleans through Texas, on to San Francisco and eventually ended up in New York." His experiences along the iron way inspired songs like The Oldest Dream In The World which ended up on his next album, A Better Man. "America is such a huge land mass you can be on the train for days. So I'd woken up in the night, looked out the window and wrote the lines, 'I never saw a night so full of stars, I never saw a love so lost as ours.' The words were just coming out and I wrote them down in a wee book on that train."

Kennedy's path to widespread acclaim as a solo artist now took a considerable detour because Van Morrison heard his version of the Morrison song Crazy Love. Van the Man was so struck by Kennedy's voice that he invited him to join his group. The opportunity to work at close quarters with a Celtic rock legend and get paid into the bargain proved irresistible and Kennedy remained with Morrison for six years.

In the course of those years, Kennedy soaked up a lifetime's worth of experience. "Through touring with Van I got to sing with Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and James Brown." Kennedy's several Dylan encounters came when Morrison and Dylan toured together in 1998. "The day that Carl Perkins died, for example, Van and Bob decided to do a tribute to him. On Bob came and we all did Blue Suede Shoes together, with me singing harmonies with them. That was the first time, and then he did it again a couple of other times. You find yourself standing on the stage of Madison Square Garden with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, thinking, 'How did I get here?'"

Kennedy credits the exposure he received while touring with Morrison with helping him achieve multi-platinum sales in Ireland for his 1996 album A Better Man and for the 1999 compilation Now That I Know What I Want, but his unquenchable thirst for new challenges drew him away again to join the cast of Riverdance on Broadway for nine months during 2000, singing songs specially written for him by the show's composer Bill Whelan.

"Brian's ability to float a song into the ether is very rare," says Whelan. "He has an amazingly expressive facility with dynamics and tone, and he always puts the song first - ego is left to the less gifted."

While based in New York, Kennedy also managed to fit in impromptu duets with both Meryl Streep and US President Bill Clinton, during performances at fund-raising events.

Early in the new millennium, Kennedy signed a six-album deal with Curb Records and, not long after, began his bittersweet association with one of his signature songs, You Raise Me Up. Although Brian was the first artist to sing it, on the 2002 Secret Garden album Once In A Red Moon, a flurry of covers by artists including Westlife and Josh Groban denied him the opportunity to make his version the international hit it deserved to be.

Kennedy proved himself a true renaissance man in September 2004 when he published his first novel, The Arrival Of Fergal Flynn. The book was a runaway best-seller but its plot, about a gay singer in Belfast, inevitably led to widespread speculation about his sexuality. "I found myself under the magnifying glass in Ireland. I had never been one to show up at premieres and events with a pretend girlfriend and I'm a very private person when it comes to my lovelife, but the more I said nothing, the more it looked like I was ashamed of it. So I talked about it at some length on a major tv chat show and that seemed to settle it."

His 2006 album Homebird was somewhat overshadowed by his participation simultaneously in the Eurovision Song Contest, where he represented Ireland with his own composition, Every Song Is A Cry for Love, securing a creditable 10th place.

Kennedy made a bigger splash with his tenth album, Interpretations, in 2008, which saw him covering a baker's dozen of classic hits. "I'd been listening to Joni Mitchell's covers album Both Sides Now," he explains, "as well as George Michael's Songs From the Last Century, and Sinead O'Connor's Am I Not Your Girl? It took just three days to do that record in Windmill, Van's studio in Dublin, but I was very pleased with the end result. Now, though, I'm thinking about my next record which will be all original songs again."

On February 19, 2010, capping his 20 years in the business, Brian Kennedy scooped Ireland's coveted Meteor Award for Lifetime Achievement. "Everybody was saying, 'You're far too young!' And it is a bit odd, because you think of it as something that comes at the end of a career." He laughs. "On the other hand, it has been twenty years since I started, ten albums of my own and God alone knows how many others that I've sung on."

Caroline Downey, director of MCD Productions and Producer of the Meteor Awards, has no doubt about Kennedy's qualifications. "It's not just the uniqueness of his hauntingly beautiful voice," she says. "Brian has very successfully stayed on top of his game for the last 20 years, not an easy feat in this industry. And, somehow, he still manages to look the same as he did two decades ago!"

(Source : feature by Johnny Black, based on interview with Brian Kennedy)