Irish Musician Phil Coulter Seeks Pot o’ Gold in U.S.

Despite widespread poverty and unemployment, many hard-pressed Irish-Catholic homes in Northern Ireland’s Londonderry are furnished with a piano rather than some fancy piece of furniture one cannot play music on.

Music is not only a passion for Derry’s Catholic underclass, but it is seen by many of its young musicians as a one-way ticket out of poverty and prejudice to fame and fortune.

Young Derry musicians need look no further for a local-boy-makes-good story than Phil Coulter, a 46-year-old composer, singer, pianist and producer who latched onto one of those hard-to-come-by tickets out of the Derry ghetto. Now known as Ireland’s musical ambassador, he has earned fame in the United Kingdom and Europe while accumulating numerous awards, including seven platinum discs, 29 gold discs and 47 silver discs.

“There was a piano and plenty of music in my house, where I was one of five youngsters. My father played fiddle by ear, and my mother played piano rather badly. Music gave me a goal and a direction, and you could even say saved my life,” Coulter said recently in a telephone interview from Chicago, where he and his Irish Pops Orchestra were to perform that night.

Hoping to make inroads on the huge pop market in the United States--the biggest plum of them all--the king of Irish middle-of-the-road pop and his 16-piece orchestra are making a 5 1/2-week, 20-city Christmas tour of North America.

Maura O’Connell, one of Ireland’s top-ranked singers and a former member of the celebrated traditional Irish group De Danann, is featured with Coulter and his pops orchestra. A highlight of the show is O’Connell’s rendition of “Silent Night” in Gaelic.

Coulter is hardly a household name in America, although he is a big seller throughout the United Kingdom and Europe and one of the biggest-selling Irish performers among the sizable Irish-American record-buying public.

His recent series of mellow albums, earlier hit songs for Elvis Presley and Waylon Jennings and his double role as both songwriter and producer for the Bay City Rollers, Richard Harris and several European pop and rock performers have generated worldwide sales of more than 25 million records.

Classically trained at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Coulter has written scores for such Hollywood films as “Waterbabies,” a 1979 children’s film with James Mason. He had his first taste of the big time as a young keyboard player and arranger for a mixed bag of stars, including Van Morrison, Chet Atkins, Anita Kerr and Tom Jones.

Despite his success, Coulter has never abandoned his roots in Derry. Nor is its tragedy or its music far from his thoughts, he says. His greatest song, he says proudly, is “The Town I Loved So Well,” a powerful anti-war song that depicts Derry torn apart by the troubles of Northern Ireland.

“Derry was a depressed area where unemployment was very much a way of life. It was the norm for women to be the breadwinners. They worked at long lines of sewing machines at the shirt factories while the husbands stayed at home to get the kids off to school and do the housework. But the town was full of music, and music was a way of getting a job,” he said.

“There was no question that any job--and certainly none in the public sector--would go to Catholics. The one exception was in music.

“If you went to an audition as a trumpet player, say, you weren’t asked right off whether you were Protestant or a Catholic. You were auditioned and judged by your ability, not on your religion.”

There have been several turning points in Coulter’s career since the late 1970s when he was sitting pretty in the pop world as a successful producer and songwriter of many hits. Among those were Presley’s “My Boy,” the Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night” and Sandy Shaw’s “Puppet on a String,” which won the Grand Prix in Europe’s prestigious Eurovision Song Contest.

“I woke up one morning and said to myself that I’m beginning to think like a teeny-bopper songwriter and producer to the exclusion of other things,” he said.

As he contemplated whether there was more to life than bubble-gum music, Hollywood beckoned. It was an irresistible call for Coulter, who has had a consuming passion for American pop culture ever since his boyhood days when he found his father’s cache of old Jimmy Durante records on 78 r.p.m. records.

Later, a Buddy Holly record turned the serious teen-age classical pianist into a closet rock ‘n’ roller.

After several years in Hollywood as a friend and protege of the great film composer Elmer Bernstein, Coulter went home again to Ireland.

Almost inadvertently, he stepped into the present phase of his recording career and middle-of-the-road style that stresses the melodic, lyrical side of Irish music.

His first giant step in that direction was his mellow album “Classic Tranquility,” which featured his piano playing and orchestrations. To his astonishment, “Classic Tranquility” became one of the best-selling albums ever in Ireland.

It was followed up in 1985 by “Sea of Tranquility.” His albums sold a remarkable 500,000 copies in Ireland that year, outselling the combined sales of U2, Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson.

Coulter toured the United States last year for the first time with his pops orchestra. This year’s tour, he said, is being undertaken to promote his latest album, “Phil Coulter’s Christmas” on Shanachie Records.

“I’m not a crusader, but one of the things I’d like to dispel is that Irish music begins and ends with ‘McNamara’s Band.