Paul Brady at The Ballymaloe Grainstore

A rare opportunity to see one of Ireland’s greatest singer-songwriters in the intimate setting of Ballymaloe Grainstore.  Paul Brady usually performs in large venues such as the National Concert Hall and Cork Opera House, so we are delighted to offer this very special intimate evening.

Paul has created more than his fair share of iconic songs:  Hard Station, Get Back to the Centre, The Island, Nobody Knows, Crazy Dreams, Busted Loose and Steel Claw . Many have been covered by such stellar artists as Tina Turner, Cher, Carlos Santana, Art Garfunkel and Phil Collins.

Born and raised in Strabane, Northern Ireland in the 1950s, Paul Brady was exposed at an early age to the sounds of swing, jazz, show tunes by  his parents.  Then he got into 50s rock ‘n roll, 60s pop and Motown, blues, R&B, and country and western. Through all this ran the potent flavour of Irish traditional music and song.

Learning to play the piano pretty much by ear, trial and error, his early heroes were Jerry Lee Lewis, Winifred Atwell and Fats Domino. By the age of eleven he had begun to play guitar, spending hours of his school holidays learning every tune the Shadows and The Ventures recorded, every lick Chuck Berry played. Mid-teens saw him take summer jobs playing piano and guitar in Bundoran, a seaside resort in nearby County Donegal. But it was around 1965 in Dublin, at college, that he began to develop as a singer and performer joining a succession of R&B/Soul bands including The Inmates, The Kult and Rootzgroop , covering the songs of Ray Charles, James Brown, Junior Walker and blues legends like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Chuck Berry.

After living in London and New York City, Paul returned to Dublin in 1974 to join Planxty, the premiere Irish folk band of the early 70s. This was the band that was to launch the solo careers of Andy Irvine, Liam O‘ Flynn, Donal Lunny and Christy Moore. From 1976-78 he played as a duo with Andy Irvine, a relationship that produced ‘Andy Irvine and Paul Brady’, an album still sought after in CD form today.

Paul’s most recent CD is the long-awaited ‘The Vicar Street sessions Vol.  1’, recordings from a month of shows there featuring guests including Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler, Bonnie Raitt, Sinéad O’Connor, Ronan Keating, Gavin Friday, Curtis Stigers, Mary Black, Maura O’Connell, Eleanor McEvoy and Moya Brennan.

His most recent collaboration is with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, with whom he has co-authored three new songs.