Phil’s perspective on the town he loves so well...

More recently with the building of the city’s third bridge and the opening of Ebrington Square the vista that has been created from the Waterside is radically different to the picture painted by Phil Couter in his song ‘Town I Loved so Well’. Last year Phil Coulter presided at the piano for the re-opening of First Derry Presbyterian Church and he is heartened to see the positive change within the city.

“I view what is taking place with great enthusiasm and with great relief. The song came about from my visits back home. I could see the scars, not only on the landscape, but on the people; there was psychological damage as well as physical damage. I could see there was a kind of resignation and a pall of gloom hanging over the city and I could see, to use a Derry expression, it looked like a beaten docket, and there did not seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel, you know? And that gave birth to ‘The Town I Loved So Well’, just out of as much frustration as a love song about my place and a song that decried violence from whatever source. I think I wrote the melody in a couple of weeks, but it took most of a year to write the words because I was so aware it was a volatile situation and so highly charged and shame on me if I were to do anything to inflame it any more. I was very aware that this was not going to become a rebel song. I was at great pains to pick every word carefully because I thought this is important. If you fast-forward a few years,

“I think the smartest thing the IRFU did when they wanted a song, was to come to me, not because it was to me particularly, but because I am from the North of Ireland. The elephant in the drawing room for a long time had been that there was this disconnect between the Soldier’s Song and players and supporters from the North who did not see that as their anthem and perceived themselves to be British rather than Irish - I completely get that and understand ad respect it, and that is what they were addressing when they asked me to come up with a song that would be all-inclusive. I was very honoured and it was a great challenge,” he said.

Different songs mean different things to Phil Coulter, but he maintains that his songs are a bit like children, in that some of them exceed your expectations, others don’t live up to your expectations and some of them give you great joy while others give you great heartache.

“At the end of the day you love them all,” he says, adding that he does not listen to his own work with any degree of regularity.

“Sometimes I encounter some of my old songs and think ‘Oh Gee...’,” he says, clutching his head with both hands.

“I would not sit down and play the best of the Bay City Rollers of an evening, naw, naw. That was then and it was a lot of fun, but that was never going to stand the test of time the way that a song like ‘Scorn Not His Simplicity’ has done 40-something years later, no,” he adds.

He continues: “Professionally, one of my prouder boasts would be that I am the only non-American songwriter to have written a hit single for Elvis Presley. I am of an age when I remember when Elvis Presley came on the scene and completely changed the scene. Before that pop music was kinda cute,” he says launching into a rendition of ‘How much is that Doggie in the Window’.

“Then along came Presley and ‘wow’, a whole new game. A lot of my songwriting contemporaries all agree that Presley was the man who galvanised us in terms of songwriting. He was iconic, so to have Elvis Presley singing my song...I still get a tingle,” he says.