The golden voice of Tommy O'Brien

THE TWO HANDS TENSE AS HE HOLDS THE script; when each piece of music is coming to an end he raises his left hand and quickly lowers it to his chest, with a look of professional pride and ease, as the red light comes on. The script is per¬fectly rehearsed. "Good evenin' listeners," he begins and even the ‘g' in "evening" is missing in the script. He has timed the introductions and the music so that his pro¬gramme runs to just over 29 minutes. Every single pause, or inflection, or laugh has been prepared and rehearsed; the guy knows exactly what he is doing.He is delighted to discover that his timing is right once more. He walks out into the control room. "If there's any probiem we can fade it," Johnny Devlin, the producer tells him and everybody looks up waiting for his reaction. Tommy O'Brien takes things seriously and fading a record is a matter of the utmost gravity. He rages against the fading of records. His speaking voice outside the studio is high-pitched; his speech comes fast and incessant, full of drama and conviction. "Fade it. I'll kill you."

Today is another milestone in Tommy O'Brien's great love affair with the microphone. Today he is going to record three programmes instead of the usual two. And in future he is going to record three. He has written Johnny Devlin a note to warn him of this; he has steeled his nerve that it is going to be done, even if it means getting a taxi to the station. There's no point in coming up every fort¬night when you can come up every three weeks.

On the days he records his great programme "Your Choice And Mine" a car picks him up and takes him from his native Clonmel to Thurles; from there he gets the train - the dining car staff know when to expect him and have his breakfast ready for him. All the porters and most of the passengers know him and are aware of his sacred mission; his journey to Dublin with his box of records resembles nothing less than a royal progress. But this morning the roads have been icy and the car has had to go too slowly. He missed the train; he had to get a car in Thurles to take him the whole way to RTE. He can't remember this having happened before in his long career as a commuting broadcaster. But his life has been a long struggle with the elements and the great dramas: the death of Aida, the love between Romeo and Juliet, the wiles of Don Giovanni, the flashing eyes of Cannen. Even orchestral works have their own dramas to act out. All his long iife he has been iistening to these dramas. He recounts the missing of his train with an almost operatic verve and orchestral fluency.

He wants a dee-jay. Is there a dee-jay? Johnny Devlin thinks there is and wanders off to make sure. Is he, Tommy O'Brien, not a dee-jay? The denial comes hot and heavy, followed by a degree of abuse. No, he isn't a dee-jay. He doesn't actually handle the records.

The dee-jay arrives in the person of Frank Corr. Tommy is pleased; now we can begin. He hands the script around to all concerned and opens up his box of records. "Be awful careful of this record, it's very rare," he admonishes Frank Corr. Suddenly, for the first time, he stops talking and stands to attention, his hands by his sides. Slowly he draws in his breath. Everybody waits for him to speak. Here we have the born performer and his captive audience. "Johnny," he says, "I'm going to play one I've never played before in my life." He looks around at everyone as though he has just delivered an important message from on high. There followed a conversation about music and who wrote what and when between Johnny Devlin and Tommy O'Brien, the elders in the temple. Everything goes smoothly and according to the script.

The battle to make three programmes instead of two seems to be well on the way to being won. But then the great Needle Stuck ln. The Record row begins. Tommy blames RTE. "It worked perfectly at home," he roars. But no matter what they do, the groove in the record resembles nothing as much as the Black Pig's Dyke. "I'll never finish three programmes with these whores," mumbles Tommy O'Brien.

Sometimes while the record is playing he sings along. Sometimes he talks: "Wait until you hear the second tune. It's got Verdi written all over it," or "If only Pavarotti could sing like this," or "There wasn't a tune in the whole opera." Then the singers, he knows everything about the singers. Ben Davis who made the recording when he was 76, Isobel Baillie who died last year.

It's time for the next number, the voice becomes dis¬ciplined, almost calm, controlled: he tells his listeners that the sound they are going to hear is the sound of pure en¬chantment. The deejay puts on the record. Tommy O'Brien grins in recognition when the music starts. He thinks for a moment. "Maybe it's a slight exaggeration to say it's 'pure enchantment'," he says and stops for a moment, "but it is."    .    

Touring companies were popular at the time. He remembers when he was twelve or thirteen and one came to Clonmel. They did concert scenes from operas. He remembers vividly that on the first night they did a scene from "Maritane" by William Vincent Wallace. It was the prison scene and there was a trio for tenor, contralto and baritone called "Turn On Old Time". Even now, and it must be sixty years later, he hums the tune and says that he was absolutely overcome. He keeps humming the tune to himself to help him recall what it was like to hear that sort of music for the first time.

Not long afterwards through an advertisement in a news¬paper he paid fifty shillings for a hornless table grand, six records and a box of needles. It was Clonmel just after the war and when he left school he went to work for the Clonmel Chronicle as a junior reporter. One day when he had started making his own living he saw an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph for the International Opera Season at Covent Garden. He saw some of the names and they in¬cluded a number of world famous figures whose records he had in his growing collection. Wouldn't it be great, he thought, to go and hear them in real life?

It was a long way from Tipperary. He was seventeen years old and five foot four. It was his first time in London. He arrived on a Monday morning and went straight to Covent Garden. A cross between Stephen Dedelus and Dick Whittington, he stood outside and stared at the Opera House. "Well there it is," he thought. "Imagine I'll actually be in there tonight." Such is the stuff of almost half of the novels written in the nineteenth century.

Tommy O'Brien, our hero, went up to the tall attendant. "Excuse me," he said, "have you heard any of the singers tonight?" "Oh yes, sir ," said the attendant, "I heard them all at rehearsal." The attendant continued, Tommy O'Brien remembers, and said: "There's one little fat Italian and she's great." "And that", says Tommy O'Brien, "of course, was Toti."    

Toti was the coloratura soprano, Toti del Monte, "who could be said to be as broad as she was long; she was only five feet tall and she was very fat." On his first night in London he heard her singing in Lucia. The next night he saw Tosca and then Butterfly and then Aida. Aida is his favourite opera: he has seen it more often than any other. He witnessed the debut of many famous singers in that opera.

On that first visit he stayed for a fortnight and he was lucky because one of the touring opera companies had hired the Lyceum and Tommy O'Brien was able to go there as well as Covent Garden to see opera. But that wasn't all: on a Sunday afternoon, he won't say what year, he never gives dates, John McCormack gave a recital in the Albert Hall. There were seven thousand people there and loads of people turned away. McCormack sang 25 songs. For the first two songs the voice was dry and uninteresting, Tommy O'Brien felt. It was a phenomenon he was to notice with other singers. "But after the third song it was entirely re¬different, it was glorious." Back he went after his two weeks in London to his job as a junior reporter on the Clonmel Chronicle. When that newspaper folded he joined the Clonmel Nationalist and soon became a senior reporter. Every summer until the war he went back to London for two weeks. He saw all the great singers and musicians. Yet it seemed that those two weeks basking in the extraordinary pleasure he gets from music had to be paid for as though they were the golden fruits of some Faustian bargain. The rest of the year back in Clonmel was sheer slavery. He had taken on the job, in addition to that of reporter, as official court stenographer for Tipperary Circuit Court. Sometimes he would start at 10.30 in the morning and work until 9.30 at night. He kept it up for ten years, taking down two hundred words a minute in impeccable shorthand, until he was ready to shout out loud was in the court. He gave it up.

He is still proud of his shorthand; he is still proud that he taught it to himself on his grandfather's farm in his beloved Comeraghs from a manual he bought for six old pence in Clonmel. He became editor of the Clonmel  Nationalist. He enjoyed the job but hated when people asked, as they always did, to have their name kept out of the paper after court cases. He had to refuse and there are people in Clonmel who don't speak to him because of it.

In those years between the two wars when he was going to London every summer there was an abiding passion in his life other than music. Billiards. He was crazy about billiards. He was three times Irish amateur champion, and four times runner-up. He was only in his twenties when he came up to Dublin and beat a man everybody thought was unbeatable. The man from the Irish Independent asked him if he had any hobbies besides billiards. Classical music, the reporter was told. The reporter from the Indo wouldn't believe this. "The last time I won," Tommy O'Brien remembers, "I played a great game. I was absolutely marvellous. I just knew that I'd win."

When he came to Dublin to play billiards he always stayed with a family called Kenny in Drumcondra. They were Northern Catholics and mad on opera. They had a gramophone and one day Tommy O'Brien told them: "The next time I'm coming up, when I'm playing in the ~cond round, 111 bring up a lot of 78s and we'll play them." He brought the records and the family would sit around as Tommy O'Brien, up in Dublin for the billiards, put on records and introduced each one with a short explanation. If it was an opera, he would tell the story, or maybe he had seen the singer in London, but for each piece of music he had an anecdote. Friends of the family began to drop in to hear him. Once Tommy O'Brien was about to playa piece without an explanation but a man stopped him. No, please talk about the record before you put it on.

So back home in Clonmel one day he had an idea. It worked up in Dublin in the Kenny's house - why the hell wouldn't it work on radio? He wrote to a man called Fachtna 0'hAnrachain in RTE and told him about his visits to Covent Garden and his record collection. "1 think I could do some radio programmes," he said. He was en¬gaged to do six quarter hour programmes called "Covent Garden Memories". A star was born.

As the years went by the programmes he did increased and multiplied. A series of six, then a series of eight. Kevin Roche, the head of light entertainment, was a great believer in the snappy title. Tommy thought that if he could think up a snappy title he might be able to sell an idea to Kevin Roche. The title he had for years was "Tommy O'Brien and His Records" but he knew Kevin Roche would never buy that. He met him in the lavatory in Henry Street one day when Tommy was up in RTE to make a recording. "Kevin," he said, "I've thought of a great new title for a series which has never been used before, even by the BBC." The title was "Your Choice and Mine". Kevin Roche bought it.

He thinks if he plays ballads and well-known songs, that his audience will follow him wherever he goes. He wants to entice people who wouldn't normally listen to Mozart or Beethoven to listen to his programme so he can make them share his enthusiasm. Basically, he is a man with a mission.

THERE WAS NO ANSWER. Knock harder. Still no answer. It was difficult to just open the door, because there was no guarantee that this was the right house. There was a kitchen with an Aga cooker and there were two cats sitting on a chair. Hello. Anyone here? Still no answer. Beyond the second door there was a hall and even in the hall the music could be heard. It was stunningly clear as though there were a huge orchestra planted in the living. room of this old house built high on a hill over Clonmel. The music was Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and it was playing really loud. It took a long time to alert Tommy O'Brien to the fact that there were visitors.

Once aware of this, however, he was up on his feet, dancing around the room and talking. He never stopped talking except when music was playing. At one end of the room there were cabinets full of records and just in front of the cabinets there were two huge speakers which he recently acquired and he expressed his deep delight with these speakers. After he had put the meal on the table, he would demonstrate how the speakers work with 78s.

The two windows in the living-room look down on Clonmel; the view is spectacular and at night you can look out and see a mass of small lights. He moved here over ten years ago and he has been living here on his own since the death of his sister.

He has built up a huge collection of records over the years, although he has bough t very few over the past decade. He still lives in some golden age' of singers and records before the fall of man. He has not been back to Covent Garden since the war, for example, he doesn't like the singers. He hates the way they have perfected the system of recording; he likes recordings of live concerts. lie has made great friends while buying records: one in particular was Rev David McCauseland, a Presbyterian minister, a kindred spirit in Clonmel  who introduced him to Beethoven.

He has remembered the aria all evening since it was mentioned. Yes, he had three recordings of it. What's he saying, three, he has more than that, but three that he would like to choose between. He stops and thinks for a moment and then enumerates all the recordings of the aria and what he thinks of them, he names all the foreign singers in the rich tones of south Tipperary. He makes up his mind and sails down to a record cabinet. Within a few seconds he has the record in his hand. The duet from '"The Pearl Fishers" sung by Jussi Bjoerling and Robert Merill. He walks up to the turntable and puts it on. The music starts. He knows all the French words and sings along for a while but he stops when one of the most magnificent arias of nineteenth century romantic opera bursts into full flower.

But soft, no, hold on, don't go yet, wait a minute. There is another matter. Sit down. The greatest Irish singer since McCormack and Burke-Sheridan. Who? Names are men¬tioned and dismissed by him. Suddenly he shouts out the name: Frank Ryan, the tenor from Tallow, Co Waterford. "Frank Ryan to my way of thinking had a world beating natural tenor voice. However, he made very few recordings and he wasn't fully trained." Tommy O'Brien wants to play one last record by another man who stayed at home: he wants to play Frank Ryan singing "I'll Walk Beside You". He remarks on Ryan's ability to hit particular notes. The room fills with the voice on an old record, the room already full of a lifetime's obsession with the human voice. It is getting on towards midnight and he is old, but Tommy O'Brien is still listening with enormous intensity for the singer to hit the high note.