Ralph McTell: 'The first time I played Cork was a bit of a disaster'

Irish Examiner

06-05-2025

Ralph McTell has always had the wind in his hair. In 1962, as a 17-year-old, he hit the road, busking with his guitar around Europe. He didn't have a plan or know where he was going. He did buy a map before setting off, but it was in eight tattered pieces by the time he got to the south of France. It was a time when beatniks like himself hitchhiked everywhere because it was more 'noble'.
'I left home with a 10-shilling note inside the little pocket in my Levi jeans in case of an emergency,' says McTell. 'I had my guitar. The first time I had left home, I left with a blanket for image, but the second time I took a cheap sleeping bag. I hitchhiked on my own. I'd stay the night in places, have something to eat and move on. I had plans to get to India, but I only made it as far as Istanbul.'
McTell is still on the road. As part of the celebrations for his 80th year, he's undertaking his biggest Irish tour yet, having first played in Ireland in Belfast in 1969, just as the Troubles were kicking off. He consistently returned to Northern Ireland when most of his peers sidestepped the war-torn region. In 1976, before one gig in Belfast, the audience gave him a standing ovation before he played a single note, just for turning up.
McTell's maiden trip to Cork was anticlimactic. 'The first time I played Cork was at the Connolly Hall and I think there were 30 people there,' he says with a morbid chuckle.
'It was a bit of a disaster, but I'm delighted to say the last time I played there was at the Cork Opera House and it sold out. I've got some lovely friends down that way.'
The legendary singer-songwriter shares a long friendship with the Dubliners, in particular with John Sheahan, and one-time member Jim McCann. McTell toured Australia at the same time as the group in 1975. His friendship with the late Luke Kelly goes back to the early 1960s, before McTell's professional music career took off.
'I first saw Luke Kelly in a folk club when I was quite young,' he says. 'Luke was a resident there. He was under the influence of Ewan MacColl and singers of that ilk, very left wing. I was interested mostly in simple country, old timey American music and banjos. Somebody said, 'Oh, there's this banjo player from Ireland up in north London.' I went to see him with a friend of mine.
'It was the first time I glimpsed what a passionate singer looks and sounds like. It was frightening – the way he delivered with no microphone, just the power of the voice and personality. He had a reputation of being a grumpy fella, but I always felt he had another life outside of music.
"He was a deep thinker. Whenever I went to Dublin, I'd dig him out in his pub. He'd be sitting there with a heavy newspaper, a packet of Major cigarettes and a pint of stout. We were always pleased to see each other.'
Luke Kelly was the first person McTell sent his song From Clare to Here to, one of the great ballads about Irish emigration. The song was released in 1976 – and has been covered by numerous artists, including Nanci Griffith – but its origins go back to an incident in the early 1960s when McTell was working as a labourer on a building site in south London.
'There was an Irish gang working on the site,' he says. 'There was one boy – I would say he was lying about his age, drawing men's wages – he was about 15. He was from rural Clare.
Ralph McTell in London in 1975. Picture: Evening Standard/.
"I never knew the town. I only ever knew him by his first name, and he probably had a different name for the [illegal] contract he was on. I tried to be a big brother to him. He was already getting locked into the Irish ghetto syndrome, where when you're away from home, you only stay with Irish lads, you drink your wages, and you have a hard time.
'We were digging a deep trench, down the bottom of this hole. I paused to roll a cigarette. I tried to make conversation. I said, 'It must be a bit odd for you, Michael, being over here, being from the country and all that.'
"He answered by saying, 'Jaysus, it's a long way from Clare to here' and carried on digging. I always tell people if he had said, 'It's a long way from here to Clare' I would have accepted that and it would have gone, but because he put 'home' first, I knew in that little one-line poem that that's where his heart lay. In such moments, inspiration lies.'
Ralph McTell will be performing at the Cork Opera House, 8pm, Sunday, May 11. See: www.corkoperahouse.ie
Isle of Wight Festival 1970
The Isle of Wight festival in 1970 was the last of the three original festivals. The organisers expected around 150,000 to attend, but more than four times that arrived on the island. The Guinness Book of Records estimated the total attendance was between 600,000 and 700,000, more than attended Woodstock the previous year.
Jimi Hendrix, who died a few weeks after the festival, was the star attraction on the bill. He was joined on stage by artists such as the Doors, the Who, Miles Davis, Leonard Cohen, Rory Gallagher and Joni Mitchell. Ralph McTell, who performed on the main stage on the festival's fifth and final day, wore his lucky shirt – a red tennis shirt he traded in Milan in 1965 for a set of strings – for the gig.
Festival-goers heading to the Isle of Wight Festival in August 1970. Picture: Evening Standard/.
'I was living out in Cornwall in an old battered caravan in a field when this gig came in,' says McTell. 'I no idea what I was walking into. I just turned up with the guitar. My manager arranged it all. He was in London. We met and went to the place. I could feel the atmosphere, an excitement like nothing I'd ever felt before, like the atmosphere at a boxing match – where there's a lot of energy flying about, not just from the ring, but from the people who go.
'I felt that with the people that were there. It was our festival. It was the end of something, rather than the beginning – it was the end of the dream because we all thought music and poetry was the way the world was going, but reality bit at the festival when some mob pushed the fences down and they declared it a free festival. My manager panicked, so I never got to see Jimi Hendrix.
'Kris Kristofferson was on before me. When I walked out on stage it was ridiculous – I had a stool and two microphones. I did a 45-minute set.
"I don't remember anything about it except I got an encore and I couldn't get out to play it. Looking back, it was an important moment for me. I'm one of the festival's survivors. Recently, a mural was commissioned with those performers still alive. Hand prints were made and turned into an artwork.'
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